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Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
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11:48 pm - Yakkity-Yak
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I was up all night last night exerting pure willpower in an ultimately futile attempt to keep myself from throwing up. At about 5 AM, the inevitable finally happened, so I called in sick to work and spent most of the day recuperating and catching up on sleep.
This evening, I read the first chapter of The Humongous Book of Calculus Problems by W. Michael Kelley. Once I had my stomach force an order of Chili's habanero chicken crispers through my nasal passages, math seemed like a fun idea.
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| Sunday, November 2nd, 2008
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1:20 am
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Today, I recovered a lost Kerberos master password, set up a backup KDC (complete with replication), added a second file server to my AFS cell, and moved thirteen disk volumes onto it while keeping them online and in continuous use. All of these were long-standing entries on my todo list kept there by their risky, technically daunting, and potentially time consuming natures. Amazing, what you can accomplish when you're trying to avoid the real work you have to do...
current mood: accomplished
current music: The Hum of the Disks
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| Friday, September 19th, 2008
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11:51 am - GENTLEMEN! I bring you...
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MACGUYVERBOT!
It's been forever since I posted, but it's just because I've been too busy doing things to write any journal entries about them. I'm back in the 'Ville for my brother's wedding this weekend, so I have a little slack time to write about one of the cooler things to suck up those precious LJ minutes. I'll post about the wedding when I find out how it goes...
Check behind the cut for more of Maxint Labs' latest creation.
( Dynamically Balanced Mayhem )
current mood: accomplished
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Thursday, May 15th, 2008
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10:56 pm - I Lieu of Real Posting...
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| Monday, April 7th, 2008
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7:10 pm - Birthday!!!1!!one!
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Happy birthday, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rewil!
Enjoy it, because once you're dead, we don't say it anymore!
Yay!
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| Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
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1:24 pm - Daleks in the War on Terror
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"Terrorist groups may soon deploy killer robots against unsuspecting civilians, a British researcher warned Wednesday": snapshot of Al-Qaeda's latest.
I never knew Davros was an Islamic fundamentalist...
current mood:  amused
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| Sunday, February 10th, 2008
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10:24 pm - Two Great Tastes That Don't Go Together In Any Way
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I'm a big fan of Iain M. Banks' Culture novels; RL friends may remember a computer I once had called excession, named after a title in the series. "WTF" didn't quite capture the moment when I saw this on ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) iain_banks today.
Yes, that's Culture/Harry Potter crossover fan-fic. Those f-list members who are into the HP thing will have to pass on their opinions. I haven't read past the first chapter, but be advised that it has been flagged as adult content on another site, so hot, wizard-on-witch (or drone) action may be involved.
Orthogonal 1: the right shift key of my Alphagrip went out tonight... a bummer, but now I'll get to see what the insides look like.
Orthogonal 2: I just started re-learning German. It's amazing what comes back to you once you get started.
current mood: amused
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| Saturday, January 19th, 2008
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7:55 pm - For The People Who Are Still Alive
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Always fashionably <cough> late, I just finished Portal. The cake was awesome and as a bonus, the song that I thought sounded like Jonathan Coulton turned out to actually be by Jonathan Coulton.
To celebrate, I'm spending the evening hacking on a little bit of macrology that I whipped up last weekend after returning from the Manhattan Christmas party. It's a mini-language that generates readers for the HTTP parameters in the web applications I've been writing.
current mood: chipper
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2:43 pm
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An Open Letter To The Producers of The History Channels "Decoding The Past: Earth's Black Hole"
Dear Producers,
On the evening of January 17, 2008, The History Channel aired your program, entitled "Decoding The Past: Earth's Black Hole", which describes the theory that the disappearance of ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle is caused by a black hole hidden in the Caribbean Sea.
( Some minor points )
current mood: incredulous
current music: The Backyardigans
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| Friday, December 14th, 2007
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11:06 pm - Wardrobe, Lungs, and Ice
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| Monday, October 22nd, 2007
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7:24 pm - The Facts of Life
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Tonight, snazzykathy is in Independence, KS filming part of the Neewollah ('Halloween' spelled backwards) festival, so it's just me and Monkeypants tonight. We came home, turned on some DVR'ed Blue's Clues, and got some frozen pizza. We finished our dinner, and with the most innocent of intentions, I turned on the science channel. There was a documentary running on the geologic and evolutionary history of the Earth, and Sophie, who is fascinated by dinosaurs, immediately locked on. We were sort of half-watching, and I drew her attention to a large North American predatory bird; one of the big two meter ones from 30 million years ago. She was going on about the bird and the "dinasohs" when we get to an explanation (and very well produced animation) of how these birds hunted mammals, like the early horses. The dog-sized horse on the screen stumbles at the bird's feet and barely gets up in time to take off running for it's life. After conducting a dramatic chase, the bird catches up to it's prey and with one kick, sends the horse flying into a tree. At which point Sophie exclaims "Oh NO!".
