General Rambling

Jargon

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Overheard at the grocery store yesterday: “Oh my God, Doug, there you are. We’ve been trying to find you. They need the M-O-D at the service counter, there’s a lady there going absolutely nuts.” I’d been listening to them page the M-O-D for ten minutes, and I’d been watching this guy help bag groceries for five. “What’s the M-O-D?” he asked. “Manager on Duty,” said in the snottiest voice she’d talk to her boss in. “That’s you.” I bet if they’d paged a MANAGER he would have responded. Which makes me think about all the jargon I use on a daily basis. Given that people won’t generally ask for clarification when they don’t understand something because they don’t want to …

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Virtualization Versions

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Ryan over at vmhero.com is pondering what the numbers behind Virtualization 1.0, 2.0, etc. mean. I wish him luck with that. Personally, I’ve never heard any actual, real-life sysadmins refer to anything by those terms. I don’t have a Virtualization 2.0 environment, I have an environment that lets me get things done. And sometimes I upgrade it. Then I go home for the day. I do have one question, though. What version of virtualization will get us SkyNet? Actually, SkyNet uses a lot of physical hardware, so maybe it isn’t virtualized very well. I hope those creepy red eyes are low-voltage. In a weird twist of fate, I went to lunch before posting this and came back to Don MacAskill …

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Sydney Pollack

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The New Yorker has a good post, “Remembering Sydney Pollack:” Finding the spine of a story like “Out of Africa” was important to Sydney for many reasons, the most important of which was that it led to what he called “the ache.” The ache is self-explanatory if you’ve seen Sydney’s films. It is the ache of having one chance at deep love in a lifetime of shallow loves, and losing it too early. It is the ache of perfect, private union destroyed by terrible, worldly circumstance. For Sydney, the ache was about the way that the things we hold most dear always elude us. The ache is exactly what I relate to, what I look for and enjoy in so …

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Browser Errors? Ditch the Toolbars

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Over the last three months I have fixed four PCs that have had strange browser errors, appearing as dialog boxes to the unsuspecting users. The dialog boxes are usually some sort of failed assertion, whose message only holds meaning in that the user knows something bad just happened. “Why is my computer telling me I’m doing something illegal?” one person asked. The fix? Remove every toolbar installed on their PC. In two cases the Google Toolbar wouldn’t uninstall unless I updated it first. In one case there were four different toolbars (AOL, Ask, Yahoo!, and Google) all competing. And in all cases, when I asked the owner of the computer if they used the toolbars, the answer was “Toolbar? What …

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Old Technology

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A complete stranger walks in, looks at me, and utters a mildly panicked “Hey man, can you give me a jump start?” He’s young, maybe 18 or 19. “Problems?” I ask. “Yeah, won’t start. And now the battery is dead.” I walk with him out to the parking lot. The car is beautiful, some sort of 1970s Mustang, a deep shade of blue. “Is this your car?” “Well, sort of…” “Sort of?” No way am I jumpstarting a stolen car. “It’s my dad’s, I thought it’d be fun to take it out but now something’s wrong and he’s going to be pissed.” “Ever seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?” I joke. He has. Not nearly as funny to him. I hook …

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Stop Signs vs. Stop Lights

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Sitting in traffic today I realized that teams of people are either like stop lights or four-way stop signs. Stop lights are nice because everybody knows the rules, and they aren’t flexible. Everybody knows what everybody else should be doing, which is either sitting there idling, burning expensive fuel, or driving forward full-blast. Big queues build up sometimes behind a stop light, blocking other streets. When the stop lights aren’t timed perfectly (and they rarely are) you get these gobs of cars hurrying, then waiting, then hurrying again. One thing is true, though: that clueless guy talking on his cell phone doesn’t mess things up too much. Even they can figure out when to go. Stop signs are different, especially …

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Happy 150th, Minnesota

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Minnesota, the land of my youth, is 150 years old today, having been admitted to the Union as the 32nd state on May 11, 1858. Happy birthday!

Dell TOE Key

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I had the opportunity/task today of replacing a Dell PowerEdge 1950 system board. A voltage regulator was dying and taking the machine with it. I hadn’t actually seen one of their integrated TCP Offload Engine keys before, and they’re interesting, if not a bit small. Go RJ11! Personally, I like bigger parts, so when they fall on the floor I can find them again. Not that I ever drop anything. Nope. Never.

How is /etc/hosts bad? Let me count the ways.

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/etc/hosts is a nice way to temporarily convince a host that certain DNS mappings exist, for testing, troubleshooting, or just temporarily working around oddities. However, I’ve seen a resurgence in using /etc/hosts for more than just temporary purposes. This, in my opinion, is bad. I’ve always been a huge fan of tip #6 in “The Pragmatic Programmer:” Don’t Repeat Yourself. As soon as you repeat yourself you risk the different copies getting out of sync, which causes problems and confusion. Putting a fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) in /etc/hosts as well as in DNS means that at some point later in life the two will be out of sync. “It’s only on a couple of hosts, for testing.” First, if it’s …

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