This happened when I was back in college. It wasn't my UPS (heck, it wasn't even my dorm), but I knew several of the people involved. Now, whenever I smell something funny around my computer, I'm always careful to check it out. Nothing like a lead-acid battery fire to really ruin your day...
So I've been waiting for Apple to cough up a 802.11g version of their airport, since I knew it was coming. And my prayers were, uh, half-answered. Apple released a new base station that supports 802.11g, now known as "Airport Extreme" (which looks like it rocks, and is only $199), but on the page for the airport cards themselves, there was one little disclaimer:
* Requires AirPort Extreme ready system. AirPort Extreme ready systems are those with mini-PCI support form factor. AirPort Extreme cards cannot be used in older AirPort card bays (PCMCIA form factor slot).
DAMMIT! So my "ancient" iBook won't be able to use these cards, since it only has the PCMCIA slot. I guess I'll just have to upgrade to a 17" powerbook... =)
Would anyone really be worse off if Microsoft took the "my" off of "My Computer", "My Documents", etc? I already *know* that they're mine! Do people really like their computers to talk down to them like that?
You've never worked in tech support before, have you? I know you're being funny, but there's actually a kernel of reality in the "My" naming scheme. Almost all the users I've spoken to over the phone refer to everything on the computer as "theirs". This includes applications ("My Netscape"), folders ("My Documents"), and even shell windows ("My shell.example.com").
I don't really know which came first, the users calling things "my" or Microsoft, but it's actually a pretty common thing for novices.
Call me old-fashioned, but I consider 5MB to be plenty for a single e-mail message size. While there are good exceptions to this rule, I'll list the arguments in favor of a "small" max message size:
Quotas. If you have a quota on mailbox/home dir size, you're just asking for trouble by allowing huge attachments.
Over-reliance on e-mail. Even if you allow large attachments, it doesn't mean everyone else will. My last company allowed 50MB attachments. While we could (and did) get just about everything, the sales team assumed it was OK to fire off 24MB bloated word docs to customers, whose mail servers would promptly reject them. Usually, this happened at some Very Important(tm) time, so trying to explain the finer points of e-mail attachments wasn't a good idea.
Over-reliance on dumb file formats. Word attachments (especially with pictures) rapidly bloat past the 8MB mark. Consider a different format for exchanging docs, like PDF. It still looks right, and it's much smaller. My 100+ page thesis, with pictures, is ~2MB in PDF. 5MB is a lot more room than people think it is.
If you're sending a lot of pictures, you really should put them up on a web page; that's what the web is for. If you must send them over e-mail, just split them up into chunks and fire them off that way.
Again, some of these points means that you need to make a public webserver available for users to post things on. I would recommend a CGI that posts content and returns a key to that content (MD5 hash, perhaps). Only with the key can the user get the content. That way, your staff can upload anything of any size, and then e-mail the MD5 key to other people to let them download it. Reasonable security and relative ease. You could even have users include an expiration date so you can auto-delete stale uploads.
Oh, what the hell, I'm feeling charitable today.
(800) 555-1212
People might suspect that one because of the 555 prefix. If you want to have some fun with a legit number, use this one:
808-983-3211
It's in the Hawaii area code, which works well if you live here (or if you want to pretend that you live here...). Best of all, if people call it, they can never complain that you won't even give them the time of day. =)
Re:revrdist/Assimilator
on
Mac OS in a Lab
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Amen to revdist. I administered the mac labs at my college in the pre-osx days, and I used revrdist to do so (about 60 machines). We looked into netbooting, but there's a fair amount of net traffic for that, so the net guys said no. revrdist is also a lot of traffic, but only during disting. If you set the boxes to boot early in the morning, the dist happens when nobody's around and the network isn't clogged.
It is tricky to set up (uses a weird flag-based config file), but once you've got it tweaked right, administration is a breeze. Just burn a CD with a bootable system folder and revrdist on it and you can boot a hosed machine off the cd, copy the sys folder over, reboot, and the machine will fix itself.
