Outright Rant

How To Boot Into The Apple Boot Camp Menu

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One of my goals for this blog is to make things that are difficult to find on the Internet less difficult to find, and one of those things is the key to hold in order to boot into the Apple Boot Camp menu at system startup. Finding that information once a year when I need it is always a many-step process, because the Apple documentation is wordy and doesn’t just come out and say: Hold the Option key down. Or Alt if it’s a PC keyboard.   There’s also the Boot Camp control panel, too, but obviously you did not, or could not, use it, which is why you were searching for the keystroke combination instead. Hopefully you didn’t have …

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Who Cares About Time Zones Anyway?

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If you think you have a thankless job you should think about Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert. Heck, it’s not even a paying job for them. They’re volunteers. Perhaps even masochists. What do they do? They maintain the time zone database (“zoneinfo”) for all of the computing world. And while residents of a particular country have to put up with just the general stupidity of their own politicians, these guys have to put up with all the stupidity of all politicians, across the Earth. Every time a politician in Russia, or Cameroon, or Indiana thinks it’d be a good idea to screw with the clocks these guys update and redistribute their database[0]. Vendors pick up the update and send …

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LSI Security Question Fail

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I was trying to register for access to the LSI download center and in the process I ran across a very interesting security question: Gee, guys, if I knew what my password was I wouldn’t need the security question. I also enjoy “What is your mother’s last name?” Consider that a disproportionate number of IT staff are men, and that, at least in the USA, women of my mother’s era usually took their husband’s last name. It’s highly probable that my mother’s last name is the same as mine… This is all on top of the fact that it’s asking for passwords and such without SSL. I think it’s safe to say that your security is not their priority.

Fallacies of Distributed Computing

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I was cleaning out a stack of old papers and ran across a copy of “The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing” that I’d made back in 2004. As Wikipedia puts it, a guy by the name of Peter Deutsch “asserted that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make a set of assumptions… and these assumptions ultimately prove false, resulting either in the failure of the system, a substantial reduction in system scope, or in large unplanned expenses required to redesign the system to meet its original goals.” 1. The network is reliable. 2. Latency is zero. 3. Bandwidth is infinite. 4. The network is secure. 5. Topology doesn’t change. 6. There is one administrator. 7. Transport cost is zero. 8. …

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Blame

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The idea of the “good old days” is usually false, especially in IT. With one exception, there hasn’t been a better time to be in IT or working with technology. The exception is virtualization and blame. Back in the day it used to be the storage guy’s fault, directly, when the storage was slow. Or the network guy’s problem. Or the app admin, with their inefficient apps. Maybe it was the guy who runs the LDAP servers. Maybe it was the OS vendor, or the hardware vendor shipped us a lemon. Now, though, it seems that it’s always the virtualization guy’s fault. For everything. Virtualization has turned IT into a nanny state. Because virtual environments sit between applications and nearly …

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Why No-Reply Email Is A Bad Idea

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I absolutely hate no-reply email. I understand why it exists (autoresponders and bounces), but to send an email with no way to respond at all using the same communications medium is ridiculous. A good example of this is the customer satisfaction survey Red Hat just sent me. It is from a no-reply email address and there is no other email address listed. There is just some text and a URL, and clicking on the URL gets me: $ dig rhapps.redhat.com ns1.redhat.com […snip…] ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;rhapps.redhat.com.             IN      A A records are overrated. I generally am a nice guy and let vendors know something is messed up, but there are limits, especially when I’m already on the fence about a negative …

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Midnight is Always Tomorrow

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“So, are you ready for the big power outage on Sunday?” a colleague asks on Thursday. “You mean Saturday.” “No… Sunday morning.” “Um, I was told two months ago, and countless times between, that the outage is on Saturday, midnight to 8 AM, and they were starting to shut things down at 10 PM.” “It’s Sunday, midnight to 8 AM. They’re going to start shutting things down on Saturday at 10 PM.” “Did they move the outage?” “No, I bet they were just telling you when things were going to start. On Saturday.” Midnight is 00:00, meaning the start of a new day. Always. If you’re in doubt, use 00:01. Assume everybody is clueless about time, because they are. For …

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Cisco & Gartner Censoring ViewYonder

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Steve Chambers of Cisco, blogging over at ViewYonder.com, has had one of his recent blog posts censored by his employer, Cisco. This is really too bad. I don’t always agree with Steve’s opinions but I like that they’re out there. As an example, very few people would have the balls to point out that many IT failures are actually because IT people cause those failures. Very true, in my opinion. I’ve even started referring to “MTBC” in conversation. However, I’m not at all a fan of Cisco, for a few specific reasons, and now I can add censorship to that list.  It’s obvious that Cisco doesn’t want, and cannot handle, passionate employees. Too bad. It’s people like Steve that drive …

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I Hope AT&T Dies A Painful Death

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The new solution to the fact that I get 3 bars of signal in the middle of nowhere, but half a bar in my living room in Madison, WI? Femtocells. Pay $150 and get a device that turns your cell call into VoIP… From the NY Times: Even though the calls would be offloaded to an Internet service provider, AT&T customers would be charged for the minutes of phone service in their existing wireless plans unless they pay an extra $20 a month for unlimited calling. So AT&T wants you to pay $150 for the device, $40/month for DSL from someone else, then is going to charge you to use the DSL for your call? Unbelievable. And why, for those …

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I Love the FCC Test App

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AT&T: The Nation’s Fastest 3G Network: This is out of the Twin Cities, MN, and the best of three tests. If I’m at home in Madison, WI I don’t get 3G with my half bar of service. The day the iPhone is available on another network, legitimately, I’m gone.

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