various stuff Marty's Weblog

I recently bundled all of my service with Verizon FiOS.  I'm probably saving about $20 a month now with their new 4-pack bundle (TV,Phone,Internet,Wireless).  It's really more of a simplicity thing for them, to put everything on one bill. No complaints here though.

The install took quite a while, about 5 to 6 hours.  Not having had High-Def before, the upgrade was well worth it.  The only thing I do not like so far is the router.  All of the devices installed (router, set top, DVR, ONI) are monitored by Verizon, which made me a little uneasy about leaving my computers out there unprotected.  I fiddled with the router configuration for about an hour, but ended up choosing to disable the wireless on the Verizon router and connect my old Linksys Router to the new router, leaving the new Verizon network as a DMZ.

Yesterday was a tough day.  One of my dogs, Lola, who we've had for about 10 years had become very ill and needed the "final trip to the vet".

Lola was 17 years old (thats 119 in human years) and up until about 10 days ago she was in great health.  We took her in to get caught up on her vaccines and to get a general check up.  She had always had these fatty nodules on her chest that from time to time we would have checked to make sure they weren't something bad.  This time around, one of the lumps came back as suspicious.

We'll never know if it was her age, the recent cocktail of vaccines, or something to do with the suspicious lump, but her health declined very rapidly over the past few days.  She had lost the use of her hind legs and needed to be carried in and out, and held up while outside.  Samples we were finally able to get indicated there were probably kidney problems as well.

When let out in the front yard, our other dog, Patrick(also 17), always stays nearby.  Lola was the explorer.  If we turned our eyes away for 5 seconds, she would be two blocks away, happily sniffing every shrub in the neighborhood.  Yesterday she started a new exploration.  Goodbye Lola.  We love you and will miss you.

Lola

 I stumbled across the MacOS "say" command the other day.  With a 4 year old at home learning to spell with his "Word Whammer" on the fridge door, I got the idea to recreate the Word Whammer functionality as a perl script, so he's not limited to 3 letter words.  The only problem is that he's taken to entering garbage text to see how it pronounces it.  To verify for real words, I was hoping to find a word list file [native to MacOS] like the Solaris spell command has (/usr/dict/words).  Nothing jumped out at me (didn't look long) I figure worst case I could just get a copy of /usr/dict/words from Solaris.  Anyway, here is what I came up with.  If you've got preschool age kids, this simple script provides hours of fun and learning:

#!/usr/bin/perl
$WORD="";
print "Type \"bye\" to exit.\n";

while ( "$WORD" ne "bye" ){
    print "Enter a word: ";
    system("say \"Enter a word\"");

    $WORD=<STDIN>;
    chomp($WORD);
    $word=$WORD;
    $len=length($WORD);

    for ($i=$len ; $i >= 0 ; $i-- ){
        $W[$i]=chop($WORD);
    }
    if ("$word" eq "bye"){
        system("say \"Goodbye.\"");
        exit 0;
    } else {
        system("say \"You spelled, ${word}.\"");
        for ($i=1 ; $i <= $len ; $i++ ){
            system("say \"$W[$i]\"");
        }
        system("say \"$word\"");
    }
}

exit 0;

A good friend of mine just got his first book published.  It is entitled "Nagios 3 Enterprise Network Monitoring".  I'm meeting him for lunch tomorrow to get my signed copy.  If you are in to network monitoring, check out the book.

If you are a history buff (civil war / buffalo soldiers, etc...) Check out his fathers work.

I have been working on an Identity project where we are deploying to Application Server EE v8.2 on Windows Server 2003.  The issue of the passwordfile might be surfacing as a security concern.  I have never been a fan of storing the cleartext password in a file... The counter argument I always hear is that file permissions (*nix:chown or win:cacls) are sufficient to protect the password.  When doing Solaris installs, I've added a layer of pseudo-obscurity that allows the password file to sit on disk encrypted.  Here is a snippet of code from the startup script that I use.

umask 377
cd /opt/SUNWappserver/bin
crypt crypt < key.crypt > key.txt
./asadmin start-domain --user admin --passwordfile key.txt domain1
rm key.txt

If you know the arguments to the crypt command, you are able to figure out how to decrypt the file.  But then "file permissions should be sufficient", right?