We looked into using a "lockdown" program to prevent abuse of the machines, but decided that people who want to get around it will. revrdist helps lower the blood pressure by ensuring that fixing any software problem takes 5 minutes of your time, at most. You stop caring if people hose the machines because it takes much longer for them to wreck 'em than it does for you to fix 'em.
As a bonus, installing new apps on the machines is easy -- just update the server, set the macs to reboot every morning at 4am (energy saver control panel), and you're good to go!
It's been a while since I submitted this article, so I'll bring you guys up to speed on my other attempts:
While I appreciate the two-partition suggestions, they're not quite what I'm looking for, as I don't want to split the disk in half for the two different machines. The "transfer partition" (a small partition in HFS that both machines can read) idea is a good one, but when I get to that point it's easier to just network the machines together and copy the files rather than waste the disk space.
On that front, I've tried NFS and Samba between the linux box and the ibook, without much success. I suspect it may have to do with large file support on the linux side.
The NFS mount works okay, but then randomly craps out (I get read errors) on large files. I've tried tuning the NFS connection params (different version numbers, TCP/UDP, buffer sizes) without much luck.
With Samba, I'm smacking into the large file size limit on linux. I wanted to try an SMB mount from the linux to the ibook. The ibook seems to be exporting the full sizes on the files, but the linux size can't see files over 2GB. I've recompiled Samba on both, but that didn't help. Therefore, I think I need to patch my kernel for large file support in SMBfs and try again.
I just bought Jaguar, so I'm hoping that I might get a little help in the new release. Also, I haven't tried AFS yet... =)
While this doesn't quite fit the bill for what you want, it's not a bad calculator. The TI-34 is solar powered, small, light, and doesn't try to do anything fancy. It was the "recommended" calculator at my high school, and it worked great all the way through college.
Mine actually just died recently, and so I'm looking for a replacement. Unfortunately, TI discontinued this little gem and replaced it with a 2-line dot-matrix display thing. Ugh!! So now, like you, I'm looking for a nice simple calculator. If the TI-34 looks good to you, I'm sure you could find a used one (or maybe even a new one -- they haven't been discontinued for too long).
I've set the "Normal" stylesheet to 10 point Courier on 24 pt leading and turned off all the toolbars . . . The only reason I'm using Word is because you can import a styled Word document into InDesign and let InDesign's stylesheet override the formatting in the Word document.
Have you considered LaTeX? It lets you write your docs in a simple text editor (which is pretty much what you've turned Word into) and then apply the correct formatting, pagination, endnotes, citations, fonts, figures, and layout later.
It works great in Mac OS X, and has a few good Mac OS-native frontends. It produces PS or PDF, and doesn't cost a dime! The markup language takes a little getting used to, but there are some excellent books available, or you can use a WYSIWYG front-end.
Just viewing the site launched endless popup ad windows some of which resized themselves to fill the whole screen, popped more windows when you closed the old ones, etc.
Really? I have cookies turned off, and popup protections on in Mozilla. To top it all off, I'm running adzap under my squid proxy, so I didn't see a single popup (or any of the many banner ads they intended me to see).
It's too bad, really. Some of them sounded kinda interesting...;-)
Let me start by saying that I had an overwhelmingly positive college experience. I knew I was a computer geek before I went, and I figured I'd major in CS and become a programmer.
I went to a small liberal arts college with a great CS program. But also important was the fact that there was a student-run web group that had just gotten off the ground (this was 1996, mind you). It was a student club -- none of us were paid for the work that we did, but we maintained several Linux machines for students to serve web pages from (at this time, the college did not provide web space for students, and most students could not set up their own web servers.
I learned a heck of a lot from that club, both from trying things out on my own, but also from being around other people who knew more/different things than I did. I have since applied that knowledge in sysadmin and programming jobs.
