Happy Halloween!

Jenkins

In which I attempt to liven my work day by describing system recovery from backup with analogy; a homage to Halloween and SciFi; a Jenkins work is never done.


There was a shout from the cube farm: Jenkins had fallen over and was twitching.   I sighed.  This always happens at 4:00 in the afternoon when everyone is tired and weary.  Never at 9:30 in the morning when everyone is fresh and rested.

 Left my comfortable office, prodded Jenkins with a long stick.  He climbed back into his chair, wearily started to work, looked mournfully at me, sighed, fell over and died.

 I trundled the corpse outside and into the dumpster.  Retrieved and animated a new Jenkins from a collection kept in cold storage.

Jenkins looked around, nodded and wearily turned to his task.  As I left I heard him give a wheeze as the workload took it's strain on his body.

Zero: End Game

They did it.

At 7 this morning, zookeepers used several darts to tranquilize the 1,100-pound bear, who refused to leave his moat after falling into it Oct. 13. Zoo spokeswoman Jennifer Diliberti said the move came because "things were hanging on for a little bit too long,"

I think 'hanging on for a little bit too long' is code for 'the damn bear was making a monkey out of us'.

And if McCain loses?

Palin-Jindal 2012!

Update: spelling corrected, thanks to the observant fellow from SpaceX.

The Sexual Philosophy Test

Last quiz for a while.  These are fun but the internet isn't about fun, it's about work.

Your result for The Sexual Philosophy Test...

Very Proper and/or Traditional

51% Perverse!

Your mommy and daddy are very proud of you. Everything they taught you about sex has stuck in your moral code. Your viewpoint on sexual relations follows a high moral code that is not uncommon in many relationships. It is based mainly on values that you have learned from your family background and childhood experiences. It could also be influenced by your political philosophy in what modern society accepts as being right or wrong. You would be very unlikely to ever condone an open relationship or have a homosexual interest. You may listen to your mate's interests but it is doubtful they could persuade you to change you viewpoint on what is sexually right and wrong. You more than likely use and own very few sexual aids; the ones you have are more traditional in nature.

Take The Sexual Philosophy Test at HelloQuizzy

I've always liked that picture.

Mandated Testing

Little Monkey took his very first mandated-by-the-State-of-Wisconsin school test this morning.

Me: How was it?

Him: They had snacks!

Food is a strong motivator in that one. [1]

[1] See.

My Muse

Your result for The A-Muse-ing Test...

Your muse is Urania!

30% Urania, 30% Clio, 0% Erato, 0% Euterpe, 0% Calliope, 0% Thalia, 30% Melpomene, 0% Polyhymnia and 10% Terpsichore!

Urania is the "celestial one" of the muses. She can tell the future by looking at the stars. She keeps her eyes focused on the heavens and is most helpful to those that are into philosophy and what is in the universal skies.

Urania is the one to call on when you wish upon a star.

Look for the first star and make a wish. Do not think about your age or where you are, only the magic that can become. Open your heart and ask Urania to join you. Then give into the mystery of life and see what happens. Allow love and trust to enter your heart and for a time be free from worry and stress. Life is, after all, meant to be lived.

Take The A-Muse-ing Test at HelloQuizzy

Short 'n Fluffy

I've managed to teach the new dog - a Poodle \ Schnauzer mix - how to sit and shake hands. Indeed she likes it so much she runs up to me when I get home, sits, and waves her paw in the air.

Granted, it's not the act she's fond of. Food is a strong motivator in that one.

A minor problem is she's so short and so fluffy that when I'm standing up it's not always obvious she's waving her little leg in the air, hoping for a cookie. Just a sort of cloud of gray fur, eddying around and emitting excited woof noises waaay down there by the floor.

Dear Lazy Web: http load balancing

Dear Lazy Web,

I've got web servers and I want to load balance them. I know, I'll use a proxy server! [1]

I see two obvious choices: Squid and mod_proxy in Apahce2.

Just getting out and grubbing around in Google I don't see a whole lot of difference between the two. From my POV Squid is easier to install [2] but I'm not afraid to get down and recompile Apache if I must.

What is your verdict on using one over the other, Lazy Web?


[1] The obvious rejoinder: Now I have two problems!

[2] Solaris is the operating system of choice.  Apache2 and Squid are software packages [3] from Coolstack but Squid 'just works' and Apache would need to be re-compiled.

[3] Yes i'm lazy.  Compiling an application from source is fine if you gotta do it but having software Just Come as a package is handy.

Hard work as a cure what ails

Mark Cuban's cure for our economic mopes?

The cure for what ails is us the Entrepreneurial Spirit of this country. We are a nation of people who encourage , support and invest in those of any and all age, race and gender who will use their ingenuity and come up with a new idea.

Ah, hard work.

What, waiting for the government to be our savior isn't a viable program? Why that's just crazy talk.

X is a human right

That lawyer fellow at Maggie's Farm has a point ...

How long must we wait for the Dems to propose socialized legal care? It's only right, isn't it? How many folks are economically destroyed by legal bills? Or go without justice because they cannot afford legal help?

