I love open source, we had a problem in a vendor library and we fixed it ourselves. If we had to wait for someone else to do it, who knows how long it would've been broken.



It was only a change to a couple lines of code, but it was very hard to track down. It took me and a co-worker a day of pair programming to narrow it down and figure out what to change, but damn it feels good to have done. And to have our specs and continuous integration running reliably again.

It was like 4 layers deep worth of metaprogramming. I feel like I know our spec library very, very well now. :)

Servers have been ordered. Clustering and failover designed. Weeks and months of testing and automation. Probably a hundred hours of work total. Super excited, I've been prepping this stuff for 6 months now and it's going to see the light of day.

We're going for paired mirrors to start, then splitting out each VM container type into their own tiered clusters as we need to add capacity and can judge bottlenecks.

I know no one cares about this but me, but it's my journal so, what the hell :)

I'm reading a book, "The 48 Laws of Power".



It is by turns interesting and disturbing. Each law has it's own chapter, with historical anecdotes and analysis.

Some are fairly neutral:

Law 5: So Much Depends on Reputation -- Guard it with Your Life.

Others, not so much:

Law 17: Keep Others in Suspended Terror -- Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability. Or, Law 33: Discover Each Man's Thumbscrew.

Now, part of my enjoyment of this book is that it appeals to the inner dictator in me, a side that I never knew that I had. But, hmm... I do. Hate to admit it.

Generally, it's an interesting look at the 'pack of monkeys' part of our brains and culture. Everything I have read so far I can relate to experiences and situations that I've been in. I'm hoping to keep my eyes more open to this side of human interaction, without using it to scheme and plot.

If I ever start to seem unpredictable, though, cower in terror!