The Kudzu Files

GPS navigator wierdness, and TR

We just returned from a week in DC, visiting our daughter. More on that trip later, but I just have to mention this little glitch that came from our Garmin GPS navigator. Twice (well, once, because I only fell for it once), when we were crossing the Key Bridge from Arlington into DC, the Garmin unit had us circle back, cross back over to Arlington on another bridge, then come back over Key Bridge. I would have thought it was my driving, but the second time we aproached Key Bridge from a different route. The Garmin just really wanted to see the underside of the Kennedy Center, I guess.

Also, I found out that there is a Teddy Roosevelt Memorial. On Teddy Roosevelt Island, no less.

Why RAID Is A Bad Idea

Note that he's not talking about enterprise servers; he's talking about desktops and workstations. Interesting read, from a guy who sells these things....

Why RAID is (usually) a Terrible Idea

Half Price Computer Books

Anybody gotten anything from Half Price Computer Books lately? For the past couple of months, every time I've gone to their site I just get

"We are currently down for scheduled maintenance. Please visit us again soon. We would like thank you for your interest in HalfPriceComputerBooks.com, and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused".

I'm wondering if they're still a going concern.

Great Art Should Be Appreciated

When an appreciation of great literature, creativity, and inspiration come together, it's an awe-inspiring thing. This is one of those times. I don't know who this blogger is, but over Christmas vacation he/she (with some help) recreated Helm's Deep from Tolkien's The Two Towers using cardboard and Christmas candy.

Pretty awesome. Take the link and see all the pictures.

Spam Block Spam

I tried to send an email to someone tonight, someone I know but wouldn't consider a close friend. I got this back:

I apologize for this automatic reply to your email.

Click the link below to fill out the request:

Needless to say, I didn't fill out the short request form, and therefore won't be approved. And therefore, he won't receive my email. I don't know many people who use those spam-blockers,fortunately, because I really don't like the implication that somehow I'm not worthy to send emails. What really bothers me is when people on mailing lists turn these things on - as a listowner, when I encounter someone doing this, I block them from the list. I hate spam as much as the next person, but this isn't the way to handle it.

Changing the subject, I think the President is giving a pretty good speech tonight. A much different tone than his previous speeches. I'd give him a B+. Not that I agree with everything he said, but it was a good speech nonetheless.

Interesting - on the way out, the President walked right past Senator Lott. Shook hands before and after him, but not Trent's.

Sliced And Diced By Occam's Razor

I got an email from one of our users yesterday - unable to connect to their test database. I have a small universe of test databases. There's the near-clone of the current production database, the near-clone of the previous version of the production database which was upgraded to the current version as a final test of the upgrade procedures; there's the database being used to test the new module supporting the National Emissions Inventory, and a clone of that database being used for performance testing. There's the database being used to test the next version of the application, and the database being used for Oracle10g verification and SQL/XML development. I finally managed to kill off two databases that were being used by two different groups doing separate draft permit development. And those are just the test databases for our primary application. Then there's the primary production database itself, and three databases supporting other applications, and two test databases for those. It's not like we're not that big a place! I need a database of passwords for all the different databases.

So, I received an email from one of the users of one of these test databases. They're in an office in another part of town, and they couldn't connect to the particular test database they wanted to hit. I had them try a couple of things, with no success, so after lunch today I went to that office. Start the application, "cannot resolve service name". Check the database ID, its OK. Ping the server, OK fine. Tnsping the database, it's OK. Try the app again, make sure I saw the error correctly, yes, I did. Change the database ID to a different database on the same server. OK fine. Change back, nada. Telnet to the server, stop the listener, restart the listener. Try the app again. Annnkkkk! Check the tnsnames file. It's good. Fire up SQL*Plus, try to connect to the target database. Nothing. Try to connect to another database on that server. OK fine. Fire up the Oracle net config utility. Test the connection. Can't test it, I'm using a redirect in the tnsnames file. Rats! Fire up the app again, because I can't think of what the problem might be, stall for time while I think. Still won't connect. Not surprised. Check the connection info again, compare the port numbers. OK fine. At this point I'm pretty baffled. I telnet to the server again, decide to connect to the database directly.

The database was down. The database was down. I'd shut it down a week or so ago when I was setting up another database on that server, and hadn't brought it back online. I spent an hour trying all sorts of remedies to various connectivity hypotheses, and the problem was the thing I should have checked first, the most obvious and therefore the simplest solution. The database was down. Occam's Razor. Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate. You should never focus on the solutions to a problem before you've focused on the problem itself. Forests and trees.

Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate. Indeed.

Symbolism, Homeland Security Style (Updated!)

One of the benefits of the War On Terror! is the proliferation of new government-created symbols. These go far beyond the much-adored color scheme for telling us how much terrorists hate us on a particular day. Here are some of the new symbols, what people think they mean, and what they're supposed to mean. No, really, they do have meanings!

The Symbol	What People Think It Means	What It Really Means
	If you spot terrorism, blow your anti-terrorism whistle. If you are bald, yell really loud.	Use a whistle if one is available. Shout only as a last resort – shouting can cause a person to inhale dangerous amounts of dust.
	Use your flashlight to lift the walls right off of you!	Tap on pipe or on wall so that rescuers can hear you.
	The proper way to eliminate smallpox is to wash with soap, water and at least one armless hand.	Wash with soap and water, but do not scrub the chemical into the skin.
	After exposure to radiation it is important to consider that you may have mutated to gigantic dimensions: watch your head.	It would be better to go inside a building and follow your plan to “shelter-in-place.”
	Hurricanes, animal corpses and the biohazard symbol have a lot in common. Think about it.	If you see signs of a chemical attack, try to define the impact area or where the chemical is coming from.
	If you are trapped under falling debris, conserve oxygen by not farting.	Avoid unnecessary movement so that you don’t kick up dust.
	If you spot a terrorist arrow, pin it against the wall with your shoulder.	If the door is not hot, brace yourself against the door and slowly open it.

And remember - serious people paid even more serious money to come up with these! ("I'm from the government and I'm here to confuse you")

OK, here's more:

The Symbol	What People Think It Means	What It Really Means
	If a door is closed, karate chop it open.	Use the back of your hand to feel the lower, middle, and upper parts of closed doors.
	Michael Jackson is a terrorist. If you spot this smooth criminal with dead, dead eyes, run the fuck away.	Use a wet cloth to cover nose and mouth.
	If you have set yourself on fire, do not run.	If you catch fire do not run. (I guess they accidentally made sense with this one)
	Try to absorb as much of the radiation as possible with your groin region. After 5 minutes and 12 seconds, however, you may become sterile.	Time: Minimizing time spent exposed will also reduce your risk.
	A one-inch thick piece of plywood should be sufficient protection against radiation. Always carry one!	Shielding: If you have a thick shield between yourself and radioactive materials, more of the radiation will be absorbed by the thick shield, and you will be exposed to less.

Random Notes And Opinions

Most made-for-TV movies on the SciFi Channel are pretty bad. "The Lost Room" was a pleasant surprise. "Post Impact" is not, but I'm wasting a couple of hours on it tonight anyway, because something mindless seemed right for a rainy Thursday night. Still, it's bad. Really bad. Rex Grossman bad.

People will sit in a parking lot waiting for a car to pull out of a spot rather than park 2 spots further out. I don't understand this.

They'll also wait to turn in traffic for several minutes to take a "short cut" that saves them maybe a minute. People - if you have to wait, it isn't saving any time!

Think the big sports debate this week is whether Boise State should be playing Ohio State, or whether Alabama has gone completely insane? Think again.

Chris is posting junk to try to move a certain post off the main page. The internet never forgets, Badger Boy!

Summer offers her homage to 2006 at Jaded Thea. (By the way, Summer, thanks for changing the picture, that was kinda creepy).

And, I won the only fantasy football league I was in that mattered. The leagues I didn't win, didn't matter.

(Also - that phone number is accounting for most of my blog hits lately).

It's The Meers

I don't quite get the TI DLP "It's the mirrors" commercials. I mean, I get the mirrors part, the TV being DLP. The little girl is cute and all (although by this point, I wish she'd learn to get that other syllable in "mirrors"), but I don't understand the elephant at all, and it shows up in every commercial, if I remember correctly. And it doesn't dance or kick a football or anything. At least it doesn't step on her foot.

Unix Geek Humor

It's been a long day. But this is funny. At least if you're a Unix geek.

h/t to Dave.

Another Quiet Passing

When I first encountered the internet, Usenet groups was what I encountered. My earliest Usenet posts date back to 1988, but that was really on the old Usenet network itself. But in 1992, I began using the internet, and found Usenet groups more easily available. In those days, Usenet was informative, helpful, fun. It stayed that way until sometime around 1998, when the World Wide Web thing began supplanting Usenet as a source of information, and also when many Usenet groups seemed to begin going downhill as the signal-to-ratio decreased, in some cases to static. But Usenet was still interesting at times, and thanks to Deja News, and later Google Groups, it was easy to hit from a web browser. Like this:

But last week, I noticed something was missing from the Google page:

"Groups" was gone, replaced by "Videos", Google's attempt to move in on Youtube I guess. Now to get to Groups, you have to click on "More":

Now, many people may not even notice, and most of those who do will probably say "doesn't matter to me". That's OK. I just wanted to be on record as saying I'll miss it.

