Andy's Blog

"Nobody said it was going to be easy..."

And nobody said it was going to be nearly 4:00 AM on a Saturday morning, and that I was going to be finding bugs in code that I'm supposed to be running as part of a server maintenance, scheduled to start about 19 hours from now...

-Andy.

Please don't copy me.

I'm sometimes do some fairly unsafe things. Witness this:

That is a picture of the sunset today, taken while I was doing 65MPH on US 101 N. Two things: the picture actually turned out surprisingly well, considering it is from my phone. The second: this is the first time I actually found myself wishing for stop-and-go traffic, so that I could take more pictures. And the third thing: don't anybody try this, because it was a pretty stupid thing to do. But I was feeling like being stupid, so I did it.

It has been a busy few days. My employers decided that they wanted their money's worth -- so I spent a significant portion of last week playing the role of "crazy work guy". This culminated in a 12 hour work day on Friday, combined with a server maintenance which stretched until 6:30 AM on Sunday morning.

I will say that it felt pretty good to get that server maintenance over with -- I was fairly stressed about it, because life could have been "bad" if the maintenance had gone poorly. But luckily I work with a bunch of smart people.

In the midst of all of the weekend work, I did manage to get into S.F. to go to Stan's birthday party. He pulled off something pretty amazing -- a large group of people, a live (and bonafide) D.J., and some live music -- via a bluegrass band known as "Sugartree". Damn. I didn't actually see too much of Stan, but I socialized with the crew, and met some of Stan's co-workers.

Since I was such a good boy at work last week, I treated myself today by leaving at 3:00. This gave me some time to mess around with some stuff, and get ready to split for the City at a reasonable time (hence the picture that started off this rambling post). Mike and I both went downtown today to have dinner with a fellow UIUC alum, Adam Slagell. It was a good time.

I did the drive to Milbrae then bart thing, and on the way down there, I kindof wished that I had one of those oQo thingies that Stan was talking up a few weeks back. Then I could have written in my blog.

Oh, and I finally bought a new receiver this weekend. I went with the Yamaha RX-V2400. It is really, really, really great. I'll go into more detail in a subsequent post...

-Andy.

Links?

I just realized that I didn't post any hyperlinks in that last, er, post. So, here's one:

That's a link to KoRn's new video, which I watched this evening whilst surfing around mtv.com. It's pretty gross. Mike would like it.

-Andy.

Windows XP, defeated

I managed to slay the twin dragons of Windows XP and productivity today, by getting my new Dell installed with a fresh copy of XP, activated by the key printed on the box. To Michael K.H. Au-Yeung, wherever you are, I take my hat off to you. I couldn't have done it without you.

And while I was at it today, I managed to get pathetically little "real" work done. Even better!

-Andy.

One more thing

I'm pretty sure that my first Dell, that I bought back in '95, was assembled in the USA. I'm not claiming that all of which the computer was comprised were made in the USA. I'm just saying that final assembly was done in the US -- at least, that's what I remember.

While sticking my head inside the case of the machine that I got today, I noticed that a lot of components were made in China. Components like the case, power supply, cables, motherboard. And I got to thinkin' -- I bet this thing was assembled in China, based almost entirely on Chinese-built parts.

And then I thought about how times had changed.

And then I got one last whiff of the "new computer smell", and got to playing with my new toy.

-Andy.

Windows Product Activation

So, I got my new machine at work today.

Let me just take a moment to digress -- finally! I have been waiting to get a new machine for like, ever. The other two people on my team got new machines last year (like around Octoberish) -- but did I get any love? Not by a long shot. But now I am in possession of a 3Ghz P4 with a cool Gig of ram (up from a PIII 866 that I just got up to 512Mb like, 6 weeks ago). Man, am I ever excited.

It's too bad that Windows XP decided to give me the old "once again".

