One surly mofo

I've been on that flight

2009-10-13T13:15:39Z

http://www.leasticoulddo.com/comic/20091013

Map of states I've visited

2009-10-13T04:16:49Z

I think this is correct:

visited 22 states (44%)
Create your own visited map of The United States
Almost all of that (except for PA and IL) is while driving, too :)

Clearly I need to work on the eastern portion of the country to get my numbers up. And Alaska, but I don't think I'll drive for that one.

Thanks, Chicago

2009-10-08T01:30:11Z

Not once, but twice today I missed being hit by a car by less than a foot. The second time this evening, the guy just didn't see me in the crosswalk. Despite the fact that I had a "walk" signal, I kind of understand: it was dark, a car had gone in front of him, etc etc. I would have appreciated some kind of acknowledgment that a pedestrian had been there, but, whatever.

The first today bothered me. It was around noon on a busy street. I had the right of way, cars were stopped at the intersection, the whole nine yards. However, the truck (pickup, not semi) half a block back decided that they were going to run the light, and, well, there was only one open spot there at the line. This person and I even made eye contact before I jumped out of the way. Good thing I moved, as he certainly didn't change course.

To make matters worse, he then locked up his brakes to avoid the cross traffic, leaving the truck sitting across the crosswalk that I was standing on. Argh.

AND THEN HE ALMOST BACKED OVER ME GETTING OUT OF THE CROSSWALK.

Fuck you, random driver.

Knee update 4

2009-09-17T13:24:10Z

Good news! The doctor said that my range of motion is really good in my right knee, almost what it is on the left. Given that, he's not recommending physical therapy for another two weeks, because I'll just need strength therapy, and that isn't normally done for a month after someone gets out of the brace.

On flat surfaces, I'm pretty much back to normal. I can't squat or do anything else that puts a lot of strain on the right knee, and stairs are out, but otherwise I'm doing what I normally would.

Knee update 3

2009-09-14T04:29:24Z

I realized that people are asking me about the knee, so I should post something. I'm out of the brace, walking around ~normally. I still can't put much pressure on it (no running, careful with stairs, no squatting, etc), but it's pretty livable at this point.

Tomorrow (Monday) I see the doctor for more xrays. If everything still looks good, I start physical therapy soon there after.

New Mexico, it's been fun

2009-09-12T04:25:16Z

So, some of you know that I've been looking for a job in Chicago. If not, now you do :)

I've accepted a job with Backstop Solutions Group as a Senior System Admin. I'm really excited about it, though moving to Chicago is a little daunting (ok, the winter is daunting. atomic_umber suggests "scary", not daunting, for this. Not for the move in general). Everything's going to happen kind of fast, because my start date there is September 28th. I would have posted this last week, but I've been in Chicago helping atomic_umber get ready for her trip to Kenya since last Saturday.

So, who wants to hang out in Albuquerque the week before that? I'm going to fly out Saturday or Sunday (the 26th or 27th), not sure yet. Movers will come pick up my stuff the week before that. I'm leaving my car in New Mexico for a while while I figure out what I'm doing with it (namely, sell or take with, leaning towards sell). If you're further north and want to do something, well, let me know about that too.

I'm sure I've forgotten something here. It's late, and we're frantically doing last minute stuff :)

Due to the work situation and my family, I'm sure I'll be back at least every 3 months, probably more so. During those times I'll try to be more prompt about posting something so I can see my friends.

knee update 2

2009-08-20T05:27:40Z

I'm still in the knee immobilizer. The first week of September I have an appointment with the doctor to get another set of xrays. If everything looks good there, I can take it off, and I'll start physical therapy. Evidently I've got an average of 6 weeks of that to look forward to, twice a week for an hour each. Great. Could be worse.

I can wear some of my pants over the thing, which is both good and bad. Good, because I look a little less like a slacker at work. Bad, because then people assume I just walk funny instead of having some problem. On the bus in Chicago, that corresponded to people giving me dirty looks about my outstretched leg. Hmm.

Also, what vehicles I fit in the front seat of:

Well: Chevy Cobalt
OK: Chevy Aveo; Ford Fusion; Hyundai Sonata; sacra_imbri's '97 Honda Civic
Poorly: Saab 9-2 (9-3?); Ford Escape; irishmasms' 90s Honda Accord
No Fn Way: my mom's Subaru Impreza (2007); my Subaru WRX (2003); Toyota Prius

WTF, I say.

DNS help?

