Running as Root

The footholds of Linux in small Windows shops are skunkworks projects and discarded hardware. Inevitably the old mail server or the equivalent is considered woefully underpowered and gets replaced. The old hardware sits in a corner of the server room and collects dust. That is until I need a "no money down" VMWare solution.

Of course the downside of this is that you will find yourself installing on frequently inadequate, old hardware that may or may not work–no one ever seems to be sure. When something goes wrong it's Linux's fault. Such was the case when I had to install on an old Dell PowerEdge 600SC. Of course, the install didn't work right off the bat.

The install hung with the last message being "Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20″. I randomly upgraded the BIOS hoping it's some weird problem with the on-board IDE and see the same problem. Then I noticed that the CD-ROM is attached to the tertiary channel. I can't recall ever having that setup before so I moved the CD-ROM drive from the tertiary to the secondary channel (by accident because the order of the IDE connectors from bottom to top of the motherboard appears to be secondary, primary, tertiary).

After the install it appears that I can't get either DHCP or a static IP to work. Everybody assures me that it's not the IP address they gave me or our DHCP server. I try a different network card with the same effect. Finally, I figure out that it is in fact the network of the IP address they gave me that is to blame (and our DHCP server seems to have crapped out at the same time, and no it isn't running on Linux). But, people stubbornly insist that it's Linux's fault until I waste my time proving otherwise. While I'm gathering evidence they make a point of wandering by my desk and asking why I'm not just using Windows. When society collapses they've got a special place on my post apocalyptic TODO list.

I finally get it all working with a fresh install of VMWare 2.0 (hate the new management web app, by the way) and a migrated VM from my desktop that has a copy of Zenoss Core happily monitoring our new production environment on EC2. Everything in that setup is new from the point of view of this organization. Of course while I'm patting myself on the back over a job well done, someone asks how to get to the desktop UI. Although it probably won't help them much I go ahead and install GNOME, VNC, and Webmin on the box even though I consider it a waste.

Now I get to sit back and eagerly await the opportunity to bask in the criticism the next time anything goes wrong with the box. I'm sure it'll be the fault of that darn Linux.

This comes up every now and then for me and I can never remember how to do it so I'm sticking it here to make it easier for me to find. The problem happens when I'm using Windows Explorer to open or browse a Windows share / Samba share / SMB mount point / etc. Windows Explorer has a tendency to cache the authentication information for the share and doesn't re-present the opportunity to provide authentication information in the event that the cached credentials have become invalid. This happened to me again today when the account I had used in the past had become disabled. You can find and clear the cached authentication(s) by doing the following:

Click Start, Run and type Control keymgr.dll
Remove the entries from the list

OR

Click Start, Run and type Control Userpasswords2
Click Advanced, Manage Passwords

The information is also in the Registry but these worked well enough for me to not go poking around in that rat's nest.

I recently got the task of finding a hosted monitoring solution for our production web site. There are quite a few options out there, so I decided to find a source listing a few of the options out there and sign up for some trial accounts. Most all of these sites are horny for your contact information. I'm fine with being contacted by email, but I don't particularly want to fill in the mandatory phone number field. I don't need to spend my day jawing with some glad-handing sales monkey. I write code for a living. So, I usually just put a 555 number in there (lazy developers never validate that shit). That way they can only get a hold of me if all of this is actually a movie, cleverly disguised to look like reality.

Not just one but two of the sales morons at these companies decided that my 555 number must be a cry for help. I want to talk to them and have them give me the hard sell, I was just confused about my real phone number. Not a problem. They used directory assistance and the rest of my real contact information to look up my company, find out our main number, and call several times. You would think that these idiots would realize that they were only going to piss me off by doing that.

The ultimate irony of it is that the site I was going to recommend was one of the ones that pulled this stunt. Unfortunately for them I'm a petty, angry developer. I'll be doing everything within my power to make sure they are the last solution we seriously consider. Now that's some sales job!

