This is an expansion on the 140 characters I spoke about on Twitter a little while ago. This is as much of the conversation as I can remember.
I just received a call from an "IT recruiter" (I don't remember who, and it doesn't matter who, really), who started off the conversation by breathlessly exclaiming:
"I need to speak to someone about a network problem."
Um, who is this?
"Is this the IT department? I need to speak to the IT manager."
Um, that would be me. Who are you trying to reach? Who are you?
"I'm so-and-so, this is the number that they forwarded me to."
Um, there is no "they", we have an auto-attendant. Who is this again?
"I got your number from J. Random Otherperson."
I don't know them, but OK. Who are you?
"I'm so-and-so, and I'm with an IT recruiting firm, and I wanted to know if blah blah you had any projects blah blah" (Yeah, I figured this out by now, but I wanted to let it play out.)
Hi, well, why did you give me this whole story instead of just coming out and saying it? I don't like being told stories to. To tell you the truth, we're not inclined to want to work with people who lie to us. I certainly don't like being told a whole cock-and-bull story to get my attention. Thank you very much. Good-bye. <click>
I hope it's not the same way in every sales arena.
Dear fellow member of the American Physical Society: This is a matter of great importance to the integrity of the Society. It is being sent to a random fraction of the membership, so we hope you will pass it on. By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership. For those who have missed the news we recommend the excellent summary article by Richard Lindzen in the November 30 edition of the Wall Street journal, entitled "The Climate Science isn't Settled," for a balanced account of the situation. It was written by a scientist of unquestioned authority and integrity. A copy can be found among the items at http://tinyurl.com/lg266u, and a visit to http://www.ClimateDepot.com can fill in the details of the scandal, while adding spice. What has this to do with APS? In 2007 the APS Council adopted a Statement on global warming (also reproduced at the tinyurl site mentioned above) that was based largely on the scientific work that is now revealed to have been corrupted. (The principals in this escapade have not denied what they did, but have sought to dismiss it by saying that it is normal practice among scientists. You know and we know that that is simply untrue. Physicists are not expected to cheat.) We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 Statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done. We have also asked that the membership be consulted on this point, but that too has not been done. None of us would use corrupted science in our own work, nor would we sign off on a thesis by a student who did so. This is not only a matter of science, it is a matter of integrity, and the integrity of the APS is now at stake. That is why we are taking the unusual step of communicating directly with at least a fraction of the membership. If you believe that the APS should withdraw a Policy Statement that is based on admittedly corrupted science, and should then undertake to clarify the real state of the art in the best tradition of a learned society, please send a note to the incoming President of the APS ccallan@princeton.edu, with the single word YES in the subject line. That will make it easier for him to count. Bob Austin, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Hal Lewis, emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
Will Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics, Hartford
Roger Cohen, former Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil
(Of course, there is a facebook/Moveable Type connector that I just found now while writing this...and the one that MT puts at the bottom of my page, so we'll see how that works out. Certainly the ability to blog from FB into MT is nice, but even Facebook has a limitation of how many characters a status update can have makes that particular blogging channel suboptimal if the goal is to Say Something Of Import™) UPDATE 20 August 2009 Of course, there's nothing new under the sun: Jeff Atwood said it a while ago.
"Would you like some cheese with that whine?"
Of course, we did have our high points: son #1's wonderful Bar Mitzvah on Purim was wonderfully planned by my loving wife and executed by Son #1 himself. My sister gave birth to my second niece, Kaia. And we actually did have a wonderful family trip to Québec, Montréal and Ottawa this summer; partly business and partly pleasure (our first family vacation since 2003), and the high point of the end of the year was our annual fire-hazard known as Hanukkah:
+-------------+ +---------------+ | web server | | database srvr | | user 'user1'| ----> | | +-------------+ +---------------+Now when the web page runs, it calls a script that connects as user 'root' from the webserver host.
+-------------+ +---------------+Presumably, if user 'root' can log in, it can create and grant privileges? Ah, not so! It turns out, you can, but if you're not careful when you first set up the permissions for root@'webserver', you end up with some permissions to do things and some NOT.
| web server | | database srvr |
| user 'root' | ----> | |
+-------------+ +---------------+
mysql> show grants; +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Grants for root@webserverhost | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'root'@'webserver' IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD '*you think i will put this here??!!' WITH GRANT OPTION | | GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, REFERENCES, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, LOCK TABLES ON `mysql`.* TO 'root'@'webserverhost' | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
mysql> grant all on *.* to root@'webserver' identified by 'xxxxxyyyy' with grant option
-> ;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
[jbaltz@webhost] >mysql -u clover -pxxxxxyyyy -e 'show tables from newDataBase' -hDatabaseServer +-----------------------+ | Tables_in_newDataBase | +-----------------------+ | User | +-----------------------+...which gives me what I need.