All this would seem to indicate that you don't really need classes to get good at being a sysadmin. However, I found classes helpful (and relevant). You'll need to be a good programmer to be a good sysadmin (at least on Unix, anyway -- can't speak to Windows since I don't use it). More importantly, many employers want to see a college degree. It's not 1999 anymore, and you can't just wander into a startup and demand a job because you know a little bash scripting
College is practically a prerequisite for most high-paying jobs now, and even when the economy wasn't soft college was considered important by many employers (at least, all the ones I interviewed with).
So, my feeling is that college is both important to employers, and also a great opportunity to grow and learn from other people like yourself. Yes, it costs money (sometimes a lot of money), but the experience is well worth it. Plus, if you can find a more sysadmin-related group at your school (as I did), the experience can be much more valuable than any certification course you can take. Even if there's no ad-hoc group, you could always look for employment in the college itself (running a public lab, for instance), which both looks good on the resume and gives you valuable experience.
DVD-R and DVD-RW can be played in set-top boxes, though not all of the older boxes will play home-burned DVDs. For a good matrix of what media play in which drives, check:
I don't know how accurate this is, but radio in Boston is saying that there are "unsubstantiated" reports that one or both of the planes were hijacked. They say the first plane might have been an American Airlines passenger plane.
Reception is spotty, but that's what I'm getting here.
Yup. Telarc has been doing this for years (recordings of cannons for the 1812, gunshots for Round Up, and other various artilliary explosions for some other song I can't remember). They put warnings all over those suckers about the flawless digital quality of their recordings. They're so flawless, they might just trash your system!
Of course, for them it's probably just as much about selling their product as it is about legal risk... I'm sure the audiophiles out there love to "push the limits" of their stereo to see what they can blow out.
First of all, I don't want to see any quotes about jeopardizing "our fiscal well-being" from people who support a 1.9 trillion tax cut.
Imagine if corporations were allowed to have any standards they wanted: weights, times, measures. I'll give you a hint: think "Web Browser Incompatibilities". Now imagine if that were the situation with real products...
I bought this "Netscape Grade A Fancy Ketchup", but it turned out to be a green gelantinous substance made entirely from Coal Tar extract. So I bought some of the store brand "Microsoft.Ketchup," which was nice and red, but turned out to be made from beets and water...
Thixotropic substances aside, your remark that the NSA should do our crypto standards for us makes me think that you must work for the NSA. According to Applied Cryptography, the NSA has stated (off the record, of course) that if it had known that the NBS (NIST) was going to make the algorithm public, it wouldn't have allowed DES to become a standard. So unless you like all of your crypto implemented in hardware on tampler-proof chips, I suggest you support your friendly National Standards Committee.
If they don't want me to receive the signal, don't broadcast it into my yard. PERIOD.
You wouldn't care if I set up a listening post to hear any wireless stuff going on in your house, right?
There's a big difference between snooping and listening. What the satellite companies do is send *everybody* the content. It's not like you're intercepting it; it's being beamed straight into your backyard.
Imagine if you lived between two neighbors. Every day, each neighbor would go to his fence that borders on your property and shout to the other one over your backyard. Are you at fault if you listen to these conversations? I don't think so. If they want to shout right over your head, then they should deal with the fact that you might actually hear them.
Hughes should be allowed to encrypt the signal to protect it. In this sense, what Hughes sells is a decryption service: they provide the broadcast to everyone for free, but only allow people who pay to have the keys.
If the pirates can decrypt the signal, power to them; they've managed to do the work of decrypting by themselves for free. Of course, if Hughes can create a piece of dynamic code that thwarts them, power to THEM.
Bush has officially been in office for 3 days. It takes longer then that for it to become clear what he is really about.
But during those three days he's already reinstated the global "gag rule" on abortion and declared Jan 21 as a "national day of thanksgiving and prayer".
To quote the guy on the news last night (sorry, don't know his name): "Bush calls himself a uniter, not a divider, and then runs straight out and takes on the biggest hot-button issue in American politics: abortion."
