Richie Sevrinsky’s blog

In case you didn’t know, I’m currently appearing in Encore’s production of “The Pirates of Penzance“ as a member of the Pirate chorus. It’s my first time back on stage since shortly after finishing college (my involvement in the Hillel Players survived my graduation, but not our first kid), and my first time in a musical.

It’s been quite an experience, and a lot of fun to boot, but it’s also been an enormous time commitment. Between the shlepping from work in Tel Aviv to rehearsals in Jerusalem, while still trying to see my family when they’re still awake, coupled with an apparently misguided sense that no rehearsal should be skipped (ever), I’m fairly exhausted. Despite the thrill of performing, I’m definitely looking forward to a more relaxing week ahead.

From what I understand, there are still tickets available for the remaining shows, but be forewarned that they’re a bit pricey at 100 NIS. I quote the following disclaimer another chorus member’s blog with permission:

Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance is being performed in Jerusalem this week and next. Pirates is an awesome, hilarious, magnificent show, particularly if your sense of humor leans towards straight-faced absurdity, British accents, and, well, pirates.

I’ll be singing in the chorus. Please don’t come to see me. If you’d like to come, make it because you think the show sounds like fun; if it doesn’t, it won’t be, and that’d be a shame. Also, the show’s on the expensive side (alack, 100NIS a ticket), so really – come iff you actually want to.

Of the production, I can say that this troupe has always put on excellent shows. A lot of the high price is due to high production values – we’ve got costumes, scenery and lighting out the wazoo; we’ve got a full live orchestra, we’ve got an excellent theater. More than that, though, we’ve got a cast which is having the time of their lives – we’ve got great actors and chorus doing their best and their most energetic. What all of this is going to say is, our production definitely lives up to excellent play.

If you have no familiarity with Gilbert and Sullivan, well, all I can say is that I’m very upset that you’re spending so little time around me, but also you can take a peek at some YouTube clips here and here. Those are from a Hollywood film with rather a larger budget and somewhat more renowned actors than we can claim, but they should give you an idea of what type of humor, story, and music you might expect from the show.

Full details are posted on the ENCORE website.

There isn’t much nightlife in Beit Shemesh most of the time, aside from shiurim (if you consider that nightlife). So I jumped at the opportunity to catch our local performance of the Comedy for Koby tour, which holds shows in all of the major Anglo population centers in Israel. To tell the truth, I might’ve preferred to see the show in one of the other venues, so as not to feel like I was attending a shul function, but in the end, having a show within Beit Shemesh is just to convenient to pass up.

The show was solid. Despite obvious punch-pulling, the comics all got a solid flow going. Amy and I were careful not to sit in the “splash zone” – the first row and the front sides of the audience are the most likely to get picked on – as opposed to a certain member of the Beit Shemesh Board Game Club, who was probably looking for attention on a birthday outing.

The show was held on the evening following Obama’s Cairo address (which I’ll need to address in another post), and the first comic, David Crowe, was clearly caught off guard when he started to go into his “Obama routine” and was met with boos and hisses.

Finally, the last performer, Jeffrey Ross, asked for a volunteer from the audience to play a few mood-setting chords on the piano for his “Love Poems”. Amy grabbed my arm and said, “Don’t — you — dare!”, but she needn’t have worried. The cry went up: “Lenny! Lenny!” Lenny Solomon (of Shlock Rock fame) was at the show and bounded up to the stage. Jeffrey Ross looked at Lenny and the crowd’s unexpected reaction, and asked: “Are you famous or something?” Celebrity is a relative thing.

As directed by the Home Front Command, we held an alert drill at the Israeli branch of F5. Along with most of the country, we found that we are grossly unprepared in the event of an actual attack.

Our building, while poorly laid out, was still built within the last 10 years — in other words, after the first Gulf War during which 39 Scud missiles landed in Israeli territory. As such, it was supposed to have been built with enough shelter space for all regular employees.

Our drill exercise lasted under 10 minutes. I heard the faint warbling of the siren at 11:00 sharp, but I never would’ve heard it had I not been expecting it. The office manager unlocked the emergency exit door, which itself blocks access to the shelter when opened fully. Once we rounded that corner, we found that the shelter, though nicely spacious, was packed to the gills with some other company’s boxes. So after standing around the shelter-turned-warehouse for a couple of minutes, we headed outside for some fresh air.

In short, the lesson of today’s drill was: in the event of a real attack, we’re all gonna die.

Nonetheless, the drill was entirely worthwhile. For one, Home Front Command did an excellent job of raising awareness of how to conduct oneself during an emergency. We were able to notify Home Front Command that we couldn’t hear the siren, and hopefully they’ll install additional sirens wherever needed. The practice of converting shelters into warehouses is far too common (some landlords even charge rent!), and now that we had an excuse to blow the whistle, the municipality will be sending an inspector at some point in the future to make sure that our shelter remains clear.

