I loved SG1. I liked SGA. I own the complete DVD sets for both series and the various movies (Continuum, etc). I absolutely hated SGU halfway through the very first episode. Decided I was being too harsh so struggled through two more episodes before giving up entirely.
TV executives are morons. MTV doesn't play music, and SciFi doesn't do science fiction. It's appropriate that they've changed their name to Syphilis.
Fuel costs are the major factor with these products. The cost to produce eggs has gone down. The cost to get it from the chicken farm in the middle of no where to the big city has gone up dramatically. Too many people think we bitch about higher fuel costs because we want to drive our gas-guzzling car around town for fun. No, we want to be able to afford food and other products.
I don't have all that much computer equipment. Just five 1U servers, a 2U server, my old machine that was replaced by by new machine, my laptop, a few switches and routers, a butt-load of network cables, a bunch of spare power cables, a couple of UPSes, and 170 SCSI drives (73G, 15K RPM).
Here's a good reason. Was going on a three day weekend holiday with the family. We had accidentally overdrawn the account by about $10 on Thursday. On Friday the payroll was automatically deposited. On Friday evening, all packed up and heading to the mountains we stop at the ATM to get some cash for the trip. Nope. They automatically lock your card if you are overdrawn and do NOT unlock it even after you fix that problem until you call them up. Except you can't call them up after hours, they don't have a 24 hour customer service line. And because they are a credit union, you can't call them on Saturday, either. We could not unlock the ATM card until Tuesday morning, so they completely ruined our entire holiday over a $10 overdraft that was immediately fixed. F*ck credit unions.
I did an experiment where I ran all email through a spell checker and graphed the results. I was hoping it would help in improving filters. There are too many people on the internet who can't or won't spell properly, resulting in genuine email having roughly the same percentage of spelling errors as spam. I expect similar results with grammar.
What I noticed when I evaluated osCommerce and few other ecommerce packages is the people who developed the package didn't have even a small understanding of how to use style sheets. This was a few years ago, so maybe things have improved since then.
I don't think there is a country in the world that works harder at self-flagellation than the Germans - nor is there any country in the world that is expected to self-flagellate that hard.
These days Israel is expected to do exactly that. They just won't play along with the UN's bullshit.
I kind of miss the crazy hotties that used to pervade the network sales arena. I won't even name the worst offenders, although the worst started with the word cable. They would go to job fairs and hire the hottest birds, put them in the shortest shirts and low cut blouses, usually white with black push-up bras - and send them in to sell you switches.
If accessibility is a major concern, you have at least one blind person on your staff that must approve the layout. I worked with a blind DBA for a year and had the luxury of having him critique a website of mine for accessibility and implemented all his recommendations. The changes weren't all that difficult since I don't use evil crap like flash in the first place.
I took typing in my freshman year of high school. I was planning ahead and figured it would be a useful skill in college. The class was taught on old manual typewriters. To this day I am very rough on computer keyboards because of the pressure I had to use on those old keyboards.
It was the single most useful class of my entire four years of high school.
I'm so glad the article didn't link to the psp developer's website since I am the system administrator for it and there was no warning this story would make it to slashdot.
The ability to map complex relationships. I don't want 50 alerts that I can't reach host X, host Y, etc. I want one alert that I can't reach router A. Even better, I want to map things so that I can say "end user application XYZ is not accessible in Kansas due to X being down".
When you have your parent/child relationships and your dependencies set up properly, Nagios does this very well. A properly configured Nagios system will alert you only for that switch that died, not for the 200 services behind that switch that you can't reach.
I want my monitoring solution to understand HA and service degredation. I want programmable rules about what happens when X is down or Y is down.
There's a 'cluster" plugin for nagios available, but I consider it a hack for something that should be inherently supported.
I want many options for escalation. If X doesn't acknowledge, try Y after 15 mins, etc.
Nagios could be improved here. I can set it up to fire off a script when a hard failure is detected and do something different, e.g. HUP apache, but there isn't a way to directly configure alternative test options.
I don't ever, ever want a pager to explode or be flooded. A problem should be noticed once and tracked. There should be no pager blizzards.
You can configure Nagios for how many times you want an alert to fire.
Of course, I don't want this thing relying on my mail system for paging because, of course, my mail system could go down. An ability to dial out if the mail system is down would be nice.
Supported in Nagios.
I want agents, hooks, interfaces, third-party add-ons, and every possible way of tying something into the monitoring system. I don't want dumb limitations like "you can only get an exit code from the OS and it acts on that" or something. For big monitoring, it's almost mandatory that some kind of API for agents is exposed.
That would require specialty software be running on the system being monitored. Not exactly feasible when dealing with every type of equipment imaginable.
I want "I'm working on it, stop paging" blackouts. I want to be reminded to lift them.
Every monitoring system I've used supports this.
I want it to tie into my change-management system. If I open a ticket and say that server X is down for 2 hours on this date, I don't want to have to remember to black it out.
