[Cadre-politics] status: paypal spam

[Dan MacNeil]

CONFERENCE PICTURES
TEACHING / CONFERENCE PRESENTATION
UTEC
SLEEP
FUTURE
MON
XEN
LDAP
SPAM

CONFERENCE PICTURES
Michael Charney was kind enough to take hundreds of pictures of the 
Grassroots technology conference [1], pull the good ones, shrink them 
and post them on the web.

	[1] http://organizerscollaborative.org/

There is a good one of Kamala [2], sitting next to a woman who's 
business card reads "Future Professor of Play". (The good looking guy 
behind Kamala is Matt)

	[2] http://www.cerc04.org/grtconf06/oc06v1/OC06_040sm.html

There is one of me listening to somebody else [3] John [4] looks good 
from any angle. Rich Cowen [5] our gracious host. The friendly 
conference volunteers [6], with the helpful woman who gave us a roll of 
tape in the middle. Another shot of the helpful tape woman [7] Paul 
Hanson [8] thinking carefully about the plate of food in his hand.

[3] http://www.cerc04.org/grtconf06/oc06v2/OC06_167sm.html
[4] http://www.cerc04.org/grtconf06/oc06v1/images/OC06_011sm.jpg
[5] http://www.cerc04.org/grtconf06/oc06v3/OC06_310sm.html
[6] http://www.cerc04.org/grtconf06/oc06v3/OC06_314sm.html
[7] http://www.cerc04.org/grtconf06/oc06v1/images/OC06_014sm.jpg
[8] http://www.cerc04.org/grtconf06/oc06v2/OC06_232sm.html

There were also quite a lot of pictures of our workshop. For starters, 
documentation that we put Fred's plotter to good use.[9] An annoying guy 
at my workshop who really, really, really likes wainwright bank [10]. 
Another annoying guy [11] at my workshop who's contribution was limited 
to "Philadelphia smells like ass" and of course me petitioning the Lord 
for some help with these annoying guys. [12]

[9] http://www.cerc04.org/grtconf06/oc06v3/OC06_352sm.html
[10] http://www.cerc04.org/grtconf06/oc06v1/OC06_118sm.html
[11] (apparently no longer available)
[12] http://www.cerc04.org/grtconf06/oc06v3/OC06_317sm.html

TEACHING / CONFERENCE PRESENTATION
The presentation on processing credit card donations went relatively 
well. About 1/2 the people left before the session was over, vs 1/3 who 
left from a slicker harbringer partners session [13].

[13] 
http://wiki.oc-tech.org/index.php?title=FULL_DESCRIPTIONS#Technology_Decision-Making_for_the_Non-Technical_Executive

We probably need to do more of these sorts of things.

I've had a two short conversations with Dan Toomey about the need for 
basic computer training in Lowell. This is outside our mission as it is 
defined at the moment, but there is a real need for it.

We are a hosting organization partly because I think it is impossible to 
write useful server based software without a complete understanding 
system administration.

A similar argument might be made for being good at basic skills training 
  so as to understand the how people who might use our software think 
and use software.

Alternatively, those of us that lack the discipline for programming and 
system administration might do ok at basic skills training. By "ok", I 
mean "better than not having a trainer".

UTEC
The new UTEC VISTA (Jeff Blakely) has been charged with a high priority, 
hounding us (me?) into making some more progress on finishing the UTEC 
member database and integrating this into something that can put TODOs 
into MS Outlook.

This charge is roughly compatible with my own desire to make July a 
month of progress for UTEC.

One challenge we (Gregg & I) need to work on before this new push starts 
in earnest, is a money model that works out to at least half of minimum 
wage for our hours of work and works out to more than results than "good 
try" for Gregg.

Another challenge is that the only people we have with a vague chance of 
timely success at UTEC's important but time-consuming needs are John & 
I.  Focusing John on UTEC risks our SLICE revenues and important stuff 
like SPAM filtering. Focusing me, limits my already limited supervision 
and guidance time and risks Lowelldeeds revenue.

SLEEP

Manny has made some progress on the sleep book [14]. (When he finishes, 
he can pass it to Rob)

	[14] http://www.sleephomepages.org/books/promiseofsleep.htm

I've gotten slightly better at picking out the clues that I'm too sleep 
deprived to function. Grumpiness is one. Mistyping my personal password 
a twice in a row is another.

FUTURE
For the first time since March, I don't feel crushing deadline pressure. 
   It is a good feeling.

This week, I'm going to rest up and take a stab at planning and goal 
setting.

In his review of me as a VISTA supervisor, John legitimately dinged me 
for being clear about our destination.

  	--- solid hosting service
	--- solid contributions to free software
	--- solid contributions to non profit efficiency.

..but a vague about the specific steps we need to get there. The solid 
hosting service is IMNSHO [] a requirement for the other stuff and 
probably the destination we are closest to right now.

	[15] In my not so humble opinion.

MON
Matt Outllette and Rob Vanderley are about done with setting up mon [1]

	[16] http://ftp.kernel.org/software/mon/

As is often the case, I'm the bottleneck for final deployment. When this 
is deployed, We'll get notification of down servers quickly, hopefully 
quickly enough to fix things before people notice.

Matt and Rob have probably had the quickest start of any two people ever 
starting in the group.

XEN
Matt and Rob are now working on getting virtual servers [] setup. This 
will allow us to quickly move services off bad hardware, very quickly 
setup specialized servers and generally enjoy the benefits of a one 
service per server model without the hassle of actually having separate 
hardware for each server.

	[17] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/

LDAP
John is still working hard on getting services to shift smoothly to a 
backup LDAP server when the first server goes down.

SPAM
So far we've figured that the action is with the SpamAssassin 
configuration and that upgrading from SA 3.0 to 3.1 will be a big boost. 
Unfortunately 3.0 to 3.1 is a major and possibly risky upgrade.

This upgrade would of course be easier if the virtual server project as 
finished. We could upgrade a copy of the mail server and see how it went.