-bash-3.2$ /usr/sbin/traceroute www.google.com traceroute: Warning: www.google.com has multiple addresses; using 64.233.169.103 traceroute to www.google.com (64.233.169.103), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 fw-gw.3phasecomputing.com (192.168.xxx.yyy) 0.673 ms 0.532 ms 0.511 ms 2 98.113.45.1 (98.113.zzz.aaa) 5.012 ms 4.208 ms 4.495 ms 3 G4-0-0-1955.LCR-09.NYCMNY.verizon-gni.net (130.81.137.34) 5.021 ms 5.199 ms 5.033 ms 4 130.81.29.236 (130.81.29.236) 5.297 ms 5.569 ms 5.028 ms 5 0.so-4-3-0.XL4.NYC4.ALTER.NET (152.63.10.29) 5.561 ms 5.464 ms 5.837 ms 6 0.ge-5-1-0.BR3.NYC4.ALTER.NET (152.63.3.118) 7.157 ms 6.812 ms 6.638 ms 7 te-10-2-0.edge2.NewYork2.level3.net (4.68.110.233) 14.080 ms 14.803 ms 13.822 ms 8 vlan69.csw1.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.68.16.62) 19.441 ms vlan79.csw2.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.68.16.126) 15.586 ms vlan89.csw3.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.68.16.190) 24.895 ms 9 ae-74-74.ebr4.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.134.117) 23.574 ms ae-84-84.ebr4.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.134.121) 17.200 ms ae-74-74.ebr4.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.134.117) 16.937 ms 10 ae-3.ebr4.Washington1.Level3.net (4.69.132.93) 24.887 ms 17.200 ms 18.345 ms 11 ae-94-94.csw4.Washington1.Level3.net (4.69.134.190) 20.201 ms ae-63-63.csw1.Washington1.Level3.net (4.69.134.162) 15.321 ms 14.534 ms 12 ae-1-69.edge1.Washington1.Level3.net (4.68.17.16) 134.966 ms 13.450 ms 13.546 ms 13 GOOGLE-INC.edge1.Washington1.Level3.net (4.79.231.6) 13.812 ms GOOGLE-INC.edge1.Washington1.Level3.net (4.79.228.38) 13.720 ms GOOGLE-INC.edge1.Washington1.Level3.net (4.79.231.6) 14.268 ms 14 64.233.175.171 (64.233.175.171) 14.524 ms 64.233.175.169 (64.233.175.169) 14.088 ms 14.066 ms 15 216.239.49.149 (216.239.49.149) 16.987 ms 216.239.49.145 (216.239.49.145) 17.781 ms 216.239.49.149 (216.239.49.149) 17.519 ms 16 yo-in-f103.google.com (64.233.169.103) 14.319 ms 13.705 ms 14.092 ms
(2008-08-13 09:32:10) albaketapy@hotmail.com: Hey Jerry%20B.%20Altzman .....I cant upload my pics to msn for some reason! Hit me back up on http://xxxxxx.blogspot.com
$ grep -cri 'Hit me back up' *|grep -v '0$' agnessopyby@hotmail.com/2008-08-11.032149-0400EDT.txt:1 albaketapy@hotmail.com/2008-08-13.093210-0400EDT.txt:1 annefogabem@hotmail.com/2008-08-11.103216-0400EDT.txt:1 elisecokaw@hotmail.com/2008-08-12.182304-0400EDT.txt:1 genevievenugimox@hotmail.com/2008-08-12.231241-0400EDT.txt:1 jennylevyv@hotmail.com/2008-08-13.032007-0400EDT.txt:1 lessielydoc@hotmail.com/2008-08-10.235141-0400EDT.txt:1 lorenanunecaz@hotmail.com/2008-08-12.204747-0400EDT.txt:1 nanettepusun@hotmail.com/2008-08-11.080932-0400EDT.txt:1 nanettepusun@hotmail.com/2008-08-13.070848-0400EDT.txt:1 phoebecytol@hotmail.com/2008-08-11.054531-0400EDT.txt:1 robertcopow@hotmail.com/2008-08-12.155737-0400EDT.txt:1
$ tracert -d www.jbaltz.com Tracing route to www.jbaltz.com [74.208.29.13] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.xxx.yyy.zzz 2 6 ms 4 ms 4 ms 98.113.aaa.bbb 3 45 ms 45 ms 45 ms 74.208.29.13 Trace complete.Hrm...1&1 is one hop from my firewall? Rockin’!
