Happy Halloween! Take a look at my most recent article for the Pacific Sun about the last public hanging in Marin County. It resulted in a near-riot as a bloodthirsty crowd watched the hanging of a Chinese man. Sample:

On the first day of September, 1893, Lee Doon was condemned to die for killing a white man. Doon, who was Chinese, was the cook for San Rafael resident Tiernan Berry, who also hired an Englishman named William Shenton to paint his house. At the end of the first day of painting, Shenton called Doon out of the kitchen and ordered him to clean up his paint buckets and ladders, apparently believing it was the Chinese servant’s job to pick up after him. Doon refused. The next day, Shenton repeated his order and when Doon again refused, an argument broke out, during which “the painter became verbally abusive to Lee Doon,” according to an article by the Marin County Historical Society.

Doon claimed that Shenton attacked him and began beating and kicking him, according to the Supreme Court decision on the case. Either way, things got so heated that Doon rushed into the house, grabbed a pistol and shot at Shenton four times, hitting him once in the back. He was seriously wounded and died not long afterward. Doon was arrested, underwent a trial and was sentenced to death by hanging at the Marin County Courthouse located at Fourth and A streets in San Rafael.

More here.

Look! I turned this pillow:

Into these:

Yay!

Ok fine, turn Strawberry Shortcake into a preteen with a bad wig. Make Megan Fox chase Transformers around. Put symbols on the Care Bears’ tummies that have no business being there. But when you start sexing up Rainbow Brite, you have gone too far.

Rainbow Brite, keeper of the colors of the rainbow, is now going to be released in updated form. So she’s going from this:

To this:

I loved Rainbow Brite as a kid–it was probably my favorite 1980s toy–so I think this Barbie/Bratz hybrid of the toy is just dumb. How can Rainbow Brite rule the color kingdom if she is going through puberty? That is just distracting. She needs to be a kid so she can focus on wielding the color belt and ruling justly over the color kids. She doesn’t have time to worry about the growths and changes of puberty on top of all that. Also, what have they done to Starlite?

I do not have kids. If I did, I would not buy this for them.

Two weeks ago, Marcia, Kyle, and I drove up to my old home of Portland, Oregon and spent a few days there. Kyle went to a Linux conference and Marcia and I hung out. Here are 10 things we did:

1. Went to Powell’s Bookstore. My favorite bookstore, ever. It is the biggest used-and-new bookstore in the world. I brought some books to sell with me and ended up with $50 in credit for the store, which I was happy to use.

2. Stayed in a very noisy hotel. We stayed at the Ace Hotel. I do not recommend it. While it has a nice atmosphere and good location, the rooms are so stripped down, it feels like you are camping, what with the sink in the main part of the room and the mattress as hard as a rock. More importantly, it is the noisiest hotel I have ever stayed at. Not only can you hear everything your neighbors are doing, every morning at 5 a.m., some men come in front of the hotel and empty garbage for about an hour into their trucks. So you are awakened to engines roaring, bottles crashing, and men shouting. We couldn’t figure out what they were doing every morning, but it was loud!

3. Drank awesome coffee. Stumptown Coffee, man. Why can’t Petaluma have a coffee shop like that?

4. Went wine tasting. Marcia needed to do a little work while we were in Portland, and since she writes for a liquor site, she wanted to check out wine tasting in Oregon. Verdict: Grape vines look pretty anywhere.

5. Went shopping. Three words: No sales tax.

6. Ate fancy food. The best place we ate at was Paley’s Place. Among other things, they introduced me to properly cooked escargot. Turns out the other time I had escargot, it was badly done, i.e. rubbery. It turns out that snail protein is very delicate and turns rubbery when overcooked. In the hands of a good chef, escargot is pretty darn delicious.

7. Saw the tip of Mt Hood.

(I like the shadows in this picture)

8. Ate flaming cheese. We had a big lunch at a Greek place and had lemon-drenched cheese that was lit on fire. Hurrah!

9. Visited Lewis and Clark and Reed Colleges. Marcia had heard a lot about these schools, where I spent a lot of time when I lived in Portland, so I showed them to her. They are very different from Sonoma State University.

10. Went on an awesome hike. After seeing the tip of Mt. Hood, Marcia and I went on a hike to a lake. Along the way, we passed butterflies, berry bushes,

wild rhododendrons, and views of Mt. Hood. The lake at the end was very pretty:

The water was incredibly clear and there were butterflies and dragonflies all over the place. And then we saw a crawdad.

On the way back, we also saw a chipmunk.

It was a good trip.

(More pictures in the gallery.)

iSeries 400 has an interview with Kyle about his book, The Official Ubuntu Server Book.

They ask him technical questions that sound very complicated. A sample:

In chapter three, “Package Management,” you mention that packaging is usually done by distributions such as Ubuntu. However, users of distributions and software vendors can also create packages. Can you explain why a user or vendor would create a package instead of letting distributions do the work?

Generally speaking I advocate that users stick with distribution packages whenever possible. When you manage any significant amount of servers one of the most valuable things you can have is consistency and stability. The moment you build your own package, you lose many of the advantages you get when hundreds or thousands of people are hammering away on the same exact package. But, sometimes a system administrator might want either a cutting edge version of a program that hasn’t been packaged yet or wants to add custom features that don’t exist in the standard package. While that can be risky, it is one reason why people build their own packages. A less risky reason is if you have your own set of custom scripts or programs that you want to deploy. While many administrators might just copy scripts to servers by hand, if you build them into a package you can take advantage of the packaging infrastructure you already have in place which makes revision tracking, automated deployment, and a number of other things easier.

Read the rest of the interview here!