The problem, in a nutshell, is that this Dell came from the factory with the stock corporate image on it. But for various reasons, I got it into my head that I didn't want said image on my desktop. So, I figured that I could just use my Windows XP CD to perform a fresh install, but use the Product Key that is on my new Dell in order to perform all of the activation procedures that appear to be a "necessary evil" these days.

But of course, Microsoft is on to me. They saw me coming from a country mile. It appears as if Microsoft is mastering several different "Windows XP Professional" CD images, with specific differences between OEM and Retail. So a Retail XP CD won't accept Product Keys that are for the OEM version, and vice-versa.

Luckily for me, I didn't get onto BitTorrent today, and I most-certainly did NOT download a Windows XP "8-in-1" ISO image. Which is all a very good thing, because it means that I won't be wasting my entire day fighting this battle tomorrow...

-Andy.

Japan

So, I'm going to Japan. The trip is set for March 19th - 28th, and I'll be going with Mike, Kevin, and Mike's friend, William. Will and Mike are, of course, the instigators behind the trip. Will because he has studied Japanese, his wife is from Japan, and he has been there several times. Mike because he is like some sort of travel vulture -- wherever he can get himself to, he will get.

Anyways, it's going to be a great trip. Way different from Norway, I reckon. But still, I'm pretty excited. EDS "gifted" me with an extra week of vacation this year, and I'm glad to be putting it to good use, pretty much right off the bat. The intinerary isn't 100% set in stone yet, but it looks like we're going to be seeing a lot of Japan in that one week. Man, it's gonna be great.

w00t.

-Andy.

iSight

Happy valentines day to my PowerBook -- my iSight finally arrived today! So, I got home from work (Kevin arrived just at the same time), and while I played with my new iSight, Kevin went back to work.

After getting the thing unboxed, it took me awhile to get the bracket assembled the correct way, including the correct orientation of the FireWire cable. Then I gave my dad a call (he wasn't in front of his AIM client), and we started trying to get the AIM 5.5 <-> iChat AV 2.1 Beta working.

After having it fall flat a number of times, I finally managed to get iChat to tell me that it was having problems connecting to port 3060 on my dad's machine. This was the sort of debugging information that we needed, and it sent my dad SSH'ing over to his Linux box to bang on the firewall.

When that still didn't work, I jumped on my FreeBSD machine, and started running tcpdump. I noticed that not only did my dad not open port 5060, but my side was denying port 5060. So, I banged on my firewall (and my dad got his firewall change correct), and we were rockin'.

The picture quality from my dad's iSight wasn't so great -- I think that Apple includes some custom software on the mac which does some color correction on calibration. But, it did work surprisingly well. Even my mom was impressed (she thought it was going to suck, the last time she saw this technology was when we had QuickCams and CU-SeeMe). Fantastic.

And because I have to keep the moblog going, here is a photo from the iSight:

In order to take the picture, I had to download a 3rd party app -- I couldn't figure out how to take pictures with my iSight using only Apple's software. The software that I used: iStill. Go third parties...

-Andy.

Also, Amazon sucks

I ordered an iSight from Amazon last week Friday. My dad ordered one from the same company, on the same day.

He got his today. Amazon is projecting that I'll get mine by the middle of next week.

Bitches.

-Andy.

FALL OUT BOY

So, last night I ventured into San Francisco with Sara, Mike, and Kevin, in order to see fantabulous Fall Out Boy. We had dinner with Stan before the show, which was cool.

The FOB show was cool. I always feel old at these things, and last night was no exception. There were 4 bands playing in total, starting with "Dynamite Boy", "Matchbook Romance", FOB, and finally "Mest". The first two bands were okay, FOB was great (but they had a relatively short set, didn't play any new songs, and we got "Stumph'd" twice afterwards...), and Mest totally sucked.

I'm not even kidding. We are all in universal agreement about Mest -- no discussion required. I was literally bored to tears during their (long) and boring set. Repetitive music. Idiotic banter. I had to spin one of my Bad Religion CDs tonight ("Against the Grain") in order to remind myself what good punk music, and to wash that garbage out of my brain.

