You got your programming in my systems administration

You've got Puppet.  You got your emacs.  This is how to make them play nice together.

Get puppet-mode.el here.

Edit .emacs like so

(when
(load
(expand-file-name "~/.emacs.d/puppet/puppet-mode.el"))
(package-initialize))

(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.pp$" . puppet-mode) auto-mode-alist))


And voy-la - .pp files are now pretty and tab correctly automagically.

Fuck .... fuck ... fuck .. fuck fuckfuck!

RT @tjic: RT @anthropocon: Look kids! A real live SPACESHIP. You'll be able to go watch it rot in a MUSEUM. #Inspiration

I did not love Shuttle.  Too big.  Too expensive.  Too government.  Too design-by-committee.  Not enough mission.  Too much 'we have a space station to justify the Space Truck that justifies the space station'.

Those wings ... those stupid wings.

And now it's all gone and we're paying a platoon of bureaucrats astronauts to train to ride to space in another country's ships in fucking Soviet designed rockets.

I am an optimist.  I believe what will come next, SpaceX or Blue Origin or whatever, will be better, will be the start of the real space age.  Spaceships and industry and bases and people in the high frontier forever and ever amen.

I do, I do, I do.

But I did love the idea of her.  An actual space-ship.  American-friggin-made.  Up like a rocket, glides home like a prayer.  Manned missions to space, an expression of the best of what we are as a civilization.

I'll miss that gorgeous complicated expensive beautiful fragile flying machine. 

You'll never see her like again.


See also here.

Vobis non me dux

We need a little more of this:

... better yet, give him the real reason: "Well, I need a magazine with thirty-three rounds in it because f&#$ you, Ed." Seriously, where does he get off thinking how many "bullets" are in my magazines is any business of his? Vobis non me dux, Ed; you ain't the boss of me.

Don't Tread On Me.  Vobis non me dux.  Same thing, different verse

Cereal

I said "I'm going to Wal-Mart - anyone need anything?"

"Cereal," said the children.

"Hmm.  I bet I could make cereal .."

"No!" the littlest one cried.  "Food poisoning!  We'll never eat cereal again!"

Drama queen.  He ate one piece of bread from my first batch.  It was not good.  I've gotten better since.

How hard could it be ...

The goal is to make the dough extremely thin with areas of near transparency. You may notice that you are in effect making one huge bran flake at this point.

Seems to meet my standard for manufacturing at home: cheap, easy, quick, repeatable.  And you only need to add raisins to produce the acme of breakfast cereals.

The only solution is to do more of the same that has not worked in the past

[Obama] added, “I personally, and my administration’s position, is that legalization is not the answer.” Drug operations could come to “dominate certain countries if they were allowed to operate legally without any constraint,” he said, and “could be just as corrupting if not more corrupting then the status quo.”

Obama Says Legalization Is Not the Answer on Drugs

When you automate crap you get very fast crap

I was pointed to 'The Venus Project' as The Way Things Will Be in the Post Scarcity world.

The model aims to incorporate sustainable cities and values, energy efficiency, collective farms, natural resource management and advanced automation into a global socio-economic system based on social cooperation and scientific methodology.

Communism with robots would still be as shitty as old-fashioned industrial-age Communism.

Meanwhile, over here in reality Gerrib notes that the actual present is a post-scarcity world.

Breaking Fast

Well that Lenten Fast went by pretty quickly.


Credit for the idea - in hindsight - goes to Travis, who is the only person I know of who has given up 'blogging' for Lent.  He did it first. Or 'did it first in my limited circle of acquaintances.


Some people died, things happened.  Without a lot of blogs to read I had
no idea that they died, who they were, why I should care.  So I
didn't.  That was nice.


Facebook can go f* themselves.  Nothing personal, I just don't feel a burning desire to re-mire myself in that slough of suck.  Except that my daughter insists on posting pictures of my grandson there.  If I didn't get to see him practically every day I'd have no idea what he looks like.


