Rude Epiphany!

So this is an interesting phenomenon. Spam (no, that’s not interesting) comments (not yet..) to my blog entries. wtf.

I’ll say it: Blogs are useless. (Yes, I’m aware of the irony.)

This site exists so that I can throw random thoughts out there and troll a little. Hey, it can’t be any worse than twitter. On that note, yeah, I have a twit account, too. I don’t know why, I think I’m just squatting http://twitter.com/wrwindsor :).

Back on the note of these spamming comments, over half are not even written in English. CluePhone ringing, it’s for you. Sneaking a URL in is one thing, but posting a comment in Cyrillic character set is guaranteed to get yer shiz tagged as spam. If I can’t read it, I’m not approving it.

Get Clue Plz, KThx.

[16:21] JMaya: remember the yes command?
[16:21] JMaya: type it
[16:21] Windsor: yeah
[16:21] JMaya: i know what its for
[16:21] JMaya: do you?
[16:22] Windsor: yes | somecommand
[16:22] JMaya: exactly
[16:22] JMaya: damn!
[16:22] JMaya: i just realized it!
[16:22] JMaya: asshole! i can’t get you with unix stuff…

I got this e-mail forwarded to me through my humor channels…

Subject: The Birk Economic Recovery Plan

I’m against the $85,000,000,000.00 bailout of AIG. Instead, I’m in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in a We Deserve It Dividend.

To make the math simple, let’s assume there are 200,000,000 bona-fide U.S. Citizens 18+. Our population is about 301,000,000 +/- counting every man, woman and child. So 200,000,000 might be a fair stab at adults 18 and up..

So divide 200 million adults 18+  into $85 billion that equals $425,000.00.

My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a We Deserve It Dividend.

Of course, it would NOT be tax free. So let’s assume a tax rate of 30%.

Every individual 18+ has to pay $127,500.00 in taxes. That sends $25,500,000,000 right back to Uncle Sam. But it means that every adult 18+ has $297,500.00 in their pocket. A husband and wife has $595,000.00.

What would you do with $297,500.00 to $595,000.00 in your family?
Pay off your mortgage – housing crisis solved.
Repay college loans – what a great boost to new grads
Put away money for college – it’ll be there
Save in a bank – create money to loan to entrepreneurs.
Buy a new car – create jobs
Invest in the market – capital drives growth
Pay for your parent’s medical insurance – health care improves
Enable Deadbeat Dads to come clean – or else

Remember this is for every adult U S Citizen 18+  including the folks  who lost their jobs at Lehman Brothers and every other company  that is cutting back. And of course, for those serving in our Armed Forces.

If we’re going to re-distribute wealth let’s really do it…instead of  trickling out  a puny $1000.00 ( ‘vote buy’ ) economic incentive that is being proposed  by one of our candidates for President.

If we’re going to do an $85 billion bailout, let’s bail out every adult U  S Citizen 18+!

As for AIG – liquidate it.
Sell off its parts.
Let American General go back to being American General.
Sell off the real estate.
Let the private sector bargain hunters cut it up and clean it up.

Here’s my rationale. We deserve it and AIG doesn’t.

Sure it’s a crazy idea that can ‘never work.’

But can you imagine the Coast-To-Coast Block Party!

How do you spell Economic Boom?

I trust my fellow adult Americans to know how to use the $85 Billion  We Deserve It Dividend more than I do the geniuses at AIG or  in Washington DC .

And remember, The Birk plan only really costs $59.5 Billion because $25.5  Billion is returned instantly in taxes to Uncle Sam.

Ahhh…I feel so much better getting that off my chest.

Kindest personal regards,

Birk

T. J. Birkenmeier, A Creative Guy & Citizen of the Republic

Only problem, the math doesn’t pan out. $85bil (that is, $85,000,000,000) divided by 200mil (200,000,000) comes out to only $425, not $425,000.

He was met at the pearly gates by none other than St. Peter, who proceeded to give him a tour of the wonders of heaven.  The Texan, however, was not impressed.

St. Peter showed him the most beautiful rivers, and the Texan said that they were bigger in Texas.

