I don’t want the world.  I just want your half.

It reminded me of the NC State expression tunnel (is that still around?) where it was OK to creatively graffiti.  There would always be some place where someone had written ‘Frodo Lives’.

The quote above comes from probably one of the best They Might Be Giants songs ever written ‘Ana Ng’.

I revisited my diner love with a trip to Waffle House this weekend while the wife and kid were away.  3 eggs scrambled with cheese, raisin toast, hash brown (scattered, smothered, covered and diced) and a vanilla coke (it was afternoon so no coffee).

He was my loyal friend. He was my oldest friend. He was my companion, He was my dog and I love him and I will miss him dearly.

Zoot MacLeod — June 8, 2008 — R.I.P.

On a side note ‘The Red Album’ comes out 6/3, I’ve already lala’ed it, but I might try out their mp3 purchase stuff just to see how it is. Depends a lot on their policies around DRM.

This is such a horrible approach.  It almost immediately leads to spaghetti and data bleed.  Nowhere else in computer science that I know of is this approach even attempted.  Almost everyone tries to come up with some way to replicate this type of functionality into their configuration management system.  They think that this will save them time and allow them to generalize their configs in a sane way.  What it really results in is a mess of what comes from where and when you need to make changes where a particular stub should go.  Almost immediately you’ve created confusion, and created an inheritance that is arbitrary at best.

I think the problem actually stems from a top down approach to config management.  People seem to think that consolitation occurs from the top down, when in reality it comes from the bottom up.

The way I approach this problem is to come up with a way to model your changes as individual configs that are additive from the bottom up.  Apache is actually a very good example of this.  If you look at the add on components, (mod_perl, mod_python, squirrelmail, etc) they add in their own configs that add up to a global configuration for a single apache server.

Take sudoers for example.  People always want to have some concatenation scheme for sudoers so that they can have global configs that everyone inherits then a role (say webserver) config that gets picked up, then host specfic configs that allow for one off host configurations.  A better approach is to be able to add single config records for each thing you need and build a total config, rather than start from the top and work down, start at the bottom and build up.

In the scope of puppet, this is done rather nicely with a type.  Types allow you to add a single record in the appropriate place and not rely on any type of inheritance to determine where and if a configuration lands on a given server.  In the example above I would have a sudo type that I would put at each class level to only add the sudo config for that class.  I don’t have to concern myself with what level of inheritance I’m at (global or otherwise)  or what order things are in because I’m just inserting a configuration record rather than a trying to manage a whole section of a file.

After an unexpected and sudden trip (sans the boy) to Cafe Capistrano I’ve now gotten on a Sangria kick. Capistrano does not have their liquor license, but does have their beer and wine license. So they make margaritas and sangria with wine only. The last time I made sangria it didn’t go so well, I loved it and proceeded to drink half of it, T hated it and wouldn’t touch it. I’ve been trying to find a by the glass recipe so that I can try different recipes without devoting an entire bottle of wine to each experiment.

It’s a daunting task because there are as many sangria recipes out there as there are bottles of red wine most of them call for adding hard liquor and soaking the fruit for several days prior to mixing. But they say wine is good for you so I guess I’m up to the challenge.

Maybe I’ll take a more scientific approach this weekend and make a couple of small variations for tasting purposes. One of the downsides (is it really a downside?) to experimenting is that once you have 2 or 3 they all start to taste the same.

I also found this today. Led Zeppelin and STP would be an awesome show, one that I would certainly attend if it was remotely close. T would love it as well as she’s bigger into Zep than I ever am or was. We’ll see if it ever comes true. It would be amazing to see them live.

2 shots Grey Goose Vodka
2 shots Sweet Vermouth
long thin twist of lemon

pour liquids over ice… shake vigorously… pour into a chilled martini glass.
Rub the lemon peel around the edge of the glass (very important) twist and drop in.

Since I’m going magnanimously claim that I invented this variation (which I probably didn’t) and because I drank many of them at Molly’s Father’s expense. I’m going to name it The Haining in his honor.