Things I Discovered On The Interweb

As a means of communication, email is not such a great thing. Less than 6 in 10 email recipients correctly understand the meaning of the email they receive. Or the typical email user misunderstands over 40% of their received emails. Or something like that. Somewhere in there, anyway. That's what these people say. The reason is that it's difficult, through email, to build a "buffer of positive regard", an "interpersonal resonance of emotional expression". I think it's that context thing again. Without ancillary communication methods like body language, facial expressions, and tone, , we have problems embracing the context of the message. maybe if we used more icons, or animated gifs, stuff like that, we could include some digital context accessories.

I also discovered that the 21st century is making us miserable. Really. It's true because David Wong says so. Sadly, he makes some good points. Technology, the internet, iPods (or in my case, the Sandisk Sansa), let you build a wall to keep unwanted people at bay. Sort of. As I noted above, email lets us communicate without communicating. Blogs do the same thing, although Kudzu Files communicates with so few people that I think the damage has to be slight. We can build these elaborate characters around ourselves, depending on the relative anonymity of the internet to preserve only the most well-crafted parts of our persona. Which, of course, makes us utterly miserable. Also, we can use all this technology to indulge ourselves in the looniest of alternate realities and conspiracy theories. And we can listen to Coast To Coast AM and hear the looniest of our fellow loonies talk about their favorite delusions. (Did you know there is a hole in the Earth in Montana or Idaho somewhere, where the aliens fly in to and out of their secret underground base?) The only comfort I can find in all this is knowing that if you're reading this, then you're similarly entrapped by 21st century technology and are as miserable as me.

Troubleshooting

In Real Life, I'm a somewhat experienced Oracle DBA. I've also done a good bit of development back in the day, and I've managed development teams and IT departments. One of the things that has been a recurring problem all through my professional life is finding a consistent method of dealing with the inevitable problems. But I've finally found it:

If it's kinda too small to read, clicking on the image will show you the original. It's simple, concise, and best of all provides a structured way to shirk responsibility.

I Hate Lotus Notes

I hate Lotus Notes. I really hate Lotus Notes. I hate Lotus Notes the way Auburn fans hate Alabama fans. I hate Lotus Notes the way Al Gore supporters hate Ralph Nader. or Katherine Harris. Why do I hate Lotus Notes? Glad you asked...

• You know how, when you paste a section of text in a Notes email, it pastes it in as a separate text block, instead of just the text? I hate that.
  
• Shen you're selecting text in a Notes email, at a certain point it decides you want to select the entire document, and there's no changing its mind. I hate that.
  
• Archiving. About half the time, the documents end up both in my inbox and in my archive. I hate that.
  
• Replication. I don't really know what it's doing when it replicates. Nobody can explain what it's doing. I have a feeling whatever it is doing is illegal in the state of Mississippi, and I hate that.
  
• Don't even talk about Notes as a web platform. I hate Notes as a web platform.
  
• You know how sometimes Notes carps out, and when you try to restart it, you get this "Error opening a window" or some such, and you have to reboot your PC, or go looking for all those zombie processes? I hate that.
  
• You can't sort your inbox by subject. I hate that.
  
• Version 6 moved your personal folders into a folder called "Folders", rather than being at the same level as your Inbox, so now you have to open that folder to see your personal folders. Everytime I have to do that, it irritates me. I hate that.
  
• You can do all sorts of stuff with Notes. But all I want to do is send and get email! Notes is like an 18-wheeler. All I want to do is run down to the garden center for a couple of bags of potting soil, but I have to drive this 18-wheeler down there to get those two. I hate that.
  
• Outlook Express lets you set up rules for things like mail filters. Very easy to do. Notes has agents. Agents of darkness. They're inherently obfuscatory at best. You set one up, it doesn't run. Why? Because you didn't create your agent using ancient Babylonian chants forn human sacrifice, maybe. Maybe it's really an agent for somebody else. I hate that.
  
• Hotspots. The rest of the world knows these as "links". Bit not Lotus Notes. I hate that.
  

  
  I hate Lotus Notes.
  

  Posted by hboswell at 3:13 PM | Comments (3)

Random Factoids

• The first Harley-Davidson motorcycle used a tomato can for a carburetor.