So to make the security folks happy, I need to come up with something similar that will work on Windows.  Last week I played with the cipher command on win2k3, but it didn't seem to do anything useful.  Files would be marked as encrypted ("E" vs. "U") but then I could just cat, errr, I mean "type" them.

Has anyone else out there run in to this and come up with a solution that works on Windows?

"This ascent of the 14,265-foot Quandary [peak] represented the first stage of a substantial commitment, an engagement to my project. I stood at the threshold of the forest, arms wide, balancing on that moment when preparation changes into performance."

-Aron Ralston, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place"

I almost sent these questions out to an internal mail list, but I get more verbose responses in the comments when I gripe about Macs in this forum, so here goes:

Gripe 1:
When connecting to a wireless network, there is a little check box that says "Remember this network".  It's checked by default, and I leave it checked.  The SSID of my network at home is not broadcast.  Apparently MacOS cannot remember a network if the SSID is not broadcast.  This is annoying.

Gripe 2:
The tab order in both Firefox and Safari skip non-text input objects.  If you have a web page (gmail login for example) that has a  login field, password field and an OK button, you should be able to click in the login text field, type your login, hit tab to go to the password field, type your password, hit tab to go to the OK button, and hit return to actually login.  This is how it works under Solaris and Windows.

What happens on a Mac is you type your login, hit tab to go to the password field, type your password, hit tab which takes you to the URL field in the Navigation toolbar (instead of the OK button), then when you hit enter it refreshes your login page, losing your login and password.

I've even tried setting the Firefox prefbar to act as if the browser were Internet Exploder, but the behavior is the same.

So those are my two most recent gripes.  Not in any order...  From my earlier post, I'm still very much annoyed by the home and end keys being different from app to app, but there appears to be no fix for that so I've had to stop using them.

I have been fiddling with MySQL for a while now because of Sun's Identity Manager product and one or two web apps I've created internally.  Until the MySQL acquisition was announced, I was never aware that the pronunciation of MySQL was such a sensitive topic.

 In the early 90's I was a SysAdmin for a mid-sized group of Oracle DBA/developers.  All of the Oracle product names were SQL*this or SQL*that (pronounced "sequel")  I don't know if that was an Oracle thing or just the way that particular group pronounced it.  My guess is that it was an Oracle thing and the MySQL pronunciation sensitivity grew from an effort to help differentiate their product from Oracle.

 Apologies in advance are in order though, because I seem to have carried that pronunciation habit with me through the years.  I am working on correcting it though.  So if you hear me mispronounce it, I owe you a beer(See Note 1).

The ironic thing here is that database folks seem to be very keen on optimization.  The insistence that a char(5) word be pronounced with four syllables vs. three strikes me as odd...  Anyway,  MyS-Q-L it is!  Welcome aboard guys!

 ---

Note 1: One beer per occurrence, Must be of legal drinking age, Do not drink and drive, Do not drink and administer databases, Anheuser Busch and Miller products do not qualify as beer.

 

I spent the last week of November in Atlantic City with a bunch of other Identity Management folks doing a peer training event called Jamfest II.  The biggest take-away from the session was that Netbeans rocks, and I've got to get more familiar with it.

I was doing the 4 hr. drive home from Atlantic City, thinking about Netbeans and Eclipse, wondering why there is such a Holy war going on between the two IDE camps.  Then I started thinking about real Holy wars and a few interesting parallels came up.  I had them listed out but then thought, "What good will this do?  It will be just another post pointing out the evils of SWT" so I figured I'd omit the list and leave it up to the readers imagination to find their own parallels.  I ran a draft of this blog (with my parallels listed) by a colleague who convinced me to think about it some more...  He also mentioned that he had recently shown Netbeans to some Eclipse users, and they loved it.  So in the spirit of the holiday season, I decided not to perpetuate the IDE wars...

All I am saying, is give 'Beans a chance...  (NetBeans that is...)

