We just set up an ANTWORKS ant farm. It's pretty cool. The gel inside was developed by NASA to send ants into space. Take heed of the warning about Army Ants:



"Note: DO NOT attempt to collect Army Ants in your ANTWORKS container. Should you see several hundred thousand very focused ants moving in your direction, we advise quickly leaving the area."

As-Is ham... not something we buy every day.

To be fair, the Spring 2012 shoe models from many companies are not yet widely available and I have not yet tried them all. Reviews are starting to appear on the web and some of the forthcoming shoes do look interesting. However, they would have to be really completely awesomely perfect to knock the Soft Star Shoes Moc3 off the top of my best minimalist shoes list.

The Moc3 provides only minimal protection, no cushion. I have a tendency to increase my leg pounding as the level of cushion in a shoe increases (and my ability to feel the ground decreases). The Moc3 keeps me true to barefoot form but at the same time provides a fiction barrier to allow me to run more miles. The sole is made by Vibram and is the "street sole" used by Soft Star in their RunAmocs. The Moc3 sole has interesting cutouts that increase the flexibility of the shoe and reduce weight. The gaps in the outsole material are still protected with a thin flexible sole material that Soft Star uses in some of their other shoes. I have not yet been poked by anthing that snuck past the vibram.

The soles looked fine after the first 200 miles of mostly road/sidewalk miles and it is even still possible to make out the word "Vibram" at the ball of the foot:



I have owned the shoes for about 7 months and I am glad to see they will be usable for many more miles.

I read 17 works of fiction during 2011. This number is down from the previous two years. Family, running, and the new job has cut into my reading time. I am doing my best to make more time for reading every day, mostly by spending less time squandering my time away on the Internet... but that also means less time for blogging. Hence, I find myself summarizing 2011 in the middle of February.

Well, here it is, the list of Fiction that I read during 2011:

A few months ago I started standing at work.

I've been tweaking my desk area and this is where I am today, version 2.0 of my standing workstation:



The upper LCD shelf is made from a cheap melamine shelf with CAPITA legs from IKEA. So far it is working well, and the third LCD monitor is a nice addition.

ClusterSSH is a nice tool for manipulating multiple *nix machines simultaneously. For example, if I want to run some commands on two Linux machines named server1 and server2, I could:

# cssh server1 server2

And I will get two xterm windows that I can control simultaneously by typing into the cssh command window. Since cssh will send keystrokes to both servers, any series of commands can be run, including editing files, etc. I have found that my daily patterns of behavior make cssh preferable to similar tools such as pdsh. Also, cssh uses very similar options syntax to the ssh command, so I don't have to remember different options (I frequently use -l and -p).

I might want to tail the logs on all of the machines in the cluster, but then focus in on one particular machine after I have identified a particular cluster node of interest. Similarly, I might work out a long command line on a single node before running it on the rest of the machines via the cssh command window.

In Debian and Ubuntu, cssh can be installed with:

# sudo apt-get install clusterssh

Cluster SSH is also available for Mac OS X (http://code.google.com/p/csshx/).

A clusterssh package seems to be working its way into Red Hat flavors via Extras or 3rd party repos such as rpmforge.

After running cssh for the first time, you will have a .csshrc file in your home directory. This file can be tweaked in various ways to make connecting to groups of machines easier. To save a group of machines into a list that you can re-use, cssh can use a plain text cluster file.

To use a cluster file: