I had a backup. Really.

Another milestone: 25 years of UNIX

Last September, I reported my 20th anniversary as a consultant, but this month marks another milestone: In January 1981 I used my first UNIX system.

I was taking Dr. Michael Rothstein's Microcomputer Programming class in the Math Department at Kent State University, and we were using an Onyx Z8000 system running the Seventh Edition. Editing was done with ed - no fullscreen editors - and it was quite a change from the Burroughs mainframe which we'd been using for previous classes. UNIX was good.

We also sometimes got to go across the hall to use the VAX-11/780 running Berkeley UNIX - now this was an impressive system. Big as three refrigerators, raised floor with in-room A/C, and real live VT100™ terminals. I still have good memories of virtually living in the VAX room.

I also learned C, and I remember sitting in the student ACM lounge trying to wrap my head around pointers and the fork() system call. Memories of those difficulties certainly informed how I taught UNIX/C later in my career.

Dr. Rothstein was my mentor throughout college, and I'm still grateful for his guidance. I learned much from him, and I'd like to think he picked up a little from me too. In retrospect, I do feel kinda bad about the "big foo" prank, but I'm pretty sure he's gotten over it by now ;-)

But mainly I'm grateful for the incredible good fortune for falling into such a great operating system so early in my career. Nobody had any idea that it would take off like it did, and though I have my feet firmly planted in both UNIX/Linux and Windows worlds, in my heart I'm still a UNIX guy.

Speaking at SCALE 4X

Next month I'll be speaking at the Fourth Annual Southern California Linux Expo, and my topic is actually mostly non-technical: I'll be talking about my paper So you want to be a consultant...?. This has been a very popular paper, and I hope I can guide some aspiring consultants who have the technical chops but need to kick up their customer-service skills a notch.

I'm speaking on Sunday, Feb 12 from 1:30-2:30, and this is my speaker bio.

I'll be wearing both my Linux Tux pin, and my Microsoft MVP pin :-)

Steve in the news: Election 2005

The other day, I got a call from a producer at Power 106 radio asking about my ballot analysis. After a bit of conversation and checking out my California Ballot Measure Analysis, she invited me to appear on their Knowledge is Power show this Sunday from 7-8. It's a show talking about the upcoming election, and it seems that they wanted an independent voice. I'm not entirely sure how this will develop, but I do know that it's early (and an hour away), and I don't have to dress up for it :-)

A year ago I was mentioned by the Los Angeles Times, but this will be my first radio appearance on the elections. Should be fun!

September 11, 2005

.. has more than the obvious meaning for me. In addition to being the fourth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States, today also marks the 20th anniversary my consulting career's start in Southern California.

I started V-Systems with school buddy David Droman on September 11, 1985, originally to do the same kind of consulting I do now; software development and system administration (though we also did hardware sales, something I don't do as a consultant). In the late 1980s David stumbled upon computer facsimile, and the VSI-FAX system was born. This was one of the first, and still the most popular, commercial UNIX fax system.

I really preferred the variety of consulting, so with David's blessing left the company to take care of our original customers. I nevertheless did a fair amount of fax software development — all the modem drivers, and most of the port to Windows NT — and our informal partnership continued until V-Systems was sold to Esker Software a few years ago.

But throughout all this, I kept with my consulting customers. I've gotten to work in many different industries and with many different technologies, and this has really contributed to what I hope is a decent depth and breadth of experience.

Our first customer was MG Bookkeeping Services, which did accounting for ARCO am/pm Mini Marts on AT&T 3B2 computers, but they've long since changed their focus to payroll under the name Telepayroll. We've had some rough times over the years — the ARCO contract evaporating was particularly memorable — but it remains a delightful relationship to this day.

I still have several other customers from the eighties and early nineties, but nothing gives me as much pride as the endorsement of consulting to one customer for twenty years.

Michael, Martin: it's been an honor.

Track Traffic With Webalizer

The April 2005 issue of Linux Magazine has my Feature "Track Traffic With Webalizer - A Fast, Free and Feature-rich Log Analyzer", and it provides a decent overview of how to configure Webalizer. I have been using it for years on my own webserver, and after setting it up enough times on different systems, I asked my editor if he thought it would make a good article; he thought it would.

What I have also worked on, but haven't packaged up yet, is a much faster inverse DNS resolver for Webalizer. When processing webserver logs, many of us like to see the DNS names where traffic is coming from, but doing bulk lookups can be slow.

Webazolver spawns some user-given number of child processes to perform lookups one at a time, caching the results in a DB file for later use by webazolver. But this approach still limits the number of outstanding queries, and a few dead resolvers can really hang the process up.

I wrote a program that uses the excellent ADNS asynchronous resolver library, and in a single thread/process it's many, many times faster than the synchronous version.

I've really got to package and post it...

LA Times says I'm a "Political Junkie"!

It seems that my California Ballot analysis is getting a bit of press. I got a call from a Los Angeles Times reporter the other day asking me about them, and why I did it. He was doing a story on making sense of the many propositions on the ballot (not really investigating any particular position), and the story came out in today's Times on the cover of the California section (below the fold).

A Political Junkie's Hobby: Explaining it all to voters (free registration required).

By Steve Chawkins, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

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Surely Hiram Johnson, that thundering progressive, didn't think it would take Steve Friedl to make his government reform movement work. But nearly a century later, the 42-year-old software consultant and political junkie finds himself yet again translating the impenetrable prose of California's ballot measures for his fans on the Internet. ...

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On Saturday, I spent more than an hour with Times photographer Glenn Koenig (a very nice guy) getting some great pictures to go with the story, but I guess they didn't make the cut. Bummer.

I've already gotten a handful of emails from people who've read the story, and though there were no references to my website in the article itself, I guess Google has once again been my best source of traffic.

California Ballot Analysis - November 2 2004

So maybe I should consider a life as a "pundit" ? :-)