Category: Chatter

What most of you probably don’t want

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Web Presence Redesign

Sometimes success is a problem. I should be glad I’ve hit this point. Instead, I’m annoyed at having to take time off from productive work to shuffle web sites. I only want to do this once, so I’m presenting my plan here. My readers are perhaps the most highly qualified people in the world to punch holes it. Also, writing it down will help me figure out the details.

I need to redesign my “web presence.” (Ugh. Hate that term.)

As an author, I present two faces to the world: nonfiction author Michael W Lucas, and fiction author Michael Warren Lucas.

I have two different names because while my readers might not care terribly much about genre, they do care about fiction versus nonfiction. My tech readers don’t want to see my novels (with some exceptions), while the fiction readers find the tech baffling (as they should). Very few people are cross-spectrum Lucas fans.

So, different names and different web sites. I make no pretense that these names are two different people.

I have a generic landing page for people interested in both sides. That URL is short enough to type on a cellphone. The page is kind of clunky, but I’m working on a modern-looking version.

I also have a blog. Which is the site you’re reading now.

My tech author page has most of my information, as that’s where most of my readership has been. The fiction audience is growing, however. I’ve heard from more than one fiction reader that the nonfiction site alienates them. (I understand them perfectly. Computer technology alienates most people.)

So I need to rearrange. And I want to do it in such a way that it reduces information duplication and maintenance of text. Plus, I only want to do it once. So, here’s the plan. Please save me labor and punch holes in it before I do the work.

The blog stays right where it is. Too many incoming links.

Move the following from the nonfiction site to the landing site:

  • all of the autobiography pages
  • about, contact
  • make the FAQ a top-level entity
  • “support an author”, but link to it

Move the following from the fiction site to the landing site:

  • the contact form (integrate with the contact info from nonfiction site)

On the nonfiction site:

  • make the “talks” page a top-level menu item
  • Rebrand the site as “The books of Michael W Lucas” with “About the Author” linking to the generic site

On the fiction site:

  • Rebrand the site as “The books of Michael Warren Lucas” with “About the Author” pointing to the generic site.
  • Link to the “Support an Author”

As far as the new landing site goes: I really must thank Lucy Snyder for letting me stealborrow take inspiration and configurations from her WordPress setup.

So, all my readers who are experts in information management: where did I screw up? What optimization opportunities am I missing here? What am I going to regret months or years from now? Other than being an author, of course.

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Penguicon 2017 Schedule

Next weekend, April 28-30 2017, I’ll be at Penguicon. Two weekends after that (12-14 May), I’ll be at Kansas LinuxFest. But we’re on Penguicon right now.

Here’s my events and the description for each. Each is 1 hour unless specified otherwise. And I’m asking your help for some of these events. (Updated to add the LN2 events, which I’m not running but a guy has to eat sometime.)

Friday:
8PM: LN2 Ice Cream
9PM: The OpenBSD Web Stack – OpenBSD is best known for security and networking. But they also have a highly secure web server and load balancer. This talk will take you through the OpenBSD web stack, presenting its strengths and disadvantages. We’ll cover the httpd web server, free globally valid SSL certificates through ACME, the Common Address Redundancy Protocol for two-server clusters, and the relayd load balancer. Many of the security issues common on web servers are simply not an issue on OpenBSD. Come find out why!

Saturday:
9 AM: Writers and Traditional Publishing – So you want to sell a book to a publisher. How do you do that? What should you expect? How do you optimize your chances of getting not just a deal, but the deal you want? What gets some people into traditional publishing, and keeps others out? Come hear authors discuss the good and bad of the publishing biz!

10-11:45AM: Author Meet & Read, Vol. 1 – A big room with Clif Flynt, Mary Lynne Gibbs, Jen Haeger, Christian Klaver, James Frederick Leach, David Erik Nelson, John Scalzi, Clarence Young, and myself, all showing off our books, talking to our readers, and signing books. I will have my books still in print for sale. I’m expecting that the others will all have long lines and I’ll be there alone, so this is your chance to heckle me in person.

10:54-11:03AM: reading from git commit murder – Readings are tightly scheduled, so I expect this to begin and end sharply on time.

1PM: self publishing in 2017 – Self-publishing is an increasingly important channel for authors to reach their readers. It also changes constantly, with new tools and distributors opening daily and existing platforms changing. This panel brings together veteran self-publishers to share their experiences, discuss the changes of the last year, and give new authors an edge in the business.

2PM: 90 second reads – Join a handful of Penguicon authors as they read 90-second passages from their novels. The selections will be thematically linked based on keywords, such as sorrow, fury, funny, love, etc. Timing is crucial! After, there will be a Q&A with the authors.

