Jonna and I eat at the same place every Friday. It’s this cute little Mexican restaurant called Mixteca Tequila Bar and Grill on Route 47 in Woodstock. It’s a cute little place with excellent food and owned by a couple of really cool people, Claudia and Mike.

As is usual being a chronic handwasher, at the end of dinner I went into the washroom to wash my hands after eating and out of the corner of my eye saw a flyer on the inside bathroom door. It was about a family that the restaurant was doing a fundraiser for.

The Gruber family consists of Joe, Laura and their 2 kids, Joey (6) and Courtney (3). In November of 2009 Joe was diagnosed with testicular cancer and has been receiving treatment. At the time he was working two jobs, neither of which provided benefits.

The restaurant is hosting a fund-raiser for the family to help offset their medical costs as Joe goes through treatment, as well as help them with their mounting bills. The fund-raiser is happening on February 21, 2010 at the restaurant (see link). You can find more information on the family and the fundraiser by from the flyer I scanned when we got home, or at the web site for the event, hosted by the Friends Helping Friends Foundation.

All food proceeds at this event will go to the family.

Jonna and I will definitely be attending and hope that our friends in the area will come and try to help out. If nothing else, you get great food and a good atmosphere to enjoy the afternoon in. The plan is to also have raffles – and the folks throwing the event are looking for donations of items such as gift baskets, sporting event tickets, etc for these activities.

If your not in the area and want to help, you can make donations via PayPal on the Friends Helping Friends web site.

I was reading the article Run IT as a business — why that’s a train wreck waiting to happen and it got me to thinking … which can be dangerous. The article specifically talks about how the idea of “running IT as a business” has unintended consequences, one of which is thinking about folks outside of IT as “partners” or “customers” and how it effects the behavior of the organization.

How does the language we use effect how we behave? Is it possible that the common practice of using terms like “partner” and “customer” causes us to behave in such a way that we are disconnected, at least mentally or emotionally, from the people that we try to make a difference with?

This has long been a pet peeve of mine. I think these terms cause an artificial separation between groups. An example that I used in a meeting recently:

At a company I worked for at one time, it was impossible to get a software release out without incident. There was not enough structure, and it was obvious that tools were required to automate the process that were not available at the time, for the particular platform we were working on.

Thats right folks, this was a time in which even Capistrano didn’t exist.

I wanted to help solve the problem. At the time, with the specific deployment model this company used, solving this problem required access that I did not have. Because I was not part of the group that got this access, I was not able to get it – until I transferred.

Yes, I actually transferred to this group to solve the problem. Two days later, I had the access required.

Same person – different access.

Much feverous work ensued. Finally it was done. The problem was solved.

So I transferred back to my previous group. Guess what went with the transfer?

Yep – the access.

Same person – different access.

It sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? But it happens – a lot.

In corporate culture we tend to use terms like “Partner” and “Internal Customer” to reference each other. I think it often causes unintended consequences.

It’s kind of funny. As I was telling this story, I thought about the story of the Sneeches. You know, the folks who some had “stars on thars” and some didn’t. Each were treated differently according to the status of the markings on their bellies. In the end, they were all the same – they just didn’t know it. Actually, in the end, when the markings were automated, no one knew Who was Who.

Corporations spend (and waste) a lot of time fighting who is at what level, whose responsibility is whose. Defining roles and their responsibilities rather than getting things done. Its not that defining roles and responsibilities is bad, but we tend to confuse people with roles and in doing so keep them from performing at their full potential. We fail to realize that people may have many skills and can serve multiple roles.

The next time you use the term “partner” or “internal customer” – think about this a bit. It might make you think a little different. It’s definitely been something I’ve been thinking about lately.

I’ve been running the same Linux server for about 10 years. Consequently, its pretty slow and outdated, and when I finally had time to upgrade it to Ubuntu from SuSE 9 while I was on vacation, found that I couldn’t really get anything but Ubuntu 8.04 installed on it. So it was time for an upgrade.

I opted to go with a Mac Mini server – for a few reasons. The price was basically comparable to an Intel server with the same technical specifications (minus any kind of CDROM drive, which I found out later) – but the big selling point for me was the amount of space I could save in the office with the Mini. A side benefit was, of course, being able to play with Snow Leopard Server.

