Fireworks, the crud and sleeping babies

So I'm going to preface what I have to say with this. I grew up in a pretty rural setting, and I love me some stuff that blows up just as much as any other "country" person; and the 4th of July is a great time of year for that love of blowing shit up.  Here's the deal, that shit wakes my kid up.  It' illegal in most parts of my state, specifically in my city and all the cities that are adjacent as well.  There is literally no legal zip code for fire works in 20 minutes of driving, but that doesn't stop people from shooting off fireworks from sun down until 1 AM for the last several nights.  I assume it's the awesome factor that drives them to do it, I mean lord knows I've blown enough shit off the face of this planet (yeah, when I say rural I mean we built a 7' tall sky cannon aka mortar tube, a made black powder bombs and regularly had bottle rocket and roman candle fights) but damn it walking my kid back to sleep after things blow up and startle him out of sleep leaves me cranky.

Enough of the bitching about explosions, on to bitching about colds or whatever the fuck this congestion/chest bullshit I've got going on over here is.  It's (ostensibly) summer, and though it feels like April or late February around these parts I don't want a summer cold.  I really didn't want to give it to my wife, who because of her breast feeding duties cannot take literally anything for it.  I've at least got sudafed (aka sudampetamines seriously I cannot take this stuff after 3pm if I want to sleep at night) to fall back on.  So yeah, happy 4th of July or some shit.

Icecream fever at Saveur

The last week my feed from Saveur has looked like this

How to make 25 ice cream toppings including rich caramel icing, butterscotch sauce and hot fudge.  Then how about some books on ice cream making, followed by ice cream cone taste testing, some list of 25 ice cream and gelato recipes, how to make ice cream, how to make ice cream by hand.  Then for kicks how about Fig ice cream recipies, Onvi ice cream, Ice cream cookie sandwhiches, Mexican ice pops, and some strawberry shortcake bars.

Any how you get the picture; and Saveur we get it.  It's hot as fuck on the east coast, shut up already.  It's the middle of Juneuary here in the PNW, and I'm pretty sure we haven't gotten over 80 yet this "alleged" summer.  I bet you will never guess what was bought yesterday in my house?  Ice cream bars and then we went out for Froyo, so yeah posting about heat apocalypse soothers for your East coast brethren is probably awesome for page views but you're making me fat(er) over here.


Fuck it, I'm going to get some gelato.

I've had it with these MotherF*cking Ants in this MotherF*cking house

Seriously, title says it all.  7 years in this house, every summer ants.  I've caulked and sprayed, in expanding insulation (that they apparently think tastes like candy) and poured an industrial sized thing of poison in the crack between my garage slab and the slate entryway.  I don't understand how they keep getting into my house and pissing little chunks of sand into my entryway.

True story.

You know how I know it's Monday?

Shit's broken.

Apparently we had a Tsunami indoors over the weekend so our main fax, print, copier that was conveniently located directly below an air handler is unplugged and pulled away from the source of offending water.  It's broken, and the main printer for about 1/2 of the office.  Sweet.

Next up, one of our partners servers is offline.  Sweet, they don't have on site tech support so it's on me to figure this shit out.  Trouble is someone stacked another server right on top of the server that won't turn on.  I don't know what the other server does, so I don't want to turn it off until I speak to someone, but it's preventing me from turning on their file server, database server, dhcp server,..... you get the picture.  Couple all that shit with I have a 9am conference call, and forgot my tie at home....

It's 10:32am and I need a drink.  The hits keep coming today, and for fun I get my Mother this week.  That ought to be about as much fun as I know how to have.

Networks are hard

So yeah, I got clobbered today.  A change an ex-coworker made to a switch config nearly a year ago kicked my ass today.  Ain't that a bitch?

Long story short see above, much longer version is around 10am I was having a conversation near one of my Wireless Access points.  It's a strange habit I'll admit, but I tend to look at it whenever I'm around it.  Why you ask?  Well these ones have handy dandy status lights, you can see how they are behaving by the color of the light, green is good with no clients blue is good with clients and anything in a red-ish hue is bad.

Well I noticed mine was magenta.

Typically not a huge deal, sometimes they dissociate from my wireless controller and eventually re-connect at their leisure.  Around 11am someone mentioned the wireless was not working so I looked into it.  I had traps in the log that told me around 10:18am every single AP disjoined the controller, not reason given.

Ruh Roh!  Out comes the investigator hat.

