Tab Clearing

We don’t have to pay for freeways!
Our schools are good enough
Give us endless wars
On foreign shores
And lots of Chinese stuff

Children singing the praises of the Leader is a feature of Communism, not a Republic.  Catchy tune, however.


Financing space start-ups: Throwing money into space


CIA chiefs face arrest over horrific evidence of bloody 'video-game' sorties by drone pilots


UNRESTRAINED MUSLIM JUBILATION  I don't think these guys get the point of living in a liberal democracy.  Maybe they do.


Guerrilla guide to CNC machining, mold making, and resin casting


Shut up and play nice: How the Western world is limiting free speech


L'Osservatore Romano.


How To : Hide The Menu Bar Or Dock In OS X


The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent

Election 2012

I may have something more intelligent and mature to write about this later.  I may not: I've got lots more better things to do with my life.  So;

To My Dear Friends Who Are Democrats,

If you vote for Obama again you are voting for more of everything you profess to dislike, throwing away your birthright of liberty for shiny pennies.

To My Dear Friends Who Are Republicans,

If you vote for Romney you are voting for more of everything you profess to dislike, throwing away your birthright of liberty for shiny pennies.


Respectfully Submitted,

Me.

Which do you prefer, assured disaster or a sporting chance?

You may say, “But Fred, how can you be so bloody arrogant as to think you can run the country?” To which I reply, “We know that the incumbents cannot. I may be able to. In any event, I couldn’t be worse: I have not that talent. Which do you prefer, assured disaster or a sporting chance?”

Fred Throws Sombrero in Ring: The Only Thing We Have to be A-Fred of is Fred Hisself

BAYONET!

There was something on the news tonight about 'horses and bayonets'.  Something-something presidential something debate.

Apropos, I have just recalled that I did use my bayonet in the field, all the time. I used it to open up MRE boxes. And slit the tops of MRE meals.

And when they served us so-called breakfast in field kitchens? Bayonets are super-useful for opening up mini-cereal boxes.

The value of a configuration engine done right

I love my job.  Love, love, love, it.

We've been talking about the value of a configuration engine replacing our rickety install process for years.  Years.  Hasn't been worth the short-term pain.

Looked at another way, have not been able to carve the time out to make it happen.

Looked at yet another way 'If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over'?

So this go-around we have a perfect storm of a project.  I've managed to build in time to set up the infrastructure to setup the servers.  An actual project plan that says 'build the configuration engine first, then build the servers using that'.  It's important that this be done right, for a lot of tedious reaons.

It helps to be the guy who wrote the project plan.

Here is the deal: spend figuring out how to build a Puppet module to manage something on a server.  An application.  A service.  User, file ... if it's something you can touch on a host there is a way to make Puppet do it.  The more complicated the module, the more time it takes.

Edit crontab?  Took about an hour.  X Windows?  Two hours.  X is complicated.

The genius comes because forever after managing that resource on a server is a matter only of putting the host's name in the right file.

Want XWindows on a host?  Edit the right file, save.  Want it gone?  REMOVE the entry from that file, wait an hour.

If one is feeling impetuous one can shell to the host and manually force the issue.

It's even making Linux look loveable.

Love.  My.  Job.

Utilize existing UAV assets and personnel to increase the greater good

I made a petition.  And I think I liked it.

Go.  Sign.

Before they take that sucker down.

Complete text below in case of deletion

Charge the United States Air Force or such agencies of the Defense Department as you see fit to

Utilize existing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assets and personal to

Find the 30,244 [1] dipsticks who signed the petition to 'outlaw offending prophets of major religions' and

Bitch-slap them into next Sunday.

[1] As of 2012-10-16 9:30 p.m. central

OS X is a supeior shell for running Linux

So I've got this Thinkpad, fred, running Slackware 14, but the keyboard is way over there, and it's not plugged into my monitors, getting those three monitors to work with the USB adapter and linux is going to be a pain and anyway it utterly lacks iTerm2, which is the cat's pajamas of terminal emulation.

Ah ...

$ xhost +fred
$ ssh -X brian@fred
# tmux
# firefox &
# emacs &

How 'bout that: X11 applications running on my Mac all nice and handy.

Theory: OS X is a superior platform for running 'linux' applications.

I am so lucky that I'm in a profession where I get to spend part of my workday dinking around with stuff like this.

Tab Clearing - Obama Has A Kill List edition

The White Rose.

Bitcoin, or How to Hammer in Nails with a Microscope.

I Don't Want to Shoot Anyone (YouTube)

The Triumph of the Trivial aka Obama has a kill list

GM now hiring -- 10,000 information technology workers

Government Dependency Will End in Chaos by Ron Paul

Imagine that—my wife was right. Republicans don’t *actually* want to stop abortion.

Oh That Wacky Free Press

"The American people would rightly not tolerate this kind of concentration of power in government. Is it not fair and relevant to question its concentration in the hands of a tiny and closeted fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned by government?"

Spiro Agnew

Postliterate Red Queen's Race

A postliterate society is a hypothetical society in which multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read or write, is no longer necessary or common.

If one finds oneself in an actual postliterate society one is in big, big, trouble.

We are working our way into it one well-intentioned step at a time. 

A push at work is for work instruction software that produces lego-like diagrams for getting stuff done.  You've seen them - pictures take you step-by-step through an assembly process.  This is a great idea for a place like ours: our assembly guys can speak any of seven languages [1].  Lego instructions make a lot of sense.  That kind of thing is getting everywhere, into everything.

