To which I got the response:

hi-are these boxes still available & are they actual moving boxes or supermarket boxes?
I just found my roommate dead & am in urgent need of sturdy boxes to start packing.
thanx

UPDATE: Apparently, the person wasn't just yanking my chain, but was serious:

thanx for info- I'll be in touch.
 Long trip to you but I don't think I have much choice or time left in this apartment.
 
My room mate was the lessee & I'm sure any day now the manager will tell me how soon I have to be out.
 
Gotta be realistic. Don't know where me & my kid will go,
but at least our stuff will be properly packed.

jbaltz@dev [~/apache-ant-1.9.0]>more INSTALL
For installation instructions see the manual in the docs subdirectory
or online at <http://ant.apache.org/manual/index.html>.

This is the manual for version 1.8.2 of Apache Ant. If your version of Ant (as verified with
ant -version) is older or newer than this version then this is not the correct manual set. 
Please use the documentation appropriate to your current version. Also, if you are using a 
version older than the most recent release, we recommend an upgrade to fix bugs as well 
as provide new functionality.

...right. So just for fun, I check what version of Ant I actually have

jbaltz@dev [~/apache-ant-1.9.0]>bin/ant -version
Apache Ant(TM) version 1.8.4 compiled on May 22 2012
jbaltz@dev [~/apache-ant-1.9.0]>

I'm looking back at 2012, just like I do every calendar year, and I take stock of things all over again. (I take "spiritual stock" of myself every Jewish New year, and "secular stock" of myself every fiscal year. Sometimes there's overlap, so I end up checking twice.)

So where do we stand now, dear reader?

1. 3 Phase Comuputing, my company, gave up 2 employees to 2 different clients. Others would call it "poaching", but these were all good moves for everyone involved, and I am still dealing with my former employees daily. So it's all a good thing.
2. Yes, we're hiring again, and this time out of 62 responses to my post, only 12 made it through my first pass clown filter, which is actually just a bit shy of 20% yield...not as bad as it used to be, but Cragislist still seems to be watched mostly by automated 'bots that respond to every ad posted with a resume and a form letter. I suppose the same thinking that goes into spammers goes into these job applicants, most of whom get dumped unceremoniously into the bit bucket.
3. In terms of other growth, I've been working weekly with my colleague Kevin Limperos on developing a best practices template for software development, looking both at the micro- scale (individual developers) to macro- scale (large systems architecture and management). There seems to be no end of opining about this, but very little in the way of hard evaluations of products. Marketing literature and MEAP texts are great at telling someone what products are good for and what problems they solve well, but also knowing what problems they aren't good for is just as useful. Just like having a product requirement that declares what something SHOULD NOT do is as important as declaring what it SHOULD, knowing what tasks a tool is unsuited for is almost as important as knowing what it is suited for.

   Coming up with these do/do nots (there is no try) is our big task.

4. There is still a growing list of things I'd like to be relearning, both in the tech world, and in the not-so-tech world:
   • Clojure--because I still like LISP (although Clojure isn't quite LISP, and the differences can be jarring) and because JVM byte-code languages appear to carry a lot of promise in larger-scale software development.
   • SmartOS--because I still hold a soft spot in my heart for Solaris and zones, and I've already learned much about VMWare-style full virtualization.
   • There's a lot of Martial Arts still that I'm practicing on a daily basis--I'm not interested in hearing from nay-sayers, I'm enjoying learning some of the traditional "internal martial arts" systems (Taijiquan ???, Baguazhang ??? and Xingyiquan ???), so there. Come (try to) beat me up if you don't like what I'm learning.
5. And, I am finishing up my tenure on the board of the Prospect Heights Shul. It's been a fun ride, I wish I could be more involved in the week-to-week goings on in the community, but I've been doing my level best to help from afar. It's been a bumpy ride for the shul, with a lot of turnover "at the top", but I have high expectations and higher hopes that this is going to take off!

I've looked back on a few of these thoughts I've discussed over the years (even though I missed one), and I do have to reiterate:

(I wouldn't be a geek if I weren't online now, just an hour or so before midnight EST.)

Best wishes for a healthy and prosperous 2013!]]> http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2012/12/reducing_entropy_yet_another_i.html http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2012/12/reducing_entropy_yet_another_i.html Mon, 31 Dec 2012 22:27:46 -0500 hiring again. Let's see how long until the first bozo reply! I even made the darn thing a bit harder to miss:

Please send your resume, CV, or otherwise orderly representation--in plain text or HTML format only--of your relevant experience to the CL-provided address. Include in your cover letter how you meet the above skills. Please prove to us that you're a human by making a half-way decent attempt at passing a Turing test.

So we're looking at some very old legacy code that does some date calculations in a particularly ... stunning ... fashion and we wanted to replace it with native Unix time functions for calculations.