• One colony of Formosan termites can eat up to 1,000 pounds of wood a year, compared to the 7 pounds that native termites eat. Researchers at the University of Hawaii concluded that a single colony could eat the whole structure of a home within two years.

• There is an old "city law" still on record in Riverside CA, which makes it illegal to kiss unless both parties wipe their lips with rosewater first.

• If the Loch Ness Monster exists, it would only weigh about 31 kilograms (68 pounds). A sonar study of the lake found that the total population of fish in the nutrient-poor lake would only amount to an annual food supply of 93 kilograms, and a cold-blooded creature needs to eat about 3 times its weight each year to survive.

• Gardenias and orange blossoms, if placed in a bouquet together, will neutralize each others' scent.

• There are more chickens on the Earth than people.

• The pressure at the deepest point in the ocean is the equivalent of having 50 Boeing 747s stacked on top of your head.

• Elvis Presley went into that hardware store in Tupelo to buy a .22 rifle. his mother wouldn't let him have the rifle, so he bought a guitar instead.

• The largest tomato on record was 7 pounds, 12 ounces, grown in Oklahoma. The largest zucchini was 37 1/2 pounds, grown in Palmer, Alaska in 2000.

Way Cool Illusion Thing

There's more here than just a group of blinking pink dots:

Go here to find out.

100 Things We Didn't Know This Time Last Year

From BBC News: "100 things we didn't know this time last year". Some of the better entries:

• WD-40 dissolves cocaine - it has been used by a pub landlord to prevent drug-taking in his pub's toilets.
  
• The energy used to build an average Victorian terrace house would be enough to send a car round the Earth five times, says English Heritage.
  
• The = sign was invented by 16th Century Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who was fed up with writing "is equal to" in his equations. He chose the two lines because "noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle".
  
• Nicole Kidman is scared of butterflies. "I jump out of planes, I could be covered in cockroaches, I do all sorts of things, but I just don't like the feel of butterflies' bodies," she says.
  
• It's possible for a human to blow up balloons via the ear. A 55-year-old factory worker from China reportedly discovered 20 years ago that air leaked from his ears, and he can now inflate balloons and blow out candles.
  
• When faced with danger, the octopus can wrap six of its legs around its head to disguise itself as a fallen coconut shell and escape by walking backwards on the other two legs, scientists discovered
  
• Tactically, the best Monopoly properties to buy are the orange ones: Vine Street, Marlborough Street and Bow Street. (For US Monopoly players, these correspond to St. James, Tennessee, and New York)
  
• C3PO and R2D2 do not speak to each other off-camera because the actors don't get on.
  
• One in 18 people has a third nipple
  
• A single "mother" spud from southern Peru gave rise to all the varieties of potato eaten today, scientists have learned
  

Many of these are Brit-centric, but what would you expect from the BBC?

Platonic Programming

No, this has nothing to do with friends working on shared code. Recently I read a book that, among other things, touched on philosophy, something I hadn't spent much time reading since college. The book led me to do a little more refresher reading on Greek philosophy, especially Plato and his concept of Forms. At the same time, I've been working at refreshing my software development side, something that's been largely set aside the past several years while I focused on database administration. At the moment, that means lots of reading on Java and object-oriented design. One of the key concepts in Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is the class. A class is an abstract collection of variable definitions (things) and method definitions (processes). It never actually exists in a program or system, except as a definition. It's a model. Everything that it can know about or do is contained within the variable and method definitions it contains. So if it never exists, how is it used? Through instantiation. Instantiation is the software process of creating an instance, a real-world entity, from a class definition. The program or system interacts with the instance. The instance doesn't have to be an exact duplicate of the class; it can add variables or methods, or override variables or methods existing within the class. And other things, which I won't bother with here. A class can instantiate multiple objects within a program or system. But the program or system only knows about the variables and methods within that instantiated object as long as the object exists, and the object only knows about the system while it exists.

I don't know if the developers of OOP read Plato, but it is an intriguing question. Plato developed the concept of Forms, which were abstract entities in another plane of existence, perfect and unchanging. What we see in the world around us - people, trees, earth, sky - are only copies of the corresponding Forms. Not exact copies, and not imperfect and unchanging, for the representations of Forms here change. People age, trees lose leaves and drop limbs. But the Form that is represented never changes. We have some knowledge of the perfect Form, which couldn't have come from anything in our experience in the physical world; Plato explained that by saying our souls, which existed before our bodies, had been acquainted with the Forms on that other plane, and held on to a vague recollection. Sort of the way a program has "knowledge" of the class, through its definition, but only in an indirect way, that has no tangible benefit, until the Form "instantiates" itself into this world. So did Plato's Forms play a philosophical role in the development of OOP? Object-oriented programming was developed in the early 1960s, by Ivan Sutherland in 1963 according to some, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard in 1965 according to others. I have no idea if any of these men ever read Plato, but it's entirely likely that at some point they encountered his writings at some level. But I'd be willing to bet that Plato would have no problem understanding the concept of object-oriented programming.