A chicken in every pot and government provided legal services for all.

Cryptonomicon Footnotes

Cryptonomicon Footnotes

1. 1940 being a good year to begin experimenting with venereal diseases in that the new injectable penicillin was just becoming available.


2. As the Nipponese were invariably called by Marines, who never used a three syllable word where a three letter one would do.


3. "Hypo" is a military way of saying the letter H. Bright boy Waterhouse infers that there must be at least seven others: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie. etc.


4. Assuming, provisionally, that Alan is wrong and that human brains are not machines.


5. An evident paradox, but nothing out of the ordinary being out of America has just made this kind of thing more obvious to Randy.


6. A deprecatory term for a fighting man not good enough to be in the Corps.


7. Men with experience in Asia use the word "Nip." The Colonel's use of "Jap" suggests that his career has been spent in the Atlantic and/or Caribbean.


8. He has no hard data to back this up; it just seems like a cool idea.


9. He has made up his mind that he will use the English words rather than making a spectacle of himself by trying to pronounce the Qwghlmian ones.


10. According to the E.Q., derived from lichen.


11. Cantrell alludes to the fact that Plan One brought them a couple of million dollars in seed money from a venture capital outfit in San Mateo called the Springboard Group.


12. Shaftoe had had nothing to do for the last couple of weeks except play Hearts using KNOW YOUR ENEMY cards, so he could now peg model numbers of obscure Kraut observation planes.


13. The first one, mi, meaning "secret" and the second one, fu, having a dual connotation meaning, on the one hand, a symbol or mark, and on the other hand, Taoist magic.


14. Ever since the four wheel Enigma was broken.


15. Baudot code is what teletypes use. Each of the 32 characters in the teletype alphabet has a unique number assigned to it. This number can be represented as a five digit binary number, that is, five ones or zeroes, or (more useful) five holes, or absences of holes, across a strip of paper tape. Such numbers can also be represented as patterns of electrical voltages, which can be sent down a wire, or over the radio waves, and printed out at the other end. Lately, the Germans have been using encrypted Baudot code messages for communications between high level command posts;
e.g., between Berlin and the various Army group headquarters. At Bletchley Park, this category of encryption schemes is called Fish, and the Colossus machine is being built specifically to break it.


16. Half an hour ago, as Epiphyte Corp. was gathering in the lobby, a big black Mercedes came in, fresh from the airport. 747s come into Kinakuta four times a day, and from the time that a person presents himself at the registration desk of his luxury hotel, you can figure out which city he flew in from. These guys came in from Los Angeles. Three Latino men: a middle aged fellow of great importance, a somewhat younger assistant, and a palooka. They were met in the lobby by the solitary fellow who showed up late yesterday with the cellphone.


17. This is dry humor, and is received as such by everyone in the room; at this point in the war, a U boat could no more run up the English Channel than it could travel up the Mississippi, sink a few barges in Dubuque, and make its escape.


18. Nipponese Army speak for "retreat."


19. It goes without saying that the Finns have to have their own sui generis brand of automatic weapon.


20. This phrase is a Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe parody.

Why? Just because, is why.

Zero Watch

Oh, how is Our Hero, Zero, doing with that crate-trap?

Zero has climbed on the cage his zookeepers have lowered in a moat to rescue him.

and?

The polar bear has explored the herring and apples delivered in the crate.

and?

He's even gone halfway inside.

Oh noes ..

He just won't make the commitment to get in that box.

Score one for the big carnivore.  Stay strong, furry white brother.

Cylon!

Ru-roh ...

I'm a Cylon!

Yes, your whole life has been one gigantic lie. You are in fact a machine dedicated to wiping out all of humanity. Good luck with that.

Take the Are you a Human or a Cylon? Quiz at HeavyInk.com

Government healthcare seems to work fine

From SB7

Here's a doozy of a non sequitur from Hege123l:

I don't want a for profit company making life and death choices for me. Government healthcare seems to work fine for government workers, the military and our politicans...

Seems to work fine. We might imagine that Hege123l has never talked to anyone in the military.

Fort Ritchie, Maryland, 1989. It's wet and rainy and cold in Maryland in the winter, and my nearly year-old son has chronic ear infections. Fort Ritchie has a clinic, so to the clinic we go. Sensibly (for the Army) dependents must wait until active duty soldiers are seen. Including the Light Duty Brigade showing up to get just one .. more .. day on their Work Avoidance Chit. Also, sensibly, unless you're about to die you are seen in the order in which you show up. Appointments are for sissies.

What this really means is that if you want to be seen for anything you show up early and wait in a crowded room until after lunch time.  If your kid is in a lot of pain, you show up early .. and wait in a crowded room. This is actually less fun than it sounds with a one-year old doing a lot of crying and vomiting.

The Clinic from Heck has two doctors. One doctor has the bedside manner of a brick and while you'd like to avoid the bastard, you can't because it's luck of the draw. By the fifth visit my son has learned the diff between Doctor Asstard and The Good Doctor. By the tenth visit he whimpers when we're in the wrong examining room and cries when the guy shows up.