Lego instructions for assembling complicated electronics, glyph-button cash registers at BurgerMcDonaldsKing, wizards for installing software .. what can you do?  If you don't do this stuff you'll get run over by your competitors who do.  Then you're out of business and working a cash register and forgetting how to make change because the machine tells you what to hand back to the customer  ...

In your post-literate society there must be a corps of people who are literate.  Someone writes the lego software, the install wizards, knows how to program the cash registers.  Morlocks. 

Morlocks get stuff done.  They know how to fix things.  They're happy people, busy and productive and well-compensated. 

It's good to be a Morlock.

Except for having to live in an society that is in a Red Queen's Race to cater to Eloi.  Ever had to wait in line while the kid behind the counter drives his register into a ditch, gets a puzzled look, has to have a manager come over and un-f*ck things?

Like that times a thousand.


 Six if you count Scot as English.  Which, listening to them, is real hard.

Once it gets started there's no stopping it until it has corrupted the whole body politic

"I have come to think, especially since my trip to Spain, that civil liberties must be protected at every stage. In Spain I am sure that the introduction of GPU methods by the Communists did as much harm as their tank men, pilots and experienced military men did good. The trouble with an all powerful secret police in the hands of fanatics, or of anybody, is that once it gets started there's no stopping it until it has corrupted the whole body politic. I am afraid that's what's happening in Russia."

John Dos Passos

But when we get together It just all works out

I asked my wife 'how' she makes her meatloaf.  She finally - finally - wrote it down for me.

Mix meat and other ingredients in large bowl until well blended. Put in as much seasoning as you think is good. I usually cook with the, "Yep, that looks about right," method. So, make sure to season it to your taste.

She is such an argument in favor of  the 'opposites attract' theory of boy meet girl.

Spy Vs Spy

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

vs

"There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax…[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

The scouts around each fire nod their heads wisely and say 'mm hmm' and 'right on' and 'preach it brother-man'.

Instead of talking about who loves the common man more, or who is more right about such useless trivia, wouldn't it be a truly nifty thing if we'd take a break and focus on actually important matters like trampling the Constitution into dust, kill lists, illegal wars on countries far away and citizens at home, insane levels of spending?

Just a thought.

GTFO

Most joint U.S.-Afghan military operations have been suspended following what authorities believe was an insider attack Sunday that left four American solders dead, officials told NBC News.

“We’re to the point now where we can’t trust these people,” a senior military official said.

Suspended. 

F*ck that sh*t sideways and twice on Sunday.  You can't do nation-building if you can't operate with the native troops and - it seems - we can't operate with the native troops without them getting all upset [1] because we do sh*t they don't like and they get all shooty at us.

Time to declare the job done and get the fuck out.


[1] On the other hand if horde of Afghanis invaded Wisconsin, installed Jim Doyle as Boss of Madison and insisted he was in charge of the rest of the state, and then had the gall to violate my cultural norms [2] to boot, I'd be tempted to take a potshot at them, too.

[2] Dissing the Packers, say.

emacs org-mode export to html - awesome like a possum

I've got a TODO list in emacs org-mode [1].  I want that puppy dog on the intranet at work.  Because compulsive sharing is what I do.

Presto!

# org2html2wiki.sh
(snip)
emacs --batch --visit "$orgfile" --funcall org-export-as-html
scp $htmlfile $host:$wikipath/$htmlfileonwki

Just wanted to not for posterity how nifty it is, now.  That one can do this kind of thing with a text processor makes me unreasonably happy.

Because tomorrow it is going to be part of my workflow and two minutes after that it is going to be just a thing and not worthy of mention.  Oh, yeah, I'll say, that old thing [2].

Also: I'm just realizing the implication here: one can call a function in emacs externally.  Sure, I read about it but seeing it ... this can be all kinds of cool.

[1] For the record, keeping my TODO in org-mode is the longest I've ever stuck with any given software or system for that purpose.  We may have a winner.
[2] Next up: exporting org-mode as html straight to the web server.
 

Tabs ... so many tabs

Space Elevator Science - Climb to the Sky - A Tethered Tower  A kickstarter for space elevator research.  Kicking butt on their goals, too.  And a few days ago mlaine messaged me saying in effect 'want to help'?  Well ... yeah.  Maybe.  Gotta think about it.  Pretty tempting.


We found these two startling photos of Lujiazui District in Shanghai, one taken in 1990 and the other in 2010.


The idea that the government should provide everything suggests a great dimness of mind and poor grasp of the origin of specie. The belief apparently is that money comes from the government, as food comes from Safeway and cell phones from Radio Shack.


Command-line utility-belt for hacking JSON and Javascript.


Password management should be simple and follow Unix philosophy. With pass, each password lives inside of a gpg encrypted file whose filename is the title of the website or resource that requires the password.


Are we going to see a shift in manufacturing towards the west? Are we going to see innovation in robotics and manufacturing? The landscape of automation is going to change. We are going to rely on software and cheaper hardware to get things done.


Programmable logic controller (wikipedia)


Foreman. The app switching app that will blow your freaking mind

Welcome To Linux Part 2

TJIC wrote

I'd be curious as to how much of your distaste is just "I like Pepsi, but this is Coke" and how much is "feature X is just objectively bad".

