alcourt

So once again, Halloween is half over before it is dark. In this area, I feel like people are trying to kill the holiday by reducing if not eliminating after dark trick or treating.

My response is the use of creeply crawlies: earthworms, spiders, roaches. During the first half hour, the very smallest kids who are terrified of knocking on strange doors anyway, get spider rings with candy. Anyone older only gets a spider ring. As it gets darker, the little ones continue to get spider rings with candy. The slightly older ones with better costumes get vinyl/rubber bugs. Roaches and earthworms are the most popular. Rats are bit more expensive. The best part is any leftovers get saved for the next year. (Usually one bag of spider rings lasts two years). If anyone comes to the door with no apparent costume, I reserve the right to give a spider ring, regardless of the hour.

Usually at least once a night, someone will see the bug or spider ring and pull it out proudly to show their parents/friends. The younger kids definitely enjoy the idea of a little ring they can wear on their finger.

The interesting twist this year is that the kid is wearing a costume that I wore as a kid. It's in remarkably good shape, better shape than many so called new costumes.

Foil broke today at fencing practice, snapping off right at the point where the handle joins to the blade. I impressed a number of people with that kind of failure.

I needed to finally get reliable about backups. So I picked up a pair of 16GB flash drives. This is a good start, but it isn't enough. I'm not very reliable about doing such things, and I wanted it easy enough that I could hand to a non-technical person, which means easy enough I'd feel like doing it myself.
( Scripting to solve the problem )

Moved my iPhoto library to a NAS array. Ran into some migration issue where a lot of the originals seemed to go missing. Might be related to a switch from a referenced to a managed setup.

Since well over half of my original files were gone, I needed some way to repair the broken links.

Finally, I found it. In the Originals directory in the iPhoto Library "package" (really, just a directory), there are directories for each year. Sub-directories for each event, named for the event. Copying the files into there repaired all broken links. No muss with importing and having duplicates to remove. Just a simple copy and I'm done.

Now why is this not documented anywhere I can find?

I find myself watching probably less than two to three hours of television -- a week. That includes watching old videos.

I've been seriously considering tearing down my personal web page. There are a few slightly interesting obscure articles in my field (security), but since they were posted, much better discussions and articles have been written and published in books. If I have something I want to say to the world, I'm sure I can find some socially acceptable Internet method to do so (as I write on such a socially acceptable tool).

PCI Causes Insanity

Americans will complain bitterly about invasions of their privacy and exposure of private information by government and corporations, right after posting those same private details to portals like facebook for all to see.

I've said it before, I'm sure I will say it again. Red Hat Linux just isn't ready for enterprise usage. What genius decided that support for extended file attributes (File ACLs) was to be a non-standard option that had to be added explicitly in, then hiding that fact so one doesn't see it from the man pages?

Until things like that are fixed, I can't see RHEL being seriously considered for many enterprise arrangements where widespread support for mission critical apps is a must.

The kid is at a national chess competition for kids. He's in the unrated section for his age, but it is still a big deal.

Following along online at http://www.supernationalsiv.com/

I may have figured out the proper method for giving a usually mostly calm cat a bath.

First, trim the cat's claws. Fingernail clippers work well for this, just push out the claw slightly to extend it, trim off just the point. Most cats, you only need do the front claws. The hind claws are often dull.

Dress in a heavy denim shirt. Something that the newly blunted claws will not readily penetrate.

Make sure everything you need is in the bathroom where the bath will occur. Towel, cat shampoo, a cup for splashing the water onto the cat, etc.

Bring the cat into the bathroom. This is usually its first sign of what is really going on to the cat. (Especially if you regularly trim the claws without giving the cat a bath.) Close the door and let the cat down. Let it fuss and worry for a few minutes as you draw the bath (a couple inches of water warm enough for you). Then once the water is off, walk the cat over to the tub and encourage it in. Don't pick it up, kind of push it forward so it has to walk on its own. If the cat is truly afraid of water of course, this will not work and you will be wondering when your thumb grew a cat head and where all that blood came from. In those cases, toss the cat into an enclosed area and pull out the hose. This is intended for a somewhat calmer cat.

