Re:at an old data center I was at..
on
Pet Bugs?
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· Score: 4, Funny
At the university in my hometown, I was talking with the IT staff about their day to day maintenance tasks. Most of the end user desktops were Zenith built 386's with 20 meg hard drives.
A common problem was that the heads on the hard drive would get stuck, and the machine would cease to operate. The standard operating procedure to remedy this was told to me as:
Remove all items on top of the computer.
Lift computer at least three feet above the desk.
Release.
If that didn't work, secondary protocol was to remove the hard drive from the machine, place it on the desk, and hit it three or four times with the blunt end of a screwdriver.
According to the techs, this worked about 90% of the time.
Well, if Red Planet is any indicator, I hereby volunteer my services as the "space janitor" (played by Val Kilmer). After the rest of the crew dies on Mars, and I use an old Russian rocket to get back to the ship and nearly die, I really think I could handle the year long ride back with Carrie-Anne Moss.
During my trip to Mars, I also will volunteer to have an encounter with Sil (Natasha Henstridge) from Species, but only if I make it home to be with my wife (Charlize Theron), as indicated by The Astronaut's Wife
Keanu will be allowed to join the mission, but will end up being sucked into space trying to shout "noooooo" as the pressureless environment causes him to explode.
Ask yourself, what if it is a whale (as other posters pointed out) and a pick axe. Pick axes were used in the "olden days" for mining. What, if in some sick inside joke, their logo is indicating they are mining for whales, i.e. investors that have a lot of money that will be easily parted with.
This reminds me of two famous (and nearly identical) quotes:
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Letter to Josiah Quincy, Sept. 11, 1773.
Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.
-- President Thomas Jefferson. 1743-1826
Well, it seems that Attorney General John Ashcroft doesn't agree with two of America's great founding fathers. He was quoted as saying, "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists."
I'm sorry John, but here, you are the terrorist. Don't persuade me or anyone else to give up my freedoms to make your job easier under the guise of making the world a safer place. To calmly allow you to take my rights is the first step onto a slippery slope that I don't even want to know the results of. I won't quit using IRC, I won't give up my private keys, and I will continue to protect my right to say and hear what I'm constitutionally allowed to. If you want to take my rights, try to change the first amendment. Until then, in the spirit of Monty Python's The Life of Brian(I know they're not American, but it's the best quote I could think of), "piss off!"
To badly quote Norm MacDonald, "Breaking news from the scientific journal DUH!"
Other places hackers hang out:
malls
coffee shops
schools
CNN might want to investigate these places as well. Inside sources from CNN also tell me that these things called "newsgroups" exist. Appearantly, these "newsgroups" allow people to exchange "news", which according to CNN sources is a "code word" for "illegal activities", and is a new sweeping trend in the scary hacker underworld.
How do they know that? I mean how do they know what type of neutrinos are coming out of the sun since their detectors are on the earth?
What I took from the article was that the sun doesn't produce enough energy to create the other two particles, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos, only electron neutrinos. It would take the energy of a supernova or equivalent to produce the other two.
One thing that is very important to remember when you are surfing at work, is that most proxy servers (read: every one I've worked with) send everything from the client to the proxy back and forth in clear text. Even secure connections are clear text from you to the proxy, and then secure from the proxy to the internet server. So, even if you are using safeweb (don't know exactly what it does), if you are using a proxy, your requests will most likely be sent to the proxy in clear text. And, they'll probably be logged.
A better way to get around corporate monitoring of browsing habits is to convert the IP address of the site you want to visit into a decimal number. That should confuse your typical admin enough. To convert:
Get IP address (nslookup or www.dns411.com)
Take the octets of the IP address (A.B.C.D) and plug into the following formula A*256^3 + B*256^2 + C*256 + D.
There's a web site that does this too, but I don't remember it. Just remember, beware the proxy and the person that owns the logs. If he/she has time and a grudge against you, he/she can find all kinds of stuff.