After the initial set server setup – which was painless – my first task was to create a caching DNS server so that all of the machines in the house could point to the same place they were when the Linux server is shut down. One of the primary purposes of the Linux server over the years, aside from being a file server, has been to cache and manage local DNS for the machines in the house. I already had plans to run an Ubuntu Server in a VM on this box to replace my aging Linux box (I still need Linux around), but didn’t think it was acceptable to have to boot the machine, THEN a VM in order to have DNS working. I also did not want to do a DNS setup on a box by box basis on every machine in the house.

I was a little confused at first. I’m used to configuring bind directly. After some googling around and not finding much of anything around doing this on OSX Server, I posted a tweet asking if any of my followers knew of a HOWTO that would explain what I needed to do.

I actually tweeted a little too soon. I think I found the settings about 2 minutes after the tweet went out. It was way easier than I thought it would be and I thought I’d throw up a quick step-by-step tutorial so that folks wanting to do the same thing could save themselves a couple of seconds.

So here we go.

In the dock, find the “Server Admin” icon and click it. It looks like this:

OSX Server System Admin

When the “Server Admin” Tool opens, you will see the main screen like the following. The blue arrow is pointing to the domain you specified while setting up the server.

OSX Server Admin Tool Main Screen

Open up the domain for your network, and you will see a bunch of services to configure. Select DNS as shown in the following screen shot:

OSX Server Admin Services Menu

Once you select DNS in the side navigation, select “Settings” at the top. This will show you the following screen:

Server Admin DNS Settings Screen

You’ll see a box conveniently titled “Forwarders”. Add the IP addresses of the DNS servers you would like to forward requests to in this box by clicking the ‘+’ key and adding each independent IP. As you can see here, I am primarily using Open DNS with Google DNS as a backup. Trust me, contrary to the picture, OpenDNS is first.

Once you have entered your DNS IP addresses, click “Save”. Point your boxes to the IP for your Mac Mini server and voila! You have a caching DNS server.

I hope this was helpful. For those of us who are used to configuring bind with vi, it may be a little confusing or intimidating to try to mimic this functionality on OSX Server. As you can see, its really a no-brainer – and no text editors need be opened.

I found this article late last night (I’m not totally sure how I even landed there) and was riveted by it for way too long. This is a rough draft of a project started by Susan Atkins (of Manson Family fame) and her husband, attempting to explain what really happened leading up to the Tate-LaBianca murders – that while Helter Skelter was used as a motive to finally convict Manson and his family members, it was really just one in a long line of manipulation techniques that he used to get people to do what he wanted.

Historically, Manson has been looked at as this mind controlling genius that somehow got a bunch of kids to attempt to enact his ‘end of the world’ scenario – one that he truly believed. This extremely well written article shows Manson for what he really was: a paranoid, self-centered, sociopathic, master manipulator, who after shooting a man who he thought was a Black Panther manipulated those around him to enact murders that he thought would throw the Black Panthers off his trail and keep them from coming after him – in other words, he was trying to save himself by sacrificing those around him.

Most interestingly, this write up explains many things that have confused people for years – including why the Tate-LaBianca murders seemed so “random”. This article is the first explanation of the reasoning behind the randomness of the acts that actually makes sense, as well as explaining some of the things Manson did in order to gain control over his followers.

This is the most rational, thought out explanation of Manson that I have ever read, coming from someone who had an intimate role in some of the most horrific and publicized murders of all time. Hopefully, it helps take away some of the mystique and fascination that some young people still have for him today.

The Myth of Helter Skelter, by Susan Atkins.

Susan Atkins is suffering from terminal brain cancer and was recently denied parole after submitting a request for “compassionate release” due to her illness.

Update September 25, 2009

Susan Atkins has died at the age of 61.