Still making Bread, at home.  I've gotten better at it.  First I had to stop trying to cowboy the thing and follow the work instructions to the letter.  Then I learned what you can cowboy, and what has to be done just so.

The recipe work instructions?  Go here, google 'bread'. 


The older kids made a shantytown at school, to learn what it was like to be in the Bonus Army. They skipped the tear gas part which takes away half the fun.  Also they weren't very good shanties, what with being _inside_ and all.  If I were in charge I'd have them build something big and important, more representative of that era, something you had to work at.  Hoover Dam.  World War II.


"Glance at the sun.
See the moon and the stars.
Gaze at the beauty of the earth's greenings.
Now,
Think."

Hildegard of Bingen

Lent

For Lent it is traditional to give up a luxury as a form of penitence.

Adios  ...

• Blogging
• Twitter
• Facebook

That's what ... a week, two?

Forty days?

Aw man: this penitence stuff is hard.

Phone book and newLISP

Work has a web-based phone book but ... it's web-based.  Gotta load up the page, enter the last name, hit 'go' ... all for a four-digit number.

Had a bash script for years; wget, grep-fu and voila. Good problem-space to try out new language on, like newLISP.

Doesn't spit back the actual data, yet, but getting this done up after a man-hour of study-time tickles me.

(print "Last name?")

(set 'lastname (read-line))

(println "Looking for " lastname)

(set 'phone (parse (read-file "/Users/bdunbar/foo/phone/phone.cfm") {\W} 0))

(set 'loc (find lastname phone 0))
(if loc
(println "Found name " (phone loc) " in directory.")
(println "Found nothing. Do you have the right spelling?"))

(println "finished.")


Something I did not know this morning

One can write functions in DOS batch.

Cool: I learned something useful.  DOS batch files are still around, making one better is a worth a few minutes of study time.

Sad: I've been noodling around a DOS prompt since 1989.  That same year I got real intimate and familiar with the best NOS of that era - Banyan Vines.

Banyan Vines and StreetTalk are in the rubbish bin.  Microsoft Friggin' DOS is still around.

Where is the justice, I say.

Agile PLM - BEA-090402 - BEA-000386 - Authentication for user superadmin denied

Encountered a problem with Agile PLM where the database user credentials were invalid, but the error returned referenced the WebLogic Server (WLS) superadmin credentials.

This caused us (me!) to look in the wrong area for troubleshooting for several hours, and needless downtime of a systemthat, while not production, was critical for training efforts for a new process to go live several days later.

Hopefully by putting this data here it might show up in google it will save someone else some grief.

• Agile PLM 9301
• WebLogic Server 10.3
• Solaris 10

Startup uses WLS encrypted boot.properties for the WLS credentials.  While this is not how the system is setup by Agile install binary, changing this around is a) trivial and b) common sense. 

Parking login credentials in a bash script variable is asking for trouble.

I do not believe this has anything to do with the problem.  But certain people (coughOraclecough) were confused on this point.

Symptoms

On startup of WLS Node Manager fails with this error message.

<Critical> <Security> <BEA-090402> <Authentication denied:
Boot identity not valid; The user name and/or password from the boot identity file (boot.properties)
is not valid. The boot identity may have been changed since the boot identity file was created.
Please edit and update the boot identity file with the proper values of username and password.
The first time the updated boot identity file is used to start the server, these new values are encrypted.>

This is, needless to say, alarming.

In an effort to simplify things, do some fault isolation, one might change the startup scripts to restore the WLS superadmin credentials and is rewarded with this error message.


<Critical>
<WebLogicServer> <BEA-000386> <Server subsystem failed. Reason: weblogic.security.SecurityInitializationException:
Authentication for user superadmin denied
weblogic.security.SecurityInitializationException: Authentication for user superadmin denied
        at weblogic.security.service.CommonSecurityServiceManagerDelegateImpl.doBootAuthorization(Unknown Source)
        at weblogic.security.service.CommonSecurityServiceManagerDelegateImpl.initialize(Unknown Source)
        at weblogic.security.service.SecurityServiceManager.initialize(Unknown Source)
        at weblogic.security.SecurityService.start(SecurityService.java:141)
        at weblogic.t3.srvr.SubsystemRequest.run(SubsystemRequest.java:64)
        Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace>

<Error> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000383> <A critical service failed. The server will shut itself down>

One can even remove the shell variables from the startup script, and will be prompted to manually input the credentials.  Which will fail with the above error message.