$ tracert -d mail.emailsrvr.com Tracing route to mail.emailsrvr.com [207.97.245.100] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.xxx,yyy.zzz 2 6 ms 5 ms 4 ms 98.113.aaa.bbb 3 14 ms 14 ms 14 ms 207.97.245.100 Trace complete.Yow! Of course, this is Windows traceroute. From a FreeBSD box, I get somewhat different results:
[jbaltz@iridium ~]$ traceroute -n www.jbaltz.com traceroute to www.jbaltz.com (74.208.29.13), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 192.168.xxx.yyy 0.514 ms 0.359 ms 0.338 ms 2 98.113.aaa.bbb 4.572 ms 5.229 ms 4.341 ms 3 * * * 4 * * * 5 * * * 6 * * * 7 * * * 8 * * * 9 * * * 10 * * * 11 * * * 12 * * *(18 more lines like this deleted...)
Craigslist has really fallen.
So far I’ve received a handful of responses to my advertisement, which asked people to write a cover letter and send their CV in a particular format. The position was for on-site work.
I received four responses that met this minimum requirement, all of which contained canned cover letters. The ad asked for specific, enumerated skills; no one directly spoke to any of them.
Of course, I received a paltry 10-12 other responses; it seems that the only PHP programmers in the area are either all gainfully employed or aren’t willing to work on-site. Or they're in India, which of course is not in the area. (There seems to be plenty in India, though...)
I thank you for the opportunity given to quote for the above and take pleasures in forwarding our resume in simple.Why am I ready for this project?
I am a Service Exporter. I must export service.I do Export My ability.I do it really happily. I am enjoying working with php. I am a Lecturer for php in local computer institute.
The posting went up at 2312 EST tonight. The posting said “send résumé in HTML or plain text” and it also said “must be able to read and follow directions”.
Email at 2355 LCL came in with a Word document attached.
43 minutes from FIRST POST to first clown. I beat my previous record.
Sigh. C’est la guerre.
I am a casual user of LinkedIn. If you are not familiar with LinkedIn, it's a “social networking site” in the same vein as Facebook [where I also have a small presence] that is used mainly so that professionals can share their respective rolodexes. Putatively, its main use is to help people find trusted others—if I am looking for a new <whatever>, and you know a <whatever> maybe you can put me in touch. There is a whole set of recommendations, in order to provide some kind of context and some notion of transitivity-of-trust.
Today I received an interesting email. It’s from someone who appears to have found out that I am on LinkedIn, and wants to be linked to me. I will quote some of his odd email verbatim; maybe someone out there might be able to shed some light onto this.
This person writes:
I found you while searching LinkedIn for possible connections. I'm using it to discover potential mutually beneficial connections. I believe that we already have common connections on LinkedIn. However, one never knows what relationship or opportunity might occur unless he or she is findable, available and open to new direct connections.(LinkedIn provides an interesting degrees-of-separation feature: who do you know who knows some random person. It turns out this person has exactly one connection through to me, a fact that, had he actually gone on the site, he would be able to know trivially.)
He goes on to write:
Since you are a member of LinkedIn, I want to invite you to join the LinkedIn network I have built. If you would be so kind as to send me an Invitation to Connect from LinkedIn, I will accept it straight away.This is a really odd request. LinkedIn provides a feature where you can invite someone to be one of your connections just by sending them an email link that they then click on to consummate the connection. Why ask me to contact him? Someone fill me in here, because I’m just plain lost. Does LinkedIn have some kind of preventative measure to keep someone from inviting others?
I read on:
I sincerely hope you will join my network. It would be an honor and privilege to be directly connected with you. I believe then we might both benefit in the near future from having a direct connection.
Wow, this almost sounds like a Nigerian bank scam. It would be an honor and privilege.
Reading further down, I can see how much of an honor it will be:
Xxxxxx X. XxxxxxxEvidently I am part of a privileged group of over 10,000!
Mxxxxxxxxx, xxxxxxxx LLC
aaa-bbb-cccc office
zzzzzzzz - Skype
12,100+ LinkedIn Direct Connections
How many people out there know 10,000 others? If you do, do you know them all well? How can he know me well enough to provide a solid recommendation of me to others, or others to me? What value can he add to me by being “part of his network”?
Help me out here, guys.
Well.
Today at school was the “Reina Varon Memorial Business Fair”—the 4th graders in the school get their parents to donate some amount of stuff, and then try to sell it off to the other students in the elementary school, and the proceeds go to various charitable organizations.