Linux: "It's terrible"

So says Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD in Forbes Magazine. He takes on the success of Linux, saying:

His take is that OpenBSd's code is tighter and more secure, and that OpenBSD developers are purer in their motivation:

de Raadt obviously has the credentials to make these kinds of charges, but you have to wonder if there's not some ulterior motive hidden in there somewhere.

More at Slashdot.

A Piece Of Pi

In case you wanted to know, here's Pi to a million places.

Avogadro's Chickens

Correction! Prodding by Dave took me back through my numbers (see previous post), where I discovered that the number I had used for dry land on the Earth's surface, about 12 million square miles, was actually the amount of arable land. Total dry land is about 4 times that amount, so the number of chickens per square mile of dry land would be about 14 billion. Still lots of chickens.

Essentially Inconceivable Numbers

Brian the Non-Blogging Geek mentioned this in passing today, and I had to work out the numbers to satisfy my curiousity. It concerns Avogadro's Number - 6.02 times 10 to the 23rd power. If you took Avogadro's Number of chickens, and assumed a chicken takes up 45 square inches of space, then each square mile of the Earth's surface would contain about 3.5 billion chickens. But if you only put chickens on dry land, there would be closer to 56 billion chickens per square mile. In case you wanted to know.

Nerdiness

Changes in attitudes

My wife remarked tonight that I was more relaxed than she'd seen me in a couple of months. Maybe it was the short road trip to one of our regional offices yesterday. Maybe it was the stargaze this past weekend. (If that's the case, then it's a shame I was only able to go for one day, instead of all four like I'd hoped). It's probably a little of both. Driving alone gives me a chance to sort through lots of things and recharge. Unfortunately, being chained to a set of databases means road trips come about once every couple of years. And for sure the past 2 months have been a challenge. I've known for years that I wasn't really suited for this type of work. The problem is, I've never been able to figure out what else I'd do. I manage OK - my databases and servers pretty much stay up, and performance is decent enough - but I'm not foolish enough to think I'm a seriously righteous DBA. Anyway, with my sanity somewhat restored, I guess I can push it on a little further down the road.

Why I Like Unix

The UPS on my production server has flaked out; it's still giving surge protection, but the battery backup is gone. So, while I'm waiting on a new UPS, I need to monitor the box so I know it's still up. But I don't want to hang around the office all weekend. The solution lay in 5 lines of Bourne shell code:

while ping server
do
sleep 3600
done
/usr/lib/sendmail hboswell@kudzufiles.com < mail_msg

This will ping the server every hour; if it's up, it just goes back to sleep. If it's down, it exits the while loop and fires off an email. Simple and effective.

Trackback spam

Just turned off trackbacks completely. After deleting another 50 or so spam pings (I think I shall coin the term "sping" for these), I decided it wasn't worth the effort, since the last legitimate trackback was a month ago. If I find a way to block spings, I'll turn trackback back on.

Cybernetics

I found myself today, and this evening, needing to undertake a fast-paced review of cybernetics - and quickly remembered why I've never invested much time learning about it. An overly simple definition of cybernetics might be "comparative study of biological and machine processes in order to understand how they're alike and how they're different". And that's nice, as far as it goes. But the problem with delving very deep into cybernetics is that it's such a squishy field of knowledge. Or at least that's what it seems like to me. Someone, maybe Dave, will come along and tell me I'm completely wrong about this. But cybernetics seems to be, on different days, a brother to, a mother to, or a distant cousin to, systems science, and operations research, and even queueing theory. I'm not sure any of those have a definition firm enough to withstand a convention of doctoral candidates in any of several quantitative fields. I remember during my college days reading about a division of the College of Engineering at my university called Systems Engineering. But when I asked my advisor about it, he couldn't really tell me what they did there, much less whether any graduates actually found work. Not that it's a useless endeavor. Indeed, we would have a certain prefix deficit without it. And how should we then adjectivize this wonderful information age in which we live? But the best, or at least my favorite, comment about cybernetics came from this website:

"It may be that we haven't exhausted the potential of a science of communication and control, but I think at this point the burden of proof would be on the optimists.