This is very true. You need something that the students will be interested in. The local NSBE had an Engineer for a Day program, and I told them that I would run a room. I had mostly young highschool students, and 2.5 hours. We built a network (4 routers, two switches) and a web site. I had everything mapped out, and tried to give the kids all the info they needed, but make them put the info together to make the network work.
But to keep the class interesting, I brought my digital camera, so that we could put pics of students on the web site they built. And I brought in MP3's of the latest pop music, but they had to use the network we built to get to them. By the end of the class, we had a fully functional network, an interesting web site (pretty good for kids that had never done that before) and a room full of laptops blaring MP3's.
The kids enjoyed the MP3's and were supprised at how unhard setting up a network could be. The adults in the room had a good time too. And I got good contacts with the CEO of the company, so I was grinning.
All in all, be engaging, and make sure the kids have a good time. If you get an idea for what they like to do, run with it. Oh, and take apart hardware if possible. It's usually a crowd pleaser.
I work for one of the companies in the catagory of "Bottom Line: Is Fortune 500 ready to embrace Open Source?" . When talking with the CEO of my business (a sub business of the biG companE I work for), I asked him why do will still pay huge costs for MS products, when we could afford to bring a team in to get free applications working for the whole company, not just our sub business. The story I got from him went like this:
The parent company has a joint venture / partnership / whatever with MS. While we technically "pay" for MS products, so they can claim sales and revenue, MDF funds (don't ask me what they are) come from MS back to our company, and get applied to each sub business accordingly.
So, my take on the issue is, if they've got a deal with MS that sends money back somehow, don't expect much to change
Holy Jamoly! I can't run to the store quick enough
on
Capture MPEG From TiVo
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· Score: 5
Durning every discussion I've ever had about Tivo, I've always said I'll get one when I can pull the videos off for archive to DVD. I'm ready to put my money where my mouth has been for the last 18 months. If anyone is in Cincinnati, and you see a Silver Audi TT hauling tail, GET OUT OF THE WAY!
A big congradulations to all the people in the Tivo underground forum. They are true hackers and have done some really cool stuff to the little PPC linux box.
That reminds me of a place I worked. It was a software company that produced restaurant software. One of the biggest customers was Burger King. After rolling out the product to 500 stores, I worked in support. The Burger King employees would call in with software and hardware issues.
After calling in a ticket for a tech to go to a store that was having network issues, I got a screaming tech on the phone. He said that he wouldn't go back to that store, as he had already replaced the network cabling 3 times. Every time he went out, rats had chewed through the cables (and this was coaxial 10base2).
From the rollout, I saw what can happen to a computer in a hostile environment. Fun things like:
A film of grease 1/16" to 1/8" thick on all components.
A box cutter stuck in the floppy drive.
keyboards so covered in grime that you needed to wash your hands after using them (we actually installed plastic covers on the new keyboards).
keys that wouldn't return do to the inordinate amount of softdrinks spilled on them.
cabling scorched by frying equipment.
So, I can imagine that a computer that is exposed to germs rather than grease could build interesting things. I'll have to remember that the next time I take a consulting gig for the medical industry.
From looking at all the graphs in the article, the data collected looks close to the Poisson distribution. If I think back to statistics class, isn't that what naturally occurring data should look like?
What I got from the article was that the professor checked papers himself when the program gave a match. From the article:
The computer rarely stumbled upon six-word matches in papers that otherwise appeared to have been written independently. But almost every time it found a six-word match, it found long passages in common, up to cases where "virtually the entire paper is the same."
The CS department at Georgia Tech had something like this, but it compared across all sections of a course, IIRC. It checked variables, spacing, structure. I think it also graded automatically. Not very popular with the students, as I remember.
Will the Pay be like other unions?
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 1
I was watching a discovery channel special on auto-worker unions. It told the story of a Detroit autoworker that made about $85K for doing what was basically unskilled labor. I'm not putting down automakers, but if a union can get a person that basically is coin-operated (light goes on, employee pushes button, light goes off) a near six-figure salary, what can it do for IT workers. I equate the skill-level described above to a junior-level MCSE with little practical experience. From my best guess, the autoworker makes about $40K more than the MCSE. Will the pay scale be linear? Will someone with a near six-figure salary make it to $200K? If that's the outcome sign me up.