Well one kid brought in to sell:
Now we’re the proud owners of “Bubbles” (sometimes called ”Dag”, after the Hebrew word for fish דג). Elana is going to dig out her old fishbowl, and we are starting all over again. (I am not counting the “sea monkeys” that son #3 got for his birthday as a gift: fish barely cut it as pets, brine shrimp are cubicly less so...)
I just need to vent.
This afternoon, I discovered a not-insubstantial amount of brackish, nasty water on the floor outside the bathroom near my office. No, I do not have any pictures. I shut off the water to the toilet therein, which appeared to be the source, flushed, let it drain (which it appeared to do OK), and turned the water back on.
A little while later, I found a HUGE AMOUNT of nasty, poo-water backflowing over the edges of the toilet, and (adding insult to injury) I discovered that the float inside the toilet stuck, meaning the toilet kept pumping nasty water all over the floor.
Needless to say, I shut off the water and began mopping up this nasty concoction, which luckily had NOT spread into any carpeted areas (but nonetheless made a nice little lake in part of the basement area), dropping every towel we had in the house onto the area to sop up this nasty marsh-muck come to visit.
After having someone come and look at the trap on the toilet (“It’s clean") and the main trap to the sewer (“Yucky, but should flow OK—no problems in there!”) we discovered, after a bit of trial and error, that one of the main sewage pipes in the house must be clogged, necessitating the use of a 40+ foot sewer snake (which of course we did not have this evening). So tomorrow late morning we get to go through this lovely exercise again.
So after all this is done, I gather up the sopping wet poo-water-towels and carry them to the washing machine in the neighboring room. (Thank Dog I didn’t have to carry them through the whole house.) I start up a load of wash and go upstairs to deal with Other Issues.
After everyone has gone to bed, I return to my office to get some work done, only to find that the trap in the utility sink into which my washing machine drains must leakWRONG SEE BELOW, because now there is yet another flood all over the floor in the utility room, this time extending into the carpeted area in my office—so now the carpet under the machinery in the office is nice and damp.
Lovely, and other nice Anglo-Saxon words.
So now all that is cleaned up, another load of wash (second pass for the towels, which got called upon to try to clean up the utility/heater room) and a load in the dryer, and hopefully that is all the excitement for this evening.
Oh did I mention that I’m solo parenting tonight, as Elana is out at the Brooklyn Pediatric Society meeting this evening?
I know, I know...I can hear your violins playing sad songs for me...and I know exactly where I can find sympathy...
NOTE: I just discovered that it is not a leaky pipe (that would require replacing) but evidently the utility sink is backing up in the same way that the toilet was...so it's draining ever so slowly, and also bringing up sewer water onto the floor (and now, I presume, onto the carpet! ugh.)
Seen at the Brooklyn Fairway:
When my wife was in high school, her “math club” put together a bake sale to raise money to help them do something...I don’t know, she wasn’t specific. The thing is, though, is that she and her club got in trouble for selling cupcakes and baked goods to her supposedly-above-average classmates at “one for a dime, two for a quarter.” (If I have to explain why this is funny, you shouldn’t be reading this blog.)
It appears that one of her classmates is now posting signs around the local Walgreen’s with the sale items:
(Yes, yes, I know it’s been a while since a posting; I’ve got a few in the queue, I promise.)
This evening the family and I went to Plum Beach, a little bit of beach right off of the Belt Parkway between exits 9 and 11.
It’s really kind of an interesting beach; there are nice views of Kingsborough Community College (behind the sailboat)
Sic transit gloria urbi.
From an email a friend sent me, only very slightly modified:
http://www.siliconvalleysleuth.com/2007/04/dell_contribues.htmlDell plants virtual tress in second life for earth day.... f***.
-M
Hell, yeah!
In the spirit of “fighting for peace is like [deleted] for virginity”, Dell inspires us to new conservation heights by urging electricity usage.
Being a somewhat lapsed amateur radio operator (KE3ML), I was interested to find out that the FCC, in a long-overdue change, has removed the Morse Code testing requirement for all classes of amateur radio licenses.
When I got my license, back in 1994 or so, I passed all the written elements and but the 20 WPM code exam (and went straight from nothing to what was then “advanced class”. (Thus came my group B callsign.) A few months later I took the 20 WPM exam and passed it handily, and upgraded to “amateur extra”, the highest available class.
Now the same thing is available to anyone who passes all the written elements.
Am I bitter that future amateur radio operators won’t have to jump the hurdles that I did? Not in the slightest. Since passing the tests in 1994, and listening to the various noise and nonsense on local repeaters and the 40-meter amateur band, I have long ago decided that the code exam represented nothing other than an initiation ritual, and that it provided no actual value to the amateur radio service.