Despite the common perception that today’s drill has something to do with Iran and the threat of a nuclear attack (in which case, some percentage of the country is simply toast, regardless of what precautions are taken), it’s far more likely that the simplest explanation, which is the one given by Home Front Command, is the best. This is one of the recommendations of the commission after the failings of the Second Lebanon War. It is entirely possible that any part of Israel could come under conventional missile attack by Hizbullah from the north or Hamas from the south, and it is only responsible to prepare for that eventuality.

When I started at F5 Networks, I fully expected that I would be plunked down in front of a Windows 2000 ™ workstation, relatively unsuited to my regular tasks as a (primarily) UNIX developer/Linux user, as I have been at practically every other job I’ve held. The general “excuse” given for this seemingly incongruous arrangement is sometimes the need for corporate standards, but more likely that the entire company runs Outlook/Exchange and uses Word and Excel in a way that would shatter in OpenOffice. Which, for many corporate environments, is actually true.

Of course, in those workplaces, I’ve never really toiled with just plain ol’ Windows, pristine as the day the gold master was burned in Redmond. No, a geek’s gotta have his toys, and a UNIX geek even more so. Of course, any Windows system I’ve run immediately gets Cygwin, LiteStep, XEmacs, Miranda, and pstools. By the time I get down to work, it’s at least as useful as most Linux systems.

So, imagine my surprise when, on the very first day of work, I saw that my workstation was already installed with Fedora Core 3. We had discussed that I use Gentoo Linux on my home system during the interview process and they thought that I’d be thrilled to work on a Linux system (which about half the company does). And I was.

Now, a couple of friends had been pressuring me to try out Fedora for a couple of years. It’s much better than Red Hat ever was, they claimed, much easier and much more frequently updated. While some Linux enthusiasts change distributions like changing their socks (actually, probably more often) and love to get into distro wars (“Man, I can’t beleive it took me only 3 hours to install Slackware!”) — I’m really not in that camp. I’ve only run Red Hat and Gentoo, and used Knoppix as a rescue/interim system. My goal is to get 1 system configured and tweaked exactly the way I want, not to flit between different versions of someone else’s Good Idea of a Starting Point. Also, the whole reason that I abandoned Red Hat at home was RPM Hell, and as far as I knew, the situation had not changed all that much when Red Hat became Fedora.

In short, this was the perfect opportunity to give Fedora/Red Hat another chance without messing around with my home machine. I quickly discovered various sites describing how to tweak my yum settings in order to install the packages that Red Hat couldn’t bear to be involved with, such as the Flash plugin and the MP3 plugin for XMMS (do they really still think that Fraunhofer is going come after them?!). But some packages weren’t listed in my yum-connected databases, and I found that some binary packages claiming to be compiled for FC3 (don’t ask me which) refused to install due to — you guessed it — failed dependencies. It didn’t really matter — some of the packages that did install, like mplayer, were tuned for IPv6.

The final straw came when I tried to upgrade to KDE 3.4 and none of the methods worked — not the KDE install script, not the packages, not up2date. I had never had these problems with my Gentoo system at home. In fact, after the initial installation, installing packages on Gentoo is easier than on Red Hat/Fedora.

So I set out to install Gentoo on my workstation. Being a cautious sysadmin (for a programmer), I always try to leave myself with a working system at all times. Upgrades may take longer, with all the scaffolding and detours to build, but they’re worth it. Besides, you can always rollback to the existing system if worse comes to worst. The first step is re-partitioning the hard drive to make room for the new / root directory. To my shock, I found the entire hard drive had been consumed in a single partition. Not only that, the Fedora crew had decided that, by default, installation should be done in a single LVM2 partition.

I am absolutely shocked at such a phenomenal degree of hubris. Setting aside for the moment the relative benefits or detriments of LVM, the only way to resize this bloated partition is to boot off of some sort rescue disk or LiveCD, but only one that understands LVM. No Knoppix, no Tom’s RootBoot. I finally found Insert and booted off the CD.

Now we come to the point of arrogance run amuck. LVM logical volumes have filesystems sitting on top of them, such as ext2 or ext3. e2fsprogs provide all tools for the regular care and feeding of ext2 filesystems, including resize2fs. When I tried to resize Fedora’s filesystem, I was stunned to get the following message:

fsck.ext3: Filesystem has unsupported feature(s)
e2fsck: Get a newer version of e2fsck!

I mounted the filesystem and quickly checked — yes, both FC3′s version of resize2fs and Insert’s were version 1.35. It took some searching until I found that FC3 has a incompatible patched version of e2fsprogs 1.35, which introduced some nasty bugs itself. Despite the fact that this version claimed to be 1.35, it had produced a filesystem that could not be adjusted (or even checked!) by other e2fsprogs.

Keeping my wits about me, I managed to find a way out of the mess. The /boot partition was still a normal ext2 partition, so it was simply a matter of copying Fedora’s version of resize2fs there. That done, I unmounted the soon-to-be-former root partition and shrunk it down to a reasonable size. While I was at it, I created another LVM volume for /home and moved that over, too.

