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I do mine with ssh, bash and git, for the moment. I'm looking at moving to something like puppet for system configuration, though. I've also heard good things about cobbler for initial provisioning, but it's mainly aimed at an RHEL environment and that's not what we're using.

The 2009 Utah Open Source Conference had several good presentations on infrastructure automation. See, in particular, Phil Windley's slides on puppet and cobbler (hopefully audio and maybe video will be available soon).

... at least for those of us living here in Utah. They've caught a bit of flak from members of the Bloghive in these parts, especially with the hackjob responses they've got going on. Of course, these are the same guys who tried to get a special E911 tax on VoIP and almost passed statewide franchise agreements, so you've got to know they're not entirely with it.

I was also the one who made the "5% a week growth" claim (at the Internet Identity Workshop this week) and unfortunately it was not clearly quoted. "5% a week" describes the growth we are seeing in new relying parties (aka sites-that-support-OpenID). Yes, its impossible for this growth to keep up over time but its still a valid data point. Graph is forthcoming.

I'm shamelessly linking to my own blog here but I think there are a few answers to the questions people are posting on this thread:

* How do I choose a third-party OpenID provider?

* Converting your existing site to OpenID

* How do I use my own domain as my OpenID?

* OpenID and Phishing

• Poll workers were not familiar with the technology. They all know what a computer is, but they don't know what happens inside the computer. Like the difference between "registering a vote" (best for a testable system) versus actual "counting the vote" as the individual Diebold machines do.
• These machines (unlike the ones in Virginia) do produce a paper tape of the votes. I bet Diebold, being the cheapskates they are, used the same printer used in the ATMs. The printer housing protrudes about 10 inches away from the touchscreen. So when the voter stands at the machine to vote the printer is at the side of the voter so the voter can not see it. I saw only one person watch what was printing, and he had to do this by stepping back from the machine after pressing each selection. Everybody else just ignored what was being printed.
• There was numerous problems with inserting the voter card into the machine. Even though the voter put the machine in the card, it seemed to occasionally have a hard time accepting it, and it hung up a few people. A small detail, but with thousands of voters vying for a few machines and poll workers needing to attend to it, it has the cumulative effect of making the lines longer.
• The elderly, handicapped, and infirm all seemed to universally struggled with the machines. While they may normally struggle with any voting, I overheard one person tell her caregiver and these were her exact words "those machines are hard." Her caregiver responded and said "no, those were easy" which brings up the next critical point;
• Everybody liked the computer touchscreen. We are a nation that for the most part embraces new technology. But because "it's a computer automatically means that it's right" thinking takes over here. I heard many voters say "that's slick" or "that's neat." The public needs to be educated between the difference of "being slick" and "being correct." Election officials that had problems were quick to excuse it as "operating error" and big media inexcusably reported it as such, but clearly there are issues of usability that come into play with these machines. Giving voting machine vendors a pass on this is inexcusable. I think the election officials "defending their purchase" rather than address issues is wrong. And as voters think "Because it's a computer" does not make the machine and software operation and design correct (as any slashdotter will tell you), voting machine vendors should not take advantage of this to ignore problems.
• I wonder what the durability of the memory cards are. Maybe my fellow slashdotters could enlighten me as to the number of read/write cycles before they go bad. This needs to be a matter of public record. Remember, these cards are facing industrial duty with millions of votes cast. Are they rated for this use or did they get them from CDW? I bet they aren't. This seems like a potentially fatal election killer to me if one of those cards break, either from memory going bad or the physical bending of contact pins in the slot (I have seen that happen with other cards).
• While we have a paper trail, if there is a recount needed, how hard will it be for the election workers to read the votes in tape form? How long will this take? How accurate will it be, or will the recount only serve to confuse the outcome further or will it clarify it? As can be seen, the political climate is such that a recount happenning is guaranteed. Also, for all those machines without a "paper trail," because a recount is impossible (as it's just a re-tally), they should not be a part of an election syste

That book about the scandal sheds a lot of light of just how screwed over customers have been the past decade+. If anything Verizon has a moral obligation to start something like this from the fact that their customers have been paying extra for it for years and the fact that America is getting its ass kicked in regards to infrastructure compared to some countries in Europe and Japan. China is also planning on sinking billions into its infrastructure as well, so it's about time one of these money whoring telecoms stop the douchebaggery and start fucking doing something instead of syphoning capital out of its customers for service in which the cost doesn't justify the performance. Maybe this will trigger Comcast, ATT, Qwest and others to stop their stupid fucking complacency and start doing something to improve this companies infrastructure instead of holding their monopolies and using the legal system to force out municipally owned service.