The problem was NOT with the WLS superadmin credentials.  I know this because we can look in the database for those.  While they are encrypted, after a while one learns that the encrypted value AE43938383AKKH23566 eq 'tartan' [1].


What Happened

We have different credentials for the Agile database user in our five different environments.

The day prior, we had refreshed our Training environment with a copy of the Production database.  To do this we used the cloning facility provided by NetApp.

The database came up 'ok', but when the application supplied database credentials on startup ... it failed.

Which one could expect.  The passwords are different.

What one doesn't expect is that the error returned does not reference an actual database account, but WLS superadmin credentials, which are still valid: authentication for user superadmin denied.

As soon as the DBA applied the Training environment credentials to the database, I was able to start the Node Manager and Managed Hosts.

Sha-zam!


So What?

Based on my experience, by comments from the Oracle SE, I believe that any Agile PLM version 9.3 [2] database account that is locked out, has invalid credentials, will experience the same problem: that is they will have an error that indicates the WLS superadmin credentials are wrong, when they are not.

This seems to not be common knowledge with the Agile support team at Oracle, or if it is it's not something the support engineer assigned to the case knew about.  And when he closed the case he was real quick to not make a KB out of the problem because it was, he said, specific to the way we implemented Agile PLM.

Which seems wrong but whatever. [3]

If this happens to you, hopefully you will find this document, not have to waste hours and hours of time fixing your problem.


[1] Not the real password.
[2] At least this version.  The way to bet is all versions that use WLS.
[3] Ref.

Making soap from components - costs - reasons why

Travis

I'm interested by your soap ideas.  Can you break this down a bit? How much does "washing soda" cost?  Am I saving 50 cents a week, or $9 ?  How much time does it take to make the mix?  If I can earn $20+/hr, tax-free, by doing these things, I might.  ...but if I'm going to earn $3/hr, and have to story more items under my sink (which is already crammed), then I'm not interested.

Cost
The Store Bought Stuff [1] : $21.99 for 80 loads (.27 cents per load)
Semi-Home Made [2] : $6.67 for 43 loads (.15 cents per load)

Recipe
One Fels-Naptha bar, grated
One cup borax
One cup washing soda

Mix well.  Use 1 tbs per load, double if heavily soiled.

Takes me five minutes for a batch.

One doesn't have to go out of their way to acquire the ingredients.  I found everything at Walmart, in the mop and soap aisle.

Commentary
Spending five minutes every six weeks to make up a new batch to save five dollars.

This is a no-brianer.  It's a few bucks.  Pick up a box of Tide, call it a day.  What are you, some kind of freak?

Yet ... it's half (rounding up) the cost per load.  Half.

Yet ... five minutes of labor every six weeks is nothing.  I spend more time than that blowing my nose, woolgathering, thinking dark thoughts about the government.  Five minutes at the kitchen table is lost in the noise of everyday life. 

Mr. Bluntobject wrote on the same subject

I suspect that the big payoff of making your own dish soap is the making your own part, giving the finger to the world of prepackaged overpriced convenience. Which, now that I spell it out, is pretty persuasive.

Yeah!

In the end, this is why I make my own washing-machine soap:

• Being thrifty is it's own reward. 
• Pennies make dollars. 
• Proverbs 6:6-8.

[1] All prices from Amazon, 2012-02-11
Tide Ultra High Efficiency Original Scent Powder
80 Loads
$21.99

Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda
55 oz.
$9.175

Fels-Naptha Laundry Bar
5.5 oz.
$3.99

Twenty Mule Borax
76 oz.
 $12.92

[2] Really, I'm not eschewing modern prepackaged convenience in favor of brewing my own soap from atomic components.  I'm just making my own from the same ingredients that P&G does. Got no time to mine borax.

