Monthly Archives: August 2015

Jon Stewart Leaving Daily Show

Miscellanous

This is first and foremost a technical blog, but on occasion, when I think it’s merited, I would like to comment on other topics, and this is a topic I have to comment about.  This is more probably for me to come to terms with it than probably it being any value to anyone else, I understand, but here it goes….

Jon Stewart’s run as the host of The Daily Show has ended.

You have to understand I used to teach US History in public schools.  Naturally, US history, current events, and politics are going to be important to me.  And that world for me has been forever changed upon discovering The Daily Show, and it’s going to change now that Stewart has left it.

I unfortunately discovered Stewart’s incarnation of TDS several years late.  I don’t know specifically when, but it was sometime just prior to the 2004 Presidential election, because I do remember TDS coverage leading up to it.  And it grabbed me almost immediately, and through the years, it was a staple of my life.  I went through periods of watching pretty much no television to keeping up with several shows, but the constant? TDS.  I don’t think I missed an episode from 2004 to now.  And when it was on break, I missed it.

Now, I know some people who may be reading this might not like Stewart, and perhaps it’s because he was on the wrong side of the political spectrum.  But if so, you probably missed the point.  During an interview with Mike Wallace on Fox News, Jon Stewart asked Wallace what he thought was Stewart at his highest aspiration, and Stewart told him plainly – Mark Twain. And this is why I admire Stewart so much.  Nobody cares today if Mark Twain was a Democrat or a Republican.  Mark Twain was great and important because of his insights, and his ability to articulate ideas.  Make no mistake – Jon Stewart is our Mark Twain.

Nobody articulated better the reality of our current political landscape than Jon Stewart, from corruption within the government on both sides of the aisle, to systemic problems within the political system, and, most of all, his insights and relentless critique of the media.  And I mean all media.  While Fox News attempted to illustrate what they felt was the problem that the mainstream media has a liberal bias and attempted to counterbalance it, Stewart held seemingly all media outlets accountable for lacking journalistic integrity, from the network news, to the 24-hour news networks, and the overtly partisan news networks of Fox and MSNBC.  He even called out all financial news networks such as CNBC, culminating in the incredibly popular confrontational interview of Jim Cramer in an interview on TDS.

He spoke out about incredibly important issues, and didn’t just take a side, but provided invaluable insight.  And most of all, he was very often disarmingly sincere.  When he spoke to Cramer, after making his point about the financial news networks seemingly promoting behaviors like stock speculation, or spreading false information to gain advantage in the markets with clips of Cramer doing these things, which when done systemically contributed partly to the downfall of the economy, he vividly told Cramer, “this isn’t a f***ing game.”

His calling out of Congress for not helping first responders to 9/11, his relentless attacks of anyone promoting disingenuous talking points on either side, whether it be the Swift Boaters or attacks by the New York Times against Marco Rubio finances…  I could go on and on.

Stewart helped millions of people, including me, not just see through various outlets plays to distort the truth, but to understand how and why it was happening.  And that’s something that isn’t something valuable to one side of the political aisle or the other.  It’s something that’s helpful for all of us.

And… his show was funny!  From political humor, to somehow being able to laugh at the Crocodile Hunter’s passing thanks to Stewart’s uncomfortably hilarious interview with Norm McDonald after it happened, to making fun of Arby’s repeatedly for absolutely no reason, and more…

I’ve watching Jon Stewart and The Daily Show for over a decade now.  Jon Stewart’s departure for me is the emotional equivalent of losing a family pet, which is a horrible comparison, but it’s the best one I can come up with that can approximate the emotional punch to the gut it is for me.  It’s like being told, “Yeah, Mark Twain’s around, but you’re not gonna hear from him as much anymore starting NOW.”

There won’t be another Jon Stewart, just like there won’t be another Mark Twain, but I’m ultimately glad we got him as long as we had him.

Are you a Daily Show or Jon Stewart fan?  What are your favorite moments?  How are you taking his departure?