Oh, and one more thing -- Being the trendy dork that I am, I now declare that I have a moblog. Witness:

So who was it that said that camera phones were going to revolutionize the world? Well, after looking at that picture, clearly, whoever said that was an idiot, and camera phones suck.

-Andy.

(PS -- that light pinkish blob on the left? That's Patrick, Kevin's brother)

Getting the old Samba beat-down -- Twice!

So, it was another really long day at work today. I spent the vast majority of it bashing my head against a problem that one of our NT SA's was having. Without getting mired in the boring details -- he was trying to image a server using ghost, and dump the resulting Gigs 'n Gigs of data onto one of our Samba servers.

Everything with his boot disk seemed fine, but when ghost got started, it died right away saying "not enough space on device for image headers", or some such crap. I checked to make sure I could create a file on the shared drive, and that the drive had plenty of space (check and check).

So, I thought that maybe it was a problem with some sort of file size limit, or something. I set out to find a copy of dd for DOS (so that I could run dd if=/dev/zero of=some_large_file.junk bs=1024 count=1048576). Basically, I wanted to see if I could write out a gig+ file in one crack. Of course, I couldn't find anything that ran in plain old DOS.

So, I set out to write a batch file that did much the same thing.

Much remembering, cursing, fighting, and debugging later, I finally had a script that reasonably approached what I wanted. I took it down to the server room, mentally preparing myself for a long wait as the computer wrote zero's to my test file. However, I was surprised when my batch file started printing an "out of disk space" error right after I started it. How big of a file did it write before the disk space errors started?

2,857 bytes.

Yes, that is it. A little more than 2Kb. Cripes. Did the shared volume have well over 2Kb free? Oh hell yes it did.

To make a long story even longer, after much debugging of boot disks, samba (even debug level 10 was now help), and voodoo later, I still don't know what's wrong. I came up with a work-around for NT guy (solution: use an NT box as the server), but I still don't know what's up with Samba.

Fast forward to this evening/morning, after all of the cards (and there were a lot of cards played) have finished. Kevin and I took on round 2 of his mission to be able to get at his code from the VPN. The sysadmins where he works have wisely configured the Samba server that he needs to disallow IP addresses associated with the VPN. Why? Because they want Kevin to learn about SSH tunneling and such so that he'll devise a work-around.

We beat up on windows enough that I got to the point where I was tunneling NetBIOS-in-TCP/IP-in-SSH in my test environment. But, once again -- I noticed some more strange Samba behavior. When I tried to connect through the tunnel, anything that allows a connection from guest works, but shares that require my username/password don't work! Argh!

I give up. Somehow, I just know that this is all Microsoft's fault...

-Andy.

I thought I was done with school....

Back when I was a lad, and doing the whole "school" thing, I found that there were good points and bad points about being a student. One of the bad (and I mean, really bad) points about being a student, at least for me, were all of times when it seemed like I was just crushed with work, and things like 12 hour work-days, all-nighters, cram sessions, etc. were necessary in order to generally achieve the "not flunk out" mandate.

It was always a hopeful notion to have, while trying to track down that last bug for your MP while simultaneously studying for that exam, that someday, some shining, glorious day, there would be no more insane, conflicting, overlapping due dates brought on by a multitude of overlapping classes. Someday, school would be over, and then there would just be work.

One job. Where you report to one boss. And only have one thing to do. Boy, that is gonna be great...

But of course, gentle reader, you know better. After working 10+ hours today, and realizing that I'm probably going to have to work all day on Saturday (to meet deadlines from overlapping and conflicting projects), that I suppose the only hope that I have now is retirement.

Retirement will be sane and okay.... Right?!?!?

-Andy.

"Swimming Pool"

If you have a choice of what movie to see, and that choice is between "Swimming Pool" and some other movie, and "some other movie" isn't "Problem Child 2", pick "some other movie".

Or, maybe play it on mute in fast forward.

-Andy.