He may have only been in for a few days, but he's making a hell of a first impression...
If one-click is so cool, why not ride the wave of the future... One-sentence shopping!
A method using speech-recognition technology to authorize a transaction. When a user wishes to purchase an item displayed on any computer system, they may initiate the purchase through verbal a confirmation such as "Computer, purchase this item." The system will then purchase the item using pre-stored credential information. This stored information may be held by the retailer or by the client, and will be used only when verbal confirmation has been provided. This system prevents the user from having to physically interact with the computer to make a purchase, making computer transactions more like human agreements.
Why click when you can talk? And since digital signatures are now binding, if voice recognition is good enough, this beats using a password.
Uhg. I can't believe I came up with that...
Slashdot Mirror
Just to add to the list of horror stories that are piling up here:
The Great UPS Fire of Fitch
This happened when I was back in college. It wasn't my UPS (heck, it wasn't even my dorm), but I knew several of the people involved. Now, whenever I smell something funny around my computer, I'm always careful to check it out. Nothing like a lead-acid battery fire to really ruin your day...
So I've been waiting for Apple to cough up a 802.11g version of their airport, since I knew it was coming. And my prayers were, uh, half-answered. Apple released a new base station that supports 802.11g, now known as "Airport Extreme" (which looks like it rocks, and is only $199), but on the page for the airport cards themselves, there was one little disclaimer:
DAMMIT! So my "ancient" iBook won't be able to use these cards, since it only has the PCMCIA slot. I guess I'll just have to upgrade to a 17" powerbook... =)
Why, if I had a rubber hose, I'd...
Well, you get the idea. =)
And I was *really* counting on that bonus to pay for my new in-ground pool!
Would anyone really be worse off if Microsoft took the "my" off of "My Computer", "My Documents", etc? I already *know* that they're mine! Do people really like their computers to talk down to them like that?
You've never worked in tech support before, have you? I know you're being funny, but there's actually a kernel of reality in the "My" naming scheme. Almost all the users I've spoken to over the phone refer to everything on the computer as "theirs". This includes applications ("My Netscape"), folders ("My Documents"), and even shell windows ("My shell.example.com").
I don't really know which came first, the users calling things "my" or Microsoft, but it's actually a pretty common thing for novices.
Call me old-fashioned, but I consider 5MB to be plenty for a single e-mail message size. While there are good exceptions to this rule, I'll list the arguments in favor of a "small" max message size:
Again, some of these points means that you need to make a public webserver available for users to post things on. I would recommend a CGI that posts content and returns a key to that content (MD5 hash, perhaps). Only with the key can the user get the content. That way, your staff can upload anything of any size, and then e-mail the MD5 key to other people to let them download it. Reasonable security and relative ease. You could even have users include an expiration date so you can auto-delete stale uploads.
Oh, what the hell, I'm feeling charitable today.
(800) 555-1212
People might suspect that one because of the 555 prefix. If you want to have some fun with a legit number, use this one:
808-983-3211
It's in the Hawaii area code, which works well if you live here (or if you want to pretend that you live here...). Best of all, if people call it, they can never complain that you won't even give them the time of day. =)
Amen to revdist. I administered the mac labs at my college in the pre-osx days, and I used revrdist to do so (about 60 machines). We looked into netbooting, but there's a fair amount of net traffic for that, so the net guys said no. revrdist is also a lot of traffic, but only during disting. If you set the boxes to boot early in the morning, the dist happens when nobody's around and the network isn't clogged.
It is tricky to set up (uses a weird flag-based config file), but once you've got it tweaked right, administration is a breeze. Just burn a CD with a bootable system folder and revrdist on it and you can boot a hosed machine off the cd, copy the sys folder over, reboot, and the machine will fix itself.