That would require some kind of custom hook into your ticketing system. The monitoring system needs to have an open API for injecting commands so that anyone could write their own script. I know Nagios can do this. I don't know about others.
I want reports. I don't care about silly little charts and graphs, but a history of everything that has every gone wrong with device Y would be nice.
Nagios does reports, but I feel they have lots of room for improvement.
I want more info on my page-receiving device than just "HOST X IS DOWN". I want context so I can decide if I have to drop everything immediately.
This would require information you suggested above regarding the API.
I'm a big fan of Nagios, but realize it has room for improvement.
They're lucky Air France didn't treat them like the RIAA members treat the artists. In that case the families would have been charged extra for the special effects used to promote the flight.
You can move somewhere were you can have an incredible, soul shaking view of the night sky. Or you can have the convenience of popping down to the convenience store at 3am for snacks. It's unlikely you'll ever get both. Places that have the best night views are trying to kill you with malaria and dangerous animals. Places without the night view have supermarkets, nightclubs, schools for your kids, and (damn) pollution.
I have an HTC Kaiser (aka Tilt). I've had it for just over a year. There's a better HTC phone at that I would love to have, but I would have to pay more than I wish to if I want to upgrade, or I can wait a little longer and upgrade very cheap or for free. This is how the cell phone business works. So just STFU and stop whining.
Backing up from one server to another is not a backup plan. At a business I worked at for a short time (the boss was a moron so staying wasn't feasible) they insisted they had a backup plan. Since I was their brand new system administrator and was responsible for all things bad that could happen, I insisted on details. They were backing up their mysql database that was running on a VM to another server, that was also running on a VM, on the same host. My response was, "so you don't have any backups." I was given grief for this response.
The list of stupid shit they were doing was a mile long and I was literally fighting with them on a daily basis trying to implement the most basic of best practices. After six weeks it came to a head and they asked me to leave. Fine with me, I was already looking for a new job since there was no way I could work under those conditions. I don't know what the fuck they were thinking. You don't hire a senior level system administrator then refuse to listen to his advice, especially when no one else in the office had any background in system administration (the boss thought that because he could install apache, that made him a system administrator).
Well, I did fix their broken mail system (incorrect SPF info) and tripled the performance of their mysql server in the first week. Would have been faster but they didn't trust turning on query caching, so I had to prove that it would work.
If I take the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train into the city, it costs $5.25 each way. That's over $50 a week. If I'm working someplace that provides parking, then it's cheaper to drive. Free parking in San Francisco isn't all that common and can be a bit pricey. Even when I did have access to free parking I almost always took BART to avoid the hell of driving across the Bay Bridge.
Unfortunately, I typically work in the Silicon Valley. From where I live, there is no decent public transportation. Driving to work is pretty much mandatory and is guaranteed to be a major biatch. When I contracted at Google for a year, I was able to take advantage of their shuttle service. A short five mile drive to the shuttle stop and a relaxing trip in an air conditioned bus with videos and wifi.
If corporations paid their fair share, like you and I have to do under threat of imprisonment, we could pay lower income taxes.
Do you actually believe, for even a second, that Congress would lower the personal income tax rate because they were collecting more money from businesses? A smart person would realize that Congress would find some excuse to keep the extra money and piss it away on more pork projects.
Slashdot Mirror
I loved SG1. I liked SGA. I own the complete DVD sets for both series and the various movies (Continuum, etc). I absolutely hated SGU halfway through the very first episode. Decided I was being too harsh so struggled through two more episodes before giving up entirely.
TV executives are morons. MTV doesn't play music, and SciFi doesn't do science fiction. It's appropriate that they've changed their name to Syphilis.
Who thought of that stupid idea? My job is to keep the servers running. My job is NOT to make sure the developers write good code.
Their servers, their rules.
Fuel costs are the major factor with these products. The cost to produce eggs has gone down. The cost to get it from the chicken farm in the middle of no where to the big city has gone up dramatically. Too many people think we bitch about higher fuel costs because we want to drive our gas-guzzling car around town for fun. No, we want to be able to afford food and other products.
I don't have all that much computer equipment. Just five 1U servers, a 2U server, my old machine that was replaced by by new machine, my laptop, a few switches and routers, a butt-load of network cables, a bunch of spare power cables, a couple of UPSes, and 170 SCSI drives (73G, 15K RPM).
Here's a good reason. Was going on a three day weekend holiday with the family. We had accidentally overdrawn the account by about $10 on Thursday. On Friday the payroll was automatically deposited. On Friday evening, all packed up and heading to the mountains we stop at the ATM to get some cash for the trip. Nope. They automatically lock your card if you are overdrawn and do NOT unlock it even after you fix that problem until you call them up. Except you can't call them up after hours, they don't have a 24 hour customer service line. And because they are a credit union, you can't call them on Saturday, either. We could not unlock the ATM card until Tuesday morning, so they completely ruined our entire holiday over a $10 overdraft that was immediately fixed. F*ck credit unions.