I reboot the controller and the configuration server, power cycle the AP closest to me and it joins the controller no problem, so I'm thinking hey that's not so bad.  Trouble is only a handful of my 51 AP's rejoin, and an hour later I only have 5 AP's and 10% isn't going to cut it.  Plus some people are starting to notice.

I have about 1 million square feet (I shit you not) of campus to try and cover so if one AP is down it's not a huge deal, but 46 kind of is.  So I pull out my magnifying glass and thinking pipe (whatever props help me think) and work on probing the recesses of my damn network.  I've got Cisco's network adviser running, a spreadsheet of IP addresses, 5 terminal sessions and my fluke network analyzer looking for issues.  I tracing links and verifying that trunks are working, making sure no ports are flapping, double checking vtp server settings, verifying STP is not doing something stupid, still only 12 AP's are joined and it's like 2pm.  I'm starving and not able to think any longer so I do the sensible thing and go get a Jimmy John's sandwich and play some sodoku.  It was a bad decision, it's Thursday and Sodoku is really hard when you're

1. distracted
2. hungry
3. stupid
4. tired

None of this stops me of course, and I fail at sodoku as I knew I would and return to my desk. At this point I still only have 12 AP's and I don't know why, so I do the sensible thing and start looking at errors in my Fluke Network Analyzer, low and behold I notice and IP conflict on the secondary IP of my master switch and the secondary IP of my wireless lan controller. I fixed that and boom all of the AP's joined. Son-of-a-bitch. I'm going to stab that guy, he's been gone almost 8 months and he is still fucking with me.

Fucking internet I swear

That's it internet, you and I need to have a little talk here.  You creative bastards out there need to stop making new shit until I have some time to finish some of the really awesome damn projects I've already found.

Seriously it's getting out of hand.  I don't have 40+ hours a week to play with projects, or even 10 hours for that matter!  It feels rare that I have even 30 minutes a day to push the ball forward on various projects any given day.  Between cooking, and taking care of my child and a little video gaming mixed in I don't have time.

Alright, so on that note I give you this bit of internet glory:  Making rings out of coins.

This video doesn't have a "How-to" but shows you what they can look like.



This video gives you some insight into how to actually do the work, but the guy is annoying and whines about the quality of his tools most of the time.

Anybody else having issues with scheduled posts?

So I typically schedule posts at into the future so I'm not on the hook to be creative every day (it can be challenging I find), but this week not of the scheduled posts have posted on their own.

That is not acceptable!

Scheduled posts are my life line here, I am guilty of not checking my blog every single day so I need to know that time I did use was productive.  I've been with blogger since 2005 and for the most part I'm happy with it as a platform, but the push to modernize things seems to be breaking shit around here.  For the longest time I couldn't see the sections under posts where it said all posts, scheduled and draft posts.  I figured out the url and manually typed it in there to get to the various sections when I needed to, but I don't appreciate a wonky interface.  I'm not running blogger in draft stop fucking the mainline up, some people actually use this shit.

Also as a side note, I think the new interface for reader, and gmail are piss.  I use Reeder for Chrome to fix the interface on google reader and read my gmail on my phone to stop from being pissed off at you.  If you're going to update interfaces stop filling the page with so much white space my eyes bleed.  Ditto on the plus.google overhaul.  I don't give a flying fuck about the trending topics, stop trying to be twitter.  Twitter is it own shitty little nest I don't need you to try and fail at being a bad interpretation of Twitter.

Rawr, go back to executing well god damn it Google, I'm gonna jump to wordpress or tumblr so help me

M is for Meritocracy

The Rise of the Meritocracy is a sociological satire written in post WWII England it pokes holes in the notion that IQ+Effort=Merit and was supposed to be a general take down of the notion that aptitude could be tested for.  This work forms the basis of the following Article on Measurement Myths from the New Inquiry.  I would really encourage you to read the article it is one of the best reasoned examinations of the current drill, kill, test regime we have adopted in the US in the wake of the well intentioned No Child Left Behind act signed into law by our good friend and former President Dubya Bush.

I'll try to summarize some of the main take aways from the article, but the article is quite long and it's case built well; I fear thumbnail sketches don't really do justice to the original content.  The first criticism of the current power structure is it fundamentally overlooks the cumulative bonuses of already being elite, the children of the elite are no more meritous than those of those currently on the bottom of the power structure.  They are however afforded more stable home lives that give them the opportunities to excel, but more over they have hands guiding them to success with positive reinforcement and active support.  This makes the children of the less powerful effectively running a race against teams rather than other individuals.  Without this support network (and the cumulative bonuses associated with it) the elites children would likely perform similarly to other unsupported children.