I've been listening to back episodes of the Agile Toolkit Podcast. One of the things that really caught my attention was the frequent mentioning of something called CodeGreen Labs. From elsewhere on the internet:

We are dedicated to creating a unique training experience that uses real projects with real deliverables. Labs work on projects that make a difference in the world, benefiting organizations that are working to improve the environment, human rights, social justice, health and economic development. By marrying the efforts of dedicated professionals learning Agile Development techniques with not for profit and research communities that need high quality software, we hope to be a small part of a positive change. Each training class will work on a specific software project for a specific cause.

It's volunteering to work on a real software project that is, hopefully, well run so that you can get real world experience. Sure, they get something out of it, but who cares about the other guy? I imagine they get mainly students. A few of the people in my work circles and I have been talking about something exactly like this. The head of my current company has mentioned to me numerous times that he's seeing disturbingly bad candidates coming to him fresh out of college CS programs. I can't comment as to the overall quality of CS programs around the country, but something like CodeGreen Labs seems like a brilliant idea on many levels. Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed at how unfriendly their home page was:

Yesterday at work I got a question from a co-worker about doing something under AIX. I don't really work with AIX, but I managed to answer the question. This is for another project that I don't work on. It got me to wondering if I could run AIX in a VM on PC hardware, probably using a PPC emulator. I'll save you the suspense and tell you that I couldn't find a way to do it. There are a couple of projects that are sort of trying to do it but they haven't done it successfully that I could find. Those would be PearPC and QEMU. I'm sure one of these projects will get it working someday, as soon as some really capable programmer wants it badly enough. I briefly thought about suggesting purchasing an RS6000 from eBay but decided it wasn't a project I needed to poke my nose into.

This is not a rant against AIX, although in a world gone mad with a billion distros of Linux, OpenSolaris, and PC hardware that is criminally cheap and available I don't feel the need to brush up on that incredibly rusty skill set. No, this is more about that fact that I don't think I would ever choose to work with any operating system and/or software product that I can't run in a VM on PC hardware–it's just too damn handy these days, especially when it comes to QA. That of course includes any non-hacked up version of MacOS, not that they'll miss my business. Also, sadly, I don't always get to pick what I want to work with. Still, it's definitely something to consider when picking your stack and deployment/hosting environment.

A few years back when I was looking for anti-virus software, I read a review that put Trend Micro's PC-cillin as the best available. I bought it and have used it on all of my ever dwindling number of Windows computers ever since. When I got computers for my parents, I put PC-cillin on them. I've always found it to be a good, non-intrusive, non-resource hungry Windows anti-virus product. My last purchase was a three license package that had a rebate that never came. Whatever.

However, their recent shenanigans have me insanely pissed off. I get a particularly spammy looking piece of e-mail on Monday with the subject of "Your Subscription will be renewed in 2 days." The email explains that my 1 year subscription is going to expire but that it'll auto-renew 7 days before expiration at a 10% discount. Yay! While the email does include my name it lacks any other identifying information. As I mouse over one of the links I see that it's pointed to dr.bluehornet.com. In fact, the email has no links pointing to any Trend Micro site. The email even came from trendmicro.cs@digitalriver.com. Surely this is spam so I ignore it.

On Wednesday I get an email saying I've been billed for the renewal. This time the email actually has more personal (and accurate) information, including a serial number. It's still from digitalriver.com but at least it has one link that points to the Trend Micro site. I begin to get very unhappy. Since when is billing my credit card for software an opt out situation? I follow the link (to digitalriver.com) to cancel the order to find that the order number isn't in that system yet. I cancel it using the email and am told that although they managed to bill me very quickly, it may take up to a week to cancel the order. I also use the original email to go to the same site to opt out of the auto-renewal program. Of course, I make sure that I don't have to provide any additional personal information on any of these sites since I'm still somewhat suspicious of things. We'll see if this manages to actually cancel the order. If not I'll take it up with the credit card company.

A wee bit of research shows that this is not a new situation. I'm still pretty pissed not only about the opt out notion of charging me for shit I didn't request but also by the fact that my information has been shared/sold/whatever to a third party. I'm pissed that an email sent on behalf of an anti-virus, anti-phishing, anti-bullshit software company is made to look so goddamn spammy that I don't want to acknowledge it.