Great. So now I'm trying to explain to a two year old that it's not real, and the mean birds have been gone for a very long time, and she doesn't have to worry about them. She takes this in with sobriety, but great composure.
After the predatory birds, we move on to the first mammalian pack hunters, and I can tell that we're coming up on a scene where the mammals are going to bring the big birds to extinction. Thinking this might set things right, I tell Sophie to "watch the 'kitty cats' get that bird". After the bird eats it, I get a very concerned comment about its well being, and decide that maybe we've seen enough natural history for the evening. While I'm getting Sophie off my lap so I can look for the remote, she points out a small early rodent who's about to become an hors d'oeuvre, then asks "is it like Mickey Mouse?". I grab the control and change the channel just in time to hear "Uh-oh!" as the hyaenodontids overtake their lunch. I changed the channel...
And found an episode of CSI: Miami where a police officer was wrestling an alligator which was trying to eat a newly discovered murder victim in the Everglades.
Sophie was quite happy when I suggested that we watch some more Blue's Clues. She has since parlayed this blunder into a horsey-ride, three bird drawings, and the reading of several books. She is now lobbying for me to draw her a kitty cat.
current mood:  groggy
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| Thursday, October 18th, 2007
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7:34 pm - Happy Birthday
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| Monday, September 24th, 2007
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10:36 pm - We're All Purveyors of Filth
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Yeah, you're all dirty perverts; just ask St. Bernard software.
Like many organizations, my employer has this web content filter in place to keep people from looking at porn. This has generally been little more than an annoyance, but management has decided to jack up the restrictions for the sake of being able to report a squeaky clean environment in our next audit. These changes went into effect this morning. Twenty minutes after receiving the memo, I took a short break from programming and refreshed my LJ friends page. I was greeted with a notice saying that the site was restricted as "Adult Content". Surprised, I visited my main LJ page and got the same thing.
I went across the hall to the system administrator's office and asked him about LiveJournal's classification, then explained that I just got denied access to my own web site. I told him that if my blog was going to be given an adult content label, I thought I should at least get the benefit of a more interesting lifestyle. We determined that St. Bernard's product, iPrism, considers the entire LiveJournal site and all of the blogs on it to be for mature audiences only. Of course, I know that parts of LJ are adult-oriented, but only in the same sense that parts of everything are adult-oriented. It's a diverse site with many topics, sharing borders with news, commentary, and email, all of which are accessible.
I spent the next 10 minutes trying to explain to him that iPrism was sorely lacking in granularity, and that not only is it possible to filter individual URLs within a domain, it's reasonable to expect iPrism to do so. I know this because I was once commissioned to build one of these distasteful systems. Blocking an entire blog site like LiveJournal is like blocking all of Wikipedia because someone might look up an article on sex.
I guess I'll tolerate the situation for now... the last time they tweaked the web filter, the admin gave me some attitude over configuration settings for Mozilla, at which point I told him that if I wanted to hide my web browsing, he wouldn't see any of my traffic at all. The CIO, who was the third participant in the conversation, beamed at the prospect of seeing me do it.
current mood: indignant
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| Friday, September 7th, 2007
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3:13 pm - Caveat Emptor
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I should have known better.
The other day, I was walking around in Wal-Mart when I spotted a computer game called "UFO Afterlight". It's a tactical-level strategy game that looks an awful lot like another game that was out when I first started college called "X-COM: UFO Defense". I never played X-COM myself, but some of my friends did, and it looked like fun. I don't generally have much time to play games, but after thinking about it for a few days, I went ahead and bought it.
( Read about all the fun I've had playing this game )
current mood:  aggravated
current music: Fox News
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| Sunday, September 2nd, 2007
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5:29 pm - As I Was Saying...