Dissolved? Not entirely. There's an old joke that if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate, and not everything associated with cybernetics has gone into solution. Caked on the bottom of the reaction vessel we find: A prefix which seems indispensible to marketroids; the occasion for a great deal of vaporizing in the social sciences and humanities; and a peculiarly navel-gazing sub-sect of systems theory, which isn't exactly God's gift to the advancement of learning in the first place."

Going back to my non-original stab at a definition, it seems that the main thing cybernetics has taught us is that biological processes and machine processes, and social processes for that matter, aren't sufficiently alike to engender any valid comparisons; or at least, maybe, that we aren't yet smart enough to draw any valid comparisons.

Trackping Spammer Hell

Spammers are using a new method to spread their crap - trackback pings. 40 pings last night. To clean the mess up using MT and mysql:

delete from mt_tbping where tbping_title = "online poker";

(or "online casino")

I guess I need to look for a plug-in to block trackback pings now :-(

Glory Is Fleeting

But I'll take it when it comes.

Technofrustration Update

In the end, the problem was that the UltraSCSI card I was using wasn't compatible with my E4500 server. Why I thought it would have been was a classic case of not asking exactly the right question. I had asked Sun sales support:

"Is this the right PCI I/O board for my server?" "Yes"

"Does this PCI I/O board support the X6541A card?" "Yes"

What I didn't ask was: "Does the E4500 server support the X6541A card on the 501-4926 PCI I/O board?" Had I asked that, the answer would have been "No".

Obviously, there is no transitive property for computer hardware.

Kudzu Search Answers

I'm blatantly ripping off Mark at The Bemusement Park on this). But the searches keep coming, so I feel an obligation.

rice's comeback to joe biden -- Time was, Rice didn't come back on anybody. There was the 1954 Cotton Bowl, and I remember a game against Texas in the waning days of the old Southwest Conference. But I don't think Joe Biden played on either of those teams.

whom much is given, much is required -- If this is true, after the Alabama-Mississippi State basketball game Tuesday night, Bama's on the hook for a lot

taco bell -- What the Mexicans rang on September 16, 1810

get rid demons -- We tried. Lord knows we tried. But Karl Rove is a formidable adversary.

definition of tidal wave -- Ask Walter Mondale. Or Mississippi State.

strep throat pictures what does strep throat look like adult strep strep throat in an adult -- I don't have pictures, but I can tell you it gets very red and it hurts. Must be a bumper crop this year.

strep longer "3 days" -- Yes

crawfish -- Indeed!!

kudzu pictures -- Nobody's been able to get one yet without getting covered by the stuff

coke - cola kill muslim -- OK, this one's a little wierd. I've known for years that you can clean corrosion off a battery post by pouring coke over it, but I had no idea the stuff was this powerful.

Technofrustration Level: High

Technofrustration #1: I've installed a new PCI I/O board in my Sun E4500, along with a PCI UltraSCSI card on the board. If I insert the card while the system is powered on, at the boot prompt, it recognizes that there's a new board in the system. But when I reset the system so it can pick up the board, it decides it doesn't recognize the board. I've tried reseating the board; I've tried installing it in a different slot. No joy. I've checked and double-checked the jumpers, they seem OK. But no joy from the board.

Technofrustration #2: trying to find and configure the correct client to connect to a DB2 UDB Version 7 database so I can migrate the database objects into my Oracle databases. Just trying to navigate the IBM website is a nightmare - I swear they must design it to be confusing and dead-end-ish. I had grabbed what I thought was the correct client, but got this snippish little message saying I was trying to connect to a Version 7 database using a Version 8 client, and certainly I didn't really mean to do that! I finally got an email from someone who pointed me to what may be the correct client (the URL of which is never referenced, as far as I can tell, on the IBM support site), but now the migration tool doesn't seem to find JDBC. It did before. !@&!&*!!!!!!!

Update - the DB2 driver started working. Why, I'm not sure - or why it didn't at first, I'm not sure. I opened the environment variables - didn't change anything, just opened it, opened the CLASSPATH variable for editing but made no changes, then closed it. Reopened the migration tool and it connected. Technofrustration level lower!

Second Update - there's a Flash PROM update from Sun that appears to be related to this: "T(rhfa) timing violation causing devices behind pci-pci bridge not probed". So tonight, I'll apply that PROM update and see what happens.

Third Update - I applied the Flash PROM update, and it still won't recognize the board. Technofrustration level rising.....