Containers are coming!

Miscellanous

Some of you may already are in the know, or have even deployed or managed them.  Some of you may have heard about them, heard of Docker, and even have a vague sense of what they are.   But make no mistake – containers are coming!

The question first though is what exactly are they?

Containers challenge what you know about operating systems, VMs, applications, and such, because they really make you realize how much you bind into the definitions of these things without realizing it just because that’s how it’s been.  Containers make you rethink much of what you know, just like VMs did when they were becoming the rage.

But let’s first make an analogy to help you understand what exactly containers are.

Let’s imagine a much simpler world of automobiles.  Imagine you needed a vehicle to accomplish a task.  While there were lots of brands, makes, models, and colors, there were really three basic types of vehicles in our hypothetical world:

  • Monster truck
  • Armored Humvee
  • Moped

What you would consider just a car didn’t exist.  No SUV’s, no  regular trucks, just those three basic types.  Now, imagine your task was to get across town where you need to smash other cars, and see above traffic.  That’s easy, you take the ridiculous monster truck.  If you needed something to get you to see your grandmother to say hello, that monster truck or the humvee would be pretty hilarious to show up in, but they’d not be particularly practical, so you take the moped.

That would look weird showing up to your grandma’s house…

But what about going to the grocery store to get a few bags of groceries, and you go to the local market where you need to parallel park?  Suppose the moped can’t carry all those groceries, so that’s out.  The monster truck is WAY overkill, too.  While the armored humvee would probably have a high safety rating, it’s overkill, and would kill you on gas mileage, but it’s the least ridiculous option you’ve got.

Ahnold, please tell us you have something more practical to go on an ice cream run… actually, nevermind, because this is so Ahnold!

But then… a new option existed – a novel idea called a car.  Except it’s not what most would typically think of.  Instead, it was one of these:

Admit it, the first time you saw one of these, you WTFBBQ’ed…

AND… it was a hybrid, and hybrids hadn’t been invented yet.  You start asking (what you would now consider since hybrids are ubiquitous) stupid questions like… “do I put gas in it?”  “What kind of gas does it take?”  “If I get in a wreck, will this happen?”

I have nothing to add other than I just wanted an excuse to use this…

Welcome to containers!  You used to run your applications (tasks) only on computers (monster trucks), but then we realized one application per physical computer was ridiculous, so we made VMs (humvee’s).  And we didn’t just get more efficient.  There were other inherent benefits to humvee’s.  Parking, while still difficult, is easier in a humvee than  that monster truck.  VMs ease DR, etc.

But we’re so used to VMs, we don’t see their downsides and the fact that those are often overkill, too!  Ever made for example six or one hundred redundant web servers for an application for high availability and to scale for the load?  Ask yourself something… do you honestly think you really need the full OS six or one hundred times to achieve your redundancy and scale out?  When you think about that, that’s pretty insane to store windows or linux that many times. Why do you think VDI environments often use linked clone techniques?  (Not that containers are linked clones, they’re not at all.)

Go look at your VM inventory sometime.  You’re bound to find some redundant VMs that store AND run entire operating systems multiple times, and there’s not necessarily a good reason other than, “I’m using VMs, what else am I supposed to do?  Each of these VMs needs a unique name/MAC address/IP address to work, so I can’t run the same application twice within the same VM, it just won’t work.”  That’s because you’re stuck choosing between grocery shopping with a monster truck, a humvee, and a moped.

And you’ve also just come to expect that the OS gets an identity on a network, not the applications within them.  A NIC bound to an OS gets an IP address.  If you want isolation between applications, they must be in separate OS’s.  Nevermind you already know that’s not true because your hypervisor is an OS, so your VMs technically are running on the same hypervisor server are in a sense running under the same OS, yet we expect isolation between them.