So Mark and I wrote a test driver program to make sure that his functions would be bug-for-bug compatible with our current codebase, and instead uncovered the following interesting fact on HP-UX 11.3: one day after January 1, 2100 is January 1, 2100. (I guess Groundhog Day got moved that year.)

So we tried with this code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <time.h>

int
main(argc, argv)
     int argc;
     char **argv;
{
  struct tm thedate;
  time_t timet;
  int n;
  char outdate[11];
  char conv[11];
  if (argc<3) {
    printf("Usage: %s MM-DD-YYYY N\n", argv[0]);
    exit(1);
  }
  if (NULL==strptime(argv[1], "%m-%d-%Y", &thedate)) {
    printf("strptime(%s, \"%%m-%%d-%%Y\",...) failed.\n", argv[1]);
    exit(1);
  }
  n=atoi(argv[2]);
  thedate.tm_mday+=n;
  thedate.tm_hour=12; thedate.tm_min=thedate.tm_sec=0;
  timet=mktime(&thedate);
        printf("(mktime returned %ld)\n",(long)timet);
  strftime(outdate,11,"%m-%d-%Y",&thedate);

  strcpy(conv,argv[1]);
  printf("%s + %d days:\n\tstrptime computes:\t%s\n",
         argv[1], n, outdate);
}

(We set the hour to be 12n as opposed to midnight to avoid a timezone issue, we're in EST5EDT not GMT.)

Well, we get, on Linux:

[jbaltz@linux ~]$ ./FDATE 08-23-2012 1
(mktime returned 1345827600)
08-23-2012 + 1 days:
        strptime computes:      08-24-2012

jbaltz@hp-ux [~]> ./FDATE 08-23-2012 1
(mktime returned 1345827600)
08-23-2012 + 1 days:
        strptime computes:      08-24-2012

Let's try around the troublesome 32-bit overflow:

[jbaltz@linux ~]$ ./FDATE 01-18-2038 2
(mktime returned 2147619600)
01-18-2038 + 2 days:
        strptime computes:      01-20-2038

jbaltz@hp-ux [~]> ./FDATE 01-18-2038 2
(mktime returned 2147619600)
01-18-2038 + 2 days:
        strptime computes:      01-20-2038

[jbaltz@linux ~]$ ./FDATE 01-01-2100 1
(mktime returned 4102592400)
01-01-2100 + 1 days:
        strptime computes:      01-02-2100

jbaltz@hp-ux [~]> ./FDATE 01-01-2100 1
(mktime returned 4102506000)
01-01-2100 + 1 days:
        strptime computes:      01-01-2100
jbaltz@hp-ux [~]> ./FDATE 12-31-2099 2
(mktime returned 4102506000)
12-31-2099 + 2 days:
        strptime computes:      01-01-2100
jbaltz@hp-ux[~]> ./FDATE 12-31-2099 3
(mktime returned 4102592400)
12-31-2099 + 3 days:
        strptime computes:      01-02-2100
jbaltz@hp-ux [~]> ./FDATE 01-01-2100 2
(mktime returned 4102592400)
01-01-2100 + 2 days:
        strptime computes:      01-02-2100

oopsie!

Yes, we're filing a bug report. Hopefully, if this hasn't been patched already, it will be before 2100. ]]> http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2012/08/interesting_hp-ux_time_bug.html http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2012/08/interesting_hp-ux_time_bug.html Tech Thu, 23 Aug 2012 10:36:12 -0500 twitter, but now I've started getting them on LinkedIn as well. At least they're making themselves obvious:

That's...er...somehow I doubt that Larry Thurston has progressed that far along with his SRS without a name change...

(That's also the second invitation from Larry Thurston I've received, the last invitation came in over the holiday weekend and the account was marked as spam, as I expect this one will be shortly.)]]> http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2012/04/social_media_spam_--_the_pain.html http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2012/04/social_media_spam_--_the_pain.html Tech Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:48:51 -0500 CADR is LISP-speak for "First part of the rest of"

If you have a list (1 2 3) Then the CADR of that list is (2)

I did a google (and bing) search on "today is the cadr of your life" after I posted (somewhat flippantly) on a friend's Facebook status update the abovementioned phrase.