To paraphrase Dr. Seuss,
    You do not like Netbeans.
    So you say.
    Try it! Try it!
    And you may.
    Try it and you may, I say.

I've been listening to Steve Vai's Passion and Warfare CD a lot lately.  September 30th he played at the Birchmere and my Friend Max and I went to see him.  Max is a big music[guitar] geek.  He was a little disappointed with the show because Mr. Vai didn't do a whole lot of improvisation.  I pointed out that there was another guitar player and two violinists on stage playing with him, and if he tried to improvise, the other musicians might not have been able to follow.(not to berate the other musicians)

From my perspective, yes, the live show was very close to the album, but still absolutely amazing. Steve Vai is a great example of excellence in one's field.  This article is proof.  Guys like him pop in to my head when things like employee self evaluations come around.  For me to consider myself excellent in the software field would mean that I have written the software in question.  I have fiddled around with guitars since ~1984.  To Steve Vai the guitar is an extension of himself which he has completely mastered.  The only person I know of that made it to that level of mastery in the software world is a guy named Neo.

My team has had our new MacBook Pros for a couple of weeks and I'm fairly comfortable with it now.  There are a couple of things I don't like about them though.

First, they are wider than my old laptop(s).  The laptop bag I had was not wide enough to hold this monster.  But then again, that bag was on it's last legs so it was time for a change anyway...

Second, There does not appear to be a native rdesktop client.  I go to client sites and need to access their MS servers that are running under VMWare...  Need rdesktop for that(Solaris has it!).    rdesktop.org has the source you can pull down, but you'd need a compiler.  So I think I'm going to have to fire up a Solaris or Windows VM to get access to rdesktop.  Too many hoops...

Third,  Sun rackmounted servers have a serial port for the console.  The MacBook Pro has no serial port.  There is a USB add-on you can buy, but a serial port is such a basic component that it surprises me that it's not included.

Fourth, I use the HOME and END keys alot when typing.  Depending on the application you are in those keys are different and it drives me nuts!  One application is fn+Left arrow, another is AppleKey+Left arrow.  While using Firefox to type a previous blog, I hit Apple+Left for HOME, which it turns out in Firefox is go back one page in your stack.  Lost the blog...

Fifth,  The Cisco VPN Software doesn't like my Linksys Router.  Read more here.

Sixth,  There is a built-in camera and mic on this thing.  Recording devices are not allowed in many of the places we SE's go.  I may need to carry a customer approved laptop as well.  At least I'll get a workout.

Seventh,  It is Unix, why should I have to load an X Server.  That should just be there...

Eight, eight, I forgot was eight was for...

Now I guess I should also point out some positive points of these new laptops so I don't come off as an anti-Macite.  I should also say that I was stretching to make seven gripes so I could use that line on the eighth... (who caught that?)

The previous clunkers I was issued had nowhere near the battery life of these Macs.

It is Unix, so the basic essentials are there.

The little magnetic power cable is cool, although easily dislodged.

I get to shop at Banana Republic now.

The previous laptops I had were USB 1.x, These are 2.0.

The Airport wireless is pretty easy to use.

Mac errors are interesting, I hit a web page that required some plugin that I didn't have loaded and I got a very dumbed down message saying I need to click a link to load some S/W, and it's a technical thing so I should just click  the link and not ask any questions.  Needless to say I had to figure out what the missing plugin was and go find it myself...  Would you click a link labeled It's OK, you can trust me, click here...
 

It's very frustrating when you send an email looking for some info and the response comes back saying something like “I don't know, ask George”. But George wasn't cc:'d on the reply. Now I have to forward that reply on to George and spend more time to get a response to my initial question.  What if I was out of the office for a while.  Simply adding the cc: to your response can save alot of time...

Gripe #2: Asking a question and getting a “Clintonesque” reply that leads me to believe that maybe I just didn't phrase my question properly. So I try again with some wording changes... If I wanted to go on a fishing expedition, I wouldn't do it here at work!

Too often people just see a question, vs. seeing the problem. Personally, I don't just fire off questions to clog the email system, there is usually a purpose...