• UrlRewriteFilter – Rewrite URL's in Java Web Application Servers – Based on the popular and very useful mod_rewrite for apache, UrlRewriteFilter is a Java Web Filter for any J2EE compliant web application server (such as Resin, Orion or Tomcat), which allows you to rewrite URLs before they get to your code. It is a very powerful tool just like Apache's mod_rewrite.
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• Zint Open Source Barcode Generator – "Zint is an Open Source barcode encoding and image generating library written entirely in C and released under GPLv3."
• htmlcompressor – Project Hosting on Google Code – Java HTML/XML Compressor is a very small, fast and easy to use library that compresses given HTML or XML source by removing extra whitespaces, comments and other unneeded characters without breaking the content structure. As a result pages become smaller in size and load faster.
• I.E 6/7 Performance and Functionality Issues | Service-now.community –
• IE6 Javascript Performance – You may experience slow performance when you view a Web page that uses JScript in Internet Explorer 6 – here is a fix.
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• InfoQ: Scaling Up by Scaling Down: A (re)Focus on Individual Skills – In this presentation, the causality between performance in the small (individuals and teams) and performance in the large is highlighted and explained. Discover what you can do as an individual regardless of your position in the hierarchy to enable higher performance software development.
• Starting With Git – Another Git Tutorial
• GitSharp – eqqon – C# implementation of Git
• codza » how to fix iphone code signing errors – iPhone code signing article.
• Red Sweater Blog – Development Phase Code Signing – Simple instructions for signing applications in OSX.
• Git: Your New Best Friend [Server Side Essentials] – Pretty detailed and well written tutorial on using the Git distributed version control system.
• Salon People Feature | The 7 vices of highly creative people –

• Salon People Feature | The 7 vices of highly creative people
  (tags: creativity)

• Woman Sued for $50,000 Over a Tweet – "Horizon’s Jeffrey Michael is quoted in the Sun-Times as saying “The statements are obviously false, and it’s our intention to prove that”, adding that Horizon has a good reputation to protect. Bonnen wasn’t contacted before the suit was filed or asked to remove the Tweet, he said: “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization”."
• OpenSymphony – Welcome To OpenSymphony – "OpenSymphony is an Open Source project dedicated to providing enterprise class J2EE components. Our components aim to stress simplicity, integration, pluggability and specification compliance. Please see the individual projects for more information. "
• 13 Helpful Cheat Sheets for Building WordPress Themes | Web Design Ledger – Resources for building Wordpress Themes.

A friend of mine, Craig Wallace, has assembled a bunch of great volunteers and friends to put on a charity benefit called Walla-Pa-Looza. The event is a fund-raiser for the American Cancer Society and will be held on August 1, 2009 from 2:00 pm to 11:00 pm at the Johnsburg Community Club in Johnsburg, Illinois. $5 gets you in the door and children under 12 are free. There will be a 50/50 raffle, silent auction, ticket raffle and other activities throughout the day.

You can find a host of information at their web site, walla-pa-looza.org, including an opportunity to become a sponsor of the event if you are a local business.

The event will feature four bands that have contributed their time and talents:

• Blush
• Peter and the Versatiles
• Danny and the Devils
• and Always Frantic

The thing that blows me away about this is it started out with Craig just wanting to have a party on his one acre lot. He, his wife, and a friend started talking about the economy and how it would effect charities – and that got the ball rolling. They decided to do something about it.

It’s definitely a worthy cause. I know I’ve lost people to cancer, as I’m sure many of you have as well. Jonna and I will definitely be donating and attending – and I would encourage anyone local in McHenry County to do so as well. I would also encourage local business to visit the sponsor page to find out how you can help and get some advertising out of it to boot!

Make sure to visit their web site to get more information and, if you are so inclined, donate (by the way, they support Paypal donations – so if you’re not local you can still donate to the cause!). Their goal is to raise $20,000 for the American Cancer Society. Let’s help them blow this goal out of the water.

Hopefully, we’ll see you there!

By the way, Walla-Pa-Looza also has a fan page on Facebook. Become a fan today!

Chia-liang Kao, the developer and maintainer of the SVK Distributed Version Control System posted a message to the mailing list on May 28th of this year declaring the end of development for the SVK tool.

I know from statistics that the tutorials on this site have been at least helpful, but am curious as to whether I should take them down or not given the fate of the tool. I myself have moved to Git, which has really good integration with Subversion.

So I’m asking you. Do you want the tutorials to stay, or can I get rid of them?

