Reading (For Dummies)

From Rome to Little Falls

Work has been going in the 'not incredibly well' verse for a while. It's a funny thing, but I like for someone to tell me what to do every now and then. The SELinux Symposium actually helped a lot, in more than a few ways...it convinced me that I should start working on some parts of RedHat, so I've decided to take on some of the projects from the TODO list. Kind of strange that I'm paid by the government, and am writing software for a linux distribution that will ultimately be sold back to...me...

Growing a little bit tired of having my life and dreams in my own hands at work, I decided to cut out a little early today and go to Little Falls to climb with some friends. A big bonus of commuting to Rome for work is that the cliffs are only a 40 minute drive from work (versus 1.25 hours from Syracuse).

Jonas, being belayed by Sarah O.

I met up with Jonas and about 4 other SUOC'ers and did a few of the famous routes at Little Falls, including Jeff Loves Eileen (5.4, located on the big slab wall and notable because "Jeff Loves Eileen" is spraypainted on the rock in the middle of the climb).

Climbing still serves as a wonderful meditation/stress relief break from the banalities of modern life...I probably should start climbing more often so that I'm not stuck doing 5.4 and 5.5 climbs for the rest of my life.

The Catskills

Finally having a mutual weekend "off", Laura and I headed out to visit my old man, my brother, and some mountains over the weekend. We hiked up into the Catskills on Saturday morning, intending to Slide Mountain via Fox Hollow and Panther Mountain. We hiked over Panther, and by the time we got to the spring, the sun was setting. Snow was falling (not called for in the forecast), so we started back -- we hadn't brought crampons or showshoes, and knew that the ice northern slopes of the Giant Ledge and Panther would be tricky in snow.

Camped out overnight...

We woke to a little more than a dusting of snow, which meant trickiness on the way back. A few hours later, we finally made it to the big descent. I remember casually remarking, "Hey, this looks like the last tricky icy part. We're home free."

Jinx

Laura and I were hiking with trekking poles, which can be great devices until you start sliding uncontrollably, at which point they become missiles ready to poke you in the eye (or the mouth, as was Laura's case). A little gauze and some ice later, and she's talking to me again. :).

Reid.Academia

Today is a history lesson in Reidology.

A couple of things from my past popped up in the World Wide Web. When I was an undergrad at SU, DFC and I hacked away on the Sharp Zaurus. Apparently, we got cited in a NIST paper on PDAs.

Earlier today, the TU Dresden made news by getting its microkernel-based OS slashdotted. Cool! I tried to get involved with the OS group when I was a student there, but didn't speak German well enough to be accepted into the collective. If I could turn back time, maybe I would have taken German instead of Japanese prior to moving to Germany...

SELinux Symposium

After a crazy trip to Virginia, I came back to Baltimore for the SELinux Symposium. I will say this about open source software, the geeks that write it, and the geeks that pursue it: it is all awesome.

Steve Grubb talking about Linux LSPP requirements implementation in the Audit system

My hope is that we're able to use the OS in some of our projects, thanks to efforts like Steve's (above). Recent meetings with Sun demonstrate that they're wholly unaware of what's going on with SELinux, which is a shame (and inexcuseable) because all this development happens out in the open -- on listservs and newsgroups and websites that anybody can read. While this isn't (and probably won't be for a long time, if ever) my employer's opinion, SELinux is doing things later, but better, more flexibly, with higher assurance, higher assurability, all while giving us the ability to more cleanly design and implement the software that is our business.

I've always been an open source fan, but that was before I really understood what it meant. Now I know, and my love has doubled. So I'm off to start my own project: hacking the crap out of PostgresQL. See you in a few years.