Enjoy using CW, if that is what you want. I am glad my children can enter the amateur radio service without having to go through hazing.
(For what it’s worth, the old newsgroup rec.radio.amateur.policy has descended into almost an entire cesspool of nonsense. I looked at it today for the first time in 10 years. There’s almost no amateur radio discussed there, just trolls discussing ... heaven alone only knows what. I still see a few of the same players from a decade ago, but mostly just total garbage. Sic transit gloria mundi.)
In this day and age, when you want to register a domain name (say, www.jbaltz.com), there is actually a two step process that goes on:
You register a domain name with a registrar, like GoDaddy or 1and1 or Network Solutions (10 years ago NetSol was the only game in town, but that is another story.) and they verify that no one else has that domain name, and they reserve it for you.
At the same time, they notify the TLD name server for your TLD with a list of the authoritative name servers for your newly-formed domain.
What? Wait? Come again? What’s
all that? Let’s define a few terms:
To wit, for jbaltz.com, the records that the .com TLD name servers hold is:
jbaltz.com. 172800 IN NS ns27.1and1.com. jbaltz.com. 172800 IN NS ns28.1and1.com.
which means that the internet hosts “ns27.1and1.com” and “ns28.1and1.com” will be able to answer the “who” and “where” questions about jbaltz.com. (The other numbers and codes are somewhat irrelevant to this discussion, although they are important.)
(Digression: A long time ago, there was actually semantic difference between “.com”, “.org” and “.net”, but nowadays the difference appears to be entirely nominal: people just scoop up the “.org” name or the “.net” name if the “.com” name is taken. There are a few TLDs that do maintain an entry-barrier other than money: “.edu” requires that you actually prove to them that you’re an educational institution, and I believe “.museum” has a similar requirement. Also, I believe other country-wide TLDs require proof of residency or something to register a website with them, with notable exceptions being Tuvalu “.tv” and Western Samoa “.ws” )
If you’re a typical website hosting with your provider (like 1and1, which is the hosting provider for this site), your hosting provider may act as your registrar (holding your name in the global namespace of .com and telling the TLD nameservers who is the nameserver for your domain) and act as the authoritative name server for the domain, but they do not have to do so. jbaltz.com is registered through MelbourneIT (neé www.registerfree.com) but has its domain name service provided through 1and1. Many many other sites do that.
My client’s site was one of them.
He had registered his site through Network Solutions, but another site (his hosting provider) was the authoritative DNS for his domain. He was moving from one hosting provider to another, and in the interim it made sense to make Network Solutions his authoritative DNS, right? I mean, they already have his registration, and they have an easy web-based interface to set up the DNS entries that were needed. It seemed like the easiest way to have a smooth transition from one place to another.
Now, Network Solutions, oddly enough, does not make moving back to them for name service easy. You cannot set up all your various and sundry domain names (www.this.com, www2.this.com, mail directions) beforehand and then tell them “OK, we want NetSol to be the authoritative DNS for us, in addition to being our registrar.” Instead, you have to do it in two steps:
Going on behind the scenes several things are going on: NetSol is setting up its own servers to be equipped to answer questions about the new domain, and NetSol is informing the TLD nameservers that it is going to be authoritative for the new domain. The former process is generally pretty quick, and the latter process can be time-consuming. (You are typically told that it takes 24-48 hours, although in reality 6 hours is about how fast it works for .com.)
What has happened now? We moved the DNS back and NetSol did the following: it notified the TLD nameservers that it was now authoritative, but it did not actually configure its own name servers to answer questions!
I think you can see where this is headed.
Now, after the move, it turns out the TLD nameservers were updated, mirabile dictu, almost immediately. NetSol’s own nameservers, however, were not updated. Which means the following things happened:
A user out on The Vast Internet tried to find “www.jerrysclient.com”
The user’s ISP’s nameserver asked the global nameserver who was responsible for www.jerrysclient.com. The global TLD nameserver replied: “NetSol is”
;; ANSWER SECTION: jerrysclient.com. 3699 IN NS NS15.WORLDNIC.com. jerrysclient.com. 3699 IN NS NS16.WORLDNIC.com.
Calling up Network Solutions technical support (“For a painful experience, press 1. To be on interminable wait, press 2”—I’m sure that Scott Adams had this in mind when coming up with Dogbert’s tech support.) was less than useful: they tried at great length to convince me that I simply had to wait for this information to propagate through the internet. I replied that it, indeed, had propagated, and the ball was now in Network Solutions’s court, and could I pretty please speak to someone in their DNS services group (I thought about posting something inquisitive to NANOG but decided later that it would be more efficacious to just wait.) and of course, I was told, I could not, but that he could enter a ticket for me, and the problem, being NetSol’s, should “clear up in 2-3 hours, tops”. The president of the client firm spent several fruitless hours, getting escalated up a never-ending chain of bureaucrats until he finally just got fed up. After about 20 hours, NetSol finally got their act together, and the site finally came “back to Earth”.