Time for a beer... Doing all this fishing has made me thirsty. 

My Son's school had a huge White Oak tree taken down this weekend.  To save money, they just had the tree company leave it in "manageable pieces" in the parking lot, and they invited the community, and the parents of the kids in the school to come help themselves.  I guess the tree company has a different view on what is a "manageable piece"...

Anyway, while splitting some of the smaller pieces (that truely WERE manageable), I broke my axe.  I've had this axe as long as I can remember, I think it was one of my grandfathers.  This was not your typical break either.  I've broken handles before, but today I broke the axe head itself.  No misuse or anything, it just broke when it hit the top of a log.  Fortunately, it was a Craftsmen.  I had to go to Sears to look at Fridges later in the day, so I brought the axe to test the Craftsmen guarantee.  No problems... I walked right out with a brand new axe!  It was also alot of fun to walk through the mall carrying an axe.  I got a couple of funny looks.

My boss has asked those of us who attended this past CEC how they think it compares to Immersion Week.  Immersion Week(IW), for that non-Sun reader out there, is a week of training where all of the pre-sales SE's from the US get together and attend session on various topics, usually presented by their “rock star” peers.  CEC on the other hand is attended by all types of techies from across all of Sun, globally. This includes Pre-sales, Professional Services, Engineering, etc...

Session-wise, I'd have to say that the two events are very similar.  The one exception being that CEC is attended by folks from product engineering.  Many of the sessions have these folks as presenters.  This allows the session to become a deeper dive if the attendees take it in that direction.  One of the presenters from the most recent CEC mentioned that they were asked to keep the content at a high level.  My guess is that the organizers requested this because many people use these events to get some cross training.  I have nothing against that, and I applaud the individuals efforts to expand their “toolkit”, but I think what we've ended up with is a scenario similar to returning to school only to find that only freshman level courses are offered.

So session-wise, I'd have to say that CEC beats out IW, just because of the engineering presence.

Networking is a HUGE benefit of these types of events.  With the broader audience attending CEC, I usually ended up eating breakfast with folks from other countries(like Jersey!).  The IW attendees are a more targeted group.  It is much easier to find software folks to “swap war stories” with at IW, and being on the Sun Federal side of the house, those contacts can potentially be used in my day to day job.  It was interesting to meet some Sun folks from far away lands but due to the nature of the federal space, those contacts aren't terribly beneficial.

So, networking-wise, I would personally have to say IW win's out.  I realize for the non-SunFed parts of Sun, it would probably be CEC though.

As for location,  CEC tends to be held in fancier places.  I've been twice, once to San Francisco, and this last time to Las Vegas.  For the past few years, IW has been held at the Qcenter, which is out in the boonies West of Chicago.  Its a nice facility for this type of event.  There are no distractions, so there is nothing to do but learn.  An added benefit here is the individual rooms and the fact that you don't have a roommate.  When attending CEC, you have to have a room mate(or you can pay for half the room), and the locations tend to offer many distractions.

So location-wise, I think the facility where IW has been held is a nicer place for events like these.  That said, this past CEC had 4000 attendees, which I don't think the Qcenter could facilitate.  So the location battle, I would have to call a draw.

My new MacBook Pro arrived yesterday.  I haven't touched MacOS since the days of System 7.x  (pre NeXTStep coming home to Apple)  Major learning curve here...  The first thing that got me was I can't right click on anything.  Right now I'm fiddling with the onboard wifi.  My home wireless network has a few layers of security, I've basicaly had to turn off security to get it to work.  Still playing...

My experiences today and yesterday remind me of when I first went off to college.  I had been happily using my trusty Apple II+ for years.  For H.S. graduation, I got a Macintosh SE, with dual floppies no less!  (no HD).  Going from whatever the word processor was, (I remember it being very similar to writing HTML in notepad) to a full blown WYSIWYG GUI was almost too much to handle.  I almost opted to bring my Apple II+ with me instead of the Mac.  I just had to sit down and use it for a while and then it clicked.  I'm sure the same will hold true for this new Mac.