The doctors - over the course of eighteen months - managed to miss that B. was going deaf and has a whole lotta scar tissue on his eardrums. His ear infections didn't really go away until we moved to North Carolina, where the Navy farmed their dependent care to civilians who looked at B, said 'wow, he's deaf, no wonder he can't talk well', popped tubes in his ears and .. lo, he could hear.


Now, mistakes happen and anecdotes are only that.  Also some of the finest care I've ever gotten has been from Navy corpsmen, dentists and PAs.

But - from my experience - saying that 'it seems to work fine' is to ignore a whole lot of experience that says there are some pretty serious problems with 'government health care for the military'.  To me, government health care will always be that small clinic at Fort Ritchie with one good doctor and one bad doctor and waiting in a 'first come first served line' with a baby in a lot of pain.

Cross Posted to The Daily Brief.

The Age of Prosperity is over

Arthur Laffer

Bill Clinton and Alan Greenspan added their efforts to strengthen what had begun under President Reagan. President Clinton signed into law welfare reform, so people actually have to look for a job before being eligible for welfare. He ended the "retirement test" for Social Security benefits (a huge tax cut for elderly workers), pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement through Congress against his union supporters and many of his own party members, signed the largest capital gains tax cut ever (which exempted owner-occupied homes from capital gains taxes), and finally reduced government spending as a share of GDP by an amazing three percentage points (more than the next four best presidents combined). The stock market loved Mr. Clinton as it had loved Reagan, and for good reasons.

The stock market is obviously no fan of second-term George W. Bush, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama or John McCain, and again for good reasons.

These issues aren't Republican or Democrat, left or right, liberal or conservative. They are simply economics, and wish as you might, bad economics will sink any economy no matter how much they believe this time things are different. They aren't.

Or as a really smart engineer once said ..

"Look," Arabian said after a pause, "you know this is no problem and I know this is no problem. But if the battery screws up, I'm going to say so. And if a tank screws up, I'm going to say so. And if the crew screws up, I'm going to say so. Fellows, these are just systems, and if you're not honest with yourself about what went wrong, you ain't gonna be able to fix anything."

The Supreme Court as a wealth distribution politburo

Senator Obama: "…The Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. "

As if that's a bad thing.

Update: Context matters of course. So, a transcript of the interview.

Zero the People Avoiding Hero

Remember the polar bear that won't leave his quiet, secluded moat for a place where he can be gawked at by hairless primates?

I said, go .. a-way!

The guys that run the zoo left his favorite treats - including lard, yum, yum - on the stairs to get him back up - no dice. Their next Big Idea . . .

Senior animal staff at the zoo lowered a large crate into the polar bear's moat via a crane this morning. A plastic milk storage crate full of his "favorite treats" - apples with peanut butter and herring - is inside the larger crate.

Then the cage door goes up, and after hours they hoist it up in the air and drop him - annoyed - back in his enclosure.


This works at my house with mice - they amble into no-kill traps after peanut butter all the time. Grumpy stay-at-homes across the world can be forgiven for hoping a carnivore has more brains than a itty-bitty mouse.

IIS - Microsoft - Guh-wha?

Work up this morning to bad news: a couple of my Windows Server 2003 hosts were not serving.

And not just mine - several other hosts had the same problem.

After a lot of hullaballo and confusion we've got the mess straightened out.

Symptoms?

• One host was missing NIC cards in it's control panel
• Operators reported being asked to install software
• Operators reported being asked to run chkdsk
• Many many services were off
• Could not view events in Event Viewer - double click on 'em and they just glare at you insolently.
• Could not launch services in Services Manager
• Login as an established user and ... greeted with the 'first time login' nonsense
• The applications - 3rd party non MS stuff - would not launch and claimed they were not registered.

Most of the hosts were fixed by Resting the security settings to default [1]. One host would not boot following this fix and was restored from snapshot.

The only commonality we can find is Server 2003 SP2 and IIS [2] and they were all VMWare ESX guests.

What in the ring-tailed rambling heck?


[1] http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=313222
[2] Amusing conversation with a vendor about that point:

Me: Why does your application require IIS?
Him: Our application doesn't use IIS.
Me: Well it won't install without IIS being on the box.
Him: Ga-wha?

Man v Kzin

From Wikipedia: Known Space

Kzinti: large and very aggressive feline aliens with whom humans fight several brutal interstellar wars. Kzinti tactics are somewhat cat-like in nature, 'Scream and leap' being the primary mode of attack. The first Man-Kzin war ended when the humans obtained the Faster-Than-Light drive, the Kzinti ships stood no chance against FTL-drive warships. Throughout the rest of the wars with man, the Kzinti tended to always attack before they were ready, and subsequently lost each and every one of them. As a result of this most of their empire was lost; in the peace treaties colonies and slave planets were ceded to man or given independence.

Or, from the Kzinti point of view .... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONz9LHTMJp8