Category: Geekery

Today in geekery

One of these days I’m going to figure out why my nightly/hourly[1] rsync backup does something strange when the clocks change. But the problem is that I have to wait 6 months or a year to see if the change I made made any difference, and then I think “nah, I’ll just fix it manually next time it happens just like I did this time”. I think it’s getting confused by the double hour when the clocks go back and thinking it has to do the nightly backup again. Come to think of it, the nightly does happen at 1:15, and when the clocks go back we get two 1:15s, don’t we? I don’t want to make it 2:15, because when the clocks go forward we don’t have one of those. Maybe I’ll make that 4:15 and avoid the whole problem.

[1] Every hour it backs up my home Linux box to an external hard drive. Once a night, it backs up my colo box to my home box, and then backs up that to the external hard drive as well.

Today’s realization

I was trying to explain to somebody how much cooler you are if you just type a big long pipeline with a bunch of unix commands rather than putting the results of one command into a file, then processing that file into another one, and so on. And how for full geek points, that pipeline really needs to include at least one awk command. And then it hit me:

Unix is an Extreme Sport(tm). Just look how much Mountain Dew the average Unix geek drinks.

Today in job requirements FAIL

I got a call from a recruiter asking if I had experience with “ETL”. I’d never heard of it, so I truthfully said no, I had no idea what it was, and she went away.

After the call, I looked it up. Evidently it stands for “Extract, Transfer and Load”. Isn’t that what 90% of computer programs do? Isn’t that what the programs I’ve written and maintained for the last god-knows-how-long to extract aviation data from various sources in various formats, transfer it into my own format (combining data from several different places into one semi-coherent whole, throwing away the data that doesn’t interest me), and load it into my database for future use does? Or when I took data from Island and RediQuote and massaged it so that it looked like what SunGard’s trading system was expecting so that SunGard UMA users could trade stocks on them? Or when I converted data from the SMPTE ShowPlayList schema and stored it into our database so we could schedule movies and disassemble and re-assemble our own concept of what a show schedule was?

So yeah, I think I understand the concepts behind “ETL”. But because I was honest to a recruiter, I’ll probably never get a job doing it when it’s called that. The problem with the whole job market is that it’s full of cases like that, where recruiters and HR departments have a checklist and are just looking for people with the right keywords on their resume. That’s why I hope that careers.stackoverflow.com and jobs.stackoverflow.com catch on with Rochester companies, or companies who understand that off-site doesn’t necessarily mean the sort of idiots you see on Rentacoder who think they can solve the Halting Problem for $500.

Oh, that’s worrisome

My colo server crashed last night. Nothing in the logs, no indication of why, it just hung up. A power cycle fixed it, but that’s the first time it’s crashed in so long I can’t remember how long it’s been. The last note about downtime I can find on my blog, from March 2007, wasn’t the fault of my box, it was a general problem with the hosting facility.

I hope the hardware isn’t crapping out after years of faithful service.

How not to make a payment system

A few weeks ago, I borrowed Dan’s truck for a trip to Whitby to pick up my dad’s power tools that he doesn’t have room for in his new house. On the way out, I saw a HUGE traffic jam on the 401 in the return direction, so I took the 407 Express Toll Road on the way home. I figured I’d just get the bill from Dan when it came, and pay it. Big mistake.

It turns out that there is absolutely no way to pay this bill without creating some sort of account profile for Dan. I’m not Dan, and I don’t want to create a profile for him. I don’t know him well enough to answer the security questions, for one thing. Plus while it’s unlikely that he is going to be a regular traveller on the 407, I don’t want to be the guardian of his account (ie. I know the PIN) if he does. There is also no way to enter the name on the credit card – if it’s not the same as the person named on the account, it isn’t going to work. There is no way to just send in a check or, if you don’t call from 9-5 on a weekday, to talk to a customer service rep. It seems to me that driving a borrowed car on the 407 should be something that the systems designers might have anticipated happening once in a while and designed in a method to resolve this short of making the owner of the car pay.

I guess in future I should either remember my 407 transponder, or just risk the traffic jams on the 401.