I got

                       today is the cadr of your life - Google Search (p1 of 7)

   Search Images Videos Maps News Shopping Gmail More »

   Web History | Settings | Sign in

   [logo_sm.gif]  today is the cadr of your life___________   Search
   Advanced Search
   Preferences

   Web Results 1 - 10 of about 1,080,000,000 for today is the card of
   your life. (0.23 seconds)

   Showing results for today is the card of your life. Search instead for
   today is the cadr of your life
   Grocery  loyalty  cards  help  trace  food-borne ... - Your Life - USA
   Today

   Nov 16, 2011 ... A new tool is being used by public health officials
   to figure out what makes
   people sick: the lowly shopper-loyalty card.
   yourlife.usatoday.com/fitness-food/safety/story/...cards.../1 - 48k -
   Cached - Similar pages

   Re-Create Your Life Today: A Smart Card Game

   Jan 13, 2012 ... Re-Create Your Life Today. If you want to improve the
   quality of your life, live
   better and be happier, then the principles of Positive Thinking can
   ...
   recreateyourlifetoday.blogspot.com/2012/01/smart-card-game.html - 63k
   - Cached - Similar pages

   Change your life today with an Attitude of Gratitude!

                       today is the cadr of your life - Google Search (p1 of 4)

   Search Images Videos Maps News Shopping Gmail More »

   Web History | Settings | Sign in

   [logo_sm.gif]  today is the cadr of your life___________   Search
   Advanced Search
   Preferences

   Web Results 1 - 10 of about 6,840,000 for today is the cadr of your
   life. (0.14 seconds)

   Did you mean: today is the card of your life

   Org Mode - Organize Your Life In Plain Text!

   1.1 Org-Mode Setup; 1.2 Organizing Your Life Into Org Files; 1.3
   Agenda Setup
   ...... If I want just today's calendar view then F12 a is still faster
   than generating the
   ..... (org-clock-is-active) (equal org-clock-default-task (cadr
   org-clock-history))) ...
   doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html - 314k - Cached - Similar pages

   Media Center - CADR - Welcome

   Valentine's Day Gift Ideas For the Allergy Sufferer in Your Life, PDF
   ... CADR
   Certified Air Cleaners Contribute to Indoor Workout Success for
   Allergy Sufferers ...
   www.cadr.org/mediacenter.htm - 19k - Cached - Similar pages

     VALENTINE'S DAY GIFT IDEAS FOR THE ALLERGY SUFFERER IN ...

Meh. Pretty weak, universe. Get out there and get your geek on. ]]> http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2012/03/today_is_the_cadr_of_your_life.html http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2012/03/today_is_the_cadr_of_your_life.html Tech Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:36:09 -0500

===============================================================================
Introduction
------------

InstallAnywhere will guide you through the installation of IBM Blahdeblah Client
SDK 69.70.FC81.

It is strongly recommended that you quit all programs before continuing with
this installation.

(Versions and names masked to protect the not-so-innocent.)

So, I'm supposed to, on this large system with hundreds of processors, shut down everything else so I can install some client libraries and an SDK? Have you taken "CYA" here just a bit too far? Can't be bothered to check or customize the messages our installer programette blob puts out? Sigh.]]> http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2012/02/orly_ibm_install.html http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2012/02/orly_ibm_install.html Tech Wed, 08 Feb 2012 23:06:13 -0500 on 2/3/2012 8:54 AM xxxxxxxxxxxx said the following:

> Rather than take the time to actually troubleshoot it, I rebooted the box. Let me know if that helps. To which I responded:

Much better. Sometimes the Microsoft method is all that's needed. Now to fix some small breakages.

Son #1 is off in Times Square (you're only a teenager once) for the "celebration" with a buddy and a few hundred thousand other New Yorkers.

Son #2 has a few friends over and is watching a movie.

Sons #3 and #4 are asleep, as is my dear wife, who has to round in the nursery tomorrow morning bright and early.

Of course, I didn't get as much done this year as I had hoped. And the year brought its share of twists and turns, personally and professionally. Lots I can't (or am just not willing to) write about.

We made some great new friends. We switched to a different synagogue in our neighborhood. We made inroads in helping to create a new synagogue in a neighborhood that's not ours. And we listed our house for sale, so we can eventually relocate to a whole new town.

I'm not going to bother listing plans for this year; I'm taking things one month; one week; one day at a time. I made my real resolutions back on Rosh Hashanah. I did a lot this year; the family did a lot, and we've definitely been places we never imaged we'd be. I will say that I'll try to be writing more -- the blog feels like it hasn't seen me in months. It hasn't. Work has been totally busy these last two months, and for that, I am grateful.

I wish everyone out there a happy and prosperous 2012, during which the world probably won't end. ]]> http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2011/12/more_geeking_on_a_new_years_ev.html http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2011/12/more_geeking_on_a_new_years_ev.html Misc. Sat, 31 Dec 2011 23:34:54 -0500 Osborne 1) had two 92kB (that's kilobyte) floppy drives.

In 1994, I purchased, for $200, a 200 MB (megabyte) hard drive, and that was considered both spacious and a good price.

My current cell phone has more space than that in regular memory, and 16 GB of flash memory.

Today I got an email about a compute cluster I used:

...When I wrote that email, we had roughly 42TB. As of this morning, we have 20TB of space free on the cluster....