About 90% the former, 10% the latter, 15% a dislike having to learn something new, 20% an intense dislike of ripping a perfectly fine, working, system up to replace it with something else.


Thinking it over it is (was) not so much 'Solaris' that I like but the combination of Solaris + hardware + support.   One of their SEs once, in a completely above-and-beyond action, stayed on the phone with me during a tricky 3:00 a.m. call when I was a total zombie and needed such basic instructions like 'no, don't retype that entire line, yy-p and edit.'  Sun support was the thing, man.


Linux Plus: things [1] just work without having to mentally translate 'linux-ism to 'solaris-ism'.

Linux Plus: the cool toys do work the way docs expect them to.

Linux Minus: the temptation to go wild and just install stuff is .. tempting.  This might be a personal problem.

Startling: a how-to written 18 months ago is referred to without irony as ancient.  In Solaris-land this same document would be venerable.


Previously.

[1] Things.  Nagios, Puppet.  gcc.  Stuff like that.

And the endian on the left is now endian on the right

I am not-not-not going to get all vi vs emacs [1] here. 

Opinions were solicited, recommendations provided, choices made.   Like the good marine employee I am, I will ask questions, provide my opinion, [2] until the order is given and then it's 'Aye-aye Sir' about-face and carry out the plan of the day.

Good bye Solaris, hello Linux.  Meet the new boss.  Same as the old boss. [3]
 
But great furry cats, Linux is such  ... such ... well it's not Solaris that's for sure.

But it's okay.

The only thing certain is change and useless whining.


[1] Because, duh, the clear winner is emacs.
[2] Code for 'be a pain in the ass'.
[3] We won't get fooled again .. YEEEAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.  Gawd damn The Who rocked, didn't they?

War, Devastation, and Whimsy

At the end of 1940, the Wehrmacht started to install guns at Pas-de-Calais.  Mission: blow up ships in the English Channel.  And as much of England as they could reach.  These batteries were named

Friedrich August
Grosser Kurfürst
Prinz Heinrich
Todt
Lindemann

Monarchs and Nazis. Genuine bad-ass strike-terror-in-the-heart-of-our-enemy names.

The British had a gun named 'Pooh'.  Later they added 'Clem' and 'Jane'.


Ref
Via

The Battle of Athens

1946.  Athens, Tennessee.  Surrounded by a paid company of thugs in the jail, Paul Cantrell, Pat Mansfield were counting ballots, stealing another election.  Business as usual.  Outside was Bill White with the militia ...

“Would you damn bastards bring those damn ballot boxes out here or we are going to set siege against the jail and blow it down!” Moments later the night exploded in automatic weapons fire punctuated by shotgun blasts.

When it was over, Cantrell and Mansfield had fled, the militia kept order for a few days.  The state came down, an honest ballot count happened, the reform candidates assumed office.  Time passed.

There are no signs or monuments to commemorate the event; people have forgotten or do not wish to remember. But the graying manager of a local store, a friendly sort and so gentle with his grandchildren, squeezed off round after round at the  jail that night. And the driver snoozing behind the wheel of his cab,  not really caring whether he catches a fare or not, helped wrap and toss the deadly bundles of dynamite that sailed through the night air. You can bet they remember.

And so should we.

Joe Biden is stoopid not so much

The 'Joe Biden is dumb as a box of hammers' meme is funny, but if you think he is actually that dumb you have another think coming.

He did get a BA, got a law degree, was alert enough to avoid the draft (five deferments), has been a US Senator since 1972.  He's not walked into the side of a bus, has never shown up dripping wet with a dodgy story and a dead girl in a submerged car.

I'm not arguing he's got a big ol' brain on board, but what he has done argues that at the very least, under that  goofball persona, is a guy with a certain low cunning.

I sure wouldn't turn my back on him.

This place is a madhouse, feels like being cloned

This morning I had a functional development host for $application.

Then a trap door opened, I was dropped into a Twilight Zone of kernel panics, broken dreams, shattered servers.


How was your day?

Amateur Hour Or Why 'Scream and Leap' is a bad idea

So this guy, Floyd Lee Corkins II, [1] ambles up to his ideological enemies, starts hollering, pulls a gun, wings a security guard.  Who promptly disarms his dumb ass.

... the suspect said, "Don't shoot me, it was not about you, it was what this place stands for."

Amateur.  Kids, if you're going to take a scary evil gun and slay people, observe the proper form: get foamy and ideological after the slaying. 

Carrying on before the festivities betrays a lack of seriousness.

Bonus: this happened in D.C. which has more cops running around than you could shake a stick at.  Super strict gun control laws.  Floyd [2], he just walked right through them laws like they was printed on paper.

[1] Middle name of 'Lee'.  Now there is a warning sign if ever was one.  Quite and unassuming, too.  Another spot to cover on mass-murder buzz-word bingo.
[2] Snicker.

Weekend at the Lunar Dells

Weekend at The Dells with family.

Love the water parks.  I like people in the abstract.  In great bunches ... ew.  Try real hard not to think about what is _in_ the water on the floor of the restroom and changing rooms.  With thousands of monkeys trooping in and out it gets kind of gross in there.


Moms - stop yelling 'Don't run, you'll fall!' You really take a few hits in the ol' credibility department.  If your spawn really thought they could fall they would not run.  Try this: 'Don't run'.   You are a parent - you don't need to justify yourself.