Almost Final Update - after talking with Sun, it was determined that the UltraSCSI card on the new board was not the correct card for the E4500. Sun is sending a replacement card.

Care And Feeding Of A Blog

James Joyner at Outside The Beltway has a nice post about blogging - how to start one, how to grow it. He links to a series written by Joe Carter at The Evangelical Outpost, and includes a series of posts he's written. Good stuff (even if my comments never seem to show up on OTB posts, maybe he has a right-wing litmus test!)

My organizationally-challenged mind has yet to decide what Kudzu Files is all about, which should come as no surprise to the ones of readers I have on a given day. I know the Aunt Mable stories leave some of you confused - hey, they're just stuff I wrote, OK?

Life With Java, Part 2

In Part 1, I was struggling with Oracle over whether I did or did not have a method in the class. In the end, the problem was pretty basic, and specific to Oracle's implementation of Java within the database: all methods must be declared both public and static. As soon as I'd done that, it worked (Dave, I did use your simplified code). So, I'm on to bigger and better things withing Javadom.

Life with Java, Part 1

For a variety of reasons, I've been exploring the Java language lately. Officially, and legitimately, with Oracle adding Java stored procedures to the database a couple of releases back, it's pretty much inevitable that I'll have to use it. There's other reasons, too - things have been in a bit of flux (flux is such a great word, don't you think) for a while, and it seems like maybe a good time to do some career reorientation. Or at least lay the groundwork. Once upon a time, I was a damn good developer and software project guy. Much has changed the past few years, while I was embarked on an ill-fated side trip into IT management (surely one of the seven levels of hell) and then back into the technical side as a database administrator. It looks like the theology of development has pretty much divided into two camps, Microsoft's .Net and Sun's Java. I guess my background in Unix made me lean towards Java. So there I am.

So far, I've just been scratching around. I have a bit of working code - working from the DOS, or Unix, command line. But Oracle and I are having a small disagreement about whether it does or does not have a method within the class. I, personally, believe t does:

public class EncodePinUtil {

public java.lang.String encode(java.lang.String args) {
String encodedPin = null;
String pinToEncode = null;
pinToEncode = args;

encodedPin = ueEncodePin(pinToEncode);
return encodedPin;

}

My hypothesis is that encode is, indeed, a method. Oracle's hypothesis is that, while there may be madness in my method, there is no method in my madness. This is, as might be imagined, somewhat frustrating. Perhaps I should resort to RTFM.

Spamless weekend

Maybe it's coincidence, but I went through the entire weekend without any spam comments. Maybe the change I made is working.

Fighting spam

I've added something that I found here that adds a security code that you'll have to enter before your comment is accepted. We'll see how it works soon enough, since weekends seem to be prime time for the spammers. Try it, and let me know if you have any problems.

And now for something completely different

(With apologies to Country Joe And The Fish, and to the tune of "I Feel Like I'm A'Fixin' To Die Rag")

Well come on all o' you admin jocks
Take at look at your Unix box
It's spewing messages on the screen
Black on white but you're feeling green
So put down your keys and turn on the light
It's gonna be a helluva night!

And it's one, two, three
alternate roots are gone
got scratches on the CDROM
Wonder where you're gonna boot it from
And you wish you knew
When the last backup was
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why
Restore and start editing files

One of those weeks

You wonder what would happen if you just got in your car and started driving, just pick a direction and go. How long would it take for someone outside your immediate family to notice you weren't exactly there? How long would you have to drive before your mind was emptied of all the drudgery that sent you off in the first place? Why, exactly, do we put ourselves through this? When your job begins affecting your life, where do you find the incentive to keep rolling along? What's the point of all this rushing about?

Several years ago, the job I had at the time sent me to Washington, DC on a regular basis. I would ride the Metro morning and evening, and what I saw constantly was people who seemed to have this sullen irritation at the life they were forced to lead. I rarely saw someone on the Metro who seemed happy. I didn't understand how people lived that way. I don't want to ever understand that way of living and working. But I've also worked around people who became high-maintenance, whose attitude was so raw that those around them were always on edge. There was a guy we called the Volcano, because of his tendency to get mad and boil over. The explosion was never pretty. He would quit, then come back a few months later. Good programmer. Lousy co-worker. I don't want to understand that way of living and working either. So, whatever this funk is, wherever it's coming from, I have to figure out a way to deal with it, small answer or big answer.