• MRR Software – "Syrinx is a fully customizable twitter client designed for Leopard (OS X 10.5+). Syrinx is built from two ideals: efficient workflow and customization."
• Apache CouchDB: The CouchDB Project – "Apache CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API. "
• Improve Your Ability to Influence with the DiSC® Profile | ManagerTools.com – "If you have been listening to our podcasts for any length of time, you know that we are big fans of the DiSC Profile. In our experience,this is the most effective tool we've found for understanding the behavioral tendencies of yourself and the people you interact with each day. To facilitate your use of the DiSC model, we've partnered with the premium supplier of DiSC products to provide you access to YOUR profile today"

• Brian "Krow" Aker's Idle Thoughts – Drizzle, State of Testing – Brian Akers (formerly of MySQL and now Drizzle) talks about how the team does coding and testing for the Drizzle project.
• Accelerate your team with online workspaces | Home | Assembla – Hosted Agile software tools (Project Management, Code Sourcing, etc)
• ReinH | A Git Workflow for Agile Teams – "Wherein our hero describes a workflow for using git productively and painlessly in an Agile environment."

• Scrum Log Jeff Sutherland: Ken Schwaber on "Flaccid Scrum – A New Pandemic?" – Ken Schwaber will be giving a talk on some of the dysfunctions that Scrum brings to light.
• You sell ads. We deliver them. | OpenX – Open Source Ad Server.
• adaptive path » blog » Dan Harrelson » Rapid Prototyping Tools – List of rapid prototyping tools from Adaptive Path.
• Prototype Composer, Free Prototyping Tool – Serena Software – "Prototype Composer is a completely new way of gathering requirements. Prototype Composer makes it possible to see how an application will look and function before any code is ever written. Instead of endless text documents, Prototype Composer makes it easy for business users and business analysts to collaborate on requirements by building simple, high-fidelity prototypes that simulate a working application." – and its free.

• Hg-Git Mercurial Plugin – GitHub – Git plugin for Mercurial, that adds interoperability between the two distributed version control systems.
• git awsome-ness [git rebase --interactive] – MadBlog – Quick article describing the use of git rebase -i.
• A List Apart: Articles: Burnout – "It's taken me the better part of a year to finish writing this article, and the reasons it took that long are tied directly to the topic at hand. If anything, the last year has made it clear that we as an industry are facing increased levels of stress, illness, and exhaustion. Having learned a few things from my own battle with exhaustion and burnout, I hope they’ll benefit others who are now or may eventually be in the same situation."
• NOOP.NL: Self-Organization = Anarchy (Part 1) – Article talking about how self-organization is the norm for the universe – and software development teams.
• The Git Parable – "The following parable will take you on a journey through the creation of a Git-like system from the ground up. Understanding the concepts presented here will be the most valuable thing you can do to prepare yourself to harness the full power of Git. The concepts themselves are quite simple, but allow for an amazing wealth of functionality to spring into existence. Read this parable all the way through and you should have very little trouble mastering the various Git commands and wielding the awesome power that Git makes available to you."
• Agile methodologies aren't just for small coding projects :: SearchCIO.com.au – In this article Scott Ambler talks about how to scale agile.
• Five whys – Joel on Software – Joel talks about an outage situation and how the team evolved from "setting SLA's" to Five Why root cause analysis and a solution that wasn't quite where they started.
• Fraser Speirs – Understanding Git Submodules – Article explaining git submodules.

Paul Scharff has started blogging about his experiences at the age of 10 when his father Ron Scharff and his employee Patricia Freeman were murdered by Larry Neumann over on his McHenry County 1981 site.

Paul’s story is a heart touching one – and it seems to me he has quite the gift for writing and making you feel what he went through. This is an interesting read for anyone interested in the case – and what effect violence like this has on a young man.

