A completely unscientific benchmark of Safari stability

Since all but disabling tabs, I’ve noticed that Safari seems, like, orders of magnitude more stable.

Our lovely data center.

Like, oh, everyone, we have all our hardware at a colo facility, managed by our bandwidth provider.

And like every colo facility, they have strict ingress/egress rules for persons and hardware. Want to rack up a server? Call the home office in Denver, request a ticket, go to Sterling with hardware, sign 20 different pieces of paper to get access to our racks. So fun.

It would make sense, if they had anything remotely resembling competence or caring. But they security are essentially untrained; they rarely speak english as a third or fourth language; no one cares enough to enforce policy, except when they do, IT WILL BE FOLLOWED TO THE LETTER. (strong correlation between english language fluency and desire to enforce regulations)

Perhaps a couple of examples will better illustrate how fucking stupid these asshats are:
1. My badge expired. All I had to do to get access was make a sad face, present a ticket ID, and ask nicely to be let in.
2. Then after my badge was 1)lost and 2)renewed, it was 3)lost again and I was not allowed, at all, to enter the hosting floor. That I had just used it once in the intervening space between 2 and 3, and that was less than 12 hours prior, was ignored.
3. Also, my picture badge was taken in 2004, when I started here. I was … larger. Recently they decided that I was not the person on the badge, because I am less large. “Look, thanks for the fantastic complement vis a vis my weight loss, but seriously pal, that’s me. OK?”

Note that in many of these instances there were serious, time-critical issues going on. No fuckin’ around, clock-is-ticking stuff.

I have to go back, again, today. I can’t wait to see what happens. It’s always an adventure.

You are now, by definition, a furry.

Even your dog has a blog:

It goes without saying that Max, a 3-year-old golden retriever can’t talk. But that doesn’t stop him from chronicling his dog’s life — as told to his owner Aubrey Jones — on the blog Max the Golden Retriever.

This really won’t have come full circle, though, until a Golden calls a Schnauzer a Nazi in a comment thread, while discussing Obama’s plans for pets.

Mac OS X network locations and the command line

Problem: I have a bunch of “workflow” wrappers to svn, but I’ve foolishly hardcoded my svn server to svnserver.local, its name on the Bonjour network. So I go home, and on the same laptop I use at work, I have to do 86 extra steps to use my scripts. Wouldn’t it be great if the scripts knew how to figure out if I was at home?

Complication: Airport at home and office are configured essentially identically, so it’s not like I can just look at the IP address.

Solution:scselect! It’s important to note that calling it w/o options prints to STDERR not STDOUT. No idea why.

Anyway after some messing around with things I ended up with this:


scselect 2>&1 | egrep “\*” | tail -1 | awk ‘{print $3}’ | sed -e ’s/(//’ -e ’s/)//’


This returns the current network location. Configure (and switch to) the appropriate network location, and now my wrappers know which repository URL to use. Yay.

Now someone please tell me there’s an easier way ….

I quit.

1. User emails problem with specific error code.
2. Code monkey use TEH GOOGLES to find answer. Answer is specific Knowledge Base article by big company in Redmond, Washington, with specific steps to fix problem.
3. User tell code monkey “that not problem at all, big company in Redmond, Washington who write software and maintain knowledge base wrong about software they write and knowledge base they maintain, you fix problem now”.

Apparently push-ups are important

Apparently push-ups are still relevant. So I dropped and did 31 before feeling like any second someone was going to walk in to my office. That’s only “good“, I think had I not felt incredibly dorky - and done a lot of upper body work this morning - I’d have done better.

It’s a rough life

Important Career Milestones

Boss: “We need that there wireless card installed into that there Windows machine.”
Me: “What, did I lose a bet or something?”
Boss: “*sigh* ok i’ll do it.”
Me: “Let me know how that works out.”

William F. Buckley is awesome.

It turns out, William F. Buckley would probably have been fun to party with:

Buckley famously smoked marijuana — after sailing his boat outside the U.S. territorial limits, where it would no longer be illegal.

He had it on his boat, anyway, so isn’t that illegal? Oh, nevermind.

At any rate, when he died, there were a lot of jokes along the lines of, “He died because he finally realized what happened to his party and the conservative movement, and his heart couldn’t bear it any more.” This is probably more true than people realize:

“Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great.”

He’s 100% right; and near as I can tell, has been marginalized by the new wing of conservatism for some time. He’s paid the appropriate deference as an elder, but any time he said “ok chaps, time to reassess things” he was patted gently on the head and told to go away and have a hard candy.

The 2 iPhone apps we need

Our “enterprise” must be somewhat unique; for us enterprise has nothing at all to do with Exchange. (We use simple IMAP and Mail.app, and the excellent Daylite for contacts, calendars, etc. )

For us there are 2 killer apps for our phones, and sadly I fear one of them will be impossible:

1, a reasonable amount of access to unix-y bits, in particular ssh. Being able to perform simple maintenance while on-the-go will be such a massive “force multiplier” for us that the phones will almost pay for themselves, in terms of no longer tethering the person on-call to their internet connection at home.

I see no reason why there won’t be 50 different competing SSH terminal apps out the day the App Store goes live. So that’s good.

2, we need a modification to the SMS app to allow it to act like a traditional pager; that is to say, “when an SMS comes in, keep making goddamn noise every few seconds until someone comes over and does something”. Like, oh, just about everyone we use Nagios (and I’ve started rolling out monit for stuff, too) to check status on machines. Machine go boom, nagios pages oncall@.

At 2am, that would be a quarter-second-long “boop” on a phone across the room, and maybe you had an extra glass of wine too many that night, and are sleeping a little more soundly than usual…

I am assuming at this point that it means we’ll need to go and buy a traditional pager: before with our shit RAZRs, you just set the most obnoxious ringtone available to incoming SMS, and it worked great. Well, except you dread that sound …

Anyway the “no background apps” rule seems to preclude anyone from writing a better SMS app.

So we’re stuck with maintaining a second cell account, or buying a physical pager. Or hacking our phones, which I sorta refuse to do. (FFS, I refuse to use input managers or any other hacks, you think I’m going to sysadmin my phone???)

It’s sort of sad to think, one day I’ll be restarting a troublesome httpd process one day, from my phone in the dark of a movie theatre, after my stupid numeric pager went off …