Rants and Revelations

Damn I hate Linksys. The first time I bought a Linksys product was years and years ago. I’m beginning to wonder why I thought it would be any different this time.
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1. Back massages are wonderful, both for relieving back muscle strain caused by moving heavy computer equipment around and for giving you time totally disassociated from everything to think.
2. Doing editing of massive MySQL dump files to turn them into files that Postgres can read, and loading them into Postgres to test, on a linode with 64Mb of memory and a shared processor does not make sense when you have a local machine with Postgres on it, 1024Mb of memory and two processors.
3. The perl script that I downloaded from SourceForge to convert MySQL dump files into Postgres dump files SUCKS ROCKS and I’m getting much better results from my own little sed script.

That is all.

As I wrote in a blog entry a few weeks ago, I added up all the money I spend on Gradwell web hosting and domain registration, and realized that because of the exchange rate, I hadn’t realized I was up over $400 a year.

I decided that I could do everything I’ve been doing on my Gradwell account with a $20 a month Linode virtual Linux host, and 5 domain registrations at GoDaddy, and a couple of free dns entries at ZoneEdit, for a total yearly cost of about $285.

The rest is even more boring than what’s come before, so I’m putting in a cut line.
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I made another pass through the computer junk today. Two weeks ago I pulled out the stuff that I thought had some potential and tried to sell it on-line. I sold a couple of barebones computers (one of them an AMD Athlon 1800+), a motherboard, a power supply, and a hard drive and a few other miscellaneous bits. I think I made $75 total. Today I took the rest of the junk out (including a Pentium 90 computer and a couple of old Macintoshes, and a SPARCClassic that I never got working) and put it at the end of the driveway for the scavengers to pick through.

The stuff I sold was probably worth a lot more than I sold it for, and there were a few things in the junk pile that would probably sell if I was willing to take the time and hassle to list it on eBay or take it to a swap meet. But hassle is the operative word here - I just wanted to get rid of it, because right now empty shelves are more valuable to me that potential sales.

However, it’s quite amusing to watch the scavengers at work. One of them drove past, slowed way down to have a look, and then sped off. A few minutes later he came back, and parked well away (like nearly 50 metres). He ran over, and furtively and hurriedly grabbed an armload of stuff and ran back to dump it in his trunk. He ran back and grabbed another armload. I swear he looked like a chipmunk collecting nuts, or a person worried that any moment I was going to run out of the house yelling at him for stealing my stuff. If I didn’t want you to take it, I wouldn’t have put it at the end of the driveway!

After he left, our neighbour phoned me to chuckle about his behaviour. Heh.

I’ve got some more stuff to put out later, including some even older Macintosh computers (a WGS-8550 and a LC-III), but I have to wipe the hard drives first. I think I’m going to wait for another time when I can watch out the window.

Computer Problem Causes False Stock Quotes

I spent nearly two years working for a company that made the software that, at the time, was responsible for over 75% of all the trades that took place on NASDAQ. My bosses attitude towards quality assurance and testing would have been laughable, if it wasn’t the fact that they could have cost people millions of dollars, and the fact that when I was working there we were losing market share hand over fist to a company that made a product that was faster, easier to use, and didn’t crash all the time.

I’m torn between hoping this failure wasn’t the fault of any of my friends still working there, and hoping that the people in charge will some day get what’s coming to them.

Most of our customers were “market makers”, which is a large step up from stock broker in the heirarchy. A lot of our customers, and three of the people in our company, were at work in the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. One person from our company got out. The other two didn’t. One of the people who died was somebody whom I was scheduled to have a conference call later that day when she got back from WTC. I think about Julie a lot when 9/11 comes up in conversation.

Warning: Even for a blog posting, this one is pretty pointless.

For the last several days, just as I’m getting out of the car at work I’ve noticed that there is a damp spot on my left thigh. It’s been mystifying me, especially since it never seems to hit my right thigh. So today I tried to pay attention - when I put my bum bag on I checked to make sure it’s not damp. I checked the car door and the steering wheel. No dampness. And on the way to work I noticed that spot was back, but not as damp as it usually is by the time I get to work. So I put my hand over the spot to see if I could feel more dampness arriving. And it got damper under my hand!

Cue the Twilight Zone music.

That’s when I noticed something else - my new watch has a nylon and velcro band. My old one had a metal band. Oh. The light dawns. This watch band absorbs water in the shower, and then it leeches out onto my pants when I rest my hand on my thigh when I drive.

Mystery solved. I guess I should take off my watch in the shower?

I forgot something I meant to put in yesterday’s post about VE Day.