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So, that last post seemed to imply that I would be writing again soon to finish up the various loose ends that were hanging about a month ago. I had intended to make postings more frequently in order to keep my various projects fresh in my mind. Well, I guess four weeks isn't really that long. :)
So first of all, I obviously made it back from Vegas alive. My deep resentment for airport security got driven a little deeper due to an unnecessarily drawn out metal detection exercise that managed to separate me from my wallet. After having all of my credit cards re-issued, I spent two days feeling like an idiot until I got a call from a fraud inspector in Florida who found the wallet in his luggage. This guy was a real life saver and shipped it to our hotel; I couldn't thank him enough. Apparently, while I was waiting in line for the guard to 'wand' me, my valuables were laying unmonitored at the front of the X-ray machine because the security personnel were more interested in accosting some poor old man with a pacemaker in line ahead of me. When I finally got through, someone had already picked the wallet up and chucked into the nearest available bag. I'd be more forgiving if I didn't realize that this stuff doesn't stop terrorism in any way.
Moving on, maxint.net's fileserver is online once more, and the data that I had feared lost has been recovered. The fix finally came in the form of a new SCSI hard drive that I got while in Vegas, of all places. Lets just say that I love Fry's electronics, and I told snazzykathy that I wanted to move there and live in the store. I now have a full backup of the data, and most of the maxint's services have been reinstated.
In more recent news, I had an interesting experience when I went out to dinner last night. Snazzy and the monkey were out of town, so I decided to get a sandwich at Subway. There were three very bored teenagers working behind the counter, and I started chatting one of them up in an attempt to order a spicy Italian on wheat. After being rebuffed several times, I was about to tell the girl to just use whatever kind of bread she thought would be best, when I followed all eyes the the doorway to discover a police officer standing there with his sidearm drawn and pointing at the floor in front of him. He said "I need you to to step outside with me" to no one in particular. Our confused glances at each other didn't seem to express the strong feelings that he thought we should have about the issue, so he elaborated, saying "I received a hold-up alarm". Apparently, one of the kids put his hand on the alarm button while crawling around under the counter, screwing with a printer. The officer still insisted on checking out the back room, then apologized to everyone and left. Police cars still continued to cycle through the parking lot for another 15 minutes, just to make sure. To my credit, I resisted the urge to tell the policeman that I sometimes went by the alias "Carlos the Jackal'.
Finally, it looks like I'm coming up on the end of a Web design project that has been progressing slowly for several months now. The site is one of the reasons my blog has been neglected of late. I made good use of the time home alone yesterday and surprised myself by making a breakthrough that enabled me to complete several pending items on the site's feature list. When I finally get this done, I'll be able to go on to some other things that I've been looking forward to.
current mood: accomplished
current music: History Channel
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| Saturday, August 4th, 2007
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1:51 pm - Not Dead Yet
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I have officially made it 32 years as of today < stops to check math on fingers >. I m waiting at terminal C22 in Las Vegas airport for the return trip home. The trip was fun, but definitely had its tense moments... lets just say that I think the TSA are a bunch of wankers and KCI security should get slapped around with some old kim chee. We're pre-boarding, so if I make to the other side, I'll talk to you all then.
current mood:  quixotic
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| Sunday, July 29th, 2007
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10:58 pm - Slow Progress
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Well, the replacement RAID controller idea didn't pan out nearly as well as I hoped it would, though I've made some major progress in the network rebuild process. The problem with the replacement controller is that I don't actually have one like I thought I did. The file server is an old Alpha that snazzykathy rescued from the junk heap for me, and it came with two other Alphas that we were told were identical to it. I kept them around for spare parts and thought they would provide the replacement RAID card. But, when I opened the machines up I found that they didn't have any RAID controllers in them. In fact, they didn't even have the same sized hard drives as the server, or as each other. Not only are they not identical, they're not even similar. I've been hauling around empty metal boxed thinking they had spare parts in them. Snazzy is awesome- upon hearing that we had no spares, she found the correct model of card on Ebay in a matter of seconds. It's on its way.