Since we live up north a lot of these water parks are inside.  People from here take this for granted.  Entering, I'm always taken aback for a minute, think about a John Varley Disney.

See, Varley is an SF writer, wrote a series of shorts and novels that take place in ... never mind.  Upshot is that, in the future, people in the moon have carved caves, hundreds of kilometers in diameters, kilometers high, painted the ceiling blue, stocked them with flora and fauna.  One refers to this kind of cave as a 'Disney'.[1]

So I stand there, take it in, think about how keen it would be to splash around in a wave pool in lunar gravity.

Hope they find a way to keep the restrooms clean.

[1] There is no problem with lawyers for Disney showing up and suing these folk into oblivion.  Long before these stories are set aliens showed up and eradicated humanity on earth to save the whales.

A rose by any other name is the title of a post

Instead of Industrial Giants, Brooklyn Has Niche Factories

Rather, this building, at 1205 Manhattan Avenue, has been sliced and
diced into several dozen small factories, each with a niche clientele.

No it gosh-darn has not been, Mr. Joseph Berger of the New York Times. There is not one single factory in that article.

But that's okay.  He is just a reporter.  Can't be expected to understand the meaning of words.  Heck, he got impressed by a band saw and a guy with a welding rig and thought 'factory'.

Like if he met a guy with a few potted tomato plant on his balcony in Williamsburg.  That's farming, man.  He's ready to go plow a field.  Write with authority on grain farming in the Dakotas.

Manufacturing is making lots of stuff, in a repeatable process.  Computers. Cars.  Tractors, routers, hammers.  It is a really complicated process, getting the gozintas to assemble just right to make the gozouttas.  It is surprisingly hard to do well.

Everything you see on the shelves at Wal-Mart is produced by an organization that has figured out how to be the best in their niche. 

If they didn't figure it out, they're out of business. [1]

Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, said Brooklyn “is going back to the future.”

“What is emerging is the artisanal approach rather than the mass
production for millions of items of something,” he said.

What you got there in Brooklyn, with the band saw and the drill press and guys that make one-off photography models is craft.  You're employing craftsmen to make really cool stuff, one at a time.

Nothing wrong with it. It's rewarding as hell, I'm sure, financially and personally.

But you don't make crafts in a factory, and it is not manufacturing.

Names matter.

[1] I could be crabby from gettin up before the rooster to fix a problem
that was costing my company a few thousand dollars per minute in
downtime.  Then again just after the rooster crowed to fix another problem.

 

Carl Sagan’s message to future explorers of Mars

Carl Sagan’s message to future explorers of Mars.

Science and science fiction have done a kind of dance over the last century, particularly with respect to Mars. The scientists make a finding. It inspires science fiction writers to write about it, and a host of young people read the science fiction and are excited, and inspired to become scientists to find out more about Mars, which they do, which then feeds again into another generation of science fiction and science; and that sequence has played major role in our present ability to get to Mars. It certainly was an important factor in the life of Robert Goddard, the American rocketry pioneer who, I think more than anyone else, paved the way for our actual ability to go to Mars. And it certainly played a role in my scientific development.

I don’t know why you’re on Mars. Maybe you’re there because we’ve recognized we have to carefully move small asteroids around to avert the possibility of one impacting the Earth with catastrophic consequences, and, while we’re up in near-Earth space, it’s only a hop, skip and a jump to Mars. Or, maybe we’re on Mars because we recognize that if there are human communities on many worlds, the chances of us being rendered extinct by some catastrophe on one world is much less. Or maybe we’re on Mars because of the magnificent science that can be done there - the gates of the wonder world are opening in our time. Maybe we’re on Mars because we have to be, because there’s a deep nomadic impulse built into us by the evolutionary process, we come after all, from hunter gatherers, and for 99.9% of our tenure on Earth we’ve been wanderers. And, the next place to wander to, is Mars. But whatever the reason you’re on Mars is, I’m glad you’re there. And I wish I was with you.

Via.

Auditing Shooting Rampage Statistics

The average number of people killed in mass shootings when stopped by police is 14.3

The average number of people killed in a mass shooting when stopped by a civilian is 2.3.

From

The optimal solution to Bad People with evil intent is own the means of self-defense, and have the will to use it.

Tab Clearing

Mocking an old man reading a bible.  Bet your mothers are so proud of you.

This. One thing I’ve noticed watching the Olympics this year is how much more racially diverse the American team is compared to everyone else.

Romney is right. Culture is why Israel and the West are rich

Love of Country: Seldom Requited.

Why Bad Jobs-or No Jobs-Happen to Good Workers

Tiny-Bash-Server

Getting Rich by the Numbers

HTTPie is a CLI, cURL-like tool for humans.

In The Boudoir With The Man

Vermont man uses tractor to flatten 8 police cars

On Neobarbarism

An open Twitter-like ecosystem

R.I.P. Eric Hammar

The 3d U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) paid tribute to Staff Sgt. Carl E. Hammar during an Active Duty Funeral in Arlington National Cemetery, Va., July 30, 2012. Staff Sgt. Hammar died
July 14, 2012 while serving in Operation Enduring Freedom.

Tab Clearing

Five years after his honorable discharge, arrested for desertion.  And spent a month under confinement at Pendelton.  And didn't get paid.  Because he wasn't actually a deserter.  The Big Green Weenie found him, big time.

State Rep. Elizabeth Coggs, the Milwaukee Democrat running in the August primary for state senator, urged a gathering of ... voters Saturday to “vote for someone that looks like you.”

