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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Random Geeky Bytes

    Let’s have just a good old-fashioned roundup, shall we?

    • When I put my Neuros on the charger last night, I expected it to actually charge the battery. Instead, I discovered this morning as I tried to turn it on at the bus stop, the battery had been discharged. Argh.
    • GeoURL is back. Finally. Note the return of the corresponding sidebar linky goodness.
    • Being one of the offices that’s cut off from the offices that haven’t been upgraded to the new VPN-based WAN sucks. A lot.
    • Spending three hours cleaning particularly virulent adware off of a company laptop (that, of course, had never once been in my possession until now) sucks quite a lot as well.
    • Backup Exec is really starting to annoy me. It refuses to actually behave in accordance with the settings I change, and it (ir)regularly gives a cryptic error when it tries to verify the backup. (If it would simply accept my “don’t try to verify the backup” setting change, I’d stop getting those errors, of course.)
    • There just aren’t enough hours in the day to do all of the things I’d like to. (This isn’t specifically a “geeky” statement, but still. Ugh.)

  • They’re not “temp” files if they’re permanent, you know.

    KNRK’s program director called me over so I could look into why his music scheduling program was running so darned slow. He’d already performed the obligatory reboot to no avail, so I dutifully went to his office and watched the software misbehave as claimed. The problem manifested as long pauses of up to 90 seconds when performing random tasks.

    I checked the Task Manager. NTVDM took up most of the CPU power during those pauses. Fine, so the Virtual DOS doohicky was working overtime. Why? My next thought was to check the program’s working directory on the server for telltale files. I found them, alright. I found four thousand of them.

    VDM(hex-numeral).tmp files. All of them zero bytes in size, ranging in age from a couple of days to a couple of years. Apparently the VDM never, ever deletes these puppies. So I did, and it… almost helped.

    I looked deeper. Deeper into the directory structure, that is. In one of the subdirectories I found something that really surprised me: 65,000 of those VDM*.tmp files.

    Whoah.

    I wasn’t at all surprised that deleting all of those files made the program work better. In fact it ran considerably faster than the PD expected, as he’d grown used to it being fairly slow. My next amazing feat will be the implementation of a timed script that regularly removes those damned “temporary” files…

  • Unscheduled Downtime

    I spent all day today at home. That is, the kids’ home. I saw them off to school (with some prodding, in one case) and then napped some more, after which the phone calls came. I talked to Wendi, I talked to some people at work, and I talked to Grandma Penny. In between calls I loaded anime onto the living room computer and chatted a bit online. Around 2:30 I started dinner, which was done shortly before Alex got home. The kids went to the hospital to see their mother and new sibling. After they came home we watched a couple episodes of anime and then I sent them to bed.

    Tomorrow, I’ll try to stagger back into something resembling my normal routine… though I will be showing up a bit late for work. Ah well…

  • It’s a boy.

    I just got word a little bit ago.

    I’m sure that once she gets home she’ll be able to tell you all about it in her own place, but since she can’t do that today… well, here’s your announcement. Mind you, I don’t have much in the way of details beyond “it’s a boy, and everyone’s doing fine.” But hey, that’s the important stuff, right?

  • Change of Plans

    I’m hanging with the kids a lot more than expected, this weekend. See, somebody had to go to the hospital tonight and is likely to be there for a couple of days. Therefore, I’m crashing out at the kids’ place.

    Hey, this’ll be a great chance for the kids and I to get in some more quality time. That’s always a good thing. Now to see if anyone actually sleeps tonight…

  • Things that make you go postal.

    Say you’re a service vendor, and you’re working with a company to set up additional services. This is a company you’ve been dealing with for a while now. Now say that the IT Department at the company in question sets up, for instance, some port-forwarding rules on their firewall. You’re able to connect to the computers you need, and can install the software. Then you come across a problem, and you think it’s firewall-related. Who do you contact?

    Apparently, if you’re our streaming audio provider, you don’t contact the IT Department. You send an email to someone else entirely at the company, at 9:30 in the morning, and wait for someone to get things taken care of.

    I found out about the email in question at about 3:00 in the afternoon when the guy who received the email asked, “So, did you fix the firewall problem?” (My reply, of course: “Uh, what firewall problem?”)

    This gets even better, as it tends to around our offices. It turns out that while the remote-access port was working well enough as I configured it, the vendor decided to change the port that the encoder listens on… to the outside port I gave them to connect to… not the original standard port that I had the firewall forwarding to. If they’d just left things the hell alone, we might very well have been streaming by day’s end. But no, oh no. Clearly they know more about this stuff than I do. Who am I, anyway? I’m just the IT guy, after all.

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