The Lone Sysadmin

Well, I return from my ice fishing trip happy and warm. It was pretty damn cold 45 minutes south of Superior, WI, but that also means a nice two-foot sheet of ice to drive out on. :-) Collectively we did okay fishing, I caught a few things here and there but nothing serious. The one nice fish I did have came off the line as I was pulling him out. It was a big crappie. Big. Residents of the area may have heard the expletives I shouted across the lake in frustration.

I did learn one lesson, though: in order for movie quotes to be considered funny (”I caught you a delicious bass!”) others need to have seen the movie being referenced…

:-)

It’s been a busy week. As the blog turns I’ve managed to annoy some users of certain text editors, and I’ve ranted a little. Not super productive. For the rest of February I want to do at least one on-topic post a day. My personal life has had some amazingly awesome things happening that have taken some of my free time, so I’ll have to work that out.

Work has been super busy lately, with new projects starting that promise to be interesting, if not fun to work on. Many blog posts ahead for those things.

But, now I have to head north, for poker, beer, and ice fishing. All this sub-zero weather is good for something: freezing lakes. :-)

Okay, okay, I was going to make a comment but I thought a followup full post was a better idea. Jesse Grosjean and xen0cide had good comments, but I’ve been getting some, um, interesting hate email. I don’t have a lot of time to comment right now, but here’s what I’ve got:

First, please stop sending me idiotic email. I don’t hate Macs, and I enjoy rational commentary as comments to the post. I think I mentioned there are two excellent ones in the post already, use them as examples.

Second, I think it’s cool that Jesse/Hog Bay Software are cool with the duplication. Hopefully he can pull some good ideas back from the other clones.

Third, xen0cide, I wouldn’t wish vi on anybody. Icky icky icky.

Fourth, I know lots of people aren’t CLI junkies, but it seems like all the people that I hear about *room from are. And it always puzzled me.

That’s all for now. :-)

1. If you’re on Windows find a terminal program. On Mac OS X, Linux, etc. open a terminal.

2. Set your terminal colors to green on black.

3. Click the maximize button.

4. Run nano, pico, vi, emacs, whatever.

If I see another raving review, blog post (especially Lifehacker), or story about how revolutionary Darkroom, Writeroom, JDarkRoom, or Writer is I think I’m going to explode. I know, I know, Mac users thought of this which means it’s the bomb and all. Pay no attention to the UNIX guys who have been doing it for thirty years…

Also, I love how everybody ripped Hog Bay Software off. Apparently Web 2.0 doesn’t include Lawyers 2.0 yet.

Dear Associated Press,

The article on how “Hackers Attack Key Net Traffic Computers” is one of the dumbest I’ve ever read.

When the author can tell us what the difference between a root name server and a router is he can continue writing publicly about networking.

Thank you.

Have you ever noticed how your OpenSSH session hangs on logout if you start something in the background? This is intentional on the part of the OpenSSH developers, but it’s annoying for system administrators who do a lot of backgrounding of things. Certainly you can force-quit your hung SSH session with the “~.” trick but that sucks, too. A quick fix I use is the ‘at’ command. In this example I want to start the Tivoli Storage Manager client daemon in the background:

echo “/opt/tivoli/tsm/client/ba/bin/dsmc schedule > /dev/null” | \
/usr/bin/at now

Customize as necessary, but you see the trick. You do need the atd daemon running to get it to work.

This just came through on the HPCwire mailing list. I’ve been watching this unfold for a week now, having been reading Jim Gray’s papers for years, and it would be sad to see him gone. I repost this information in the hopes that more people will join the search and we can find him or conclusively determine what happened to him. If you can sort through a few images a lot of people would be very grateful.

————

The disappearance of computer scientist, Jim Gray, has initiated an
unprecedented Internet-based search, with thousands of volunteers
examining online satellite images. Gray, 63, hasn’t been seen since he
sailed from San Francisco on Sunday, January 28, to scatter his mother’s
ashes near the Farallon Islands. He was reported missing by his wife
that evening when he failed to return home. The Coast Guard called off
its search last week after combing the area for five days.

Gray, a winner of the prestigious ACM Turing Award in 1998, is
well-known for his pioneering work is databases and transaction
processing. He joined Microsoft 10 years ago, where he manages Microsoft
Research’s eScience Group.

Over the past weekend many of Jim Gray’s friends worked to obtain
satellite and aerial imagery, hoping to find him and his 40-foot
sailboat. A team of engineers and scientists from Google, Amazon,
Microsoft and NASA, along with the public, have been invited to scan
thousands of the satellite photographs of the search area. Two
approaches are being used: human and computer analysis. The human
analysis is taking place via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site, and
this has involved some 6,000 volunteers looking through nearly 100,000
images since Friday evening. Once these volunteers flag an image as
containing an object of interest, these are passed to another group of
experts who look through all of the flagged images, also using
Mechanical Turk. The group is still looking for volunteers to search the
satellite photos and experts to analyze the flagged images.

For an overview of the process, please visit
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/02/help_find_jim_gray.html