Race Hucksters - God Save Us from Federal Help, by Fred Reed

Cryptocat Development Blog

Is it time for password-less login?

You'll poke your eye out kid

Often heard argument against carrying guns in public;

"But if you have a spree-killer and you have guys shooting back they'll just make things worse."

Has this ever happened?

Words to Live by -If You Are a Super Hero

From here.

"Words to live by," Diaz claims.

Bullshit twice over.

Bullshit the first, just two pages after this graphic, elderly retired cop James Gordon uses his firearm ("Of course I still carry it") to break up a riot, enforce order, organize a bucket brigade to save a burning building.  Without Batman or his army of testosterone-ripped thugs.

Gordon as a character has always stood for doing the right thing, even if it wasn't popular, or legal.  Fundamentally, he's just a guy, counterpoint to the looney-tune Bruce Wayne, an everyman, with a sense of duty.

 As Gordon monologues, drawing his gun: "They start listening."


 Bullshit the second, we don't live in a comic book.  Batman is fantasy, not an instruction manual.

Self-defense is the first human right.  Firearms enable the weak, the helpless, the everyman to exercise that fundamental right.

Where firearms are, there is civilization. [1]

[1] Apologies to Mr. Twain

Life is pretty darn good

Today Connor has made some important decisions.  There should be no cushions on the couch.  It is more fun to shut doors with his head.  Backwards is the only way to walk.

From my daughter, on my grandson.

Yes, he is an awesome toddler.

On being unarmed while being shot at

Reading this and that on the internet today about the Aurora Massacre I realized with mild shock that I've been there.  In that situation.  I don't think about it much - it's just something that happened once.

Which is to say that I was once under arms without ammunition [1], a dozen feet from a guy who was trying real hard to kill people.  He didn't [2] which is down to darkness and a whole lot of luck. [3]

But I gotta think than anyone who has actually been there, experienced it first hand, has thought about it, doesn't have a lot of truck with people who want victims to cower under a desk, for them to wait for the cops to show up, who feel that an armed citizen facing down a killer just makes it worse.


[1] Which is the stupid-silly kind of thing that happens in the military.  That time it was poor communication, happenstance, and fum-duckery, not SOP.
[2] F*cking boot.
[3] The good guys trying to kill him back didn't succeed either.  Lots of luck running around that night.

Obama and the AK-47

"But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals -- that they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities."

Barack Obama

This citizen believes an AK-47 belongs in the trunk of my car.  One over the fireplace.  Upstairs in my closet.  F**k a lot of soldiers, why should they get to have all of the fun?

But never mind.

Some will call our Commander-in-Chief clueless about the very basics of the armed forces he has been elected to lead.  Not I.  Some will say he's a dimwit, a tool to his teleprompter, victim of a speechwriter without clue.  A man who lacks curiosity about anything not in his cozy, narrow, cone of light. 

Not me. [1]

I say that it proves is that he's never, ever, seen that classic Clint Eastwood movie 'Heartbreak Ridge'. 

For if he had this line would be seared into his memory:

This is the AK-47 assault rifle, the preferred weapon of your enemy; and it makes a distinctive sound when fired at you, so remember it.



[1] Not today, at least.

cmdfu

The internet continues to delight and amaze.

cmdfu

Put this in .bashrc (or aliases.zsh if you swing that way)

cmdfu(){ wget -qO - "http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/matching/$@/$(echo -n "$@" | openssl base64)/plaintext"; }

And ...

$ cmdfu awk
# commandlinefu.com by David Winterbottom

# Get the IP address
ip -f inet a | awk '/inet / { print $2 }'

# Get the IP address
ip a s eth0 | grep "inet " | head -n 1 | awk '{print $2}' | cut -f1 -d'/'
(snip)

Whoa.

From.

Nutty Things I Found Out Today

Muhammad's name is written on Mars.
and
Muhammad split the moon apart.  Then put it back together.

Which ... fine. It's nutty, but no nuttier than believing bread and wine turn into Christ's body and blood.

It gets better: guys are going around using state of the art technology to prove that medieval miracles really did happen.

'NASA footage shows ..' 'Pictures from satellites are proof ..'

I'd be more impressed if that crowd could build satellites, or the computers, or moon rockets, or even a 1969 Torino GT convertible.  Instead of depending on other people to do it for them.

All these guys can do is smash things apart that they can't build.  Kinda sad.

Compartmentalize

Springsteen begins to mumble in what the music critic Jody Rosen calls his “flat Dust Bowl Okie accent,” and I can’t make out a word he’s saying. I ask Christie if he understands him.

“You want to know what he’s saying?,” Christie asks. “He’s telling us that rich people like him are fucking over poor people like us in the audience, except that us in the audience aren’t poor, because we can afford to pay 98 bucks to him to see his show. That’s what he’s saying.”

Wait a second, this is Bruce Springsteen we’re talking about, the guy you adore?

“I compartmentalize,” Christie says.

Jersey Boys - The Atlantic

Sex and Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers, Chapter 11, the protagonist is on leave from the war.  He describes a strip of bars, pawn shops, dives, strip joints, tattoo parlors, and book stores outside the base.

Then Our Hero, Rico, narrates ..

If you are able to get past these traps, through having already been bled of all valuta, there are still other places in the city almost as satisfactory.  I mean there are girls there, too. Which are provided free by a grateful populace.  Much like the social center in Vancouver, these are, but even more welcome.