• Git for beginners: The definitive practical guide – Stack Overflow – The beginnings of a "Practical Guide to Git" being authored on stackoverflow.com.
• Highest Voted "git" Questions – Stack Overflow – Quesions tagged with Git on StackOverflow.com
• InfoQ: How Many Chickens Are Too Many? – "The daily scrum is an important meeting within the Agile team. During this 15 minute session, the team members share their commitments along with the impediments blocking them from moving forward. According to Scrum, only the committed team members (pigs) are allowed to speak during these meetings. Other interested people (chickens) can join in, but they should just listen. Is there a limit on the maximum number of chickens, who could attend the daily scrums? An interesting discussion on the Scrum Development group tries to answer this question."
• Producing Open Source Software – Free book describing the Open Source development methodology and how to run an open source project. One of my favorite books on development process.
• Agile Alliance: Agile Alliance Home – Home page of the Agile Alliance.
• saplink – Google Code – "SAPlink is an open source project that aims to make it easier to share ABAP developments between programmers. It provides the ability to easily distribute and package custom objects."
• Cocoa Samurai: Distributed Version Control & Git [Part 1] – "When you start using Distributed Version Control you tend to start making a lot of branches and do many more merges, it becomes you do commits and merges when you want to vs doing them in some regularity because you fear your version control system might make things harder if you don't commit or merge now."
• Understanding Git Conceptually – "This tutorial [takes] a conceptual approach to Git. My goal will be, first and foremost, to explain the Git universe and its objectives, and secondarily to illustrate how to use Git commands to manipulate that universe."
• Compromising Quality for Schedule | Musings of a Software Development Manager – "I found myself silently cheering for Uncle Bob as he described a recent presentation where the speaker had just about given up on ever getting better code quality, because businesses didn’t value it."
• Tuning IE7 for Better Performance –
• Facebook Developers | Facebook Open Platform – "Facebook Open Platform is a snapshot of the infrastructure that runs Facebook Platform. It includes the API infrastructure, the FBML parser, the FQL parser, and FBJS, as well as implementations of many common methods and tags."

• What Is The Purpose of McHenry County 1981 and Why Should We Care? | McHenry County 1981 – "Paul Scharff, the eldest son of Ron Scharff, who was murdered in Lakemoor, Illinois in June of 1981 along with his employee Patricia Freeman, gives his thoughts on why the public should care about this case and what the purpose of the efforts are around the McHenry County 1981 group and web site."
• SourceForge.net: pyExcelerator – Python library to write excel files.
• The Happiness Myth | Fast Draw – CBS News – "We often imagine that we’ll be happy as soon as we get a job/make partner/get tenure/get married/get that promotion/have a baby/move. (But) usually by the time you’ve arrived at your destination, you’re expecting to reach it, so it has already been incorporated into your happiness. You quickly become adjusted to the new state of affairs."

• Twitter API Wiki / Sign in with Twitter – "Sign in with Twitter is the pattern of authentication that allows users to connect their Twitter account with third-party services in as little is one click. It utilizes OAuth and although the flow is very similar, the authorization URL and workflow differs slightly as described below."
• Canary. The sexiest bird to twitter with. – "Canary is a Twitter client that is beautifully designed, fun to use and has everything you'll ever need." – and it's Open Source
• Exclusive Sneak Peek: Tweetie For The Mac – "The Mac is finally getting some seriously awesome, native clients. Say what you want about TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop – these are all based on Adobe’s AIR platform, which is notorious for eating up memory and CPU cycles, along with weird window placement quirks. Earlier this month Nambu got a huge upgrade, and has quickly become my Twitter client of choice. But that might change next Monday, when Tweetie – easily one of the best Twitter clients on the iPhone – comes to the Mac desktop."

• Nambu native Twitter client for Mac – "In the most recent Ask TUAW, we addressed a question about Twitter (follow TUAW!), and asked readers for their favorite clients. Several users suggested Nambu, and having just put it through its paces, I can see why it's so popular."
• DreamHost Blog » Democracy at DreamHost, part 2 – "we’re going to let a few of our workers tell you in their own words what it means to be democratic. These comments come from all parts of our organization from recent hires as well as from people who have literally helped us build the company."
• Top 13 Twitter Don'ts – Features by PC Magazine – "The number of new Twitter users has soared over the past few months, as the microblogging service has taken the media by storm. If you're one of those new users, you may be baffled by Twitter's peculiar culture, or nervous that you'll commit some kind of microblogging faux pas. Don't worry, we're here to help."