2009-08-18T05:53:12Z

Someone out there has to be able to figure this one out...

At home, I do this:

$ for i in a b c d e f g h i j k l m ; do dig clanspum.net @$i.gtld-servers.net +short ; done
82.165.180.112
82.165.180.112
82.165.180.112
82.165.180.112
82.165.180.112
82.165.180.112
82.165.180.112
82.165.180.112
82.165.180.112
82.165.180.112
82.165.180.112
82.165.180.112
82.165.180.112
$

The correct IP is 74.208.184.120. The zone for that domain looks like this (abridged, let me know if you need the whole thing):

$TTL 3h
clanspum.net. IN SOA u15354709.onlinehome-server.com. dnsmaster.clanspum.net. (
        2009080800      ; Serial
        3600            ; refresh time
        1h                      ; retry time
        2w                      ; expire time
        1h )            ; "negative caching" TTL (from Oreilly)

clanspum.net. IN NS u15354709.onlinehome-server.com.
clanspum.net. IN NS puck.nether.net.
ipv6-ep                   IN AAAA 2001:470:1f10:1b9::2
ipv6                   IN AAAA 2001:470:c083:1::1
clanspum.net.                   IN AAAA 2001:470:c083:1::1
clanspum.net.                   IN A    74.208.184.120
ns                                  IN A    74.208.184.120
ns                                  IN AAAA 2001:470:c083:1::1
mail                                    IN A    74.208.184.120
mail                                    IN AAAA 2001:470:c083:1::1
clanspum.net.           IN MX   10 mail.clanspum.net.

fusiongyro paid for a DNSstuff check, and it came up all green. So... WTF? Anyone? It's been weeks since the change took place (though I evidently changed the zone last on the 8th), so I don't think the problem is "propagation delay".

[Edit] This isn't just from my DSL connection, it seems to be everywhere.

[Edit 2] I talked to the registrar/hosting company, on the suggestion of a coworker. They're handing out the wrong glue with the domain name, so they should be able to fix it. The guy I talked to wasn't sure what the problem was, but it's being escalated to their hostmaster. Assume that's a good thing :)

Knee update

2009-07-22T03:57:27Z

Saw the doctor today. Good news: it's fractured, but not broken through. If I can go easy on it for the next six weeks, I won't need surgery. With my knee in a brace, I can walk (well, limp) on it without the crutches.

Bad news: six weeks without bending my knee at all. That means no driving. I can limp to the bus to get to work though. As well, I go to the doctor every week for the next month, and get xrayed to make sure everything is going well. Sounds fun, right?

It's still better than it was.

Because I was having such a good week already.

2009-07-20T04:46:06Z

Today I tripped on something and fell into some rocks (large gravel, ~baseball sized), knee first. It hurt a lot. More than it should to just skin your knee. Lucky for me atomic_umber was there to strongly suggest going to the doctor. After the drive up to Los Alamos (she drove, I clutched some ice to my knee in pain), I believed her.

A few xrays and whatnot later, it turns out I fractured my right kneecap. This would explain the extra pain and inability to put weight on it. They gave me a Lortab to help with the pain, wrapped it, sold me some crutches and told me to go talk to a doctor on Monday (in the morning). Argh.

Odds are good it'll go like this: get a knee immobilizer, hobble around for 6-8 weeks, physical therapy after that to get it back in shape. If I'm really unlucky, instead they open my knee up and wire it back together, then all that stuff. Yay?

On the upside, I suspect that I'll get some more stuff done on the clan machine, what with all the time I'll have off of work :) (they told me I can't go in this week, narcotics and such). Yay?

cs.net progress

2009-07-17T08:30:54Z

DNS: being updated to point to the right place. local DNS is correct, backup DNS is correct, updating upstreams. There are about 5 steps to do (on a webpage) for each domain, so this is slow, and is happening while I wait for other stuff.

LDAP: Up! Thanks, Dan.

Mail: Mail is being received. You can not use IMAP or POP to check your mail yet, be cool. Also, see the DNS note above.

2007-07-17 1727 MST DNS is updating. I've hit all the domains that I think people get mail at. Mail is being received, and is going into your maildir in your account. IMAP and POP are not up. If you urgently need to check something, ssh in and use mutt/pine/whatever. The IP of the new machine is 74.208.184.120 .

cs.net update

2009-07-16T15:17:08Z

So,

The server is rather hosed. I think at this point it will be faster to kick the new one into working than perform CPR to the old one. My first priorities are getting LDAP up (so I know who the users are), mail up, and the web pages. After that I'll work on the rest.