St. Peter revealed to him the majesty of mountains, but the Texan reminded him that they were just as good, if not better, back in Texas.

St. Peter showed him the glory of the stars (they shine brighter in Texas), the enormity of the sunrise (you haven’t seen it until you’ve seen it in Texas), and the simple wonder of a doe and a fawn drinking at a lake at sunset (reminiscent of Lake Texarkana, only not as pretty).

There was nothing St. Peter could do to overcome the man’s opinion of his home state.

Finally, St. Peter took the Texan right out to the edge of heaven, and they both looked down.  From there one could see all the way down into Hell.  They could see the fire and the brimstone and the agony ad infinitum. It was a horrific sight.

St. Peter then said, “Well? What do you think about that? Have anything like THAT down in Texas?”

The Texan replied, “No sir, we don’t — but I know a couple old boys down in Houston who will put that out for ya.”

Someone stopped by the house awhile back and asked, “uh, Rob? Why do you have an axe by the (back) door?”

While the mind was racing for a snappy comeback, the mouth opened and said, “stump in the back yard.”

doh! Oh well, the truth is out, guess I’ll stick with it.

When I bought the house, there was a stump in the back yard near the driveway. (There’s a fence between the two, so you’ll not see my driveway in any of the pictures.) After mowing around it for many months, I finally decided to be rid of it. The “stump doctor”-family of services you see in the phone book want an insane amount of money to come out to your house and a minor investment for every stump they need to remove. That’s not practical for just one stump and I’d probably have to tear down a chunk of my fence anyway.

As much as my Tim Taylor roots wanted a power tool, I just couldn’t justify the $100 or more to buy a chainsaw for this specific project. On the other hand, $40 buys me a nice axe at Lowe’s and I can lumberjack my way through it, old-school. So I bought the axe and had at it.

The plan was simple — put time into it every weekend that I did yard work. I’d have to police up the wood chips and toss them into a bucket, no need to have the mower sling them into my (or neighbor’s) windows. When the bucket was full, that was a day’s worth of work.

The first week went slow, as expected. I took a small bit off of the Eastern edge and got down a couple of inches below the grass line.

The second week was a little more productive, I “got in there and got some!” as it were.

The third week was the magic moment, the stump was whittled down enough that I could break it loose.

Of course, I didn’t just let the wood chips go to the city. After each chopping session, I’d load up the chiminea and light it, and then light a cigar to savor the taste of victory.

No more stump!

I ran into an interesting problem while setting up cacti.

To start with, the Solaris-10 net-snmp in /usr/sfw will not report partition stats (used, max, free) for partitions that are not ufs. I noticed this a little while back with some vxfs filesystems at work but graphing them was filed as a low-priority project.

There is a workaround blogged at sysadmin.asyd.net where he indicates that you can have snmpd return disk percentages for zfs partitions.

After pondering that solution, I came to the conclusion that there are two issues not solved by this solution:

1. You can arbitrarily create filesystems in zfs. To monitor them in cacti, you need to hand-manage your filesystem list in /etc/init.d/sma/snmpd.conf. After that, you would need to manually add/remove them from your cacti configuration. If you have a dynamic system with a dozen or more filesystems, it would be annoying. At any scale of 1+N servers, this becomes a management nightmare.
2. You can only display %used in each filesystem. This figure can grow or shrink in a static filesystem via activity on other filesystems. Your filesystem availability is shared in a pool (zfs quota assignments minimize the fluctuations, but will not make them go away).

Given the zfs philosophy of “filesystems come and go”, it doesn’t make sense to try to plot all of them. If you have a home fileserver, you may have quite a few filesystems so that you can compartmentalize your data (as I have). Putting all of them into graphs in cacti will create a very busy page that’ll be mildly painful to scroll through.

The solution? Map the zpools instead — they’re (generally) tied to devices, so they’re less likely to be created and removed on a regular basis.

