Entropy Reducers Amalgamated

Social media spam -- the pain begins

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:48:51 -0500

I've already had many spammy followers on 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.)

Today is the cadr of your life.

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:36:09 -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!

If I actually search for "today is the cadr of your life", I get, pretty much bupkis:


                       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.

ORLY IBM Install?

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 23:06:13 -0500

So I'm installing an IBM client on an HP/UX big honkin' piece of machinery, when I'm presented with:

=============================================================================== 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.

Debugging using the "Microsoft Method"

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:00:26 -0500

Just happened a little while ago with a client's machine that was having network difficulties:

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.

More geeking on a New Year's Eve

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 23:34:54 -0500

Sigh.

One more year.

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.

Remember when disk was measured in Megabytes?

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 09:44:44 -0500

My first computer (an 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...

Small economies

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:27:40 -0500

I have a business money market (interest-bearing savings-like) account that I deal with strictly by mail. I use it for "small receipts" as sort of a rainy-day fund, and for occasional small disbursals.

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).

Everything new is old again

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 11:44:42 -0500

Well, I'm trying to work here, I'd really like some version control:


$ 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.

Next try at online backup: Crashplan

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 09:28:04 -0500

After giving up on Carbonite a few weeks ago, I decided to give 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).

A Plea to My Fellow Urban Bicyclers

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 10:46:00 -0500

Fellow bicyclers:

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!

First try at online backup: Carbonite

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 11:26:24 -0500

(It's been a while.)

After having to make an impromptu rebuild of my main machine, and watching and hearing many of my old (8+ years) outboard disks make nasty grinding noises, I decided to try one of the many online backup services. After looking through a few reviews, I decided to try Carbonite.

FAIL.

I installed the software on or about June 2, and waited...and waited. While I had a sizable amount of data to move (70+GiB) and was warned that it would take some time to back all that up, I didn't expect for it to hang continuously for 2+ weeks and get repeatedly stuck.

The typical methods for dealing with this problem (reboot? reinstall? turn off your firewall?) were to no avail. Customer service at Carbonite was polite, but stuck to their scripts too much. I attempted to escalate, and was in fact given an "inside track" by whoever listens to @Carbonite on Twitter. But it was too little, too late. If the backup service and software combination doesn't work "out of the box" on a freshly-rebuilt machine with very little on it.

On to try something else.

Neat little misfeature on bing.com

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:37:17 -0500

Search bing for 'asp content-type set' and get back (at least right now, today, 2011-04-07 17:39:55+00:00) something very strange.

Basically:

[jbaltz@3phase ~]$ curl  'http://www.bing.com/search?q=asp+content-type+set'
Ref A: 20D3A4EE958A4CB397424932B71E8D7D Ref B: A3D6F66D88F069EA1493180BDA7BB788 Ref C: Thu Apr 07 10:42:40 2011
 PST[jbaltz@3phase ~]$

More detail:

[jbaltz@3phase ~]$ curl -v 'http://www.bing.com/search?q=asp+content-type+set'
* About to connect() to www.bing.com port 80 (#0)
*   Trying 63.233.110.17... connected
* Connected to www.bing.com (63.233.110.17) port 80 (#0)
> GET /search?q=asp+content-type+set HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.19.7 (i386-portbld-freebsd6.4) libcurl/7.19.7 OpenSSL/0.9.7e zlib/1.2.3
> Host: www.bing.com
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Cache-Control: private
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
< Date: Thu, 07 Apr 2011 17:41:23 GMT
< Transfer-Encoding:  chunked
< Connection: keep-alive
< Connection: Transfer-Encoding
< Set-Cookie: _SS=SID=7097FF33770247C99BF0D79B55ABD80F; domain=.bing.com; path=/
< Set-Cookie: OVR=flt=0&flt2=0&flt3=0&flt4=0&flt5=0&flt6=0&flt7=0&ramp1=snrport4-release&release=or3&preallocation=0&R=1; domain=.bing.com; path=/
< Set-Cookie: SRCHD=D=1717541&MS=1717541&AF=NOFORM; expires=Sat, 06-Apr-2013 17:41:23 GMT; domain=.bing.com; path=/
< Set-Cookie: SRCHUID=V=2&GUID=862B2BC7B4AA4476945C2874AA071473; expires=Sat, 06-Apr-2013 17:41:23 GMT; path=/
< Set-Cookie: SRCHUSR=AUTOREDIR=0&GEOVAR=&DOB=20110407; expires=Sat, 06-Apr-2013 17:41:23 GMT; domain=.bing.com; path=/
<
Ref A: 02B378319EF048118C2FD3437774504C Ref B: FC67727D73CC547AB3D2760D7E4C3E85 Ref C: Thu Apr 07 10:41:23 2011
* Connection #0 to host www.bing.com left intact
* Closing connection #0

Oddly enough, I can get this result in Firefox 4 and on the unix command line, but not in Google Chrome or IE8.

On "the cloud" and laptops

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 11:55:05 -0500

Recently I had a client who asked for some recommendations on "going into the cloud" and how to do it:

I am considering buying an Ipad and using a cloud for all my business needs. I currently use quickbooks for my accounting, MS Word/pdf for my word processing and art files, and excel for my inventory management. I am looking for an efficient way to operate my business from any location and have my files readily accessible but stored securely and safely by a vendor. What is your recommendation?