And there was much rejoicing.I haven’t done a google search for this yet, so I don’t know if this is a popular characterization or not, but I cannot believe that I am the first one to come up with this...
Yesterday I took my two older boys (and some of their friends) to a showing of the new Eragon movie, which they all found enjoyable. And, of course, the ride home was a prolonged discussion on the divergences between the movie and the book. The movie had good special effects, and the acting wasn’t too bad, although I thought it was a waste of John Malkovich's acting talents—he could have been much more evil.
But that isn’t what interests me.
What interests me is the idea that Paolini has written Star Wars into LOTR. We have elves, and dwarves, each with their own pseudo-proto-English tongue, and instead of orcs we have “urgals” (I suppose so we aren’t so blatant.) The elves, as they always seem to be,are a
Continue reading "Eragon -- Star Wars meets Lord of the Rings" »
So last night (earlier this morning) I need to write an envelope. My handwriting is atrocious at 1 p.m., and it’s 12 hours worse at 1 a.m., so I turn to my word processor to do it for me.
On my current, new, laptop, I don’t have MS Office installed, but I do have OpenOffice 2, so I fire that up to see what it can do.
I find my way down to the envelopes composer, type in the addresses, and then try as I might, I cannot find the exact envelope orientation I need for my printer. I find one that, by all rights, should work, put an envelope in the feeder, and click print.
What happens next is that the envelope feeds through, then a plain piece of paper gets the envelope text—evidently, the envelopes are printed only after the main text (of which there is none). Two or three iterations of trying to get the right order (remember, it is 1 a.m.!) and I throw up my hands in despair. Why can’t it just take the envelope first?
I go to the other computer in the office, with MS Word 2007 installed, and go to the Envelopes wizard. It looks like the one I’ve used countless times since I started using it in Office 2000, enter my addresses, select the correct envelope orientation, insert the envelope in, and go. Time start to finish is about 2 minutes, including changing the default fonts for the envelopes. (I’m no fan of Arial to be honest.)
It isn’t that OpenOffice does it so wrong, or can’t be convinced to do it right, it’s that Microsoft made it easy and straightforward to do it right—if I want the envelope to be attached to the document, I can have that, or I can just print it out by itself. (There’s a big “print” button there on the envelope wizard.)
Some things, believe it or not, Microsoft does right.
Sigh...
I’m so far behind, I think I’ve come full circle around and am now ahead.
Or not.
It’s crazy busy, but it’s the good kind of crazy busy.
It’s not so often that I read something I so totally identify with, but Joel Spolsky’s recent article on “Phone Screening” really hit the nail on the head for me as well.
I’ve just gone through a hiring process recently for my own company—several times—and finally I have made a single hire, after having gone through at least 100 résumés over the course of months of recruiting. (In a previous position, I was also required to recruit for sysadmin positions, and was frequently called in to also do interviews on developer candidates, having made a reputation for myself of being able to shake out solid candidates from weak ones.)
Like Joel, I have found that in the sheer number of applicants into the funnel requires a winnowing process, mine is several steps:
where tables A and B had over a million rows; I’m just glad that that query was run on the test database, and not the production one...
In addition, I like to ask a few questions about the things we currently do. Usually I’ll take a problem that we just solved, and ask the candidate how he or she would have solved the same problem. (This is one of the best ways, I have found, of determining how a candidate actually thinks.) In addition, I’ll usually have the candidate write a small script just to see how fluent he or she is with the tools we use every day: this is mostly a follow-up to the “can he/she hit the ground running or splatting” question. Also, since the office we work in currently is small, it gives the candidate a good idea of where he or she would be working, and trying out the daily commute.
A few random stupidities just now crossed my path.
Well, I took my two older sons to see Zoom last night.
I can see why it was so universally panned at Rotten Tomatoes. On the plus side, both of the kids loved it. They’re into the whole superheroes thing—saw all 3 X-Men movies this summer (one on the big screen, two on DVD) so this was something good and wholesome for them.
I can say, without going into spoilers, that by and large the acting is flat, the premise is as bad as they say it is, but if you’re under the age of 12, these things probably don’t matter much.
Plus: the obvious product placements for Wendy’s restaurant and for Firefly phones got to be a bit much.
