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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: May 2007

  • Depressing Political Stuff

    Feel free to ignore this post if you’re (one of the following)…

    a) …going to take me to task for my political views. I’m not here to engage in a debate. I just found a particular interesting article online and wanted to link it. That’s all. You aren’t going to convince me that I’m wrong, and I’m not going to convince you likewise.
    b) …fed up with the state of things in general and don’t want to add more fuel to that particular internal fire. The following link contains very little that’s actually news to anyone who’s been paying attention, but the presentation and conclusions are noteworthy.
    c) …hoping for snarky commentary and/or amusing anecdotes and/or silly memes from Yours Truly. Nothing like that is on tap at the moment. It’s been that kind of week month year, I’m afraid. I apologize. Maybe later.

    Still here? Okay, then go read Ending The Empire.

  • Spider-Man 3

    I’m coming late to this party, but not as late as I am to the TMNT party. (Yes, that’s a review I should have gotten around to weeks ago. Whoops.) Please note that I’m making no attempt to hide spoilers here. It’s my firm belief that nothing I say here will “ruin” your enjoyment of the movie, but if you disagree with that on principle then you should probably wait to read this posting until after you’ve seen the film.

    I’ll wait.
    (more…)

  • The Joys of Managed Services

    I love our managed services platform-of-choice, Kaseya. It allows me to run complex scripts, remote control machines in a number of ways, and generally stay on top of all the fiddly bits involved in keeping disparate groups of machines in peak condition. Because computers take everything literally, however, sometimes you get “critical” alerts like: “The amount of installed RAM on Machine X has changed from 3327MBytes to 3326MBytes.”

    Someone stole one megabyte of RAM! Quick, to the Batmobile! (Or, maybe not.)

    Then again, sometimes the best platform in the world can’t save you from the vagaries of the server vendor. Take HP (please! ha ha) and their instructions for monitoring drive failure. “Watch for Event ID 1214,” they say, and then when the drive fails the actual logged error shows up with Event ID 1202. It’s not even that their instructions are wholly incorrect, as the last time a drive failed it did use the “correct” ID. Unfortunately, last night’s drive failure at one of our biggest clients used the “wrong” ID.

    Guess who looks bad when we “drop the ball” in such a fashion, eh? Oh, I’ve fixed that one. Now I just have to wonder how many other little traps are waiting to spring…

  • I’d call today a wash, but…

    On top of everything else today (and let’s not get into what my workday was like), the washing machine seems to have completely given up the ghost. Of course I discovered this after my clothes were fully immersed in cold soapy water. All I can do now is wait for the rinse and spin cycles… if they run at all… so I can try to salvage this mess.

    Can it be Friday yet?

  • Hear an echo of the life that was.

    This morning on the MAX train to work I met a man with his own page on Wikipedia, former coworker Clyde Lewis. Talking with him was an interesting experience, reminding me greatly of hallway conversations at my previous place of employment. It’s rather surreal to think now about the life I was forced to leave behind early last year. My life is dramatically different now but I maintain a strong emotional connection with “the biz.” (I still grouse at the radio if it happens to be on in the car and someone botches a break or makes an ass of themselves, for instance. I also never fail to look for the Stonehenge tower south of the downtown Portland skyline.)

    Clyde’s not on the air right now, but he’s working on remedying that situation. I wish him all the best in that endeavour.

  • A wee bit o’ server maintenance

    It’s always so very nice to see a high-profile notification about a new release of key webserver software, one which purports to fix a myriad of security vulnerabilities, right before I go to bed. There’s no chance of getting to sleep without taking care of the upgrade once I’ve seen such a thing. What makes the task much more entertaining is that the OS version for this server is, let’s say, a bit out of date. Getting installers for current software on this old beast can be a nightmare.

    Luckily there’s a Frenchman who believes in keeping certain key software packages installable for old warhorses like my server so I acquired the updates from his repository, crossed my fingers and ran the installers. A couple of post-upgrade scripts later and… here we are at MySQL 5.0 and PHP 5.2.2. Not too shabby, eh? I think the server may even be responding slightly faster now, and that’s the sort of thing which puts a big smile on my face.

    Now to see if I can sleep through the night without feeling the urge to check on the server every twenty minutes. Over the last couple of years I’ve grown cautious of major changes for some reason…

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