I found this to be a common enough and intriguing enough set of questions (I had to put some bit of thought into the matter) that I felt it worthwhile to share my answer:

You don't need an iPad to put all your business works "in the cloud". You could just as well use a laptop. The iPad is mad insane cool, but mostly for what it's good for. I wouldn't want to write anything major on it, or spend too much time on heavy spreadsheets--the platform is too limited and typing is a giant pain. For occasional work, occasional e-mail sending (reading is OK mostly) and reading ebooks and using the nifty over-the-air apps, it's the bee's knees. But as a primary method of accessing my business data? No. For much less you can get a reasonable laptop with Windows 7 on it and a 4G wireless card and be almost-on everywhere.
That having been said, as an ADJUNCT to a main computer, if you have the spare cash around, get the iPad. I certainly wouldn't say no to one.

Since I wrote this, of course, Google announced a pilot program of their Cr-48 Chrome-netbook, but that's probably not ready for prime-time yet, and I wouldn't recommend that as a primary business platform.

Anyway:

There are a number of possibilities. Quickbooks offers an over-the-web solution. Google has an enterprise service that's mostly free (you can pay extra but I'm not sure what exactly you get) and if you don't like them, there are other web-only document stores. Zoho is another service I've heard of (www.zoho.com) and they provide a HUGE suite of services, from office replacements to CRM to invoicing and ticket systems.

And we always have the obligatory mention of how things are stored.

"[S]ecurely and safely" is always the issue. Do you trust Google to not leak your data? (Is it any worse or more likely than you losing your laptop?) I have quite a client who has more than the USRDA of paranoia and simply won't allow his sensitive business data to be "stored in the cloud". Yet, his mail is on AOL's servers. (Go figure.) Your mail is likely to be on someone else's servers...

After all that, the next question is, of course:

Ok can you recommend an applicable laptop?

Now there's a loaded subjective question!

Realistically -- how much do you want to spend on it, and what else do you think you'll be doing on it, and how will you be using it? Laptops vary widely in durability and battery longevity.

Knowing what the intended use is, is key. In real life, not everything is a nail.

I think that the most important thing in the laptop is actually its physical usability: if you're using it mostly away from your favorite mouse and keyboard, can you work for periods at a time on the built-in keyboard and mouse combo? Is there enough screen real-estate to do everything you want to do simultaneously? Do you want a little IBM-nubby pointing device or can you live with the trackpad (or will you be bringing your own mouse?)

and

Most everything else in a laptop is configurable (CPU, memory, disk, operating system) but the keyboard/video/mouse are whatever they are.

These are actually pretty key. With a desktop system, you have many possibilities for customization. With a laptop, you're really locked in to a physical form. You're probably not going to want to carry along extra keyboards and mice. If you don't like they keyboard, and it's not comfortable, you're out of luck.

I know shopping this time of year is a pain, but my strong suggestion is to walk into one of those large electronics stores (Frys, Best Buy, even Staples) and try out the keyboards. Once you find a model you like, you can go online and find the best price for it. (It might be that the promotions running now at the stores match the amount of money you had wanted to spend on the laptop, and you just walk out with a model you love.)

This is about the most important part: since you're not able to upgrade the physical device much, make sure it's one you like.

The other things I'd recommend:

Windows 7 64 bit operating system (or other 64-bit OS -- if the Mac does it for you, they make wonderful workstations, but they're pricey!)
At least 3 GB RAM
At least 320GB hard drive
Everyone nowadays has built-in wireless, but having built-in 801.22n (the newest "standard") is the latest-greatest.
A DVD+RW is almost standard in laptops costing over $300, if you're into watching blu-ray DVDs on your laptop it will cost you a bit extra.

Finally, if you don't have a backup/restoral plan, you don't have a system. You have a disaster waiting to happen:

I'd also recommend a backup device, although if you're really going whole-hog into the cloud, online backup services are available.

And, remember that these things do not live forever, and you probably don't want to keep them forever, and if you really want to be portable, remember that batteries do have a lifetime, and you can't always get batteries for older machines. This may make you shy away from smaller-brand laptops towards the HP/Lenovo/Dell axis, where there is more likelihood that parts will be available for years to come. You don't want to be buying used batteries&endash;that way lies madness.

The other thing is that laptop longevity is only about 3-4 years (much less if you shlep the thing around with you a lot) and battery life does degrade over time (so if you need to use the machine a lot away from 120 VAC, you'll want to make sure you get a spare battery.

This whole process was actually good for me, because clarifying what to buy and how to use it (and committing it to writing) helped discover some shortcomings in the way I, and many others, had been doing IT purchasing and provisioning.

MySQL replication gotchas in /etc/my.cnf

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:32:51 -0500

If you're doing selective replication with MySQL (telling a slave to ignore some of the updates being sent from the master), you might have a line in your /etc/my.cnf file that looks like this:

replicate-wild-do-table=database.%

Now, if you wanted to get more than one database, you need to list each one. The working show slave info would reflect this

    Replicate_Wild_Do_Table: database1.%,database2.%

but you cannot list the databases in /etc/my.cnf that way! You must list them on separate lines, or the Replicate_wild_do_table doesn't get set properly:

RIGHT	WRONG
replicate-wild-do-table=database1.% replicate-wild-do-table=database2.%	replicate-wild-do-table=database1.%,database2.%

Annual pilgrimage to our urban beach

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 21:20:11 -0500

In what has become an annual pilgrimage, sons #3 and #4 and I headed off to Plum Beach again. where we managed to see quite a few kiteboarders going in opposite directions at the same time and, of course, I enjoin my fellow city-dwellers to not be such slobs and not leave litter everywhere please?