Fuck Trend Micro. I won't buy their products any more. I won't recommend their products. I will, as much as I can, campaign against the use of their products. I'll use an inferior product from another company just out of spite. We are no longer happy customer and vendor. Fuck you, your questionable business practices, your sharing of my information, your opt out auto-renewal program, your inability to instantly cancel my unsolicited order, and your choice of partners. Did I mention fuck Trend Micro and PC-cillin? Eat shit, go fuck yourself, rot in hell. There's no fixing the situation, I will not be "talked down", I cannot be recovered as a customer. Good job, assholes.

As I mentioned in another post, I'm giving Twitter a retry. I must say I'm enjoying it a lot more now that I'm not trying to treat it like other mediums of communication both in terms of what I follow and in how I use it to communicate. I'm definitely more willing to tweet things that don't warrant a blog post or an email.

A great example of this is when I was able to find out that a former co-worker had left their previous job. While that might be email or blog worthy, most people wouldn't bother putting that kind of information out there, but he tweeted it. As such, I didn't have to wait for that information to make it through the traditional grapevine. For once, I even knew about the news before some of the other people I know.

While I'm using it to keep in more constant contact with friends and former co-workers, some people are using it for a lot more. This post as a few recommendations for using Twitter that I found interesting. I'm not sold on a few of them, such as event updates. I realize that quite a few events are using Twitter to update attendees on things. This just seems like an alternative to email lists and RSS feeds. Does Twitter have better penetration than email or RSS? Is it just that I have more noise in my RSS reader? Won't Twitter suffer from that eventually? I don't know. It just seems like using an alternative form of communication just for the novelty of it.

Another use I've seen is people soliciting feedback or getting votes on an issue via Twitter. I think that's a great use, but I don't think I'll ever have enough followers to do it effectively. There's a big difference between asking your 1-10k followers for feedback and asking 20 people. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I should tweet the question (and get feedback from 1 or 2 people).

The idea of using Twitter to create and track ToDo lists intrigues me, but again, I just can't get my mind around the advantages. While Remember the Milk seems interesting I haven't gotten off my ass long enough to try it. I hear good things though.

Foamee is another one that I like. You can let someone know that you owe them a drink for something. I haven't used it yet. Maybe I'm too stingy with my kudos. Maybe I'm just an asshole. Who could say? Is my reluctance to use these and many, many other services that integrate with Twitter another example of me being too set in my ways to "get it"? Maybe in another few months I'll be writing posts about how I've come around to using them.

I recently re-discovered BitStrips thanks to a post today on BoingBoing. Now artistically challenged people can create their own comic strip. Sadly, most of them aren't funny (including my own), but it's the thought that counts.

I do wish they had better options for embedding comics into other pages. Currently they only support a weak ass frame by frame flash widget rather than a simple image of the entire strip. If you're interested in just how un-funny I can be in comic strip form rather than blog form, you can find my crap here.

Here's an example of their shitty widget:

Widget removed for your protection.

Update: I filed a bug report (not on the widget issue yet) and found through an automated email that BitStrips uses FogBugz. I have no real point here, I just like spotting tech products I'm somewhat familiar with.

Update: Better embedding options and feeds made it into BitStrips a while back so I'm updating this post to include the better option. Sorry about it popping up in your feed reader again:

Initial Dismissal

I tried to get into Twitter a few months ago but I really didn't see the point of the whole thing. However, its wild popularity and frequent mentions in every blog and podcast I follow have made me realize it's once again time to retry a technology or product I had written off early. I did the same thing with Google Reader, Google Documents, and Facebook. I'm now a big fan of the first two. Maybe I need to re-evaluate Facebook next.

The main problem I had with Twitter is that I thought of it in terms of more direct and intrusive methods of communication. I wouldn't want to get an email or a phone call from someone every time they thought about taking a dump or were wondering what was in their refrigerator. This was made worse because I put Twitter in my RSS reader. When I'd check my feeds I'd have 100 messages from people that I would usually just ignore. What's the point of that?