I don't understand this

One can make washing machine soap: Borax, washing soda, Fels-Naptha bar.

One can make dish-washer soap: Borax, washing soda, sea salt, unsweetened lemonade flavor Kool-Aid.

One can buy a bread machine for $75 bucks - and then make loaves of bread @ .16 cents per.

So why the heck do people continue to buy washing machine soap, dish-washer soap, and bread at the grocery?

Poodle - it's what's for dinner

Him: There's an eagle outside! In the tree!

You mean a hawk?

Him (eye roll): I know what an eagle looks like. White head, orange beak. In. Our. Tree.  I need the binoculars.  (exit)

He's twelve. Knows his birds o' prey.

Sat there looking huge and national symbolish for a while.

Flapped away at a sedate mosey, when, I guess, it was clear none of the smaller dogs would be outside for dinner.

Ain't gonna happen

So check this out. 

The same Roman Catholics that voted Barack Obama into office, had no problem with a dude who was all about murdering babies ...

... are now going to vote for the other guy because some legislation require Catholic hospitals to provide health insurance covering contraception to employees.

I got this ocean-front property for sale in Arizona - from the front porch you can see the sea.

The Ethicist says the darndest things

Shorter Ethicist

Peter: It is ethical to narc out a guy to thugs with guns?

Ethicist: Better to live on your knees than to die on your feet.  Do what you must to help your fellows see the light!

Fighting for what is yours?  Doing the right thing?  Passé .

The smart, the ethical, the right, thing to do is to help thems with guns in their bad deeds. 

Do it for the team, Bobby.

A thing I did not know this morning

The baculum (also penis bone, penile bone or os penis) is a bone found in the penis of most mammals. It is absent in humans, but present in other primates, such as the gorilla and chimpanzee.

Baculum

Tab Clearing

What is a Sin?

Speak No Bush   I’m no longer willing to support non-conservative, unconstitutional, financially unsustainable domestic or foreign policy agendas simply because of their Republican origins.

The real third-party threat: Gary Johnson   Johnson's positions on the issues bear much resemblance to the positions of Ron Paul. Major differences include balancing the budget immediately rather than waiting until 2015, opposition to ending the Federal Reserve System, support for a military alliance with Israel, and belief in global warming.

SSH Tricks

A Simple Lisp Webapp for beginners

Spores  One of the unresolved mysteries surrounding September 11 are what have come to be called the 2001 Anthrax attacks.

Ghandhi & Terrorism: Tackling the “Mad Idea”

Colonization of the Moon

View 711 Thursday, February 02, 2012 

I note that I haven’t said anything about what the government ought to do to help the Middle Class.  Sorry.

The answer, of course, is not much. Mostly, get out of
the way. Get out of the way of development of cheap energy. Stop making
it expensive to hire people and complicated to impossible to fire them.
Repeal a lot of regulations. It’s really not all that complicated.

Better elite better mass

The Great Divorce - David Brooks

There are two tribes in our society now - productive and non-productive.  It's not fair.  So the solution is to ...

. . . but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.

If we could jam the tribes together, we’d have a better elite and a better mass.

Jamming a pack of Morlocks into a herd of Eloi in a DMV-like program of picking up garbage on the highway isn't going to teach anyone anything. 

Except, maybe, how to skate, shirk, and avoid doing anything productive while looking efficient.

Tab Clearing

How a long-dead activist’s ideas influenced Barack Obama

Abstruse Goose: Other People's Code

An Open Letter to Catholics on Behalf of Ron Paul

The Conversation With a Florida Tea Partier That Should Scare Every Republican

Not Obama's Most Empathetic Moment

Dial 911 if this column makes you spit blood    Tepid. Lukewarm. Disappointing. Not what should be happening four years into a recession (oh, right, that’s supposed to be over) after the Federal Reserve has used all its tricks and our elected officials have bankrupted the country.  But it gets worse.

Organizations Versus Getting Shit Done