My mother tells a story of how during the war she was a young girl living in St. Ives, Cornwall. For part of the war they had a Canadian commando billeted with them. She says he’d come home after a hard day storming ashore in rubber boats and climbing cliffs and he was quiet, polite, and he always offered to help out around the house. And he would tell them stories about his home back in Canada. She was quite impressed with this young man.

I’m sure my father had his own reasons, but my mother says that the commando’s stories were one reason why she wanted to move to Canada after they got married.

I have no idea about where the commando was from, what unit he was with, or if he survived the war. But I know that when I’m honouring the service of the soldiers who fought in the wars, I always say a silent prayer of thanks for that quiet young man, whoever he is, because without him I might have grown up British instead of Canadian. And growing up Canadian is something I’m profoundly grateful for.

For the glorious few
no longer stand so straight
As they did long years before
when they faced a hard and cruel fate
on a far and distant shore.
Their tunics faded, green and blue
poor shelter from this cold;
the memories made yet raw and new
at the calling of the roll.
Garnet Rogers - 11:11

Alyssa and I went today to watch the VE Day 60th Anniversary Parade, as the veterans who did so much for us paraded from the National War Memorial on Elgin Street to the opening of the new National War Museum on Le Breton Flats.

On the drive into Ottawa on Friday night, I heard a few stories about VE Day celebrations. One was about this organization of women who’d served overseas as drivers, clerks, nurses, etc, and who were disbanding their organization after this VE Day because there were too few remaining to and those remaining weren’t able to travel to reunions. And a similar story later about how this 60th anniversary celebration in Holland will probably be the last, and certainly the last “significant” anniversay, where vets will be able to come in any number, and how the damn politicians are ruining it for them by crashing what was supposed to private dinner and dance for the vets and their wives only because partisan bickering kept the politicians from going to the public ceremony today.

The vets were supposed to come along Wellington Street at 11:30, but since there were politicians giving speeches at the National War Memorial, of course they were late. They started streaming by at about 12:45. I tried to keep Alyssa entertained by telling her some of the stories my parents and grand parents told me about their experience in the war. I’m hoping that these sorts of stories will help keep the memories alive and maybe spark some later interest in the history. Of course this long delay meant that I was standing far longer than I should have been, and my knees and hips are screaming in pain in spite of the Celebrex I’ve taken.

First was an honour guard, most of whom were wearing “spam medals” (Canadian Volunteer Service Medal) or other campaign medals or ribbons. Then some marching soldiers, some obviously WW-II vets as well, others more recent. A few wearing peace-keeping blue berets. Then some more of the WW-II vets came riding an assortment of era vehicles including Bren Gun Carriers, Deuce and a Halfs, Jeeps, DUCWs, and Sherman (”Ronson”) tanks.

As everybody passed by, the crowd applauded constantly, and called out “Thank you”. It was touching how many of the veterans called back “Thank you for showing up.” The people next to us were holding an Air Force ensign, and all the Air Force vets commented on it as they went by.

I was amazed to see in amongst the vets was a man in a motorized wheel chair wearing a Glengary with the cap badge of the Lorne Scots (Peel Dufferin and Halton Regiment), the same unit that I spent my time in. I ran along side him a bit and told him that I’d been in the Lorne Scots, but he couldn’t hear that well so I didn’t get a chance to ask him where he served. The Lorne Scots were all over the place in the war, including Boulogne, Dieppe and Sicily. But even if he was one of the people involved in the training brigades that never left England, there is nothing in my valiant defence of Canadian Forces Base Boredom from the perdiferous Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada (the “ASH-CANs”) that even remotely matches his service. But I hope my brief time trying to carry on the regimental traditions carries some weight.

A little while later there was another man wearing the cap badge and the Glengarry, and also the primrose hackle of the Lorne Scots, but he wasin a truck with a bunch of other people and he was talking to them and couldn’t hear me calling out to him.

Of course with both men, I had to resist the urge to call out some of the Lorne Scots regimental songs, all of which I only know the extremely rude words for, not the “real” ones.

Lorne Scots once
Lorne Scots twice
Holy Jumping Jesus Christ!

We are the Lorne Scots,
We wear our kilts, we wear no jocks
We wrap our putties around our cocks
To keep our balls from freezing.

and so on.

Every few years I have a dream where I’m back in the Lorne Scots. It was a period of my life I have very mixed emotions about, but I’m glad that I served.

I’ve never figured out whether the reason so many PHP sites are steaming piles of shit is because PHP is a horribly limited language with inherent flaws you can drive a truck through, or if it’s just the web equivalent of Visual Basic and so it attracts the weakest programmers on the net. But I do know this - unlike every other program on every other computer I own, this blog program is incapable of determining the correct local time and I have to manually change the offset from GMT when we switch from EST to EDT and back. So fuck it - I’m switching the time format to display GMT. Why not? I’m a pilot, I have GMT time prominently displayed on my watch. And it’s my blog, and I’ll cry if I want to.