I'm taking a partial day at work so I have some time to deal with this, so expect updates later this morning.

[Edit] If you need some data off of there ASAP, let me know and we can work something out.

Lessons learned, in progress

2009-07-15T13:15:34Z

I'm going to keep a running list here of things that this extended downtime has taught me.

First of all, the two that I should have known, but evidently needed to be reinforced.

1. Backups need to happen. They shouldn't wait for some better software or a better system, even trivial daily tarballs would have made this a lot easier.
2. Don't do things like play with malware while you're too tired to think effectively.

As I said, neither of those is a surprise. Other ones:

3. Why on earth did I pick reiserfs for this system? Gentoo suggested it. I should make sure that I know how to do low-level things in the file systems I choose. Knowing that reiserfsck was going to take 12+ hours to run would have changed what I did yesterday.
4. Why did reiserfsck trash /lib? I need to have a better understanding of the tools I'm running before I do, because this sort of thing happens.

This will be updated during the day.

2009-07-16 12:24 MST
5. I should have started working on the new machine much earlier, once I realized this shit was going to take a long time.
6. I should have told it to exclude Allan's maildir when I started untarring, as it's been working on just that for an hour. WTF.

cs.net emergency downtime

2009-07-14T15:23:28Z

All,

I just did something stupid to the server. It'll be back ~~soon~~.

You can email my gmail (bill.weiss) if you need to talk to me.

2009-07-14 10:39 MST Maybe not "soon". This is taking longer than expected. 30 minutes more?
2009-07-14 11:15 MST Evidently not. No ETA, I hope < 1 hour more.
2009-07-14 13:08 MST This is taking forever. Fuck. Sorry all, I can't interrupt the thing that's running, it'll cause more problems. No ETA. We haven't been down long enough to be losing mail, it'll come in eventually.
2009-07-14 13:14 MST To clarify, this is not days of outage, but it's probably hours. Sorry.
2009-07-14 22:05 MST Good news is, I've got all the user data. Bad news is, the machine isn't happy at all. Again, I don't think any of your data has been lost, and I'm working on it. I'll try to have backup mail up tonight somehow.
2009-07-15 00:39 MST It's just not going to be up tonight. I'm too tired to be working on something important, I'll make mistakes. Sorry :(

2009-07-15 07:03 MST I'd like to reiterate, user data is intact as far as I can tell. The server is hosed, so I'm working on two things: making sure I have the data somewhere I can get at it, and seeing if the server is recoverable. Attached to the latter is deciding if it's easier to just kick the new server into gear ASAP instead of limping the old one along. We'll see on that front. Again, sorry for the delayed outage. I have to work around my work schedule to get this fixed. I took a half day yesterday to work on it, and I suspect I'll take a few hours today as well.

Car pictures

2009-07-12T07:18:59Z

See My flickr for pictures of the car. It's not too bad looking there. Compare with 2004 October hail storm for reference.

WRX :(

2009-07-11T04:33:11Z

So, on Monday there was a hail storm up here. The WRX didn't do too well. Admittedly, it did better than its predecessor (of the 2004 Socorro hail storm), but it's pretty banged up. On Wednesday I took it to the body shop and USAA did an estimate. Today they told me that it's ~$7500 dollars of repairs (hood, roof and the left front fender need to be replaced, everything else needs some dent repair). Well, unfortunately, the KBB value of the car is somewhere between $8500 and $10k. USAA will total a car if the damage is 75% of the value, so... yeah. They haven't made a determination of what the car is worth yet, so they haven't called it totaled yet, but I'm expecting that call tomorrow or Monday.

The question is thus, what now? I could pay the salvage value of the car (unknown at this time), take the cash and do something useful with it. I could repair some of the bits of the car that really need it, doing something with the rest of the cash. Or I could put that money into go-fast bits for the car :) Alternately, I can let them take the car and buy a new one. I have no idea what I would go for right now, so this is kind of daunting.

Thoughts? I'll have pictures of the car soon enough (as in, when I remember it before sunset).

I think that, if the salvage value is low enough ($1k?), I'll keep the car. If it's high ($4k?), not. It's the area in between that I don't know about.

[Edit] I mean, there's always this. You know.
[Edit] Or this if I keep it.

Installing an OS in a strange environment

2009-07-08T04:59:00Z

Let's say that you're working on a strange machine with these limitations:

You don't have physical access at all. You get a serial console, and a network.
You get one of six Linux installs to work with, and
A network-booted Debian install that doesn't touch the HDs at all.