We looked into using a "lockdown" program to prevent abuse of the machines, but decided that people who want to get around it will. revrdist helps lower the blood pressure by ensuring that fixing any software problem takes 5 minutes of your time, at most. You stop caring if people hose the machines because it takes much longer for them to wreck 'em than it does for you to fix 'em.
As a bonus, installing new apps on the machines is easy -- just update the server, set the macs to reboot every morning at 4am (energy saver control panel), and you're good to go!
It's been a while since I submitted this article, so I'll bring you guys up to speed on my other attempts:
While I appreciate the two-partition suggestions, they're not quite what I'm looking for, as I don't want to split the disk in half for the two different machines. The "transfer partition" (a small partition in HFS that both machines can read) idea is a good one, but when I get to that point it's easier to just network the machines together and copy the files rather than waste the disk space.
On that front, I've tried NFS and Samba between the linux box and the ibook, without much success. I suspect it may have to do with large file support on the linux side.
The NFS mount works okay, but then randomly craps out (I get read errors) on large files. I've tried tuning the NFS connection params (different version numbers, TCP/UDP, buffer sizes) without much luck.
With Samba, I'm smacking into the large file size limit on linux. I wanted to try an SMB mount from the linux to the ibook. The ibook seems to be exporting the full sizes on the files, but the linux size can't see files over 2GB. I've recompiled Samba on both, but that didn't help. Therefore, I think I need to patch my kernel for large file support in SMBfs and try again.
I just bought Jaguar, so I'm hoping that I might get a little help in the new release. Also, I haven't tried AFS yet... =)
While this doesn't quite fit the bill for what you want, it's not a bad calculator. The TI-34 is solar powered, small, light, and doesn't try to do anything fancy. It was the "recommended" calculator at my high school, and it worked great all the way through college.
Mine actually just died recently, and so I'm looking for a replacement. Unfortunately, TI discontinued this little gem and replaced it with a 2-line dot-matrix display thing. Ugh!! So now, like you, I'm looking for a nice simple calculator. If the TI-34 looks good to you, I'm sure you could find a used one (or maybe even a new one -- they haven't been discontinued for too long).
I've set the "Normal" stylesheet to 10 point Courier on 24 pt leading and turned off all the toolbars . . . The only reason I'm using Word is because you can import a styled Word document into InDesign and let InDesign's stylesheet override the formatting in the Word document.
Have you considered LaTeX? It lets you write your docs in a simple text editor (which is pretty much what you've turned Word into) and then apply the correct formatting, pagination, endnotes, citations, fonts, figures, and layout later.
It works great in Mac OS X, and has a few good Mac OS-native frontends. It produces PS or PDF, and doesn't cost a dime! The markup language takes a little getting used to, but there are some excellent books available, or you can use a WYSIWYG front-end.
Virtual desktops, now -that- would be progress for OS/X - I'd like to see -that- problem addressed
How 'bout:
Now focus-follows-mouse for MacOS X, that would be something to shout about... =)
Just viewing the site launched endless popup ad windows some of which resized themselves to fill the whole screen, popped more windows when you closed the old ones, etc.
Really? I have cookies turned off, and popup protections on in Mozilla. To top it all off, I'm running adzap under my squid proxy, so I didn't see a single popup (or any of the many banner ads they intended me to see).
It's too bad, really. Some of them sounded kinda interesting... ;-)
Let me start by saying that I had an overwhelmingly positive college experience. I knew I was a computer geek before I went, and I figured I'd major in CS and become a programmer.
I went to a small liberal arts college with a great CS program. But also important was the fact that there was a student-run web group that had just gotten off the ground (this was 1996, mind you). It was a student club -- none of us were paid for the work that we did, but we maintained several Linux machines for students to serve web pages from (at this time, the college did not provide web space for students, and most students could not set up their own web servers.
I learned a heck of a lot from that club, both from trying things out on my own, but also from being around other people who knew more/different things than I did. I have since applied that knowledge in sysadmin and programming jobs.