SPOILERS:
So I get to my office this morning and find multiple calls from my customer who has a data center in LA. Evidently they still have power problems in LA this morning, because when I call up the NOC guy in our data center, he says that he’s been up for 48 hours dealing with this.
Still: where are your battery backups? Where are your diesel gensets?
Now I get to rebuild history files again, figure out why MySQL replication isn’t automatically reconnecting (I think I know why now, though, and it smells like pilot error...) and watch as the load on our master servers jumps well into the double-digits due to the inrush of MySQL replicants and file replications...
I wanted to title this something snide about co-location clowns again, but I won’t. At this hour, the anger won’t do any good. My apologies if this isn’t as coherent as it could be.
This evening, one of my client’s data centers had a major power outage. (No, they’re not in Queens, NYC.) I found out about it right after the Sabbath ended by a phone call from one of my client’s clients, whose own monitoring was going bananas—it happened in between the Saturday coverage’s most recent check and my first check post-Sabbath.
(Yes, they have UPSes...allegedly. No, I do not know why the UPSs did not kick in. We’re waiting to hear back from them for a RCA [root cause analysis] to determine what needs to be done.)
After a major outage, you learn a lot of things about your system:
Continue reading "Lessons learned after a major system crash" »
(Two entries in one day? egad. Names deleted to protect the guilty, although they deserve being shown. I’m that mad.)
So this morning at 0530 LCL I’m getting up and about to head out to an early-morning karate workout. I check my cellphone and I find out that the monitoring system for one of my clients shows me that a machine has gone down.
Great.
So I get on the phone with the co-location center NOC and have them find (of course our machines aren’t marked with anything and they have no record of which machine is which, even though we’ve asked them for this before!) and the NOC tech. finds our machine (finally) and reports to me:
I saw these [outage messages—ed.] this morning. I called the $CLOWN_COLO NOC, who told me that the “machine was off” and they restarted it for me.I do not know *why* it was down; there are no indications in any error logs of any panicking or anything like that. It looks like the power simply went off -- maybe someone was working back there and pulled a plug?
Our NOC technician responds to my client directly with (and this is a verbatim quote of the message):
yes the system got unplug
Sweet Baby Cthulhu what is going on?!
This machine is in a co-location center, what are they doing going around in cabinets and tweaking with power cables?
Thank goodness that the machine was not a centerpiece of the client’s production system! (It is a production machine, but a not-frequenly-used one, and so the 4-hour downtime experienced likely (hopefully!) caused no major issues.)
I don’t want to even get into the fact that this co-location center boasts that it has multiple internet feeds, but what they don’t tell you is that they don’t aggregate these feeds: customers are either on one or the other internet feed, and if that internet provider goes down, well, that's just too bad!
I guess I should mention that prudent network engineering would be to aggregate all the feeds into border routers, announce via BGP to all upstreams the co-lo’s entire netblocks, and provide resiliency for customers—if one feed goes down, the other feed is still available!
So yesterday my relatively new (3 months) HP Officejet 7210 all-in-one printer -- really a nice machine, comes with an ethernet interface so I could put it far away from any machine printing to it, and close to the phone jacks so it can be a good fax, flatbed scanner/copier, etc. -- decides to up and die on me, telling me that the color printer cartridge (that came with the machine!) is, all of the sudden, the incorrect cartridge for the printer.
Um, this is kind of déjà vu for me now, since my OfficeJet 4215 died a similar death back in March, which is what prompted me to spring the extra $200 on the fancier, better-dressed printer.
(Of course, it's not the $1000 laserjet machine, but I needed to buy a printer RIGHT THEN and that's what Staples had in stock that evening)
So, I go to HP's site looking for support on it, and lo and behold they give me instructions: remove and reinsert the cartidges. If that doesn't work, then “call support”. Calling in this case is using their 24/7 web-chat-support feature with someone (most likely in a timezone 12 hours from my own).
I can't complain about that, because the chat works, and the support guy helped answer my questions.
First I had to
Follow the steps below to power cycle your all-in-one: 1. Unplug the all-in-one from power and disconnect the connection port.(USB) 2. Wait 30 seconds. 3. Plug in the power only. 4. Repeat steps 2-3 two more times. 5. On the third time after plugging the unit into power, reconnect the connection port from the all-in-one to your computer.
Oh well, so I jump through these hoops. (Reminds me of the old joke: how can you tell the field-service rep changing his tires on the side of the road? He's the one swapping tires in and out to see which one is flat.)
