I had originally planned to write about the Supreme Court’s just-announced decision on gun rights, but then I thought — I should write about something important, something that’s on the hearts and minds of the entire American people, if not the whole world. So, I’m going to write about the new iPhone 4™

Once, as recently as last week, I was just like you. I whiled away the meaningless minutes of my life doing meaningless things like … well, it seems I’ve forgotten, exactly, but they were things like you do. But now that I am the proud possessor — nay — guardian of this device, my life has changed. Everything is different. Colors are richer.* Sunsets are more beautiful.** Relationships are more satisfying.*** In fact, I lack the words to construct a sufficient hyperbole.

Aesthetically, the 4th generation iPhone™ is a work of art. Its design is as timeless as the Taj Majal, as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa, as armless as the Venus de Milo. Black, and sleek, it is almost entirely made of glass. Not just any glass, but (we are told) a scratch-proof glass that is 30 times as hard as regular glass.****

Gracing the edge of this device is a band of stainless steel that serves as the antenna — a beautiful synergy of form and function. Some recipients of the iPhone 4™, clearly unworthy of the honor, have complained that the iPhone™ loses reception if this band is touched in a certain way. But as Steve Jobs™ (Apple CEO, technical visionary, Divine Being) has made clear, these “people” are holding it incorrectly. The correct way is this: 1) lay the iPhone™ on a flat surface, 2) take three steps back, 3) with eyes closed and head bowed, pray that Steve Jobs™ will forgive you for your sins.

Functionally, the iPhone 4™ is revolutionary. It decisively answers the nagging questions of our generation, like, can I possibly waste more time on Facebook? Can I be more distracted when talking to people? Is it possible to make the Internet smaller and harder to read? Yes, yes, and yes!

The most revolutionary thing about the iPhone™ is the App Store. Before, a phone was simply a means of talking to people over long distances. But with the iPhone and its App Store, I finally have a way of draining my bank account in $0.99 increments!

In conclusion, it should be obvious that I spent all my time this week playing with my new iPhone 4™ instead of working on a decent blog post.

Sent from my iPhone.

* On the screen.
** On the screen.
*** Not really.
**** Sadly, the keys in my pocket appear to be 31 times as hard as regular glass.

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When I discovered Facebook for the first time, several years ago, I thought, “This is what my life has been missing: a way to share the trivial details of daily life with hundreds of people who are almost as mind-numbingly boring as me, and a way to find out whether the girls who turned me down in college have gotten fat.”

But now the honeymoon is over, and I, along with many of you, have awakened to the painful reality that Facebook wasn’t created simply to provide an outlet for my raging narcissism without all the hard work involved in blogging. All this time, Facebook has been whoring out the private details of my life to anyone with a buck. Hey, if I wanted that, I would be Kim Kardashian.

Faced with the possibility of millions of users going back to the ghetto of losers and skanks on MySpace, Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckberg, apologized and promised to simplify Facebook’s complicated privacy settings. We’ll appreciate those changes when we find out that our user profiles include a new “Medical History” section, and, unable to resist the lure of a new pull-down menu, we select “Hemorrhoids: Yes” and “Yeast Infection: Raging”.

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If you have a lot of accounts and passwords, you can get password-management software that will keep track of them for you. All you have to do is remember one password to view all the others. Some of this software is free, some is not, and you can get it for most operating systems, or even for your smartphone or PDA.

My problem is that I use multiple computers, running both Linux and Windows, and I want to be able to access my passwords from all of them. There are password managers that are “portable”, ie., you can put them on a USB drive and run the software from different computers, but most of these will only run on one operating system.

Password Gorilla is free software that you can use to create a secure password database, on a USB thumb-drive, that you can access from Windows, Mac, or Linux.

I’ve written instructions here.

(The instructions are specifically for Windows and Linux. If you use a Mac, you can probably figure out what you need to do from the Password Gorilla website.)

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This XKCD cartoon basically explains how I got into my career: link.

In my case, the critical experience occurred after college, when I was doing data entry at Sun Microsystems, and it was Solaris I was messing with, not Perl. (Although I am pretty good at Perl, now, too.)

If you have no idea what I’m talking about:
1. Perl is a programming language.
2. Solaris is an operating system. (Like Windows, MacOS, etc. But way betterer.)

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It’s going to be hard to trust the election results when electronic voting systems are so easy to hack.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars

Postscript, 11/19/2008: In the end, regardless of who won or lost, I’m glad that the outcome wasn’t ambiguous as compared to polling data. If there was any monkey-business going on in either direction, it seems unlikely that it affected the outcome.

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I’m spinning off a new blog. For the past month, I’ve been trying to build a working Sun Cluster using VirtualBox on my laptop. If I just lost you, don’t worry about it. However, I know there are other people out there who might be interested in doing the same thing, or something similar, and so I’ve decided to start blogging about this and other technical endeavors at http://spoonfightergeeksout.blogspot.com/. Most of the progress I’ve made has been facilitated by the blog entries of other geeks, and I figure that what I’m learning might be helpful to someone else.

As an added bonus, you won’t have to read about it here.

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I just noticed that I haven’t written anything in a month. Pretty much my normal behavior. Naughty Spoonfighter.

If you’re curious, and you’re probably not, I’ve been very focused on a technical project lately. I have been trying to create a working Solaris Cluster* at home, in order to do some personal training in the technology, and to prepare for a cluster build I have to do at work. Initially, I was going to purchase a bunch of old Sun equipment (I did actually buy a SunBlade 1000), but I realized that this was going to be too expensive, and all I’d end up with would be a bunch of old computers that don’t do anything fun and break a lot. (Kind of like me.)

Still with me? If not, skip down to the part where I mention that I’m not going back to law school.

So, instead, I set about trying to create a cluster using virtual machines.** At this point, I have my laptop installed with Ubuntu Linux. It uses Sun’s VirtualBox product to simulate three Solaris systems: one will serve up iSCSI storage for the shared disk, and the other two will be the cluster nodes. Is this interesting to you? If so, you probably have a lousy social life. (Kind of like me.)

In case you haven’t already guessed, I’m not going back to law school. There’s a lot more to it, but basically, one year in law school helped me clarify my goals, and showed me that those goals are better served by building on the IT career I have already developed, rather than starting from scratch in a completely new field.

That said, I am trying to embrace my inner geek. I spend as much time indoors as possible, in order to develop an unhealthy pallor. I am reading fantasy and science fiction. I am playing with cluster, iSCSI, and virtualization technologies in my spare time. And, I have an account on World of Warcraft. It’s probably a good thing that I’m already married.

Anyway, that’s the news from Spoonfighter’s corner of meatspace. Have a good day.

* A cluster consists of two or more computer systems which work together to keep an application running at all times, even if one of the two computers fails.
** A virtual machine is a simulation of a computer system which runs on a real computer system.

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