3PM: LN2 ice cream

5PM: Writing High-Performance Nonfiction – Writing nonfiction is not merely reciting facts. It’s a specialized form of storytelling, very different from your college essays and book reports. Whether you’re writing memoirs or computer texts, using storytelling techniques transforms your work for the better. This talk takes you through making your nonfiction not only readable, but memorable.

7PM: BSD Operating Systems in 2017 – I’ll be discussing the current options in BSD-based operating systems, the big news from recent projects, new developments, and where we’re going from here.

8-10PM: LN2 ice cream

Sunday:

10AM: breakfast – LN2 ice cream

11AM: Senior Sysadmin Panel – Storage – The years know things that the days and weeks never know. We’ve gathered half a dozen people who’ve been sysadmins for over 20 years to talk about the one of the most dreaded and annoying topics in computing: storage.

12PM: Self-Promotion for Creatives – Independent creators are their own PR departments. We have to not only make all the things, we have to spread the word about all the things. Here we have a bunch of artists and writer types who successfully spread their work across the world. What works? What doesn’t? How can you be shamelessly self-promoting without being a jerk? Come find out!

Where could I use help?

In the 90 second reads panel, I get a few 90 second periods to read a selection from my fiction. Each read should have a theme. Our group has four themes: Betrayal, Heartbreaking, Scary, Funny.

For those of you who have read my fiction: I could use suggestions for parts of my books that you thought fit these themes. I have a few thoughts, but what I think fits a theme is probably not what struck you lot as fitting that theme.

So: if you’ve read my fiction, what of mine would you suggest for a brief reading in any or all of those themes?

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“And then the murders began.”

A whole bunch of people have pointed me at articles like this one, which claim that you can improve almost any book by making the second sentence “And then the murders began.”

It’s entirely possible they’re correct. But let’s check, with a sampling of books. As different books come in different tenses and have different voices, I’ve made some minor changes.

“Many people find encryption disturbing and even a little scary. And then the murders begin.” — PGP & GPG

“Welcome to Cisco Routers for the Desperate! And then the murders begin.” — Cisco Routers for the Desperate, 2nd ed

“Network administrators of all backgrounds share one underlying, overwhelming desire. And then the murders begin.” — Network Flow Analysis

“I asked a psychiatric nurse practitioner about paranoia, and was told that ‘paranoia is the feeling that people are after you.’ And then the murders begin.” — Absolute OpenBSD 2nd edition.

“Over the last ten years, OpenSSH has become the standard tool for remote management of Unix-like systems and many network devices. And then the murders began.” — SSH Mastery

“The Domain Name System (DNS) maps hostnames like www.michaelwlucas.com to IP addresses, so computers can find Internet sites without people needing to remember strings like 192.0.2.87 or 2001:db8::ab01. And then the murders began.” — DNSSEC Mastery

“Resolved: controlling user access to a computer’s privileged programs and files is a right pain. And then the murders began.” — Sudo Mastery

“Everyone from big organizations to family photographers worries about preserving their precious data in the event of system failures. And then the murders begin.” — Tarsnap Mastery

“You can arbitrarily replace everything in your computer–except the hard disk. And then the murders begin.” — FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials

“Dear systems administrators: the firewall people don’t want to talk to you either. And then the murders begin.” — Networking for Systems Administrators

“Storage: a hole with no bottom, into which you pour data. And then the murders begin.” — FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems

“Much of our systems administration training focuses on filesystems. And then the murders begin.” — FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS

“The Z File System, or ZFS, is a complicated beast, but it is also the most powerful tool in a sysadmin’s Batman-esque utility belt. And then the murders begin.” — FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS

“Authentication on Unix-like systems is perhaps the closest thing sysadmins have to black magic. And then the murders begin.” — PAM Mastery

“Blood shall rain from the sky, and great shall be the lamentation of the Linux fans. And then, the murders will begin.” — Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd Ed

Conclusion: Seems legit.

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My face on the wall

I gave a talk at the Troy Public Library on Monday night. It went well: great audience, lots of questions. To my surprise, they had a poster announcing the talk. Like I’m a draw or something.

Librarian Cathy was kind enough to take my picture with it. The poster is great.

What’s that on my face? Well, I think Benno Rico captured that best: “HELLO HUMANS I AM SMILING AT YOU TO SHOW YOU I WILL NOT MURDER YOU IN YOUR SLEEP DO NOT FEAR”

If I could smile, I’d be on TV. Late night. Hawking petrified phlegm extractors.