Because of that problem I have with my router losing it’s mind every few days, I decided to take advantage of a feature in the new firmware that allows you to schedule a reboot every day. I set it for 2 am. Last night was the first night.

I got up this morning, and nothing seemed to be talking to the outside world. I went to the router’s status page, and it showed no problems - the router had been up since 2am, I still had the same IP address, no indication of trouble. I clicked the “DHCP renew” button, however, and it gave me a new IP. That’s not good - that indicates that it probably hadn’t been talking to RoadRunner’s DHCP server since it came up. I guess there’s still a bug in the auto-reboot code.

It’s two months to the day since I switched from MovableType to Wordpress, and the spammers finally found me. And SpamKarma deleted all 7 spams without a whimper. It even decided that one IP was a repeat spammer and banned them from my blog entirely. I checked and that IP has a http redirector on port 80, probably installed without the computer owner’s knowledge.

I hate spammers with the firey passion of a thousand suns. I’ve been waiting with bated breath for them to start spamming my blog again, and I’m quite relieved to see that SpamKarma handled the first onslaught with nary a whimper.

In other geek news, I’ve got good news: I’ve got Tiger on my laptop. It’s been running the CPU and disk for hours now indexing it for Spotlight. But Dashboard is pretty cool. I kind of wish it would have an option to display the widgets all the time like Konfabulator, but it’s a good replacement for it. I hope somebody fixes GnuControl soon.

And in other geek news, I’ve got bad news: My Linksys router did that thing where the wireless side loses its mind again. The new firmware didn’t fix it. I’ve heard there are hardware problems with the V2.2 hardware. I guess that’s why it was so cheap. I’m also guessing there is no way in hell I’ll get Linksys to take it back.

In my blog entry Rants and Revelations » 4166 September, 1993, I expressed some hope that with AOL dropping Usenet access, it might mean that Usenet would go back to being the place where only the clueful hung out.

As usual when I express optimism like that, I spoke too soon. There is a new scourge on Usenet these days. It’s people accessing it through Google Groups (or other web interface) who think that Usenet is an invention of Google, and that Google is in charge of monitoring everybody’s behaviour. Representative quotes from this new breed of wankers:

• “I saw a couple of spams in this group. Where are the moderators?”
• “I’ll report you to Google if you don’t stop insulting me.”
• “Speak english, this is an American system!”

A few months ago, I was thinking about going to Oshkosh this year. (I’m pretty sure I’m not going after all, since we’re going to be moving house around that time.) I used to be on a mailing list for pilots of Piper aircraft, and I’d met up with some of them at Sun’n'Fun in 2002 and at Oshkosh in 2003, and I thought I’d check in with them again to see who was going to Oshkosh this year.

Now, I quit that mailing list last year because like any group of pilots, it had a lot of hard core right wingers, and not just traditional “low taxes, low regulation, no government services” conservative types, but a lot of “George Bush is always right and anybody who disagrees is a traitor to the country” rabid neo-cons. And it just wasn’t fun any more. But I missed the non-jerks on the list, so I resubscribed. I vowed to stay away from any political conversation, and not be goaded into political debates no matter how uninformed and stupid some of these people’s opinions are. (The loudest and most vehement ones were always the idiots who got their “facts” from Anne Coulter and Fox News.)

Last week, somebody on the list asked what we meant when we referred to “ripping” a CD. I, and two other people, explained that it was the process of taking music off a CD and converting it to digital files like MP3s, WMA or other format for either storing on a computer, transferring to an iPod or other (lesser) hand held music player, or even burning to MP3 CDs that some CD players can play. The person who asked was satisfied with the answers he got, and asked some follow on questions. So far, so good. But three fucking days later, somebody responds to the original question with the “fact’ that “ripping” is just a synonym for “burning”. I said no, it’s the exact opposite. I don’t know if he hadn’t read the intervening days worth of discussion, or just thought that he was right and we were all wrong. So I told him that if he’d read the several correct responses to Neville’s question that were posted in the days before, he would have seen that “burning” is the process of putting information onto a CD, and “ripping” is the process of taking information from a CD.

After this exchange, guess which one of us got flamed? The guy who provided the correct information and then three days later had to correct the guy who waited three days and then contradicted him, or the guy who ignored all the correct information and arrogantly wrote something wrong? Yeah, I think I just figured out why Bush won this election - because to these people correcting wrong information and lies is being “intolerant and snotty”.

Well, sorry Blanche, Roger, Rhandi, Neville, and all the other good people on the Piper mailing list, I’m gone. And I’m blogging this as a reminder to myself not to go back.