I see the point that people are making about developers needing to work overtime as releases come up and other similar situations, but what about operations people? I'd say that just being in operations, I average 50-60 hours / week, and I average one 90+ hour week ever other month. I'd be living PHAT if I had a union-style contract instead of being an "exempt" employee.
I worked for a small town ISP in the 95-96 time range, and here's what I figured out.
1) Get your finances straight first. The ISP I worked for made enough to cover costs, and a little bit of profit, but it never really made enough to repay the startup capital. I was making $7/hr in high school doing this. We only had a part-time non-tech manager for a while, and then they hired a guy for about $30,000/year to manage the business. We tech guys then asked for a raise, and were promptly told there was no budget for it. It created resentment for the manager quickly.
2) Know you're new archnemisis, the Telco. Being in a rural area, the telco probably won't have the equipment you need installed. They will want to charge you to get it installed. They will create artificially long delays. You may be dealing with an "engineer" that spends most of his/her days punching down lines at local residences. I'm not slamming Telco people by any means, I just want to let you know you're going to have to work to get what you want. If you don't know what you want, you could be in trouble.
3) Try to go with channelized T1's for your access. It may seem like individual dialup lines make upgrading easier, but it becomes a nightmare. We started with 16 Hayes modems in some sort of rack. Then, from 24-64 modems, we used Shiva modem racks (way, way, way too expensive). After we got to that point, we started buying USR Total Control racks. 2 Channelized T1's and 12 modem cards later, our users were very happy. You take out the extra D to A conversion in there, and it helps your line performance. It could make a big difference in a rural area with poor phone quality.
4) Like what you do. Do you enjoy this type of work? If you don't like long hours, sometimes unpleasant users (some are great, but some made me answer the phone with a different name), and tinkering with things to get them to work, don't do it.
5) Don't piss off your techies. If they are people that pass number 4, they probably don't need a lot to keep them happy. Let them use the office after hours to game, surf, research, whatever. Let them have LAN parties with their friends. The guy that owned the ISP I worked for was an old Army guy. He had a mentality that the highest ranking person was always right, and that everyone needed to do exactly what he said. That being said, he had no idea how to run an ISP. We would get into heated arguments about the way things should be run (technically, not financially). If you trust your techies enough to maintain your servers, listen to their input. Even if you don't do what they recommend, listening my help the situation.
That's about it. Reply or email if you want more specifics about my experience.
and are interested in creating visual art. Traditional methods of design may be limited to you, as you can't get feed back about the medium you are using. But with an algorithm, you can explicitly specify where you want pixels to be and what color you want them to be. There is also the mouse that lets blind people "see" graphics(I realize there is no color information transfered by the mouse). For someone with this type of disibility, this could be a major form of expression.
Or what about people with Lou Gherig's disease? The smartest man on the planet can only communicate by moving a stylus with his mouth. Some version of code is the only way he can communicate (imputs to a speech generator as code? maybe).
As far as fair use (the second point) is concerned, If MPAA says that they only liscense me to the shiny piece of plastic that a DVD comes on, then they should have to replace it for free for my lifetime. If the media degrades, or chips or gets a scratch from normal use, and I can't make a backup, then I want a new disc. Yeah, I'll see that one about the same time as the universe dies an entropy death
This follows other noteworthy networks from Disney
on
Tokyo.Disney.Net
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· Score: 2
I used to work for the software company that wrote the Point of Sale system for Disney World in Florida. I pretty much handled all the Disney calls on the weekend for about a year and a half, and I got to know the network setup pretty well. They were doing some interesting stuff.
To get a network connection out to a cart (that's what they called all the little stores all over the park), they would do just about anything. There were stores that had RF connections when cable couldn't be pulled to them. A routine call from one of those stores was, "Is the little dish next to the register plugged in? No? That's the problem." They built a new store on the opposite side of one of the lakes down there and ran fiber along the bottom of the lake for its network connection.