Great poster though.

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2017 presentation proposals

I have my usual two annual events that I speak at coming up: BSDCan and Penguicon. I have ideas on what to submit, but thought I’d see if anyone had something they’d like me to present. Things that I can present, that is.

For BSDCan, I’m pondering between a talk on OpenBSD’s web stack (httpd, relayd, and CARP) and a 4-hour ZFS tutorial. I’ve been kicking ZFS a lot the last couple years, and figure folks are sick of it. The relayd book should be out before then.

Last year at Penguicon, I ran 10 events. That did me in–mostly because I didn’t know I was ill at the time, but still. Panels are much easier than talks, though. So I’m going to submit fewer this year, and let them throw me on panels as needed.

For the Penguicon tech track, I’m thinking of talks on the OpenBSD web stack and “BSD in 2017.” The “Senior Sysadmin” panel I chaired last year did pretty well, so I was pondering reprising that but with a theme like “storage” or “maintenance.”

I usually throw a couple things into the lit track as well. This year I’m pondering a panel on self-publishing and a panel on promotion for writers. That’ll leave space for me to get added to other lit panels.

Is there something you’d like to see me present at either of these? Leave a comment to say so.

And as someone’s going to ask why I submit more for Penguicon that BSDCan, let me answer that.

BSDCan has a soft “one event per speaker” limit. We get a lot of proposals, and we want to bring as many different BSD folks together as possible. Plus I’m on the BSDCan committee. Having ten events starring me would look bad.

And Penguicon will let me get away with doing ten events. Give me blank time at a con and I’m likely to sneak out to the county library for a couple days of peaceful reading. If the library won’t let me in, I generally hide under the stairwell and start chewing my hair out. I have no hair left on my head and the police tell me I’m out of warnings, so I reduce the odds of that happening by staying busy.

Hey, if I was social, I’d be in sales.

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A Christmas Wish (List) Gone Wrong

My wife’s family are nice people. They’ve kind of gotten used to me hanging around. It’s been over a quarter century, I guess you can eventually get used to anything.

My sister-in-law, DR, and her family always get me a gift at Christmas. It’s usually something practical and clearly well-intended, if not something I’d pick out for myself.

This year, DR’s seven-year-old twins are really excited about the present I’m getting this year. It’s a big box. It’s heavy. And they tell me I’m going to love it. They’re quite sure of this. I’ve had a few more Christmases than those two, so I’m not quite as excited. But they’ve gone into this frenzy of anticipation, so I let them help me rip the paper off.

It’s so heavy, I have to balance it while they attack the paper.

It’s a box of heavy brown cardboard. The edges are sealed with strapping tape. There’s a pretty serious thing in here. Probably metal, from the way it shifts.

The front of the box declares it to be… a tripod stand? Rated for a few hundred pounds?

The twins are thrilled. They’re too young to realize I’m not as excited. I’m kind of puzzled.

My wife asks “Is it what it says on the box?”

I look over at DR…

…and she’s staring at me in horror.

“I got it off your wish list,” DR says quietly.

I’m looking back at her. “Uh… I don’t have a wish list.”

“Of course you do!” And she shows me the Amazon wish list for Michael W Lucas.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Really, that’s not me.”

“But…” DR says, “I’ve… been buying your gifts off that wish list for years and years now.”

Restoring order takes a few minutes. The twins don’t understand why the adults are laughing so hard, but they’re happy to join in anyway.

Somewhere out in the world, there’s a Michael W Lucas. Every year right before Christmas, he gets a note from Amazon. “Hey, someone bought something for you off your wish list!”

And the something never arrives.

The poor bastard.

I’m just barely getting my breath back when she blurts out, “And I order your birthday presents from that list too. Have them shipped to your house.”

“But I haven’t had a birthday present from you in…”

Of course not.

Somewhere out in the world, there’s another Michael W Lucas. He has a pickup truck and likes Dean Koontz. I adore Koontz, and sold my pickup in 2007. He needs a few tools. I need a few tools. We’d both like an inversion table.

And every 2 February for the last, oh, ten years or so, he’s received a gift off his wish list. It has a note. “Happy Birthday! Love, DR and Family.”

He has no idea whatsoever who DR is. And there is no Amazon Thank You Note service for him to contact her back.

I sincerely hope that this Michael W Lucas has many many friends.

I hope that he’s not sitting alone in a basement apartment in a trailer park, despondently thinking “Nobody loves me. At least I have a secret admirer. Even if she doesn’t know my right birthday, at least she gives a crap.”

Because this year, 2 February will pass without him getting a gift. And he will never know why.

