The Blue Beacon

This is a belated news; pink.the-7.net, the first “production-grade” personal server I have ever had, is no more.  The friend who has provided me with years of free hosting has recently decided to retire from the IT scene and become a bar owner—which, named Grand D’or, is a small but fabulous wine bar/bistro located in suburban town of Suji, near Seoul.

I received its harddrive during the trip to Korea last month, noticed it was “merely” 100GB, then realized how long it has been since pink first went into service, back when a server with three-digit harddrive capacity was a novelty.  In retrospect, pink has really been the arena where many of my personal “firsts” have happened.

Pink was the first mail server I publicly hosted.  Not just for myself, but for family, friends and relatives as well.  Mom, for example, has used her @astralblue.net email address for nearly 10 years before she switched to GMail—and she still gets many of her emails at the old address, which forwards all incoming mail to her new GMail address.

Pink was the first web server I publicly hosted. Many friends had their homepages hosted on pink. The old DDR Freak videos, including those high-quality ones by Ray “v00j00”, all lived there as well—and they maxed out the uplink so my friend had to cap it at 10Mbps constant, which I felt really sorry for.  And, after the old DDRStreet went belly-up, I set up a mirror of those invaluable videos there on pink, spending many nights to reorganize them into a neat directory tree, an act for which I have received countless praises ever since.

Pink was where I first started webcasting, which many of you may know/remember as “iABC” or “midnight blue^”.  Back when MP3 at 128kbps was viewed as the ideal “CD-quality” encoding and 160kbps/192kbps an overkill, iABC held a unique position: Hobby webcast offered at production level.  There would be minutes of silence when I was too busy chatting with others or even forgot that I was “on air,” and most would agree that my piano definitely sounded amateur (hi “rubber band” tempo and slipping fingers), but at least it boasted top-notch sound quality.

Pink was one of the first “FreeBSD evangelist” servers in Korea.  On #FreeBSD at HanIRC, an IRC channel my friend and I co-founded, I gave out shell accounts to nearly anyone who was interested in and wanted to try FreeBSD—how brave I was back then!—and even supported them to use various services that I was hosting, be it web, mail, DNS and such.  The intention was to demonstrate that FreeBSD was another open-source alternative that could handle nearly all major server-side tasks for which, back then, most people thought Linux was the only open-source platform.  The effort was quite successful.

Pink was part of my first “geographically diverse” backup cluster, being in Korea while the rest of my servers were all in the states.  I wrote a simple script for remotely storing dump(8) archives over SSH, using public key authentication to automate the process.  The script ended up being part of one of the oldest in-production setup I have ever had, until 2006 when I finally converted to Amanda.

Pink hosted my first source-control repository.  Although I knew how to use CVS before, I did not bother to have my own repository until some months after pink was born, when I needed to revert to a working version about two weeks old but couldn’t find an archived copy anywhere.  Since then, cvs.the-7.net—a CNAME to pink—has been home to most of my pet projects: BitchX scripts, common home directory setup (.bashrc for one) and miscellaneous shell scripts that live in ~/bin, such as “xtctl”—an xterm control utility that I wrote back in 1996 so I could change the size and title of xterm windows without having to consult the escape sequence table every single time.  It really helped to have a centralized repository for all that, accessible from anywhere: For instance, when someone gave me a new shell account, all I had to do was to check out the “ab/home” module from CVS and do “make install”; voila, on the next login I had all the familiar utilities, aliases and shell prompt!

Many of these goodies have since migrated to pink’s younger and more powerful sibling, purple.the-7.net, and pink have gradually become to hold only things important to friends back in Korea.  And it was showing its age, having only 256MB of memory and one 1GHz Celeron processor: Recently, pink would at times swap in and out of hard drive almost to the point of thrashing (and I felt sad when it did that). But it still carried out all the tasks faithfully till the last day of its service, which I am tremendously grateful for.

And now, pink’s hard drive lies before me, waiting to have all its contents sucked out to the new home: pink.the-7.net.  Confusing?  It might be, because it will be a virtual box (FreeBSD jail) hosted on purple—my “main man” that lives in Fremont.  No, I am not going to bury pink in time so easily, because of the past decade it has shared with me through innumerable ups and downs.  It may not function as a geographically separated backup site anymore, it may not have the same fat upstream pipe, and one day it will probably become a museum in itself, a fossil, a trace of time, but it is my wish that pink, having been the first for so many things I have done and the first in itself too, be given a permanent seat in my life, so that I can one day tell my grandchildren by starting with “When grandpa was a young engineer,” fire up a web browser (which by then might become ancient too), start streaming random midnight blue^ recordings, and smile.

Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego University, echoes yet another trait I have been spotting among younger generations, then steps forward by suggesting a possible cause for that as well: Kids these days are often much too self-confident compared to what they are really capable of, and that could be traced to the way their parents reared them.

Citing a research led by Dr. Twenge, The Daily Mail reports that kids into whose mind too much self-confidence and praise are introduced by their parents often end up being unrealistically confident about their ability, believing they are more intelligent than the previous generation and claiming they will perform better than their own parents in all aspects of life—at work, as spouses and as parents—while in fact their actual competency and performance is far below what they claim, not even on par with but lower than their parents’ generation. A remarkable quote of Keith Campbell: “Previous generations had more realistic ambitions.  Today’s teenagers have been taught to reach for the moon without being warned that many of them will not make it.”

This is very true, unfortunately, for quite a few acquaintances who I have had made here in the states for the past few years.  Often, their self-perceived competency begins to become threatened when they go to college: They wonder why their grades never exceed B0 despite their brain, then after graduating, they now wonder why all those jobs that guarantee $50K—some even say “a six digit income” (orz)—fail to recognize their ability and intelligence.  It makes me want to inject several IV bottles labeled “self-assessment” and “modesty” directly into their head, but with the facts that such advices have little effect and that the only effective prescription for them is the harsh reality which forces them to re-evaluate themselves, there is nothing of help I can really offer them.

Amusing.  My LiveJournal friends page features dream-related (literal) posts by three different people in a row.  XD

This is a side effect of being in one company for 11 years: I just found that I have maxed out my vacation days once again, even after taking a two-week vacation last July partly for the same reason.  There are 44 genuine vacation days, 6 personal days and 2 floating holidays left = 52 days.  I need to take random days off before I start losing them, yet I am at a loss of what to do with them now that I have no reason to take personal trips to Japan.  Haha.

Perhaps I should pay a long visit to Korea once again (November 2006 was the last time).  Give a grandma a surprise visit, see a few good friends and eat a lot of Korean food that I have been missing.  Ahh, the latter alone gives me euphoria.  XD

The problem, though, is that the airline fuel surcharge is still sky-high (last time I took a trip to Japan, it accounted for approximately 40% of the ticket price… orz).  I really wish the rumor that it will go down in 2009 would indeed come true.  *crosses fingers*  Come to think of it, it is already November and the new airfare schedule for Q1 2009 should have gone into effect by now.  Perhaps I should start checking them out.  : )