There is also a myopia in the elite class that fails to recognize these cumulative benefits that causes them to perceive that they have earned the benefits they currently receive, and assume that if others applied themselves the benefits would be available to them as well.  By discounting the value of the assistance they have revived and the cumulative advantages afforded them the elite effectively feel justified in not advancing or assisting the disenfranchised and retreat to intellectual enclaves that assure them they are correct in their assumptions (Ayn Rand's Fountainhead is mentioned as an example and to satirize their position of authority).  My personl feeling is that examples of this abound, but the general fall of charity and near complete dissolution of service organizations is truly indicative of this myopia and a danger of the entitlement mindset.

Another and more troubling outgrowth of the test for merit is the testing inherently undervalues that which it doesn't measure.  How do you test for artistic intelligence, or the ability to render the profound into prose?  There are few tests to measure creativity (an inherently unstructured way of thinking) and the focus on testing, and the passing along the standard knowledge is a destructive force on free thinking and ultimately dangerous.  I'll leave you with my favorite line from the last paragraph of that article.

More and better testing, regardless of how it is conducted, won’t make for better people, despite what educational reformers seem to believe, because tests always impose reductive goals that invalidate some ineffable amount of real aptitude among those tested.

For a completely different take on education here's the New Turks Discussion on Education in Finland.  This is the world I want my son to have access to, learn and pursue what you want.

The Tech guy

So my lot in life is to fix things it seems.  I don't mind, truly I think I'm pretty good at it or at least I have a mind for this type of thing.  I find I have a knack for isolating things with a/b testing to come up with a decent explanation of what is going on and a course forward to fixing it.  If my own reasoning doesn't sort it out fast enough there is always google and the wealth of information on the internet.

Here's the thing, it gets a little overwhelming.  My own hobbies aside Last weekend my Mother In Law managed to cook a computer by touching two usb cables together (seriously I wouldn't believe it unless I saw the melted usb cable myself) so I helped them procure and setup a new one.  I still have the recovery of their files from the old one to get done.  My Mom needs windows 7 (so she thinks and I don't trust the local yocals in her town to do the job without loosing all of her pictures) so that is coming down the pipe on my birthday weekend.  My wife's iPod touch won't sync her movies for some reason so I fixed that last night with a factory restore and sync from backup.  My Dad broke his ereader (for reals it's broken, looks like impact to me).  I work in I.T. so yeah sometimes just my day to day gets me ground to a pulp trying to fix 60ish needy 40+ year old children.  My Mom wants me to sell her old iPhone, and I have an old iPod touch to sell, my wife and I are trying to figure out a way to play music in the boys room in a simple manner, I have a micro-cnc router that I'm trying to build, I will be receiving my Twine in a few weeks for monitoring temperatures in a friends crawlspace to see if we can use it for barrel aging beer.  On top of all of this I really want to play MW3 and I have a 5 month old son and a wife.

IT related post

Okay so it's about to get technical and ranty up in here so if you don't care for either thing piss off.

Last night my coworker and I stayed late to update an IBM Bladecenter S raid controller and upgrade the drives from 1tb drives to 2tb drives.  These drives are effectively the SAN for the blades so doubling the storage is kind of a big deal as we get ready to start adding more blades into this thing.  The trouble I had with this is the update process is really just bunch of bat files and python scripts that rely on default users that you cannot change and in typical IBM fashion it's not all built in house it just strung together oem parts glued together with code.  It was supposed to be a maintenance window of 6-8PM, but we didn't finish until 11:30pm and I have contractors in this morning (supposedly 30 minutes ago so some fuckers are about to get a phone call) all because of the kludgy as fuck nature of the update process I'm tired and cranky.

Also the SAS raid controllers on IBM bladecenters run MontaVista Linux professional version 3.1 on the Power PC platform and have a default userid and password and telnet is on by default.  For the technically inclined try to imagine what is wrong with this horrifying picture.  I can change the password, but telnet needs to be on (that's how you communicate the firmware updates ..... for serious) and I can hide the interfaces in VLAN's with ACL's which mitigates it to some degree, but I still bet this damn thing has busybox on it (it serves web pages and I think has an ssh interface) .  Anyhow the updates are done, and I'm tired but I'm rocking a 7.3tb array in one storage module bay(would be 9.1 but I assigned one drive as global hot spare) and a little shy of 2.8tb array on 15k rpm sas drives for running sql on

Academic research copyright

An interesting article about publicly funded research in the US and 2 publishers working hard to ensure that it stays behind their paywalls for perpetuity popped up on Techcrunch and in the course of reviewing my drafts today I also remembered getting an action notice from Demandprogress.org about a petition to End Corporate Citizenhood.  If you live in the US and are tired of corporations having the right to spend nearly unlimited amounts of money to convince Congress to do what ever it is they want, that petition would be one concrete thing to help start the conversation to end this bs.