I know he’s not living in his truck. Because he wants an inversion table.

If you happen to know this other Michael W Lucas, please check on him this February. He might be quite despondent at the loss of his mysterious secret admirer.

The result of all this is that I finally have an Amazon wish list. I spent a few hours auditing my Doctor Who DVD collection, added a few books I’ve been meaning to get for research, and topped it off with the Wile E Quixote T-shirt.

I sent the link to the list to DR. It seemed the right thing to do.

Her response?

“Oh, no. I’ve learned my lesson. You’re getting gift cards from now on.”

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MWL’s 2016 wrap-up

The year-end post is an Internet tradition. Being naturally conservative, who am I to buck tradition?

It’s a couple days early, but I’m going to go out on a limb here: the list of people 2016 killed does not include me. Yet. (Dear 2016, this is not a challenge. I would not dream of questioning your ability to slaughter folks. You are the champ, truly.) This was in doubt for a while, but I responded well to treatment. My bone marrow has started firing. I have hemoglobin again. At the end of 2016, I stop taking all the meds.

Now that my bone marrow is firing again, the theory is that it will keep going. It might not. I need to monitor my blood for the forseeable future. Hey, if I reach 50 and that’s as bad as it gets, I’ll be doing good.

The lesson here is: if I stop making words, don’t assume it’s only because I’m an undisciplined slacker and that I need to “try harder.” That’s a great assumption if it lasts for a week, but if it keeps going on I need to see the doctor.

Dammit, what happened to my youthful invulnerability?

Writing-wise, I published three tech books:

FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems
FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS
PAM Mastery

I’d like to note that the specialty filesystems is now my worst-selling tech book of all time, lagging far behind the PGP and Tarsnap books. It’s a necessary prerequisite to the jails book, though. (No, you won’t have to read it to understand the forthcoming jails book, but I had to write it before writing the jails book.)

The ZFS book was co-written with Allan Jude. The specialty filesystems book was mostly written in 2015. PAM was written entirely in 2016.

I published three novels:

Kipuka Blues (Immortal Clay 2)
Butterfly Stomp Waltz (a crime thriller)
Hydrogen Sleets (aka “Aidan Redding 3” or “Montague Portal 4”)

The first two were written entirely in 2015. The last was half-finished in 2015.

So, yeah… anemia pretty much whupped my butt in 2016. While word count is not the be-all and end-all of writing, it’s a useful metric for a working writer. I wrote 15,600 words in July, 4400 words in August, and 5000 in September, for both fiction and non-fiction. That’s not enough to make a living on.

I started treatment in September. They said it would take effect very slowly.

At the beginning of October, I thought I was feeling well. I set myself a three-day challenge to complete a short story. It bombed. My “feeling better” was a condition the experts call “wishful thinking.”

October: 6900 words.

In November, I wrote 30,700 words. December so far has only 25,800 words, but I see a drop every December because of the holidays. That’s fine. I’m shooting to break 30,000 before the end of 2016.

As of today, total word count in 2016 is 195,700.

I’m not back where I need to be. But I’m clearly on the way back. Apparently, if your brain doesn’t have oxygen, it stops working. Who knew?

Many of the November words were fiction. I wanted to write something quick and short, because I really needed to complete something. 28,000 words later, I had a new Prohibition Orcs novella. Which my writer friends will tell me was a daft thing to do–short stories sell. Novels sell. Novellas don’t.

But orcish rumrunners in 1927 Detroit amuse the crap out of me, and that’s all that’s really important, so buzz off. I’ll post the official announcement on it once it’s available on iBooks.

Other things in 2016? Well, today I hit 60 inches on the stretching machine. That’s great for my martial arts practice. I put on weight: not good, but highly predictable when you have roughly enough brain power to handle Star Trek: Voyager. (I was still saying the plot twists before they appeared on screen, though: I was slow, not dead.)

Where am I today?

The novel I started on 1 February 2016, git commit murder, is flowing nicely. (Think “Agatha Christie does a Unix con.”) I haven’t spent more than a year on a novel since 2001, and I have no intention of starting now. I might stretch my fiction hours in January to keep that from happening.

The new tech book, “Relayd and Httpd Mastery: OpenBSD Web Services” is also flowing nicely. I’ve almost finished the httpd part–all that remains is OSCP stapling.

Best of all: once I get going, the words pretty much arrive the way they used to. Getting started is still painful, but I expect that to improve with more blood.

My 2017 goals?