The only remaining challange at this point was installing Gentoo on a LVM-based system. With the excellent documentation and forums that
I’ve come to expect from the Gentoo community, I was still pleasantly suprised to see that Gentoo has an official guide for Gentoo LVM-based systems, in which they clearly warn that basing your root partition on LVM is a Bad Idea. Nonetheless, since I was already stuck with a huge LVM installation, I found clear, comprehensive instructions on installing Gentoo with root inside LVM.

This really sums up the distinction between the two distributions and their communities. Fedora seems to be inclining more and more towards a Cathedral, where the maintainers know What’s Best for You and select default installations and packages that will only lock you into their worldview. Gentoo, on the other hand, is built around letting the user choose themselves, even when it’s something they recommend against.

Which world would you rather live in? I thought so.

Listening to the radio in Israel always a trip into Fantasyland. Bear in mind that practically all of the stations are controlled by either IBA (the Israel Broadcast Authority) — i.e. the government — or the army (Galei Tzahal and Galgalatz). There is no Fourth Estate here; all mouthpieces are extensions of the current administration (with minimal external influence still exerted by the labor unions, but I digress — I’ll pick on Amir Peretz another day).

Oh, actually, there *used to* be a divergent opinion on the airwaves, but they were declared illegal and shut down, despite all efforts to obtain a proper license. In the US, if you want to run a radio or TV station, you have an opportunity to be licensed by the FCC. Granted, it may not be cheap, and the radio spectrum in large cities is already over-crowded, but anyone can run their own media outlet with their own spin. That may seem quaint in the era of blogs, podcasts, blogcast, etc. but despite what you may read online, many people in Israel commute with non-satellite radios and get their primary news from Kol Israel.

This morning’s news led off with 3 stories about the continuing standoff between the banned anti-disengagement march to Gush Katif and the police. The stories all suggested that the “right-wing settlers” were rioting violently, despite all efforts by the Yesha Council to keep them calm and negotiate with the police. A few arrests were mentioned. You have to wonder what the government was thinking by coming down on the protest so hard. If the army hadn’t declared Gaza a closed military zone, and the police ignored the march, there really wouldn’t have been much of a news story. Right now, Sharon is giving the protesters a golden opportunity to martyr themselves for the cause. This standoff is of the government’s making alone.

And here’s the Fantasyland bit: Item 4 on the news was about some Palestinian mortar fire and gunfire directed at the Gaza settlements. No injuries, no serious damage, no further details. At the same time that 10,000 police officers are blockading a legitimate non-violent protest within a democratic country, our citizens are under continued attacks and we do nothing. The Palestinians do nothing. The Bush administration says nothing. Sharon has said repeatedly that there will be no disengagement under fire (but there *will* be a disengagement, make no mistake about that!), but on this point, he’s decided to go soft.

Fantasyland goes up a notch in News Item 5: Pro-disengagement groups have started roadside “blue” protests, to counteract the “anti-democratic” orange protests. “Anti-democratic” is a big word in Israeli governmental PR, and is perhaps the greatest insult. Never mind that it’s applied to you opponent only, regardless whether it’s left calling right or right calling left. To paraphrase a famous line, I do not think that word means what they think it means. Anti-democratic *should* mean acting against the establishment of a governing body selected by the citizens. It should refer to such acts as vote fraud or a military coup. Given that today we associate freedom of expression with a democratic society, acting to squelch the right of others to freedom of expression could also be considered anti-democratic. But holding a protest against the policy of a duly elected government, while recognizing its authority? There’s nothing anti-democratic about that. If anything, that’s a high form of democracy in action. The protest is to convince the government that its policy does not reflect the will of the people (at least, that segment of the population) and to illustrate that they will be voted out of office in the next election.

What we’re seeing in Israel right now is the inherent problem of the multi-year cycle of representative democracy. Once you’ve elected a representative to the government, then you’re stuck with him. He has complete freedom to take whatever positions or work towards whatever policies he wants. He only has to keep you happy enough to vote for him in 4 years. Actually, this problem should be more pronounced in the US with the 2 term limit on presidents, but there really aren’t enough consequential issues in the US to really make a difference. With Ariel Sharon, who is thinking only of his legacy and his retirement, he is not held accountable even by the flimsiest of control devices inherent in democracy. He has no interest beyond the disengagement. While I disagree with his policies and his methods, I admire his resolve to finish his career in a blaze of glory. Nonetheless, those who call his opponents anti-democratic would do well to examine their own feelings on democracy and freedom of expression.

After a great deal of messing around with various packages, I’ve finally come to the
conclusion that I need to run my blog on my own server. Here’s the initial post that I
did on Blogger before that realization:

Well, it’s quite clear that I need a blog. For someone as opinionated as I am, not having a blog limits my potential ranting audience far too much.

But as a techie, I want the fine-tuned control that can only be achieved by hosting a blog yourself (not to mention the bragging rights). So, my account and blog here is temporary, possibly to be superceded by something else — if I ever decide on a package to use. Ah well, such is the life of the technological perfectionist.

Welcome to the blog, and good luck to me!

Update – Jan 17, 2008: I’m still running this on my own server, but I’ve moved over to WordPress. WordPress might have tons of potential plugins to manage, but at least the basic functionality doesn’t require as much tweaking as Bloxsom.