A brothel, by golly, run by the city.  Take a number, soldier, the wait time is 20 minutes.

My mind is in the gutter.  It's the USO that is free.  Sure.

Heinlein was careful, he had a way with prose. 

That ain't no accidental clunker of an ambiguous sentence.

Vote for Gary Johnson because he'll abolish the IRS

Gary Johnson will END the IRS (YouTube)

Gary Johnson 2012 - The Economy and Taxes #2: Cut Taxes

THE U.S. TAX SYSTEM IMPOSES AN ENORMOUS toll on productivity through high marginal rates, absurd complexity, loopholes for the well-connected, and incentives for wasteful decisions. A better, fairer system will be:

• Abolish the Internal Revenue Service.
• Enact the Fair Tax to tax expenditures, rather than income, with a 'prebate' to make spending on basic necessities tax free.
• With the Fair Tax, eliminate business taxes, withholding and other levies that penalize productivity, while creating millions of jobs.
• Suggested Reading: www.FairTax.org

No more IRS?  An entire thugocracy turned out to honest labor?  Getting rid of a friggin' wind anchor on the ship of state?  Sign me up.

Also - Gary Johnson wont have a (*&(^*&^^ kill list.

Tab Clearing

Responsibility and Clicking: Such people have no problem with the idea of magic, because everything is magic to them, even science.

Summary of the AWS Service Event in the US East Region

Perl Net::FTP

4 min Emacs screencast inspired by Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle (emacsrocks.com)

emacsrocks.com

michaelw's Emacs Hackery

Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant

File Management with Emacs (dired tutorial)

The Collected Writings of Mencius Moldbug

List of wireless router firmware projects (wikipedia)

The Socialization Of America Is Economically Impossible

Dear Person Seeking a Job: Why I Can't Hire You

Defending Against SWAT Entries (Not What You Think) TL:DR - if the police assault you, it's your own fault. Next column: Defending Against Rapists (Not What You Think).

It's not the heat ...

Hot.  Sultry.  Sweaty.  Humid.  So hot the rabbits ain't gonna run and the dog ain't gonna hunt.  How humid is it?  Don't ask.  August in Texas finally found me up here in Wisconsin in July.

Only good thing about riding a bike to work is that I don't have to climb into a car sealed up and baked in the sun.

Did I mention it's hot outside ...

Master Funnery Sergeant

Who is this? Who the f*** is it?

Not just a phoney-fake Marine but a phoney-fake Marine who got to jump out of airplanes.  And not just a phoney-fake Marine who can parachute but one who got himself a Special Warfare insignia.  And an EOD badge.

And not just a phoney-fake parachuting Marine/SEAL/EOD man but a phoney-fake parachuting Marine/SEAL/EOD man who can't arrange his shooting badges correctly or assemble his cover correctly.

Jesus Christ and Saint Peter in a sidecar.

You know - you just know - this guy is sitting at home after work.  He has no friends.  None, zero, zilch, nada.

I feel sorry for the guy.

Via Terminal Lance

Cloud Go Boom

A storm knocked out amazon's cloud service last night (2012-06-29) [1].  A whole lot of stuff on the internet got whacked.  Especially annoying was Netflix - I wanted to watch a movie, and couldn't, for about five minutes.

It used to be that, for an organization, to experience this kind of disruption you needed your own data center.  You had to pay out big bucks for servers, disk drives, electricity, staff.

Now all you gotta do is pay a lot of money to someone else.  Progress!



Which isn't to say that I'm against the notion of 'cloud'.  For some applications, it makes sense.  For some organizations it's ideal. 

But if you're gonna do it, you gotta recognize that you're outsourcing something real important, that the cloud provider is not nearly as interested in your data as you are.

And sometimes they're going to pull a fumducker and leave you hanging.


[1] I'm sure we're going to find out, in time, that it wasn't something simple like 'ran out of fuel for the generators' but a really-truly cascading error that jumped out of the fourth dimension to whack them hard.  We've all been there.

Ideal Workspace

Ideal: browser - Terminal - emacs [1] [2]

In virtual desktop 2 is email, virtual desktop 3 is for other stuff.

It does not stay this tidy, but this is the ideal.[3]

Your mileage will vary.


[1] Really, aquamacs.
[2] Yes, emacs has a shell.  Several of them.  They're just not as good as iTerm2.
[3] As-of right now.

bizlog.sh

BizManager from GXS is an okay tool for EDI.

But it lacks any but the most rudimentary reporting on how much traffic one is sending.

What I need is a breakdown by date/hour of what kind of traffic I'm sending. 

I asked the vendor.  Reply: Have-not-got.  We'll-get-back-to-you. 

Annoying.

Bash to rescue - here.

Run that sucker for a few days, then do this on the output ...

cat *traff*txt | grep as2o | sort -k3 -k4 | uniq | nawk '!x[$3 $4]++'
cat *traff*txt | grep as2i | sort -k3 -k4 | uniq | nawk '!x[$3 $4]++'
cat *traff*txt | grep ftps | sort -k3 -k4 | uniq | nawk '!x[$3 $4]++'
cat *traff*txt | grep ftpu | sort -k3 -k4 | uniq | nawk '!x[$3 $4]++'
cat *traff*txt | grep ftpd | sort -k3 -k4 | uniq | nawk '!x[$3 $4]++'


And presto: data you can hand to your project manager and say 'this is how much krep the EDI tool handles.'

