Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 50

Get your name in the relayd book

(note: comments that are not bids will be deleted. The next post is for meta-comments.)

There’s a long tradition amongst science fiction writers of selling bit parts in books in exchange for charity donations. It’s called tuckerization.

I see no reason why science fiction writers should have all the fun.

I need a sample user for the forthcoming book on OpenBSD’s httpd and relayd. This user gets referred to in the user authentication sections as well as on having users manage web sites. They w...

A Christmas Wish (List) Gone Wrong

My wife’s family are nice people. They’ve kind of gotten used to me hanging around. It’s been over a quarter century, I guess you can eventually get used to anything.

My sister-in-law, DR, and her family always get me a gift at Christmas. It’s usually something practical and clearly well-intended, if not something I’d pick out for myself.

This year, DR’s seven-year-old twins are really excited about the present I’m getting this year. It’s a big box. It’s heavy. And they tell me I’m going to l...

MWL’s 2016 wrap-up

The year-end post is an Internet tradition. Being naturally conservative, who am I to buck tradition?

It’s a couple days early, but I’m going to go out on a limb here: the list of people 2016 killed does not include me. Yet. (Dear 2016, this is not a challenge. I would not dream of questioning your ability to slaughter folks. You are the champ, truly.) This was in doubt for a while, but I responded well to treatment. My bone marrow has started firing. I have hemoglobin again. At the end of 20...

Reddit advertising of “PAM Mastery”

I spent $25 on a Reddit ad that ran for the last week, for PAM Mastery. The ad (Pluggable Authentication Modules: Threat or Menace?) appeared in /r/CentOS, /r/Ubuntu, /r/sysadmin, /r/unix, /r/freebsd, /r/linux, /r/BSD, and /r/debian.

So what did I get for that?

62,521 impressions. 215 clicks through to the ad. 89 click-throughs to the book page.

How many of those translated to purchases? That’s pretty hard to guess, but: the links from my web site are affiliate links. When you buy the book fr...

Reviews and Murder

First, an independent review of PAM Mastery, from nixCraft. The book took bloody forever to write, but from the reviewer’s comments like “Once again Michael W Lucas nailed it,” apparently the end result was decent.

Not sucking is good. I like not sucking.

Next up: something I can see myself linking back to in the future.

I normally don’t link to Amazon reviews here, but a review on a short story compels me to make a general comment.

This story is billed as “a DevOps murder mystery.” I’m writi...

“PAM is Un-American” talk now online

From my mug.org talk. You want more on PAM? Get my PAM book.

The Apocalypse, on Sale

Lots of apocalyptic news and feelings in the last couple days, and probably for a while to come. Why not trade one apocalypse for another?

My post-apocalypse SF 1novel Immortal Clay is on sale for the next few days. You can get the ebook for only $0.99.

Immortal Clay plays off of John Campbell’s classic story Who Goes There, (filmed as The Thing), but after we lose.

Why do this? Book sales routinely drop before an election, and jump right after. Selling a few copies per day for a few days on...

On the Election

I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t elect someone who advocates and empowers active hatred for women, blacks, latinos, and the poor.

I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t elect someone who declared that if he became President he’d have to do “unthinkable things” to “make America great again.”

I wanted to believe we wouldn’t vote for a candidate that proposed rounding up folks based on their ethnicity and putting them in internment camps.

Well, crap. I guess this is what America is.

I won’t de...

Ohio LinuxFest 2016 wrap-up

I spent last weekend at Ohio LinuxFest, present on ZFS and meeting readers. First, the obvious question: how did things go between a BSD Unix guy and a whole bunch of Linux fans?

It was kind of like visiting a parallel universe–the GNUniverse, if you will. And unlike Star Trek, that universe’s inhabitants are perfectly friendly.

The program heavily featured system administration and community presentations, where a BSD conference would have had more code. (That’s not a complaint, just an obse...

Challenge bomb

I felt great on Monday. Did 2400 words in 3 1-hour sessions. Tuesday? My anniversary. I had more important things to do than write. Today, after packing for Ohio LinuxFest, I’m exhausted.

So: I made words, but I didn’t finish anything.

I’ll finish this piece next week, after the con. Completing a small something will do more for me than a similar number of words in an ongoing book.

Stupid anemia.