Rob and I are working on updating our standard envrionment in our data centers.  As may be clear already, we're big proponents of SmartOS, which has been working really well for our needs.  We've also big proponents of automation (and, in particular, Ansible).

I'm generally extremely happy with my 17-year old 2000 Boxster S that I bought new.  However, running back and forth between Atlanta means that I've not been driving it as much as I have recently (although quite a bit more than I did in the 2008-2010 period).   Last year, I replaced the battery with the same basic unit with a 48-month warranty, figuring that 7 years was a long time for a battery to last (yes, the previous one was replaced in 2010). 

For those of us old timers, here's an amusing shootout between a SparcStation 20 and a Raspberry Pi, including both the Pi and the Pi2 (but unfortunately not the Pi0).  

As part of completing our shut-down of 2007-vintage Xserves at the hosting center, we're moving a lot of servers to SmartOS (or at least SmartOS-hosted VMs). We've been really happy with the system so far.  Here's a quick story of the power of this environment.

Over Thanksgiving, one of the two drives in my "Big Disk" RAID (it was a mirror of 2 2TB drives that I used to store large things that aren't worth having on the SSD on my Mac Pro).   Generally speaking, my response to failures with SMART (especially with cheap spinning rust drives) is to replace the drive immediately and if it's a set of drives in a RAID to consider replacing both of them and bumping to the next most efficient capacity.  

Occasionally, in the vast expanse of the internet there are gems from people I know and respect.  I'm not going to summarize, because the entire article, The Age of Deception , is worth reading by itself.
Thanks, ssh.

Somehow in the midst of all of the craziness around here, I missed that, as the New York Times reports, Obama Won’t Seek Access to Encrypted User Data.  For the time being, they appear to have agreed to the rationale that a back door provides as much entree to the criminal element as it does to law enforcement, and that the benefits don't exceed the costs.

Wired had an article last week entitled Your Relative's DNA Could Turn You Into a Suspect, in which they describe a of using familial DNA searching to locate suspects. There are interesting implications here, especially with regard to public DNA search resources like Ancestry.com.  
Thanks to Bruce Schneier's Blog for the link.

Over the past couple of weeks, I once again reacquainted myself with the joy of using TimeMachine as a backup system.  (Please, use more than one, at least one off-site and one on-site would be a good idea, consider CrashPlan for the offsite version, we've used it for years and are very happy with it).

There's an excellent article, Keeping Secrets, on medium today (originally from the November/December 2014 issue of Stanford Magazine) about the conflict between academic work on cryptography and the NSA's role in national security.   Most of the focus is on what happened and not on who was right or wrong.