Let the cat acclimate for a minute to the water. Don't splash it, just pet it calmly. Then use the cup for splashing and splash the warm water all over the cat. You may need to hold it by the front to keep it in the water. Again, calmer cats are necessary for this step. A crazier cat may be more harsh. The occasional swipe isn't unexpected. Remember, you are supposed to wear heavy denim or similarly partially cat proof clothing.

Then shampoo up the cat, and rinse by the same splash technique.

I was surprised how well this formula worked. The key seemed to be to let the cat calm down and not have the water on while the cat is in the tub.

Will computers ever get to the point of the Babylon 5 problem?

Ivanova (upon waking up grouchy to computer scheduler): "Why does my mouth feel like cardboard every morning?"

Computer: "Unknown, checking medical records"

I guess you could also call it the Data (ST:TNG) problem.

I'm too young to have so many medical issues that the doctors and nurses make jokes about my not staying away.

Basement drainage pipe isn't correctly set up. Been a nuisance ever since we moved in. Two years ago, it was rather bad, we got ready to have it permanently repaired, but the first plumber gave us bad info. Put it off because the problems disappeared. They came back with a vengeance last week. Had it professionally snaked, got the estimate to do a permanent repair reactivated, was going to do it as soon as it warmed up a bit. Except that the problem came back less than a week later.

I was asked as a favor to one group to help out another group. This group, completely isolated from everyone else, was losing all their experienced system administrators and trying to bring in several new ones who had never even touched Unix before, nevermind worked as system administrators.

Since the key problem that was facing the group was security, I had to put securing a server at the forefront of everything. It creates an interesting dilemma, how to train someone not in your group, where there are no senior SAs who can say "sit down and watch what I type," or let them type and then say "no, don't hit enter, you made this mistake."

Got sent a spam malware attempt claiming to be from the FDIC with a copy of my account statement for review because of identity theft. They even got the source address right, something most don't. Of course the fact that the "statement" included a .exe is pretty much a dead giveaway, along with the fact that it lists someone other than me on the To: line.

That doesn't even get into the other failures less often for a non-techie to spot, like it was sent by Outlook Express, or the Received headers aren't right; I don't think the FDIC uses hotmail to send out official email.

The old joke about computers never doing what you mean, only what you tell them applies to kids, except kids don't even do what you tell them.

They certainly can't be counted on to do what you mean.

Was looking at some political information, and had been referred to factcheck.org. Seemed semi-legit, until reading through one discussion, the commentator claimed that the median is not a form of average and insisted that when discussing income levels, only the mean could legitimately be called an average.

Considering that in the case of examining income, the arithmetic mean is among the least useful of the types of average, that's more than a little scary.

A former coworker of mine once described system administrators as either cowboys or farmers. The farmer term, I've never heard anyone else use, but the cowboy SA, the one who rushes in with little plan and just does what they believe is needed to keep the system up at that instant, has been referenced over and over again, and lately, vilified.

Last night was an example of where the cowboy was absolutely necessary. Had numerous strange issues, and what was needed was not careful planning but just rushing in and doing whatever was needed to repair the boxes. There is a time and a place for both. Outside a specific outage, you usually want your sysadmins to act as a farmer, carefully plotting out every move, examining possible consequences, and filling out appropriate paperwork to document what they are thinking of doing.

I was asked today if it was a good idea to do a patching cycle at the same time we were going to have a datacenter wide change window. It took a little bit for people to realize why I said absolutely not.

Especially for datacenter changes, power or network disruption is likely. The last thing you want to have happen during a patch cycle is for there to be a power or network disruption (since the patching occurs over a network shared file system.) If it does, better hope the recovery system works really well, or you're reaching for backup tapes.