Things I would like to do with my operating system

... that I should be able to do, [1] but can't.  Maybe I just don't know how.

What: Focus on an application window in Space1 [2].  Input a keystroke,  send it to Space2.

Why: I have a window -  an email, a pdf - it's in the wrong space.  I need to refer to it while I doodle around in another virtual window.  I don't want it here, I want it there.  I want it there now, I don't want to wait while it makes a long trek left or right across three monitors to the next space.

Okay I could restack spaces so they are on top of each other, not side to side.  Still: keystroke, bamspiceweasel, done.


What: From terminal [3], send input to browser.  'Enter' 'Next' or 'Page Down' 'Page Up'.  Slap text into an input box [Enter].

Why: Terminal is where I work. Stuff happens in term.  Twitter.  The company phone book from a shell script.  I edit text there. [4]  The web browser, when I'm working, is a reference.  It contains how-to guides.  Tutorials.  Knowledge base stuff from vendors.

The browser is a television.  I want a remote control.


[1] Linux or OS X need only apply.
[2] Wiki: Spaces (Software)
[3] Do I really need to footnote this?
[4]  I play iTunes from terminal.  It rocks.

S4C Novel of the Month

Zoe's Tale is the best book John Scalzi has written.  Ever.

Wraps up all the loose ends from the Old Man's War series.  And brother, there were a bunch o' them.

It is supposedly a YA novel but ... naw.   It's just good.

Joe Bob sez check it out.

P.S.  I still want a Brain Pal.

A treat for your soul

Just Because ...

Darth Vader Wearing a Kilt on a Unicycle Playing Bagpipes (YouTube)

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Vote for Gary Johnson because he won't have a f*cking kill list

Gary Johnson: I Will End the War in Afghanistan and Bring Our Troops Home Now. Unlike President Pepsi and his challenger Governor Coke, Johnson means it.

And he won't have a f*cking kill list, neither.  Go, sign.  Doesn't mean a damn thing, but it's fun, costs you nothing, and it's a way to protest.

And they've solved the 'innocent bystander' problem that has dogged earlier drone strikes.  If they get blown up, they were bad guys.  Automatically!

There is a bit from Full Metal Jacket where a door gunner is murdering women, children, who were out in a paddy, working.  He yells to Joker "If they run, they're VC.  If they stand still, they're well disciplined VC.  Ha!"

This is now national policy.

If this pleases you, if having a shadowy cabal do evil in your name makes you happy, then by all mean, please: vote this krep-head in for another four years in office.

On the other hand, if this kind of thing makes you sick to your stomach, if it bothers you in the slightest, then you have choices.

Doing nothing about evil is to condone it.


"Hey, hey, BHO, how many kids have you killed today?"

None, they were all bad guys, because, bystanding.

"Oh."

Tab Clearing

How to Stop Sucking and Be Awesome.

Uncle Sam pays the bills for companies to privatize space.  As it should be.

The Privatization of Outer Space

Space Exploration: A Closing Window?

The Hardware Startup Movement.  Hardware startups are hard because - capital.  Now .. not so much.  Maybe.

Speaking of Iraq .. Belmont: Friday Follies.  The one sense in which these two videos are alike is that they depict a policy failure. Both record how immense organizations became sidetracked into pursuing in goals which had nothing to do with any rational objective.

Peter Thiel's Rise to Wealth and Libertarian Futurism.

Walking a directory tree with PERL.

NET::FTP : Recursively search FTP directories (was: Net::FTP Problem)

Why, yes, I took a dive into the PERL pond this week.  How did you guess?

Why I use Perl: Reliability.

Modern Perl.

Compiling and running scripts in Emacs.

Free Bach Recordings.

China: The United States prioritizes the right to keep and bear arms over the protection of citizens ... causing rampant gun ownership.   I am failing to see the problem here.

Of Boobs and Glasses

Welcome to the Future Nauseous

pv - Pipe Viewer

Tab Clearing

Our new Drug Czar, Gil Kerlikowske: "Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them."  Well golly however did we get that idea into our silly heads.


The US Code on GitHub.  320 mb of text.  Maybe we've got a few too many laws.


pv - Pipe Viewer - is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline.


Predictably, Catholics were not amused, and Muslims threatened to kill lots of people.


Hardware Startup Movement

Tally-ho on Dragon

Audio from Mission Control;

"We copy. Tally-ho on Dragon!"

Tally-friggin-ho.  Welcome to the actual space age.

No Coke - Pepsi

Mihm's Charcaol Grill - pretty good food.  They've got this on their menu board

WE DON'T SERVE COKE.  EVER.

Because, the nice lady behind the counter said, when the original owner opened, he choose RC.  The Coke rep told him if he didn't choose Coke he'd go out of business.  That would have been 1958.

A half-century of institutional grudge.  I respect that.

Right-tighty lefty-loosey

When one is lefty-loosing a lug nut one ought to really be darn sure he's lefty-loosing and not righty-tighting.

Because after you sweat those things down with a lot of muscle and some foot action in the bargain it's a bear to lefty-loosey 'em again.

The regulatory grip that is squeezing the life out of civilization itself

It started in California.  Then it just growed.

An ominous regulatory announcement from the EPA came in 2007: “Starting with containers manufactured in 2009… it is expected that the new cans will be built with a simple and inexpensive permeation barrier and new spouts that close automatically.”