I really hope this isn't true

Geeksaresexy.net has an article speculating about rumors on the new xbox.  They say that there are rumors floating about that it would prevent you from playing used titles, and if there is any merit to the rumor that Microsoft is considering it I thought I would say here and now that, this would be a deal breaker for me.  I would not buy it, and would recommend anyone that asked to not buy it.  I use my xbox 360 pretty much daily, either listening to music, playing games or watching windows media center.

This is the type of thing that companies need to know is insidious and we will not stand for it.  They are trying to use drm to undermine first sale doctrine, which still carries force of law and has been upheld by the US supreme court.  I'm fairly certain that the EFF, should absolutely peruse this one as it has the inevitability of Microsoft loosing as terms of service cannot make you sign away rights granted to you buy the federal government.

Good luck and if its true fuck off Microsoft.

HockeyStick my ass

This is going to take a while and really, I hope you have some time on your hands because if you like the internet then this is important.  First up an excellent video that concisely lays out SOPA and PIPA's place in history, how we got here and where it leads from here. Again it's long but you should watch it.



So I'm going to bet at this point your response is something along the lines of wow great info, but didn't you hear we "defeated SOPA and PIPA".

Here's the thing no we did not.

Engadget and Gizmodo both have article about this, but the gist of what is going on here is a typical congress tactic of stalling until the news moves on and then doing what they planed on anyway.  That video called on you to vigilant and get ready, LOIC isn't going to make this go away and you need to understand that this is about more than LOLcats (but they are included in this).

 

This song falls clearly into the category of parody for the common observer, but because it's using the melody of a copyrighted work it could be a target for take down notices especially when you consider that you are not allowed to profit from performances of works currently covered by copyright.  What we need and I'm sure I'm not the first to propose it is a substantial effort to rework copyright.  As it sits the last several times that legislation has been introduced by the media industry it has substantially increased the length of time copyright is in effect.  When it was originally written it was intended to give the artist that created the work the right to profit from their work during their lifetime, but so as to encourage them to continue to work was limited enough that it couldn't carry their family forever (or as is more commonly the case now the company that owns the rights forever).

SOPA

I think I've mentioned it before, but given how unbelievably poorly this law is shaping up I thought it was time to post a little round up and information on what you can do should you find this proposed bill as abhorrent as I find it.

First Gizmodo has a pretty solid run down on why this bill is murderous for the internet as we know it.  The gist of it is that because sites that host infringing content typically are not US sites, court orders and take down notices do not have force of law.  To make it so rights holders have a way to see their interests looked after (keep in mind who the government works for here kids) they can have that sites DNS records blocked or erased without due process (remember foreign entities) with no appeal process.  This fundamentally undermines the way that DNS and the internet works and is from an infrastructure point of view a very bad way to implement this.  We would be following in the footsteps pioneered by The Great Chinese firewall.  Not the best role model, I would say.  Next up there is third party transfer of liability, that is a legal way of saying that if the search engines don't expunge records that rights holders get taken down fast enough they can be sued for the infringement that they are "facilitating".  Finally the whole framework amounts to a tool that can and in the hands of companies like UMG will be used to stifle free speech.  It literally blows my mind that a congress that claims to be in the business of lessening the power of government would like to handover such a huge power grab to private companies.  Or it would blow my mind if it wasn't business as usual over in congress.

Gizmodo has a link to a petition you can sign to ask Obama to veto the bill.

Gizmodo also has a story up of all the companies that are supporting this bill so you can know if you still want to give them your patronage.  The most notable of them is the Registrar GoDaddy, they have caught a decent amount of flack for this so I don't feel the need to pile on any more.  I will note that I have chosen to take my business elsewhere.  Yeah broken websites for a little while, but I think it is important enough to take the time to do.

Now I would like to post a link to a video that has a pretty decent attempt from one of the bills co-sponsors on what they want the bill to do.  They are trying to extend a physical metaphor to police the internet is the short story.  Once again Congress just doesn't understand the technology they are trying to regulate and should not be allowed to work on it.

Not covered in this post is the related and already passed 2008 Pro-IP law used to take websites down currently.  This is a really strange use of ICE and Department of Homeland Security, (read excessively broad interpretation of the Patriot Act powers).  Some people have gone as far as suggest that the current USAG should face criminal charges for his mis-use of laws.