And if any of the Disney IS staff from Orlando read this, I want to say that they did a great job handeling the poor software the company I worked for wrote. They were some of the best people I dealt with at that job.
Check out the gallery and hall of fame at http://www.povray.org. The contests at http://www.irtc.org/ have still and animation examples. There is some truly amazing work at these two sites. As someone who actually raytraced all the frames for a 30 second 640x480 movie running at 30fps (back in 1995), I have the utmost respect for the artistic and technical talent possessed by the submitters of these works. If nothing else, it's something pretty to look at.
I don't think the Georgia Tech library is a "Federal Book depository," at least in this sense. If a Federal Book despository has to allow anyone access, then the Tech library isn't one. When I went there, you had to have an ID card to get in the library (at least most of the time, when the guard wasn't sleeping or talking to someone).
On a side note, I say good for Tech. When I was there, I started the IFC committee to get ethernet into the greek houses (it eventually went into other non-university houses as well). Tech has always had some cool network stuff going on, so good for them.
What I seem to remember from previous Slashdot articles, was that CPRM would have to have an OS and Applications that support it. The discussion from the guy on the committee (don't remember the name) seemed to say that it wouldn't really affect one that ran linux. So you if still want your winXX desktop, run it under VMWare
Aside from insanely ridiculous performance needs (like a database that needs all the resources of a fully loaded E10K), one of the selling points (especially to the PHB crowd) is the fact that you can buy a nice (READ pay out your @$$) 24 X 7 X365 support contract from Oracle. When you have very expensive SLA's (like loosing a month's worth of revenue from being over by an hour), being able to call a dedicated support team and get answers (don't know if it actually happens, but that's the theory) quickly can be worth the huge licenses and support fees. If you're competent, and you have some leeway on being able to figure out a problem, I say go for one of the open source-ers, if it meets your needs. But if you want a good, responsive backup, that's one of the reasons the big boys are there.
It's already in development. BitHive is a P2P client that uses IRC networks for listings. It is the partly the work of cr0bar, who brought us the Matrix bastardization at detonate.net
Did anyone ever read the Bastard Operator From Hell that was very close to this? The story went along the lines of the BOFH convincing his boss to buy a huge quantity of CAT5 cable and store it on the roof. All the data would be looping around the network on the CAT5 cable on the roof. I just about spit Mountain Dew all over the screen when I made the connection.
I've worked with a few different sets of filtering software (SmartFilter, SurfControl to name the two most recent). So far, I haven't seen any that block the "IP address to Decimal" representation of a site. So, for all the kiddies (and people with abusive filtering software at work), I'll post this.
If you know the ip address of the site your are going to, but it's blocked try this.
Get IP address A.B.C.D (you can try dns411 or just nslookup)
Compute this formula A*256^3 + B*256^2 + C*256 + D. For slashdot, this would be 64 * 256^3 + 28 * 256^2 + 67*256 + 48 = 1075594032
Slashdot Mirror
A common problem was that the heads on the hard drive would get stuck, and the machine would cease to operate. The standard operating procedure to remedy this was told to me as:
If that didn't work, secondary protocol was to remove the hard drive from the machine, place it on the desk, and hit it three or four times with the blunt end of a screwdriver.
According to the techs, this worked about 90% of the time.
During my trip to Mars, I also will volunteer to have an encounter with Sil (Natasha Henstridge) from Species, but only if I make it home to be with my wife (Charlize Theron), as indicated by The Astronaut's Wife
Keanu will be allowed to join the mission, but will end up being sucked into space trying to shout "noooooo" as the pressureless environment causes him to explode.
Ask yourself, what if it is a whale (as other posters pointed out) and a pick axe. Pick axes were used in the "olden days" for mining. What, if in some sick inside joke, their logo is indicating they are mining for whales, i.e. investors that have a lot of money that will be easily parted with.
my .02 sacagaweas
This reminds me of two famous (and nearly identical) quotes:
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Letter to Josiah Quincy, Sept. 11, 1773.
Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one. -- President Thomas Jefferson. 1743-1826
Well, it seems that Attorney General John Ashcroft doesn't agree with two of America's great founding fathers. He was quoted as saying, "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists."
I'm sorry John, but here, you are the terrorist. Don't persuade me or anyone else to give up my freedoms to make your job easier under the guise of making the world a safer place. To calmly allow you to take my rights is the first step onto a slippery slope that I don't even want to know the results of. I won't quit using IRC, I won't give up my private keys, and I will continue to protect my right to say and hear what I'm constitutionally allowed to. If you want to take my rights, try to change the first amendment. Until then, in the spirit of Monty Python's The Life of Brian(I know they're not American, but it's the best quote I could think of), "piss off!"
Other places hackers hang out:
- malls
- coffee shops
- schools
CNN might want to investigate these places as well. Inside sources from CNN also tell me that these things called "newsgroups" exist. Appearantly, these "newsgroups" allow people to exchange "news", which according to CNN sources is a "code word" for "illegal activities", and is a new sweeping trend in the scary hacker underworld.Also, staring at the sun can cause blindness.
What I took from the article was that the sun doesn't produce enough energy to create the other two particles, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos, only electron neutrinos. It would take the energy of a supernova or equivalent to produce the other two.
A better way to get around corporate monitoring of browsing habits is to convert the IP address of the site you want to visit into a decimal number. That should confuse your typical admin enough. To convert:
- Get IP address (nslookup or www.dns411.com)
- Take the octets of the IP address (A.B.C.D) and plug into the following formula A*256^3 + B*256^2 + C*256 + D.
- Go to http://resultingdecimalnumber/
For www.safeweb.com it would be:There's a web site that does this too, but I don't remember it. Just remember, beware the proxy and the person that owns the logs. If he/she has time and a grudge against you, he/she can find all kinds of stuff.
Time to go to the store and get reflective foil and big flourescent lights.
But to keep the class interesting, I brought my digital camera, so that we could put pics of students on the web site they built. And I brought in MP3's of the latest pop music, but they had to use the network we built to get to them. By the end of the class, we had a fully functional network, an interesting web site (pretty good for kids that had never done that before) and a room full of laptops blaring MP3's.
The kids enjoyed the MP3's and were supprised at how unhard setting up a network could be. The adults in the room had a good time too. And I got good contacts with the CEO of the company, so I was grinning.
All in all, be engaging, and make sure the kids have a good time. If you get an idea for what they like to do, run with it. Oh, and take apart hardware if possible. It's usually a crowd pleaser.
The parent company has a joint venture / partnership / whatever with MS. While we technically "pay" for MS products, so they can claim sales and revenue, MDF funds (don't ask me what they are) come from MS back to our company, and get applied to each sub business accordingly.
So, my take on the issue is, if they've got a deal with MS that sends money back somehow, don't expect much to change
A big congradulations to all the people in the Tivo underground forum. They are true hackers and have done some really cool stuff to the little PPC linux box.
After calling in a ticket for a tech to go to a store that was having network issues, I got a screaming tech on the phone. He said that he wouldn't go back to that store, as he had already replaced the network cabling 3 times. Every time he went out, rats had chewed through the cables (and this was coaxial 10base2).
From the rollout, I saw what can happen to a computer in a hostile environment. Fun things like:
- A film of grease 1/16" to 1/8" thick on all components.
- A box cutter stuck in the floppy drive.
- keyboards so covered in grime that you needed to wash your hands after using them (we actually installed plastic covers on the new keyboards).
- keys that wouldn't return do to the inordinate amount of softdrinks spilled on them.
- cabling scorched by frying equipment.
So, I can imagine that a computer that is exposed to germs rather than grease could build interesting things. I'll have to remember that the next time I take a consulting gig for the medical industry.The computer rarely stumbled upon six-word matches in papers that otherwise appeared to have been written independently. But almost every time it found a six-word match, it found long passages in common, up to cases where "virtually the entire paper is the same."