The government never said “no vents.” It abolished them de facto with new standards that every state had to adopt by 2009. So for the last three years, you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly. They are not permitted to have a separate vent. The top has to close automatically. There are other silly things now, too, but the biggest problem is that they do not do well what cans are supposed to do.

The can on the left was bought last year.  Had the other one for a few years.  The new can has a complicated capspout with controls - a switch to lock back when you want to pour, a button to mash make the gas come out.  Release the button and the (for lack of a better word) safety resets.  It is annoying.  It does not feel cheaply made, exactly, but I wonder how long it will last.

Some boating forums have suggested drilling a hole and putting a tire stem in there and using the screw top as the way to close the hole.  Great idea. Just what I wanted to do with my Saturday afternoon, hacking the gas can to make it work exactly as well as it did three years ago, before government wrecked it.

Taco Seasoning

Taco Seasoning. 

You know what that is - it's a packet of stuff you buy at the store, toss in the ground beef, and you've got taco meat.

Still buying it at the store?  Cut it out.  Just stop - it takes so little time to make, it's so easy, that I am now embarrassed that I ever bought it from the store.

Here.

1 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp paprika
1 1/2 tsp cumin
1 tsp sea salt
1 tsp black pepper

Mix.  Dump into your ground beef.  Store if needed.   Do I need to tell you 'in an air-tight container'?  Didn't think so.

Taco-friggin-seasoning.   Have a nice day and happy Cinco de Mayo.

Bulk Food - Peter Watts and Laurie Channer

It's a few years after we learn to understand Orcan . . .

Well, no one expected the whales to be such assholes.

Awesome short story.

Bulk Food - Peter Watts and Laurie Channer

To protect and serve

Cops arrive to help a guy in distress, won't take 'I'm fine, go away' for an answer, shoot his ass dead.  That'll learn him some manners: open the damned door next time, like a good subject.

Later a Grand Jury says 'no problem, dude, free to go'.

"If I knew that there was a man coming to my house with the fixed intention of doing me good, I would run for my life."  ~Thoreau

America's just the hardest-to-ignore instantiation of a cultural and philosophical system that can be seen in a few other places

Here Randy's got another hangup, something that's been slowly dawning on him as he stands on the beach beneath Tom Howard's concrete house: the perfect freedom that Tom's found in Kinakuta is a cut flower in a crystal vase. It's lovely, but it's dead, and the reason it's dead is that it has been alienated from its germinal soil. And what is that soil exactly? To a first approximation you could just say "America," but it's a little more complicated than that; America's just the hardest-to-ignore instantiation of a cultural and philosophical system that can be seen in a few other places. Not many. Certainly not in Kinakuta. The closest outpost is really not that far away: the Filipinos, for all of their shortcomings in the human rights department, have imbibed the whole Western freedom thing deeply, in a way that has arguably made them economic laggards compared to Asian countries where no one gives a shit about human rights.

Neal Stephenson 'Cryptonomicon'

Shocked, shocked I am . . .

The Administration's top man for Terrorism: We're thought about the drone strike thing and the shit-can-the-due-process-thing.  Much to our surprise, everything we've been doing is cool.

Paul Krugman: Shoveling money onto the fire hasn't worked yet.  We need to shovel more in.  Also, I have a new book out.

Elizabeth Warren furiously paints herself as a prole, is actually the 1%.  Also she's indian Native American.  Oh wait, she's a prole in her heart, where it counts.  She feels your pain.

Validate executable exists in shell

Like this!

#! /bin/bash
command_validate() {
command -v ${1} >/dev/null 2>&1 || { echo " WARNING: I require ${1} but it's not installed. Aborting." >&2; exit 1; }
}
command_validate passwd
exit 0


Is that cool, or what?

Via the always helpful stackoverflow.

Door knob

A thing I knew before today but never really thought about:

At a cost of $3.00 each, it is cheaper to buy a used door knob from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore than to pay a guy to re-key a lock for which you have lost the key.

Any other form of existence doesn’t interest me.

I'm doing up thing at work that features a little shell scripting, a lot of Kermit: glue to do a thing with free tools that the big expensive EDI application can't do for itself.

After hours of gazing at complete but scattered kermit docs, examples, source code, I was able to very carefully type the meat of my script.

rename /replace:{{}{\%6-\%7}{^}} \m(filename) \%4

This is the watershed.  It's all downhill from here.

Now the shell script can iterate over a text file, pass variables to the kermit script which contains that painfully wrought line above.

kermitget.sh ftp.blah.com user password destination store prefix date-time

And all kinds of crazy Turing-stuff will happen. 

A three-line function will call a 20-line Kermit script, process hundreds of customer names, thousands of files.  Data flies into EDI which sends it to JDE which turns into orders, requests.  Things get built, shipped.  We make money.

Stuff happens.

"Meaningful Work or Death. Any other form of existence doesn’t interest me."

Instructions on Friday the Thirteenth - Max Wolf Valerio

Instructions on Friday the Thirteenth   -   Max Wolf Valerio

Fall asleep with your contacts on

dream of forests lit up with light bulbs

And the thirteenth floor

        disappears –                  an elevator floats inside the liquid tower 

                  wake up again           and again            under     

                        scrolling stars – 

 

And there is a Catskill eagle . . .

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.

~Bruce Lee

And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

~Moby Dick

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