On the other hand, I managed to partially access the data on the array another way. I found that one hard drive of the four has gone bad and when I pull it out, the system is able to access the controller after some extended tests. After that, I'm able to start the boot loader located on the drive array. This is very good - it means that there is still a boot loader there to start! Once there, the boot loader (called aboot) has the ability to list the contents of the partitions, and I've been able to confirm that the filesystems are still intact. Next, I successfully used aboot to start the Linux kernel, further confirming that the drive contents still exist, but then I hit another wall. The Linux kernel itself can't see the logical partition formed by the RAID array. Even though it was itself stored on the logical drive (and loaded into memory by aboot), it can't see the drive to finish starting the system. The story seems to be the same when I boot the OS from an installation CD. I have not yet been able to formulate a Google query that gives me any useful information...
current mood: hopeful
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| Friday, July 27th, 2007
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4:06 pm
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Well, my network's main file server is still down, but there is on small bit of good news: I got the new machine to successfully boot Linux last night. I'm not sure if the success should be attributed to the SATA-friendly addition I made to the kernel command line, or just to the fact that I wiped it and started over, but it is now up and running in all it's SMP-enabled glory. Surprisingly, the network came right up, so I was able to update it fully and add a bunch of packages that weren't on the CD. X Windows isn't running on the new Nvidia card yet, but I haven't put much effort in to it. Debian's graphical install ran, so I know I can fall back on generic VGA if I have to.
The machine that died and started this whole chain of events was named hubris. At first I thought that I'd carry the name over to the new system, but it occurs to me that the only parts in common between the two will be the case and a DVD drive. I've always thought that "flux" would be a good hostname, so I'm going to use that for the new computer. It seems to be an accurate description of the network's state right now. And, I've been doing a lot of soldering lately. More on that later...
After much reading and consultation with various hackerly people, I've decided to try and swap out the RAID controller in the main server with an identical spare. I'm worried that the array's definition lives in the controller instead of the disks, and if that's the case, I don't know what the result will be since the two controllers were running different types of arrays. The new admin at work says he's done it successfully with another brand of hardware, and it would logically make sense to store the definition in the disks themselves in the event of this kind of situation. I've also read up and devised a full set of backup/restore systems that will be implemented as soon as the system is back online. I'm cautiously optimistic.
More or less orthogonal to the "computer crap" axis, I went to the optometrist yesterday, and am now back in contact lenses. I thought it would take several weeks to get them in (Wal-Mart took six last time), but after taking my insurance info, they came out with a trial set in a case. There must be some blind people in this town if they keep these babies in stock... And, they dilated my pupils. Trippy, but not as bad as I've been led to believe.
current mood: optimistic
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| Thursday, July 26th, 2007
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1:15 am - God Hates My Computers
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A couple of weeks ago, I had a computer burn out on me. Annoying, but not a big deal because it was a non-critical machine, and it was most notable because it literally burned out. After a few weeks of kernel panics and spontaneously switching off, it turned off and didn't come back. Thinking it was a faulty power supply, I detached the main power plug on the motherboard and found one of the pins singed dark brown. A nearby elecrolytic capacitor had a blob of dried grey goo on top. It looks like the electrolyte oozed out and shorted it out.
So today, I finally got a replacement. The machine wasn't absolutely vital, but it had the anti-spam system, a development database, and some application severs. I replaced the guts and installed it on the rack. Wham! The circuit breaker in the UPS tripped and took the whole rack with it. It seems that the new hardware draws a bit more power than the old stuff. After plugging the new machine into the wall, I discovered that the Kerberos/LDAP/AFS server was navel-gazing over the fact that in could no longer find its disk array. It seems that the RAID controller in the most important machine on the network is no longer working. It has all of the user accounts, passwords, email archives, and 10 years worth of personal files. It has no backup.
Once your initial peal of schadenfreunde inspired laughter dies out, I would point out that I had no backup because it was a flarghing RAID-5 powered by a UPS! Yes, that's no excuse, but I didn't have the room to do online backups anyway. The new system had a buttload more storage, and the first thing I was going to do when I got it in the AFS cell was to put a set of backup volumes on it. UPS mitigated RAID controller failure caused by installing a backup server. Yes, the systems devoted to protecting the network from failure have conspired to nearly wipe the whole thing out. If it was just a disk plugged into the wall, this wouln't have happened.
You know what's really funny? I looked up "irony" in the dictionary today because I read that people often misuse it.
current mood: irate
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| Tuesday, July 17th, 2007
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11:14 pm - Everything Old Is New Again
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In an attempt to stay one step ahead, I've completely blown past the wizard-related activities of Summer, 2007, and set my sights on the fanboy obsession of Summer, 2008:
The X-Files returns to the big screen!
Man, that'll be 10 years after the first movie. I always thought my perception of time was a little abnormal, but damn. Maybe I got abducted by aliens...
current mood: psyched
current music: That Captain Morgan Commercial
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