The CS department at Georgia Tech had something like this, but it compared across all sections of a course, IIRC. It checked variables, spacing, structure. I think it also graded automatically. Not very popular with the students, as I remember.
I see the point that people are making about developers needing to work overtime as releases come up and other similar situations, but what about operations people? I'd say that just being in operations, I average 50-60 hours / week, and I average one 90+ hour week ever other month. I'd be living PHAT if I had a union-style contract instead of being an "exempt" employee.
1) Get your finances straight first. The ISP I worked for made enough to cover costs, and a little bit of profit, but it never really made enough to repay the startup capital. I was making $7/hr in high school doing this. We only had a part-time non-tech manager for a while, and then they hired a guy for about $30,000/year to manage the business. We tech guys then asked for a raise, and were promptly told there was no budget for it. It created resentment for the manager quickly.
2) Know you're new archnemisis, the Telco. Being in a rural area, the telco probably won't have the equipment you need installed. They will want to charge you to get it installed. They will create artificially long delays. You may be dealing with an "engineer" that spends most of his/her days punching down lines at local residences. I'm not slamming Telco people by any means, I just want to let you know you're going to have to work to get what you want. If you don't know what you want, you could be in trouble.
3) Try to go with channelized T1's for your access. It may seem like individual dialup lines make upgrading easier, but it becomes a nightmare. We started with 16 Hayes modems in some sort of rack. Then, from 24-64 modems, we used Shiva modem racks (way, way, way too expensive). After we got to that point, we started buying USR Total Control racks. 2 Channelized T1's and 12 modem cards later, our users were very happy. You take out the extra D to A conversion in there, and it helps your line performance. It could make a big difference in a rural area with poor phone quality.
4) Like what you do. Do you enjoy this type of work? If you don't like long hours, sometimes unpleasant users (some are great, but some made me answer the phone with a different name), and tinkering with things to get them to work, don't do it.
5) Don't piss off your techies. If they are people that pass number 4, they probably don't need a lot to keep them happy. Let them use the office after hours to game, surf, research, whatever. Let them have LAN parties with their friends. The guy that owned the ISP I worked for was an old Army guy. He had a mentality that the highest ranking person was always right, and that everyone needed to do exactly what he said. That being said, he had no idea how to run an ISP. We would get into heated arguments about the way things should be run (technically, not financially). If you trust your techies enough to maintain your servers, listen to their input. Even if you don't do what they recommend, listening my help the situation.
That's about it. Reply or email if you want more specifics about my experience.
Or what about people with Lou Gherig's disease? The smartest man on the planet can only communicate by moving a stylus with his mouth. Some version of code is the only way he can communicate (imputs to a speech generator as code? maybe).
As far as fair use (the second point) is concerned, If MPAA says that they only liscense me to the shiny piece of plastic that a DVD comes on, then they should have to replace it for free for my lifetime. If the media degrades, or chips or gets a scratch from normal use, and I can't make a backup, then I want a new disc. Yeah, I'll see that one about the same time as the universe dies an entropy death
To get a network connection out to a cart (that's what they called all the little stores all over the park), they would do just about anything. There were stores that had RF connections when cable couldn't be pulled to them. A routine call from one of those stores was, "Is the little dish next to the register plugged in? No? That's the problem." They built a new store on the opposite side of one of the lakes down there and ran fiber along the bottom of the lake for its network connection.
And if any of the Disney IS staff from Orlando read this, I want to say that they did a great job handeling the poor software the company I worked for wrote. They were some of the best people I dealt with at that job.
On a side note, I say good for Tech. When I was there, I started the IFC committee to get ethernet into the greek houses (it eventually went into other non-university houses as well). Tech has always had some cool network stuff going on, so good for them.
A beta version of the client is expected soon.
If you know the ip address of the site your are going to, but it's blocked try this.
Not the greatest trick in the world, but won't someone please think of the children.