Given that, say that you want to install a new unixy OS on the machine. Linux, BSD, Solaris, whatever. How do you do it? In gentoo, you would just:

Boot from recovery image,
Partition and format the HD as needed,
Mount the drive in /mnt/new (/mnt/new/boot, .../home, etc),
untar the gentoo stage-3 into /mnt/new,
chroot /mnt/new

At that point, you're in an effectively identical environment to what you would get booting off of the Gentoo CD and following the install instructions.

Arch Linux, IIRC, can do a similar game, though it isn't as happy about it.

So, how about your OS of choice? I'm not really interested in NetBSD or OpenBSD, but I'd love to hear it if they'll do it.

If you can come up with a way to get a Windows on here, you're a pervert, but I'll give you lots of geek-cred (tradable for e-peen points).

FM(W)S

(That's Frequently Made (Wrong) Suggestions)

"Netboot the installer for something": That would work, but we're already netbooting the recovery disk. I don't have control over the server that does that, and I don't have anything that can win the BOOTP race.
"Tell the hosting company to drop in the CD of your choice": That would be great, but their pricing model is based off of something I'll call "we don't touch your hardware". Also, they don't really like that I'm doing this, preferring that I run an OS that they ~~backdoored~~ installed for me.

Edits

2007-07-08 0633: A friend on IRC points out that, were I to read the freeBSD page, I would find Remote Installation of the FreeBSD Operating System without a Remote Console, which looks interesting.

Firefox 3.5 "location aware browsing"

2009-07-02T06:24:44Z

So, I just upgraded to FF 3.5. Going to flickr.com/map and clicking "Find my location" kind of blew my mind.

Albuquerque people, want to do something?

2009-06-07T05:55:08Z

So, Albuquerque folks, I'll be in your neck of the woods for about a week: Sunday (6/7) night through Saturday(6/13) mid-day. Anyone want to do anything? I seem to have plans for Monday dinner, and I'll be busy 0700-1730 or so each day (possibly less late on Friday).

I'm staying near the Sunport, if that matters. I'll have my cell phone with me outside of the above time range, and I'll have email access.

Open letter to the Linux OOM killer

2009-06-07T01:17:29Z

Dear OOM killer,

When picking something to slay on my system, could you please stay away from things like the LDAP server? My mail client, for instance, would have been glad to take one for the team.

Don't worry, I still love you. I'm just asking you to be a little more considerate when you come in the night for one of my processes. It's kind of difficult to recover from the LDAP server going away, what with the lack of ability to resolve UIDs and whatnot.

Thanks,
Bill

I can't imagine why people don't like medical billing companies...

2009-06-02T18:29:35Z

Bill: You sent me a letter saying that it's the second notice that I owe you money. Didn't I send you something last time?
Medical Billing: Er... Your account balance is zero. It says you paid us on the 27th of last month.
Bill: Yep. In fact, that's the day the check posted.
MB: ...
Bill: So, what I'm getting at is, if my check posted on the 27th, why did you send me a letter dated the 28th saying I hadn't paid?
MB: ...
Bill: See, the 27th is before the 28th. You were paid before you sent me something saying I hadn't paid.
MB: Oh! They must have crossed in the mail.
Bill: But you didn't send it until after you cashed my check.
MB: ...
Bill: ...
MB: ... Can I help you, sir?
Bill: No, I guess we're good.
MB: Ok! *click*

I'm so glad I decided to use my lunch on this instead of, say, eating lunch or something.

If I still had userpic space...

2009-04-15T06:00:56Z

-- from Strong Bad email "lackey" (view here)

[Edit] I just archived my old icons at http://www.clanspum.net/~houdini/icons/. So, if you're looking for any of them, they're there. I went from 20 slots to 5 when I let my paid account expire.

for jmattax

2009-04-05T22:38:57Z

The song "Still Alive" makes me think of Jason these days. Thus, Still Alive on a CNC machine. That's a neat hack.

mint.com?

2009-03-19T19:47:08Z

Do any of you use mint.com? I think I've heard someone say they like it. I can't look at what they do and think it's a good thing, but I don't know.

I really want everything they do, but with manual input.

Interesting...

2009-03-15T05:00:16Z

Wikileaks: 10 years inside the international child porn industry with our confidential insider.

I'm not saying I support what the guy is doing or anything (as should be obvious), but it's an interesting read from the technical side.