All this would seem to indicate that you don't really need classes to get good at being a sysadmin. However, I found classes helpful (and relevant). You'll need to be a good programmer to be a good sysadmin (at least on Unix, anyway -- can't speak to Windows since I don't use it). More importantly, many employers want to see a college degree. It's not 1999 anymore, and you can't just wander into a startup and demand a job because you know a little bash scripting
College is practically a prerequisite for most high-paying jobs now, and even when the economy wasn't soft college was considered important by many employers (at least, all the ones I interviewed with).
So, my feeling is that college is both important to employers, and also a great opportunity to grow and learn from other people like yourself. Yes, it costs money (sometimes a lot of money), but the experience is well worth it. Plus, if you can find a more sysadmin-related group at your school (as I did), the experience can be much more valuable than any certification course you can take. Even if there's no ad-hoc group, you could always look for employment in the college itself (running a public lab, for instance), which both looks good on the resume and gives you valuable experience.
At sufficiently low pressure, you can boil water at room temperature. I don't think you'd want to open your software in a vacuum chamber, though...
DVD-R and DVD-RW can be played in set-top boxes, though not all of the older boxes will play home-burned DVDs. For a good matrix of what media play in which drives, check:
t .shtml
http://www.proh.com/DVD_and_CD_compatibility_char
Gotta love shortwave radio...
I don't know how accurate this is, but radio in Boston is saying that there are "unsubstantiated" reports that one or both of the planes were hijacked. They say the first plane might have been an American Airlines passenger plane.
Reception is spotty, but that's what I'm getting here.
Of course, for them it's probably just as much about selling their product as it is about legal risk... I'm sure the audiophiles out there love to "push the limits" of their stereo to see what they can blow out.
Imagine if corporations were allowed to have any standards they wanted: weights, times, measures. I'll give you a hint: think "Web Browser Incompatibilities". Now imagine if that were the situation with real products...
I bought this "Netscape Grade A Fancy Ketchup", but it turned out to be a green gelantinous substance made entirely from Coal Tar extract. So I bought some of the store brand "Microsoft .Ketchup," which was nice and red, but turned out to be made from beets and water...
Thixotropic substances aside, your remark that the NSA should do our crypto standards for us makes me think that you must work for the NSA. According to Applied Cryptography, the NSA has stated (off the record, of course) that if it had known that the NBS (NIST) was going to make the algorithm public, it wouldn't have allowed DES to become a standard. So unless you like all of your crypto implemented in hardware on tampler-proof chips, I suggest you support your friendly National Standards Committee.
If they don't want me to receive the signal, don't broadcast it into my yard. PERIOD.
You wouldn't care if I set up a listening post to hear any wireless stuff going on in your house, right?
There's a big difference between snooping and listening. What the satellite companies do is send *everybody* the content. It's not like you're intercepting it; it's being beamed straight into your backyard.
Imagine if you lived between two neighbors. Every day, each neighbor would go to his fence that borders on your property and shout to the other one over your backyard. Are you at fault if you listen to these conversations? I don't think so. If they want to shout right over your head, then they should deal with the fact that you might actually hear them.
Hughes should be allowed to encrypt the signal to protect it. In this sense, what Hughes sells is a decryption service: they provide the broadcast to everyone for free, but only allow people who pay to have the keys.
If the pirates can decrypt the signal, power to them; they've managed to do the work of decrypting by themselves for free. Of course, if Hughes can create a piece of dynamic code that thwarts them, power to THEM.
Bush has officially been in office for 3 days. It takes longer then that for it to become clear what he is really about.
But during those three days he's already reinstated the global "gag rule" on abortion and declared Jan 21 as a "national day of thanksgiving and prayer".
To quote the guy on the news last night (sorry, don't know his name): "Bush calls himself a uniter, not a divider, and then runs straight out and takes on the biggest hot-button issue in American politics: abortion."
He may have only been in for a few days, but he's making a hell of a first impression...