General Rambling

Holidays, w00t

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Hey all, First of all I have to say thanks for another great year. I really enjoy writing here, and you folks have been great to me, encouraging me, and generally making me believe that I’m not just writing for myself. Not that I’d stop, of course, but it’s nice when someone is listening. 🙂 So thank you! I’m off for the holidays. As with most vacations for me the lead-up to them is terrible, with the nailing down of loose ends being the key time sink. I’ve also had a couple of big presentations & proposals to make, so I haven’t been as attentive as I should be to my email. I know a few of you have emailed …

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Why You Shouldn't Touch Bulbs

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One of my hobbies is theatrical lighting design. Sometimes I find myself training new helpers in the mysterious arts of the theater. One of those arts is replacing lamps in lighting fixtures (“lighting instruments” in theater parlance). Rule #1 of replacing a lamp: don’t touch the bulb. Why? Because the gunk from your skin causes a hotspot which melts the glass. That’s a thumb-sized hole in the bulb: This is my new example of why these aren’t arbitrary rules. 🙂

Fake Steve Jobs Taking On Plagiarism

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Fake Steve Jobs (Daniel Lyons) takes on Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at eWeek for lifting press releases and claiming the text as his own. I think this is an important thing to keep in mind. Plagiarism is stealing, and if bloggers want to be treated as journalists they have to adhere to the ethical standards of the community. I don’t know how many times I saw the official VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 announcement reposted this week in various forms on various blogs. It just makes me think that folks doing that sort of thing need to be careful about their attributions. I am definitely not accusing anybody of plagiarism[0], just reminding folks to be mindful that reposting other’s work, even a …

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One To One Mapping

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Systems that collect data need a one to one mapping between data entered and its meaning. Truthfully, this is most common for data NOT entered. I’ve seen a lot of systems where a field which is not relevant is left blank. How do you know which ones were left blank intentionally and which ones were accidental? If you’re going to bother collecting data why not be as specific as possible? Use units. Number of CPUs? Did you mean sockets or cores? Amount of RAM? Disk size? Is that in MB, GB, or TB? “N/A” is a perfectly acceptable answer, too, if everybody knows what it means.

iCal for Conference Schedules

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Dear Conference Organizers, When you put a conference together please release an iCal file of all the sessions. Lots of people attending conferences have PDAs, and they can import the schedule into their PDAs so they don’t have to carry a schedule around. It also makes it easier to cross-reference the sessions if the schedule is sorted by something other than time (track, topic, etc.). Thanks!

Fun with ipcrm

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Speaking of screwing up, I was reminiscing about some of the other screwups I’ve made. We were having trouble with a server that appeared to have a memory leak. The major application on it was an Oracle database, and I had been reading something about ipcs and ipcrm and how you should check for orphaned shared memory segments and delete them. Sounds dumb now but at the time it seemed compelling. Not wanting to do anything rash, I checked AIX’s man page for ipcrm, which indicated that ipcrm run with certain flags wouldn’t delete a memory allocation that was still in use. Cool. I ran the command, and it did nothing. I just figured it was a dead end. What …

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You Know It Is Going To Be A Good Day When…

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You know it’s going to be a good day when you spend 30 minutes debugging a problem which ultimately ends up being a one character typo, an extra ‘p’, in /etc/exports: /export/rippper *(ro) That’s something you just don’t see unless you’re really looking for it. My best screwup yet[0] was a few years back. I’d reported a problem with compiling Python on AIX 4.3.3. The Python guys got back to me and told me that they didn’t have AIX boxes, so if it was going to get fixed I had to do it. So I set about changing the autoconf/configure scripts to do the right thing. I had two terminal windows open, one where I was editing, one where I …

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Traveling with an iPhone? Keep the firmware on your laptop.

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When I travel for more than a couple of days I sync my iPhone with my laptop. That way I have a backup copy of my data (photos and notes, mainly) as well as a way to freshen the music and movies a bit. On my last trip I decided to sync my iPhone in the two hour layover I had in Denver. I had my laptop on one leg and my phone on the other. Once I’d started the transfer my phone promptly fell off my lap and pulled the USB cable out. I plugged it back in to continue but the damage was done. iTunes claimed my phone was mated to another iTunes library, and showed all the …

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Features I Wish My iPhone Had

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I love my iPhone. I really do. I just wish it had a few more features, like: 1. A “jog dial” like the old iPods. Christopher Fahey sums this up nicely at graphpaper.com. Not that this is a democracy in any way, but consider this another vote. 2. The ability to stream to an Airport Express. I have an Airport Express connected to my stereo. It’d be cool if I could stream to it wirelessly. Cables are so 1833. 3. The same iPod forward/pause/back controls in any orientation. When I walk I often carry my iPhone horizontally in my hand (it switches to Cover Flow mode). I hate having to hold it vertically while I’m walking just to skip a …

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Ahhh, Vacation

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I hope everybody had a wonderful week last week, holidays or not. I was off doing my yearly tramping around in the Wisconsin woods looking for deer[0]. And eating. It seems like I spent Wednesday through Sunday eating. Ugh. The nice thing about sitting in the woods waiting for animals to show up is a lot of time to think. Once I’m through with the 1000 messages in my INBOX and voice mail[1] I have a whole bunch of new stuff to write about. It is sort of strange to think about computers when you’re in the middle of a national forest, but nature has long been a muse for artists, philosophers, and soldiers. Why can’t it do the same …

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