Containers, just like when server virtualization became all the rage, cause you to rethink and realize that IP’s don’t necessarily coincide with OS’s, but you kinda knew that since a NIC can have multiple IP addresses, and a OS can have multiple NICs, and you can add virtualized NICs, too, right?  Why does a computer name HAVE to refer to an OS instance on a physical or virtual machine?  It doesn’t, and you already know this with DNS aliases, network load balancing technologies, etc.,  but it’s so ingrained in your brain, it’s hard for you to think it could be any other way.

You think that’s air you’re breathing?

Containers are essentially VM-esque in that they’re in some ways a virtualized instance of an application, with their own unique instance identities (container1, container2, etc.) complete with IPs, names, MAC addresses, etc., but they’re not completely independent like a VM is as far as its OS, as they depend upon a controlling OS instance that can and generally is shared between multiple containers simultaneously.   It’s that notch on the dial between a VM and an individual application within an OS.

You may think this kind of technology is unnecessary and just causes confusion.  It’s honestly similar in my mind to the whole smartphone/phablet/mini-tablet/tablet/laptop/desktop computer continuum.  You may completely not participate in the use of one of those devices whatsoever because it doesn’t fit your needs, but it fits others.  I personally use a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop, and a workstation class computer, and I find those cover my needs, and have no use for a phablet and mini-tablet.  Some people find that they can go with a phablet instead of a smartphone and a tablet.  That’s all well and good.  Everybody doesn’t own every major type of automobile either.

But there’s a reason why each of those devices exists, and there’s a reason why container technology exists, too.  And it’s becoming more popular.  It’s been done for quite sometime in linux, and Microsoft is finalizing it’s first go with containers within Windows Server 2016.  So, as IT pros, it’s better to be aware of it before you’re driving a car you don’t know how to drive, as my analogy goes.

Physical fitness as an IT Pro

Fitness,

You gotta do it.  You just got to.  You have to focus on your physical fitness.

I’m speaking of being physically fit.  Not Arnold Schwarzenegger fit.  Not run a marathon without breaking a sweat fit.  But you have to be reasonably healthy.

Let’s face it, our jobs in IT, whether you’re a consultant, programmer, admin, or anything else is very often not conducive to your health.  Irregular work patterns due to emergencies, or rushing to meet some kind of deadline that’s crept up, long days sitting in your desk without a chance to move around much, perhaps a family life to keep up with as well, and the fact that perhaps a disproportionate amount of us aren’t really into playing sports or generally go outside leads many of us into very bad habits when it comes to my health.

I’m included.  When I graduated from high school, I was 180 pounds at 6’1″, could bench 250, and in very good health.

By the time I graduated from college, I was 220.  Paying for college tuition myself without student loans led to a hectic schedule of studying, working part time, taking classes, and eating conveniently, which often meant not well.

It just got worse when I transitioned into IT from teaching.  At least with teaching, I walked around A LOT.  When I got into IT, you SSH’ed into this, RDP’ed into that.  It wasn’t good.  I got up to about 330 pounds.  My doctor diagnosed me with high triglycerides.   I knew at that point, I had to do something, so I did.

I realized this – what’s the point of working hard in anything, even if it’s your passion, if it’s going to lead to a short life that you haven’t been able to do the things you want?

I realize that many of you may struggle with the same thing.  I’m no saint, but I did manage to drop 100 pounds to 230 via diet.  I did balloon back to 270 (never over), but I’ve managed to drop 15 pounds in the last 4 months or so,  so I’m doing better again.  My high triglycerides have gone away, and never came back.  I feel better, too.

I want to share what I did because some of it might work for you.  I also wanted it to be from someone who truly still struggles with it, because it is tough to do.  Perhaps all this may motivate and work for others also working in similar occupations that may struggle with how to maintain health when it seems like everything in your career goes against you doing just that.

This category is all about this topic.  Spoiler alert – I bought a treadmill desk, so this category is going to have a lot of information about this, and how my use of it has evolved, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, what things have you done to get healthier that have worked for you, whether it be exercise routines or diet?