I did an experiment where I ran all email through a spell checker and graphed the results. I was hoping it would help in improving filters. There are too many people on the internet who can't or won't spell properly, resulting in genuine email having roughly the same percentage of spelling errors as spam. I expect similar results with grammar.
Mi van?
What I noticed when I evaluated osCommerce and few other ecommerce packages is the people who developed the package didn't have even a small understanding of how to use style sheets. This was a few years ago, so maybe things have improved since then.
These days Israel is expected to do exactly that. They just won't play along with the UN's bullshit.
Booth babes are the best thing about trade shows.
If accessibility is a major concern, you have at least one blind person on your staff that must approve the layout. I worked with a blind DBA for a year and had the luxury of having him critique a website of mine for accessibility and implemented all his recommendations. The changes weren't all that difficult since I don't use evil crap like flash in the first place.
I took typing in my freshman year of high school. I was planning ahead and figured it would be a useful skill in college. The class was taught on old manual typewriters. To this day I am very rough on computer keyboards because of the pressure I had to use on those old keyboards.
It was the single most useful class of my entire four years of high school.
I'm so glad the article didn't link to the psp developer's website since I am the system administrator for it and there was no warning this story would make it to slashdot.
When you have your parent/child relationships and your dependencies set up properly, Nagios does this very well. A properly configured Nagios system will alert you only for that switch that died, not for the 200 services behind that switch that you can't reach.
There's a 'cluster" plugin for nagios available, but I consider it a hack for something that should be inherently supported.
Nagios could be improved here. I can set it up to fire off a script when a hard failure is detected and do something different, e.g. HUP apache, but there isn't a way to directly configure alternative test options.
You can configure Nagios for how many times you want an alert to fire.
Supported in Nagios.
That would require specialty software be running on the system being monitored. Not exactly feasible when dealing with every type of equipment imaginable.
Every monitoring system I've used supports this.
That would require some kind of custom hook into your ticketing system. The monitoring system needs to have an open API for injecting commands so that anyone could write their own script. I know Nagios can do this. I don't know about others.
Nagios does reports, but I feel they have lots of room for improvement.
This would require information you suggested above regarding the API.
I'm a big fan of Nagios, but realize it has room for improvement.
They're lucky Air France didn't treat them like the RIAA members treat the artists. In that case the families would have been charged extra for the special effects used to promote the flight.
You can move somewhere were you can have an incredible, soul shaking view of the night sky. Or you can have the convenience of popping down to the convenience store at 3am for snacks. It's unlikely you'll ever get both. Places that have the best night views are trying to kill you with malaria and dangerous animals. Places without the night view have supermarkets, nightclubs, schools for your kids, and (damn) pollution.
So what is important to you?
I have an HTC Kaiser (aka Tilt). I've had it for just over a year. There's a better HTC phone at that I would love to have, but I would have to pay more than I wish to if I want to upgrade, or I can wait a little longer and upgrade very cheap or for free. This is how the cell phone business works. So just STFU and stop whining.
What makes you think he has friends now?
Here's a short list of things he doesn't think are important:
Yeah, I guess he's right. The internet is useless.
Backing up from one server to another is not a backup plan. At a business I worked at for a short time (the boss was a moron so staying wasn't feasible) they insisted they had a backup plan. Since I was their brand new system administrator and was responsible for all things bad that could happen, I insisted on details. They were backing up their mysql database that was running on a VM to another server, that was also running on a VM, on the same host. My response was, "so you don't have any backups." I was given grief for this response.
The list of stupid shit they were doing was a mile long and I was literally fighting with them on a daily basis trying to implement the most basic of best practices. After six weeks it came to a head and they asked me to leave. Fine with me, I was already looking for a new job since there was no way I could work under those conditions. I don't know what the fuck they were thinking. You don't hire a senior level system administrator then refuse to listen to his advice, especially when no one else in the office had any background in system administration (the boss thought that because he could install apache, that made him a system administrator).
Well, I did fix their broken mail system (incorrect SPF info) and tripled the performance of their mysql server in the first week. Would have been faster but they didn't trust turning on query caching, so I had to prove that it would work.
I'd have to agree. As a software company, they kind of suck, but they are great when it comes to acquisitions.
If I take the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train into the city, it costs $5.25 each way. That's over $50 a week. If I'm working someplace that provides parking, then it's cheaper to drive. Free parking in San Francisco isn't all that common and can be a bit pricey. Even when I did have access to free parking I almost always took BART to avoid the hell of driving across the Bay Bridge.
Unfortunately, I typically work in the Silicon Valley. From where I live, there is no decent public transportation. Driving to work is pretty much mandatory and is guaranteed to be a major biatch. When I contracted at Google for a year, I was able to take advantage of their shuttle service. A short five mile drive to the shuttle stop and a relaxing trip in an air conditioned bus with videos and wifi.
That was the exact quote I was thinking of when I made my post. I could not remember it well enough to include. Thanks.
Do you actually believe, for even a second, that Congress would lower the personal income tax rate because they were collecting more money from businesses? A smart person would realize that Congress would find some excuse to keep the extra money and piss it away on more pork projects.