Holy swollen throat batman

Yesterday was a total wash for me, and I hope tomorrow is a better one.  First we have all staff meetings with the yearly instruction on how to effectively sexually (or otherwise) harass you co-workers and a recognition lunch.  Well you would think it being my 5 year anniversary I would be excited to get my little attaboy plaque to hang up, but instead something in my lunch tried to kill me.  2 sweet benadryl later and give or take some EMT's and my building's security officers standing around watching if I'm going to kick off or live to see another day and I decided to go home rather than slip into a benadryl coma at my desk.

So in short Fuck you Fennel (I think it's the fennel otherwise fuck you mystery allergen).

Stop Censorship

If you live in the US and haven't heard about SOPA/PIPA winding it's way through the congress and senate then what rock are you living under?  StopCensorship.org can fill you in, but the long and the short is they want to be able to blacklist sites like Youtube if one copyright owner claims your video of lip-syncing is infringment.  No due process, no safe harbor, just bam, blacklist.  As written I don't believe that there is a way to contest being blacklisted, much less any testimony on how to make this work with out completely crippling DNS as we know it.

It's nasty legislation by onery old men, looking to strangle the internet that causes them so much trouble.  The trouble is we like the internet a hell of a lot more than we like them, so spread the word.

Also here is a bloggy compatriot that recenly blogged similarly on this issue.  Thanks R for keeping up the good work putting this info out there.

Sony loosing money?

Not to sound smug, but here is another company that I am not a huge fan of.  Sony has repeatedly treated their customers poorly with proprietary formats and crappy drm software, now they are projecting a loss, in the same breath I hear Lenovo is posting a large Q2 profit.  I realize that Lenovo inherited the legacy of IBM, but they have built some really solid products on their own right.  The Lenovo Ideapad U260 is the computer I give to my executives and they love it, core i5 with 4 gb of ram.  Its tiny and wicked fast, and looks damn sharp.  I have several Sony products but my house is boycotting them until they stop with their go fuck yourself attitude about consumer standards.  SD card won the format war, get over it Sony.  They sank millions of dollars into seeing that the HD-DVD standard failed (fuck you very much for that one Sony) in part because it wasn't technology controlled by them

The new Google Reader Kinda Sucks

So the screenshot below will illustrate my problem with the new google reader and expose my ocd tabbing and crap ton of stuff open. In the new interface I have 567 vertical pixels to view content on.

<slow clap> way to fucking go google</slow clap>

I have 900 vertical pixels on my display, I waste 84 by not browsing in fullscreen for the tabs and the address-bar and my bookmarklets.  Your google+ uses 29, and then you waste 177 on whitespace that could be displaying the content that I use your product to view!!!  I'm not overly concerned about this, as I read more on my android tablet using Feedly, and for Chrome I'll install a user script to fix your fucking retarded design choices.  But I really would hate to see what this looks like on a netbook.

Hope you fix this soon, because it is a failure in my eyes.

Mac Virus

I realize they are technically just Trojans at this point, but the level of sophistication is coming for the Mac and their "don't need anti-virus" smug motherfuckers.  The viruses on PC started out very rudimentary, and by default computers where very trusting (hi smb protocol), it sure is a good thing that Mac software devs had the example of Microsoft to learn from.  They wouldn't ever develop a very promiscuous and trusting protocol to install with every Mac, (looking at you bonjour, also I was being sarcastic if that was missed.).

The link says it all, but the new iteration of a Mac Trojan is disabling the security update funcion on Macs after it is installed.  The malware deletes itself if a piece of software that sounds a lot like anti-virus is detected.

Just keep gaining market share there mac, wait and see what the harsh spotlight really feels like.

Netflix thoughts

Someone shared the Dear Netflix page in my Facebook stream, and for those of you that cannot read it don't worry I'm going to summarize here shortly.  The gist of this open letter is that Netflix is changing their business model, and the changes themselves could have been swallowed (with one exception) had the company been earnest with what they are doing and upfront about why they where doing it.  This is a company that has enjoyed enormous goodwill from its customers, their growth over the last few years is a testament to how much it users told their friends about how great Netflix was.  You simply cannot buy that mind-share and marketing.  Users loved that it was affordable, and easy to use.  We felt like it was good bang for our buck and we used it, oh did we use it.  When it was just a DVD by mail service it was still miles ahead of Blockbuster.  I basically stopped going there because Netflix was so convenient, you can see the affect that had on Blockbuster in the real world.