They only have 20 TB (terabytes), of space left. That's only 100,000 of my 1994 drives... ]]> http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2011/10/remember_when_disk_was_measure.html http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2011/10/remember_when_disk_was_measure.html Tech Mon, 10 Oct 2011 09:44:44 -0500 I get one "business reply mail" envelope with each monthly statement to send in deposits.

Interest bearing what it does now, it doesn't pay for me to send in the small checks as I receive them; instead I hold them until I get my monthly statement, and send a wad of them in at once. The amount of interest I lose in holding the small checks is less than the cost of a stamp (right now).]]> http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2011/09/small_economies.html http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2011/09/small_economies.html Misc. Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:27:40 -0500

$ git
ksh: git:  not found
$ hg
ksh: hg:  not found
$ bzr
ksh: bzr:  not found
$ cvs
ksh: cvs:  not found
$ rcs
ksh: rcs:  not found
$ sccs
Usage: sccs [-r][-d path][-p path] command [options...][operands...]

Where am I? When am I?

$ uname -a
SCO_SV XXXXXXX 3.2 5.0.6 i386
$ date
Tue Aug  2 11:45:59 EDT 2011
$

Welcome to 1984! Someone please pass me the flint, I need to start a fire.

This wouldn't be so funny if the project I have to work on here didn't involve reinventing the wheel. Which it has to. ]]> http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2011/08/everything_new_is_old_again.html http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2011/08/everything_new_is_old_again.html Random Rants Tue, 02 Aug 2011 11:44:42 -0500 Crashplan a try. It's an interesting product, in that it allows you to choose between a paid plan (where you back up to their servers "in the cloud") or a free plan where you can back up to other computers, including another friend's computer over the internet (so presumably you could create your own free "Crashplan-lite" system).

I'm liking it so far, but it has one major drawback: the server a huge memory hog. My main machine isn't so skimpy (or at least I used to think so) at 4GB of RAM (all of it usable, since I'm now running a 64-bit operating system) but...

with my machine "at rest" it's sucking up by itself almost 1/8 of my free memory (and it gets piggier, if you can believe it.)

and this is with no other "user" processes running. (It seems that my standard set of background processes isn't so small, either, but...) It easily blossoms up to over 550 MB of memory used, which of course sends my poor little laptop into a fan-spinning frenzy.

This appears to be a common enough question but support at Crashplan seems to be ... well, at least they recognize the problem, even if they don't have a good way of managing it:

Jerry,

You can reduce the amount of memory, but depending on the size of your back up you may run into issues doing this. Please be aware it is not recommended or supported in any way by us here at CrashPlan.

Edit the CrashPlan engine's CrashPlanService.ini file to allow it to use more java memory:

Stop the backup engine: http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/how_to/stop_and_start_engine
Edit the below line in in C:\Program Files\CrashPlan\CrashPlanService.ini
-Xmx512m
Edit to something larger such as 640, 768, 896, or 1024. E.g.:
-Xmx1024m

This is the maximum allowed. CrashPlan will not use that much until it needs it.
Start the backup engine.

You will want to change it to 300.

Again, we do not recommend that this is done, but if you do really see the need to reduce the memory, these are the instructions.

Nonetheless, hope springs eternal that this otherwise promising system can right itself and reduce its bloated memory footprint (it's clearly running with some java-like virtual machine, given the command line arguments).]]> http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2011/07/next_try_at_online_backup_cras.html http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2011/07/next_try_at_online_backup_cras.html Tech Mon, 25 Jul 2011 09:28:04 -0500 I can't lay claim to biking all of the time, or even most of the time, but I do enjoy a bit of recreational biking around Brooklyn and some other parts of the 5 boroughs. Whether alone or with my children, I do my level best to obey the local traffic laws as they apply to bicycles, including stopping for stop signs, not weaving in and out of traffic, etc. Moreover I teach these to my children: to stop at all intersections where cars could be coming, and to be extra aware of traffic and pedestrians, and to stay off the sidewalk if at all possible.

Yesterday, while driving the family back from the Cloisters museum in Upper Manhattan, I had the opportunity to narrowly miss about a dozen bicyclists riding wildly down Ft. Washington Avenue, weaving in and out of traffic, running across and against red lights, and speeding through intersections--basically, making a nuisance of themselves.

I often see and hear anecdotes from bicyclists complaining how cars are "out to get them" and don't show them any respect. Well, let me remind you all that it goes both ways, and you should remind your fellows (repeatedly) to not be jerks on the road. Physics is a cruel mistress, and a ton+ of moving metal versus your gentle skeleton means that, even if you're right, you're still wrong.

Let's be safe out there!]]> http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2011/07/a_plea_to_my_fellow_urban_bicy.html http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2011/07/a_plea_to_my_fellow_urban_bicy.html Random Rants Mon, 18 Jul 2011 10:46:00 -0500