There's No Geek Orthodox Priests

But maybe there should be. And no, I didn't mistype "Greek". I meant "Geek". The computer types out there know what I'm talking about. You reach a point where what you've been doing isn't working, you're not sure why, you just know you're burned out and bummed out and bored out of your skull. The technology complexities that used to fascinate you now feel like the rock of Sisyphus. You wake up in the morning, and more than anything you want to just roll back over and go back to sleep, because the things you're going to deal with today are the same things you dealt with yesterday and the day before that and the day before that. It's like one of those rooms where you look in a mirror and see a mirror across the room reflecting the image of you looking in a mirror seeing yourself looking in a mirror on and on and on into infinity. And when you're in one of the earlier waves of computer professionals, there's not many aging role models to light your way. So you just slog on, trying to figure out if you're just tired, or at a point where you really need to make a serious change. And you find yourself taking long detours on the way home, trying to figure out how to figure things out. So it would be nice to have some Geek priests with whom you could have those long, rambling, philosophical chats with, where you solve all the ethical issues of the world, except for the one you're dealing with. Where you explore the nature of truth, and faith, and honesty, using every argument you can recall from your college philosophy class, making no more sense now than you made then. But at least when it's over, you can focus a little better, cope a little longer, and play the string out just a little further. Maybe you're no better off than you were, but you're not as aware of it, so you are a little better off than you were. And the next day, you start it all over again.

New and improved

So this is how I've resolved my problems - moving Kudzu Files to it's own domain. Something I probably should have done a long time ago. Scott, the return of KF really had nothing to do with the Dr. Peppers, but if you want to believe that, it's OK with me. I think I've moved everyhting OK, but if you find something that still points to hboswell.felisonca.com, please let me know.

Not long ago, someone called me a liberal moonbat on another blog; I guess I need to live up to the name.

Books for geeks (or geeky wannabes)

No, these are not the hardcore geeky things. These are more properly classified "Geek Culture". But they're good reads:

Life With Unix: A Guide For Everyone, by Don Libes and Sandy Ressler: a little dated, written in 1989, but still an enjoyable journey into the world that gave us Unix.

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays On Software Engineering, by Frederick Brooks. This one is really dated (some would say obsolete). It was written in 1975. But there are universal truths buried inside.

The Cuckoo's Egg, by Cliff Stoll. An early story on tracking a hacker.

The Soul Of A New Machine, by Tracy Kidder. The story of Data General's attempt to build a 32-bit minicomputer during the late 1970s.

And a fiction work:

The Adolescence Of P1, by Thomas Ryan. The first computer fiction I ever read, if you don't count "2001", and still the best. I suspect this might be hard to find, but worth it if you do.

More blog/mysql maintenance

Another spamstorm tonight, about 30 spam comments in a 10-15 minute time frame. Rather than delete them one at a time, it's easier to just run mysql delete queries:

DELETE FROM `mt_comment` WHERE comment_author = 'online casino';

Midwest tornadoes

Bemusement Park is keeping an unofficial chroncile of the severe weather in the upper Midwest. For instance, here, and here. Sounds like it's time for Bill Murray and Dan Akroyd to show up.

Thirty Years Ago

One of the things I do sometimes when I'm bored is drop by the main Jackson library and look through microfiche of old news magazines. A couple of days ago, I dragged out the US News And World Report film from January-June 1974. Here's some of the things that were newsworthy then:

-hospital costs were rising, and there were concerns that one day drug costs might become unaffordable
-there was talk of gasoline rationing, possibly some sort of alternate-day availability
-but, it was projected that there was enough oil in shale beds in Colorado and Wyoming to supply the US with oil for 15-20 years
-Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev was rumored to be in poor health and losing support in the Kremlin
-the Pentagon had concerns about whether the South Vietnamese Air Force could meet the challenge of an expected North Vietnamese campaign
-an explanation of why the Pentagon was shutting down major anti-aircraft installations at 7 US locations
-sources close to Ronald Reagan speculated that he was considering a run for the Presidency in 1976
-much, much speculation on how Watergate would affect Nixon's ability to govern
-some people thought computers would not be useful to the population at large unless/until they were able to recognize English speech.

archive.org

If you haven't been checking out archive.org, you're missing a ton of stuff. In addition to the Wayback Machine, which lets you see early version of millions of web pages, there's thousands of audio and video archives. For instance, those of you who have, like me, been hanging around geekland for longer than you care to think will remember The Computer Chronicles, which ran on PBS from 1984 until 2002. Well, archive.org has every episode of The Computer Chronicles archives in QT and mpeg. You can see a commercial for the new 1960 Fords, or take a ride in your merry 1927 Oldsmobile. Or watch the US blow up Bikini atoll. And don't miss this little gem.