What I did not like was that part of the debugging process involves breaking into a new package of (expensive, ’natch) cartridges to try them out. But that's just me being cheap. With two new cartridges in the machine, my printer now reads:
After all of this, Mr. Tech Support declares:
xxxxxx: This shows the issue seems to be with the printer hardware
xxxxxx: Please let me know the serial number of the All-in-One
[my response]
xxxxxx: It appears that this device has experienced a hardware failure and I shall be glad to process the request for a printer replacement with your permission for free of cost and you will receive the unit with in 5 to 7 business days.
jerry altzman: that would be delightful
Well, raise my rent! They're going to ship me a new one. Of course, this item is a “collateral product”, and therefore
xxxxxx: However, the All-in-One is a collateral product, that is, you would be required to ship the defective All-in-One on receipt of the replacement. Therefore, you would be required to provide us the credit card information as security.NOTE: do not provide the Credit Card information in this chat session
In cases where HP did not receive the defective part/unit within 30 calendar days of shipment of the exchange part/unit from you then you will be charged for the exchange part/unit.Return instructions and pre-paid shipping label are included.
My son came home a few weeks ago with one of those ubiquitious little certificates that his school sends home every time they "complete" something.
This one was a certificate for completing some small bit of computer-reading curriculum--they're using computers to help teach first graders how to read.
I'm looking at the certificate this morning...just looking at the art, and I realize on it is a picture of a classic IBM-XT-formfactor computer, keyboard, old monitor, and 5.25" floppy disk.
Don't get me started on 5.25" real-floppy floppy disks.
OK, so I'm on the phone with Yahoo! customer service now...on hold in between trying to explain a problem to a customer service representative. In fact, I've typed up almost this whole entry while listening to the music-oh-hold, while my rep "researches" my issue. It also turns out that they're not allowed to leave you on hold for more than 2-3 minutes, which, I have to admit, isn't a bad thing.
One thing I should mention: I did put in time in the front-line customer-service ranks, I was a student consultant in Columbia University's student computer labs back from 1986-1988, and I also was responsible for email and phone support in Spanish at a previous employer for a while, so I know a little bit why they call it "helldesk".
THE PROBLEM:
I am trying, ostensibly, to figure out how to deploy Yahoo!'s domain keys for a client's domain.
The twist is: the domain in question is managed by Yahoo!, even though we've moved web and mail services away from Yahoo! itself. DNS services and domain registration are still through Yahoo!.
Are you still here with me? Because I haven't gotten to the good part yet.
It turns out that Yahoo!'s interface won't allow you to add the TXT records to the DNS you need -- at least, not through their web interface -- as a first step towards deploying domainkeys. OK, so off I go to call up Yahoo! customer service to figure this out.
Yahoo! does not make it easy to find their contact numbers (like Amazon.com), but the trick is to log in and search for "866" -- that leads you right there to the customer support numbers.
Now, I finally get to speak to a rep, named M_ (names obscured to protect the clueless). I explain my problem to him, two or three times, until he's finally beginning to get some small notion of my problem: we're sending mail to Yahoo! users from outside of Yahoo! and the mail is ending up in the Bulk folder. (As an aside: it's amazing that Yahoo catches these rather innocuous emails, since it lets through so much other stuff that is so blatantly spammy that one wonders if they play games just to anger the non-paying users. But I digress.)
M_ asks me, "do you have a link that talks about this [domainkeys] feature?" Yes, yes, I do. It's at http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys. (Another digression: I'm not going to get into whether or not DKIM is a good idea or not, it's been beaten to death in places like NANOG and SPAM-L, and I'm just not that interested in rehashing the arguments pro and con here. Suffice it to say, it's somewhat controversial.)
"So what's your problem?" Well, you see, I need to implement this, and it requires tools I don't have. "How do I find that link on the page?" Well, you search for the text "How do I deploy" on the page.
"How do I do that?"
OK, going through my mind is now: HOW DO YOU #%!#@% SEARCH FOR TEXT ON A WEB PAGE? Don't they teach you anything? I cannot believe that you had to ask me that. By the way, M_, when it says "lather, rinse, repeat", you don't have to spend forever in the shower. There is an implicit break statement in there.
"Well," I respond, "you hit 'control-F', then type in the text 'How do I deploy', and hit return."
OK he's back. It turns out that "it's a server issue" [DUH] and "you don't have access to that" [DUH] and he can't help me. "But it's Yahoo!'s solution!" I cry. "Well, maybe you can tell your users to specifically whitelist your address."
That might work, if we knew who all of our users were. Or we can say "quick, before you finish and we send you a registration email, go to your email provider and whitelist support@[domain here]".
Can you connect me with someone who can help me? "No, I can't." OK M_, let's talk to your manager.
"But the manager isn't technical!" Yes, I understand that, however, I do want to mention about your inability to search for something on a web page...