Then again, I've never associated telecoms with ever doing anything moral, intelligent or in the best interest of the consumer.

I know loading the file isn't just parsing the XML. Loading a binary file isn't just loading data either, the point is that the overhead of parsing XML relative to parsing binary data cannot be any larger than the total cost of parsing the XML. Hence, for a huge office file, the overhead of XML vs some binary format is going to be no more than 1 second on the load time; and that's if you had to read all the data before displaying or editing anything, which you clearly don't.

And as you point out, that's via Expat as it was a few years ago. Expat is now 12MB/sec/GHz, and XML Screamer gets within 20-40% of the speed of simply sucking in all the characters raw. So for your 100MB bloated file from hell example, you're looking at a parse time of 4.3 seconds for XML on a 1GHz machine, vs 2.6 seconds raw data slurping. So, switching from XML to binary might save you 1.65 seconds.

So I still say that trying to speed up file load by switching from XML to some other format is a classic example of premature optimization. You'll get way more speed boost by optimizing other parts of the load process; XML is not the problem.

It's like a replacement for FTP, but it's peer-based distribution like BitTorrent. It seems to be a viable soloution for the Server/Client bandwith problem, however, it's still in pre-alpha stage, and could use some help with programming. http://www.windley.com/archives/2004/04/replacing_ ftp_t.shtml

I want one of these as a Pringles can with string

In Utah, incumbent monopoly telco Qwest's modest investment of $50,000 in campaign contributions and its' powerful lobbyists (one is the son-in-law of the State Senate President) may be enough to kill the UTOPIA 18-city initiative to build a publicly-owned FTTH (fiber to the home) system. A bill (openly crafted by Qwest) that would effectively outlaw city's financing the project sailed out of the Senate and threatens to become law. This action comes after 18 city councils have voted to join UTOPIA and 6 have already made financial guarantees . The UTOPIA system is based on an open-access model allowing multiple competing providers to offer voice, data and video services to subscribers.

This comes as the Salt Lake City Tribune, a strong foe of the UTOPIA initiative, ran an article wondering why Utah is losing its' position as a major technology center.

There are more UTOPIA links at http://communityfiber.blogspot.com/2004_02_08_comm unityfiber_archive.html#107630357108945975

I've posted some additional comments on the article based on my experience as Utah's CIO and some personal interactions with the players.

Directly related, from Doc's blog the day after:

If you want to get an sense of how deeply the hand of Hollywood penetrates the skull-socks of their congressional puppets, dig the letter sent to Tom Poe by one of his state's senators. I've emphasized the relevant parts:

Dear Mr. Poe:

Thank you for contacting me to express your concerns about the intellectual property rights and the public domain. I appreciate hearing from you.

I understand your concerns about ensuring that. This issue is very controversial because Congress must protect intellectual property rights while still allowing ordinary Internet users to have access to public domain content. I appreciate hearing your suggestion for a tag system. I am carefully reviewing a number of proposals to address this issue, and as I do so, I will keep your views in mind.

Again, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with me. For more information about my work for Nevada, my role in the United States Senate Leadership, or to subscribe to regular e-mail updates on the issues that interest you, please visit my Web site at http://reid.senate.gov. I look forward to hearing from you in the near future.

My best wishes to you.

Sincerely,
HARRY REID
United States Senator

On Thursday evening I shared this with Phil Windley, the CIO and blogger-in-chief of the State of Utah, and in the discussion that followed it became clear to us both exactly what kind of plans guys like Reid have in mind for the Net's natives: Indian reservations.

Like Hollywood, these guys see the Net as a distro system for industry-controlled intellectual property, and the public domain as a small preserve off to the side somewhere. Thank you for giving us this fine land with all the free building material. Now go off someplace where you can hunt and gather stuff that has no commercial value. And bury your dead while you're at it. They're starting to stink.

...

[Later...] I've been told that the very same letter quoted above has been going out from the offices of other elected officials. If that's the case, it's even creepier. Does anybody know? Is this thing just Sen. Reid's boilerplate, or is a much more massive cut & paste job?