General Rambling

Alice Peacock

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Some friends of mine and I have been following Alice Peacock for years. I’m not quite sure anymore how we got started listening to her, but she’s great. You may have heard her songs on the radio, or on a Hershey’s chocolate commercial. I saw her in Madison, WI last Friday. I didn’t have her newest CD so I bought one. Being me, I decided I didn’t want her to sign it in the same way every artist signs a CD, and so: Nice! It’s cool what happens when you ask people to do something a little bit differently.

LMGTFY

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At least once a day I have this conversation, usually with one of the same four people: “Hey Bob, do you know what ‘pam_tally(sshd:setcred): unknown option: no_magic_root’ means?” “Have you tried searching for the answer yourself?” “No. Why?” <uncomfortable pause goes here> As such, I adore the creators of “Let Me Google That For You.” http://lmgtfy.com/ (hat tip to my friend Terry Bradshaw for finding this one).

Easiest Way to Get Rid of Malware

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Q: What’s the easiest way to get rid of malware on Windows[0]? A: Not to get it in the first place. A couple of other observations I made while cleaning a friend’s computer: 1. The malware was detected by my friend because it was closing windows. Any window that could be used to fix the infection was closed by the malware. That doesn’t seem to be a very productive strategy for staying installed. 2. The Avast BARTPE CD creator rocks. Luckily, a part of my organization that does more desktop support for customers has a license for it. It’s really nice to boot off a CD to fix everything. 3. I started with the Avira free antivirus scanner. It is …

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Back on the Horse

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Hey, what’s this? It’s a blog… and I seem to have a login to it. 🙂 Some of you have emailed me, wondering where in the heck I’ve gone. It’s not a long story: 1. Work has been nutty lately. I can safely summarize it by saying “be careful what you wish for.” For a long time I’ve wanted to get more involved with project management and higher-level decision making in my organization. Now I long for the days when it was just me, vi, and a dark room. 2. My hobbies have been nutty lately. I decided about a year ago that I’d like to try producing a play with my theater company, Strollers Theatre. I’ve done that now. …

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Servers Too Cold?

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Dear Readers, Has anybody ever had a server get too cold? I’ve seen them get too warm, but there’s very little data about the cold end of things. Can anybody tell me what happens? I’m mainly talking about servers. We do have some IBM tape drives that don’t like the cold, but that’s understandable. In the cold I’d expect issues with fans, especially the cheap ones with sleeve bearings. What else?

FeedBurner Hosed

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In the last few days, since April 1, my RSS feed subscriber count on FeedBurner has plummeted, now just a little over a third of what it has been for a long time. It looks like lots of people are having this problem, as well as email subscribers not getting any email. Perhaps Google should apply the “beta” designation to FeedBurner, too. I’ve figured that this was some sort of reporting problem, because a 60% change in readership numbers is a huge error, and catastrophic for people who have ad deals, apply for funding and grants based on statistics, etc. In typical Google style there’s just one little mention of this on their blog: Issue: We are observing reduced subscriber …

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What If

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I have to stay current on my blog reading… I missed the “Eric Whitacre Extravaganza” a few weeks ago in Minneapolis. It would have been really cool to hear the new Nox Aurumque performed by St. Olaf, and one of those events my mom and brother would have wanted to see, too. I credit my ex-girlfriend Susannah for introducing me to Whitacre’s work, in that she was part of a group that sang Water Night, Cloudburst, and Lux Aurumque two summers ago. BYU renditions have since been permanent fixtures on my iPhone. I just spent the last 30 minutes replaying the Conspirare version of What If, over and over and over. I agree with Mr. Whitacre’s description as “a very …

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April Fools

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…and so begins the onslaught of April Fools’ Day pranks and jokes, most of which won’t be funny, amusing, or even jokes. And the pranks, well, ugh. Good pranks are so uncommon. Back in the day when I was an Assistant Scoutmaster I happened upon a group of Scouts planning midnight raids on other campsites at summer camp. The ideas they had! Tripwires, dumping the other Troop’s 55 gallon water drum (for fire suppression) over, burying fireworks in their fire pit. Terrible. It’s a real challenge to come up with a funny but harmless prank. I was lucky that as a Scout my Troop had a good prank culture, especially when we were camping, and the pranks were mostly safe …

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Intel Xeon 5500 Release

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I’ve spent the morning looking at the new server models from Dell, based on the Intel Xeon 5500 series of CPUs (Nehalem-EP). These things look sweet, but there are some interesting caveats. A few of my observations so far: 1. Intel has killed the front-side bus and in its place implemented QuickPath Interconnect (QPI), a competitor to AMD’s HyperTransport. It’s speed is measured in GigaTransfers per second (GT/s), and is 4.86 GT/s, 5.86 GT/s, or 6.40 GT/s per direction, which according to the Wikipedia article I linked to is 12 to 16 GB/s per direction per link. Cool, but most people are going to pick a CPU based on price point rather than link speed, given that everything in the …

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"Meet The Engineer"

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Okay, so I work at a University, and occasionally I use a bathroom frequented by students who still believe in writing creative stuff on the walls. Today I see a quote: “I have yet to meet the person who can outsmart a bullet.” and figuring that it isn’t an original work I go looking for the source. It turns out to be the Heavy Weapons guy in Team Fortress 2, during their “Meet the Team” videos. Whoever had the idea for that is a genius. You don’t need much character development in a first person shooter, but these are just the right length, and funny as hell. If you haven’t watched them and are looking for something to kill a …

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