Outright Rant

F'in Small Towns

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I am sitting in the parking lot of a motel in Tomah, WI, downloading Daft Punk from iTMS, poaching wireless, because Wal*Mart (yeah, yeah, I know, I’m desperate) had twenty copies of Dokken’s greatest hits but not Daft Punk’s “Homework.” Or any Daft Punk. Daft Punk? Who are they? No Target, no Best Buy, no music store in sight. Where in hell do these folks get their music? And why is it all f’in country and Christian? I mean, I like some Christian rock, but it takes so little effort to see a little bit more in life. God forbid you might like it. WTF. And there was no freakin’ way I was gonna get the new Tool album from …

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Rube Goldberg, Part 2

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“Hey Bob, big important web server A isn’t working right after you patched it the other day. We need to roll the patches back.” “Can you tell me what’s going wrong first?” “PHP can’t talk to the Oracle databases.” “Does the test environment work?” “Yeah.” “It’s identical to production.” “Um… I don’t get it.” “I put the same patches on the test box that are on the production machine.” I always do. That’s the point. “Well, maybe it’s on a different network.” “What’s on a different network?” “Did big important web server A switch networks?” At this point an alarm is going off in my head. Switch networks? Yeah, I just randomly change the IPs of my servers because it …

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Spamming Bastards

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Okay, you comment spamming clowns. Because of you I’ve set it to moderate any comment with more than zero URLs in it. Grrrr.

The Customer is Always Idiotic

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“Hey Bob, can you talk to a customer about upgrading his backup client?” We run Tivoli Storage Manager for a backup system, and we resell the service to customers. We are in the midst of upgrading to TSM 5.3, and we just informed all the customers that they need to be running a recent client. Recent, to us, means versions 5.2 or 5.3, which represent the last five years of TSM development. IBM doesn’t support older versions of the clients, so to ensure that we can resolve any problems that crop up we ask that people upgrade from time to time. Most of our customers just have us upgrade their clients for them as part of our contracts with them. …

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I Hate Programmatic Email

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Hi. I don’t want email from your apps. Really. I don’t want to know that your cron job ran successfully last night. I don’t want to know that there were 38 commits to your CVS repository. I don’t want to know that you are planning routine updates to your J2EE environment every Tuesday for the next year. Not via email, at least. Over and over and over and over I get mindless email from applications. I get an email per error. I get a notice per scheduled change. I get commit email, and log checking email, and email that says everything is fine. And you know what? I stopped listening. I built a mail filter for all the crap you …

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Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme

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The Strollers production of Frank McGuinness’ “Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme” opened last Thursday. Two seats shy of sold out. I remembered to look for reviews today, and I found Michael James writing about it in the Capital Times. Two comments from me: 1. Mr. James, I think you missed part two, where all the soldiers were meeting each other. 2. It’s just a little cigarette smoke, not mustard gas. For those of you not in the Madison area, Madison banned smoking in bars last year, and since then it’s been an inquisition against anybody who smokes. I like smoking cigars, so I fall in this category. Did you know that the mere sight of smoke …

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Use Freakin' DVDs (and IBM doesn't get it)

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Dear all OS vendors: Provide DVD images. Seriously. Everybody you care about has a DVD burner. Everything has a DVD drive. Well, almost everything. Some older equipment might not, so yeah, you’ll have to keep the CD ISOs around. But I hate burning five discs when I could just burn one DVD. I hate keeping track of five discs when I could just keep track of one DVD. If customers don’t have a DVD drive, suggest that they spend $25 and get one. Now, if you’re one of the vendors that doesn’t even provide ISOs to your customers, CD or DVD, here’s my message: die, die, die. Take IBM, for example. IBM, technology giant, hasn’t figured out that letting customers …

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Shut Yer Trap

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The last couple of weeks have been pretty hectic. My coworkers have been on vacation and generally AWOL, leaving me alone with all our customers. I’m accustomed to being the only guy doing work around the office, but when other emergencies come up it throws a wrench into my normally scheduled insanity. Given the way I work, as a human, it’s hard for me to write creatively when I’m stressed out. So I usually end up drinking more, playing more Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, and bitching at my boss. Always productive. 🙂 One of the emergencies that ate about 20 hours of my life was the realization of what was causing I/O problems on our VMware ESX Servers. In short, because …

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Professional Obstacles

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One of the ways I sort people is using the obstruction test. Do they obstruct my efforts, or do they assist me? From now on I’m giving people +2 points if they help me, -1 point if they block me, and +1 point if they just stay out of my way but don’t help me. Nobody remains neutral as there are only two choices: right and wrong. “What exactly do you need that for?” — war cry of obstructionism, -1. “Oh, you’re doing such-and-such. Have you tried blah-blah-blah?” — could go either way, generally helpful, +2 “I need to get this in writing from your boss” — I just asked you to add me to a vendor’s support website so …

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Quick Compression HOWTO

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Hi. Here’s a quick HOWTO on using compression, and on BitTorrent. If you were looking for a real HOWTO, well, you can probably achieve compression with: compression_program.exe uncompressed_file.txt You could get tricky with: cat uncompressed_file.txt | bzip2 > compressed_file.txt.bz2 Oooooh. Certain file formats are compressed. Generally files ending in: MP3, MP4 ZIP, RAR, ARJ, LZH GZ, BZ2, TAR.GZ, TAR.BZ2 MPG, MPEG, MPEG2, MPEG3, MPEG4 OGG, FLAC AVI, WMA, AAC, M4P, VOB, etc. etc. etc. are compressed already. This means you don’t need to compress them again. Really. You actually lose space when you do that, due to the overhead of compressing things. And time. And patience. There’s nothing I love more than getting a zipped-up set of MP3s, or a …

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