The concept is quite simple, take the output of something like this

: myserver; zpool list
NAME                    SIZE    USED   AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH     ALTROOT
data                   1.81T   1.74T   70.4G    96%  ONLINE     -
export                 38.8G   13.9G   24.8G    35%  ONLINE     -

and twiddle it so that snmpd will digest and spit it out.

First, a little shell scripting. We want raw numbers so that we can graph them, so we need to get rid of those pesky non-numeric characters. Something along the lines of this:

#!/bin/ksh
export PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib
zpool list -H -o capacity ${1} | sed -e 's/%//g'

Then we put this in /etc/sma/snmp/snmpd.conf:

exec zpool-list.ksh /etc/sma/snmp/zpool-list.ksh export
exec zpool-list.ksh /etc/sma/snmp/zpool-list.ksh data

Restart snmpd:

: myserver; sudo svcadm -v restart sma
Action restart set for svc:/application/management/sma:default.

We can use snmpwalk to verify our output:

: myserver; snmpwalk -v 2c -c public localhost .1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.8
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extIndex.1 = INTEGER: 1
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extIndex.2 = INTEGER: 2
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extNames.1 = STRING: zpool-list.ksh
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extNames.2 = STRING: zpool-list.ksh
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extCommand.1 = STRING: /etc/sma/snmp/zpool-list.ksh export
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extCommand.2 = STRING: /etc/sma/snmp/zpool-list.ksh data
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extResult.1 = INTEGER: 0
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extResult.2 = INTEGER: 0
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extOutput.1 = STRING: 35
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extOutput.2 = STRING: 96
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extErrFix.1 = INTEGER: 0
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extErrFix.2 = INTEGER: 0
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extErrFixCmd.1 = STRING:
UCD-SNMP-MIB::extErrFixCmd.2 = STRING:

If you notice in the above, we really only have one output line to work with. Therefore, I decided that %used of the zpool was sufficient, so long as I disabled autoscaling.

The cacti steps were fairly straightforward.

1. Create “Data Source(s)” using the “SNMP - Generic OID Template”
2. Create a “Graph Template” copying most settings from “Unix - Logged in Users”
3. Create “Graph Object(s)”
4. Associate (3) Graph Object(s) with your “Device”

Normally you can skip (2) and do (3) above using “SNMP - Generic OID Template”, but I ran into cacti bug 0001145 and had to create my own template. No sweat, really.

You can find the details to the above Cacti steps in forums.cacti.net.

So since I’ve been out of town for two weeks (yay employment), I missed a “signature required” package that FedEx Ground tried to deliver. I got a nice little card in the mail stating that I can call in to schedule a pick-up at the local shipping station.

All the steps executed, I ended up at the huge facility by (the now defunct) Cowboys Stadium with a big security shack, trucks of all sizes rumbling in’n'out of the front gate, etc.

They have two security guards manning the shack. The entire time I’m there, employees are coming’n'going in a slow trickle (about one every 5min). All departing employees have to go through security much like airport security checkpoints — metal objects in dishes, all bags searched, a quick trip through the metal detector. The guards aren’t your run-of-the-mill TSA-esque trolls, these two (one male, one female) weren’t bodyguard material but they were fairly aware of their jobs, protocols, and what was happening around them.

So the routine for me to pick up my package goes as follows:
1) Security guard pages “QA, call [extension]”
2) when white phone in front of me rings, I get to pick it up and give the caller my tracking number
3) someone shows up in a golf cart with my package(s)
4) proper ID is given, paperwork is signed, and off I go with package(s)

It takes about 10min between phone conversation and someone shows up with my package. Just as the “QA” person appears, another non-employee walks in with a small slip of paper in-hand. Security looks at him and The New Guy says that he’s there to pick up a package. Security points at the QA guy, who’s filling out my paperwork, and declare that “he’s the man to talk to, he’ll take care of you. No point in calling since he’s here.”

The QA guy overhears this, looks up, and says, “just a second.”

I sign the paperwork. As I grab my package, the other non-employee hands Mr. QA the “door card.” He looks at it, looks up and says, “Xbox.”