I'm now trying to think of Twitter as a general group chat. I'm using a client for it instead of the reader (currently TwitterFox). I then get updates as they happen (or within 5 minutes at least). I'm usually not bothering to catch up on anything that I missed unless it's a reply. It's a very lossy communication method. I'm free to ignore it for long periods of time if I feel like it. It's also filling the gaps in time after I've run out of subscribed content. We'll see how that works out.

SXSW and the Mob Mentality

Part of the reason for the re-evaluation has to do with the recent SXSW / Zuckerberg / Twitter incident. I wasn't there and there are conflicting accounts as to how big of a fiasco it was, but the interesting thing is how vocal the audience became. In the days before instant ubiquitous communication everyone would have sat quietly through the interview thinking like thoughts about the poorness of the interview. After the interview they'd then compare notes about the perceived suckitude, blog about it, and move on.

With Twitter, the audience was able to communicate with each other in a relatively clandestine fashion. I think this creates a feedback loop where everyone gets more and more pissed off. The perception of the poorness becomes enhanced and it's just a hop skip and a jump from tweeting your dissatisfaction to voicing it quasi-anonymously in the room. I'm not sure this is a good thing, but it's certainly interesting.

I say it may not be a good thing because I'm not a big fan of micro-ratings within a public forum. When presenters adjust their content on up to the minute feedback from the consumers I think there is a tendency to dumb things down and appeal to either the least common denominator or the most vocal group. I'm not sure this was the case at SXSW, but I'm not ruling it out.

To get back on track, I'm once again paying attention to my Twitter account, so feel free to find me and follow me if you're curious about my bowel movements, mental or otherwise.

For the last month or two I've been having a war with whoever is stocking our beverage cooler. We have a cooler with a limited capacity and a locker with a backup supply of room temperature cans.

The first problem is that someone is ordering a whole shitload of Coke products–Coke, Black Cherry Vanilla Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Caffeine Free Diet Coke–and taking up way too much shelf space. This increases the chance that my beverage of choice will run out and I'll be stuck gazing longingly at a room temperature Diet Dr. Pepper and thinking about what might have been. To combat this, I sneak into the break room and re-arrange all of the sodas in my free time. Typically this consists of trying to make the shelf presence of each beverage more proportional to its popularity. This means eliminating as many Coke slots as possible.

Today I wander into the break room only to discover that they're attacking me on all new fronts–layout, usability, and increased error rates. Check this shit out:

That's right. Not only is the Diet Dr. Pepper down to two slots (I had managed to expand it to three), they've also put it on the Diet Coke shelf AND put that abomination known as Cherry Vanilla Diet Dr. Pepper right next to it. They've put two similarly colored, diametrically opposed diet drinks right next to each other. They've sandwiched an innocent beverage between two fizzy misanthropes. They're obviously trying to get me to pick up a can of that Cherry Vanilla pisswater by accident and lose my love of Diet Dr. Pepper. Barring that, they're thinking I'll grab a Diet Coke by accident and somehow fall victim to the brainwashing chemicals contained in every can.

I now have to fall back and formulate some manner of counter-offensive. This day is lost. Well played…

Update: If It's Worth Doing…

Behold, a [more] properly stocked soda refrigerator:

I relocated all of the juices on the bottom shelf, being careful to separate the orange and apple juices in order to decrease the chance of accidental color related selection. The same goes for the Diet Coke, Diet Dr. Pepper, and Cherry Vanilla Diet Dr. Pepper. Ditto for Mountain Dew and Canada Dry (both green cans). I also took the liberty of claiming a full four (4) shelves for Diet Dr. Pepper. I figure any soda that spends that long in medical school deserves an additional slot or two in the soda fridge.

Sure, there are still problems. The Diet Sprite still has a full five rows (spanning two shelves–4 and 1), even though no one seems to drink it. I'm hoping someone will start drinking them in order to clear out the heinous stocking abomination that occurred at some point in the recent past. Then I can claim that shelf for the Minute Maid Light Lemonade if they ever start ordering it again. The ball is now in their court.