  • Write 4 complete tech books.
  • Write 4 novels.
  • Keep practicing martial arts.
  • Stand up against racism, sexism, and fascism in my daily life.
  • Be sufficiently flexible to kick Ray Percival in the head at BSDCan.
  • Drop 20 pounds.
  • Stay writing.
  • Stay married.
  • Stay alive.

If I pull those off: I win.

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On the Election

I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t elect someone who advocates and empowers active hatred for women, blacks, latinos, and the poor.

I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t elect someone who declared that if he became President he’d have to do “unthinkable things” to “make America great again.”

I wanted to believe we wouldn’t vote for a candidate that proposed rounding up folks based on their ethnicity and putting them in internment camps.

Well, crap. I guess this is what America is.

I won’t defriend people over differences in economic policy. I think Ayn Rand was a sociopath, but I’m friends with folks who believe in her work. (The fact that she died broke, dependent on government handouts, kind of makes my case.) I’m OK if your stance on issues is different than mine–I’ll argue, but it doesn’t make you an enemy.

But blatant racism? Bragging of sexual assault? Not ok. I have too many black friends, too many female friends, to accept that.

So many of those friends are heartbroken today.

And there’s not a damn thing I can do.

I have no idea how to talk about this with my friends and family. The only thing that comes to mind is “move to Canada.” I’d post a link, but the Canadian Immigration web site has crashed due to all the folks hitting it.

I can’t use my “White Male Magical Inherent Worth” to protect the vulnerable people I care about everywhere they go. Are we supposed to all move together into one armed commune and only travel en masse? “It’s noon, everybody to the bus for grocery shopping! We’ve reserved sixteen carts for today. Remember, stay with the group. The Expedition Leader will blow her whistle twice to signal an advance to the next aisle. We’re starting in produce and working our way through canned goods, then the convoy will hit dairy and end up in frozen foods. If you’re somehow separated, hit your panic button and we’ll send a white man for you.”

We survived the incompetence of the Bush administration. (And yes, he was incompetent. I’ll fight the whole bar on that, but only in person, not online.) If that’s all we faced, I’d say “crap, we best save money for the coming economic crash” and move on. Heck, I’d plan to make a profit off the inevitable crash.

But a President who brags about sexual assault? Who says that folks from our most populous neighbor are rapists? Who declares that “certain people” need to be kept from voting?

The President is a role model. Trump’s election empowers every entitled dude who abuses random women in the hardware store or the park. It empowers the freaking KKK. It empowers people who think they’re better than others because of the luck of the genetic draw, who want to make life worse for other human beings.

I want to make things better for those folks.

And I have no idea how to do it.

All I can say is: I’m sorry. You deserve better.

(PS: The First Amendment only applies to governments. This blog is private property. Comments are open, but if you’re a jerk I’ll moderate you right off. There’s lots of soapboxes out there for people who good with racism or who think Bush’s handling of Katrina was great.)

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Ohio LinuxFest 2016 wrap-up

I spent last weekend at Ohio LinuxFest, present on ZFS and meeting readers. First, the obvious question: how did things go between a BSD Unix guy and a whole bunch of Linux fans?

It was kind of like visiting a parallel universe–the GNUniverse, if you will. And unlike Star Trek, that universe’s inhabitants are perfectly friendly.

The program heavily featured system administration and community presentations, where a BSD conference would have had more code. (That’s not a complaint, just an observation.) Friday had a single track of talks, while Saturday had six. This meant I skipped a couple of talks on Friday–I’ve been a sysadmin since 1995, and if I must sit through another talk on GNU screen someone’s getting a serious wedgie. Saturday’s program had an embarrassment of riches, however.

The keynotes were excellent. I particularly enjoyed Catherine Devlin’s talk on open source in the US government. 18F is a great example of how a government agencies can be perfectly competent.

On a BSD-specific note, Ken Moore from iX Systems talked about the new system management tools in PC-BSD TrueOS.

For a small conference OLF treats their speakers quite well, with lunch every day and a pre-con party on Thursday night. They also did an excellent job of communicating with speakers. I knew exactly what was going on, my timetable, and the presentation requirements. Knowing simple things like “our presentation gear is VGA, please bring an adapter” helped everyone a lot.

OLF did have a couple of extra surreal notes to it.

If you watch an SF show with parallel universes, somehow all of the major characters appear in slightly different form. This is absurd–changing the universe around you would change your interests, your personality, and possibly even your very name.

I’m pleased to report, though, that in the GNUniverse of a Linux conference, Andrew Fresh and Peter Hessler are still hackers. Their names have changed, to “Justin Smith” and “Andrew Pullins.” They even wear hacker T-shirts. Their allegiances have changed, however…

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