The two security folks stop what they’re doing, look at Mr. QA and then look at Mr. Non-employee. He nods and smiles an affirmation, at which the security guy turns to Mr. QA and asks, “how did you know?”

“You see these tracking numbers, when they start with ‘769283′, they’re from Mexico or Taiwan or whatever, but they’re always Xboxes.”

I wasn’t paying much attention to this discussion, and at this point I hit the door and was heading to my car. The thing that idly popped into my head was “yeah, if you see enough of these, you’re bound to know the oddest details.”

About ten minutes later, as I’m driving down the road, I thought to myself, “he could identify the contents!?!”

(For those of you that do not know, I travel a little bit for work, usually about one week a month I’m not home.)

Baggage Claim Lottery (BCL) is a game you play with co-travelers at the luggage claim carousel. It is based on the relative arrival times of luggage compared to other participants. The game requires minimal preparation, which only involves agreeing on the rules and rewards/penalties. BCL can be initiated with any person at any time, until the first bag appears at the luggage claim.

Participants are categorized into two groups: Multiple-baggage players (MBPs) and Single-baggage players (SBPs). Score is tallied by counting the number of items that come out of baggage claim system ahead of all of the participants items.

MBPs are scored based on their worst score (when their last item was collected).

A score of 0 goes to the SBP who’s item was the first one out, also considered a “perfect hit.” By nature of the scoring system, MBPs can never receive a “perfect hit.”

If an item arrived on an earlier flight and is in the “baggage pen”, this item is not considered for scoring. If said item belongs to a SBP, this player neither receives a reward nor suffers a penalty.

A “crap-out” is when an item does not arrive and the player must speak to a human (employee of the airline) before leaving the airport.

If only one MBP draws a “crap-out”, this player is immediately the loser (regardless of SBP crap-outs). This is called the “mea culpa” rule.

If multiple MBPs draw a “crap-out”, these players share the “loser” penalty (again, regardless of SBP crap-outs).

If multiple SBPs draw a “crap-out” and no MBPs draw a “crap-out”, the scoring is reversed and the “winner” (with lowest score) becomes the “loser.” This is called the “poor saps” rule.

Prizes are flexible and should be determined in advance. We strongly recommend good sportsmanship — a loser due to a “crap-out” will not be in the mood to buy the first round of drinks once you reach a pub (for example). A recommended prize would be buying the “winner” the first round (cost distributed across other players).

Neurotics have problems, psychotics have solutions.

link: Hans Reiser: Once a Linux Visionary, Now Accused of Murder
link: 20/20 (abcnews) write-up

I worked with this guy back in ‘95-96 at Synopsys.com during the 13mo I was there. He was the “PC Systems Integrator” (evaluating new technology) and I was the “PC Systems Support” (Network, servers, desktops) by title — in reality I did both jobs because his mind was perpetually “elsewhere.” In short, we didn’t get along much at all.

I wouldn’t call him a “prodigy” as 20/20 did, but I will certainly give him credit for “extreme project focus.” He was fairly intelligent, which made our e-mail sparring interesting at times.

Online, I hear a bunch of comments like “he’s freaky looking, fry him!” Ironically, I bet they were the same folks that said “Scott Peterson looks handsome, fry him!” On the other side of the coin, a lot of Linux fanboys are wailing and lashing their own backs.

Let’s talk about the possibility… If he did it; there’s no body, no weapon, no (identified) crime scene, no witnesses, and no crying confession. Prosecution’s case is apparently based upon the following:

1. His car is missing the passenger car seat.
2. They found a trace of her blood on his car.
3. Their divorce was heated — it wasn’t looking good for him to keep the kids.
4. He acted strange once when they trailed him.
5. He’s intelligent.
6. He bought some books on murder investigations (receipt was dated after he found out she was deemed missing).
7. Her best friend said he obviously did it.

Erm, that’s it? WTF.

If we fired up the “wayback machine”, someone could quote me saying ill things about Hans and his health due to our differences at Synopsys. Let’s chalk that up to youth and impatience, as nowadays I’d rather not see a man beat to death over something that they (apparently) won’t be able to prove.

Here’s to you Hans, good luck.