what mean, to win

"Install of ruby-1.8.7-p358 - #complete Please be aware that you just installed a ruby that requires..."

Wed, 30 May 2012 16:22:19 -0400

“Install of ruby-1.8.7-p358 - #complete
Please be aware that you just installed a ruby that requires 2 patches just to be compiled on up to date linux system.
This may have known and unaccounted for security vulnerabilities.
Please consider upgrading to Ruby 1.9.3-194 which will have all of the latest security patches.”

- compiling ruby 1.8.7 (which is still the default ruby in redhat land)

arch foibles

Wed, 30 May 2012 14:54:26 -0400

funny, trying to pacman -Syu fails:
error: failed retrieving file ‘udev-compat-180-1-arm.pkg.tar.xz’ from archlinuxarm.org : The requested URL returned error: 404

helpful note hidden in udev pkg:
(20/52) upgrading udev [########################################] 100%
udev changes:
* udev-compat has been removed, and should be uninstalled.
* Framebuffers are no longer blacklisted by default.
* binaries moved from /sbin to /usr/bin
* if your kernel does not provide /dev/loop-control, you need to manually
load the ‘loop’ module before using losetup

in other words, just pacman -R udev-compat and you should be fine.

iozone

Wed, 23 May 2012 11:21:15 -0400

Just some scratch notes on iozone + rhel:

uname -a = x86_64 … iozone pkg is only i386 - so time for rpmbuild

wget http://www.iozone.org/src/current/iozone-3-408.src.rpm
sudo rpmbuild —rebuild iozone-3-408.src.rpm
(note where it installs to, should be the following):

sudo yum localinstall —no-gpgcheck /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/x86_64/iozone-3-408.x86_64.rpm

The pkg installs into /opt: (check)
rpm -qpl iozone-3-408.x86_64.rpm

/opt/iozone/bin/iozone -h

to test ec2 instance store fun (wip):
sudo mkdir /mnt/$(whoami) && sudo chown $(whoami): /mnt/$(whoami)
iozone -a -R -f /mnt/#(whoami)/test > instance_store.iozoneout

"Cheer up! I know what I need to work on, and I can focus on building something I can be proud of,..."

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:32:05 -0400

“

Cheer up! I know what I need to work on, and I can focus on building something I can be proud of, finally.

It’s going to be a hard few months, but the sacrafice will be worth it.

”

brainstorming

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 07:41:00 -0400

edit: high level here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recommender_system , don’t even bother reading my sophomoric crap :p

So lately I’ve been thinking about how to build a recommender. I haven’t given it enough serious thought, so I’m going to brainstorm here, in a vaccum. I’ll hop on over to googling and research right after this.

I hypothesize that in order to get an accurate prediction of people’s desires, you have to look at historical data. (you don’t say, lol)

Trivial implementation:
Given that:

Person A is given a set of possible choices from Set G:

Set G is a set of choices that are tagged, each tag being value 1:

Person A will then generate a histogram of interests based on the selected choices.

Now, when you introduce element E into the set, tagged the same way, if E’s tags fall within the top elements in their respective interests, you would deem the element recommendable to Person A.

So there’s two problems with this: tagging is manual, and we need to be able to iterate and correct for bad data.

When person A is presented with element E they should be able to respond positively or negatively. If the recommendations we are giving are wrong, the negative weight should start decreasing geometrically. Example:

Person A picks a bunch of stuff. The stuff is now heavily weighted on Interest J.

However, J is a false positive. Person J presented with a bunch of interests in J will now start rejecting Recommendations. weight in J goes down -2, -4, -8

Implementation of this will be interesting. If I use generators for the weights for each entity the engine part can be relatively transparent. I could store the intermediate values into a mongodoc and navigate the relationships with some sort of cheesy graph database.

Reverse engineering amazon - I wonder if the quality of the items are curated in any way or if it’s purely just opt-in. It’s tempting to say it’s the latter since the implementation sounds cleaner and more pure. OTOH that seems like me giving up and putting the thing into a mathematical black box. I want to say that the pump is primed by something like full-text search initially… that’s got to be it.

The fact that I don’t know any of this stuff very well is embarassing so I’ll need to do more research.

The Systems Interview - The Scientist, the Engineer, and the Accountant, all going to war

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 09:27:00 -0400

I strongly feel that a huge part of being a good Systems Administrator is treating the job with thoughtful respect. It’s rolling science, engineering, and accounting into your daily workflow. You don’t have the luxury of time, so much of this has to be automated. Thankfully, if you do a decent job, 60% of the work is already “done” for you via logging.

Unfortunately, not everything is logged, and nothing is correlated without some footwork on your part. And, frankly, it feels better to simply log and measure everything that is easy, and ignore everything that’s hard, and just focus on doing your core job.

There’s a time and place for everything, and there’s going to be a point where you need to take a stand and really start gathering data that’s not being recorded.

Q: What do you do to gather data?

Everyone answers this using an exhaustive list of tools, and that’s of course what you actually do. You set up a cacti, statsd, instance (or, even better, just roll newrelic) and start attaching hosts, devices and services to it. You measure things. You log them and generate graphs. You can figure stuff out!

Fewer bring up the all-important point - all those pretty graphs need to actually be interpreted by someone (or, something). Things need to actually be actionable to be of value. Even an awesome baseline, such as newrelic and splunk all set up for you, is completely and utterly useless if nobody looks at the data.

A truly valuable quality of graphs is that they are a piece of time series data that allows you to trend by computing the rate of growth. Trending is predicting. It’s leading the target, just like you would lead a deer for a kill shot. You want to be precise and plan for growth and capacity, or some action that will bring value or prevent the loss of value (prevent downtime). You can use fancy engineer’s language to encapulate this very simple idea, but it is that, in a nutshell.

The other value of graphs is that they are a summaried god’s-view of the world dashboard that you ought to be eyeballing whenever you make a significant change (pushing out new code, replacing a dead disk in an array, etc)

Another value of graphs is that they help commit the system, in motion, to your internal memory. That is, the often touted sysadmin “sixth-sense” whereupon when stirred awake at 3am in the morning, you can quickly diagnose and figure out what the culprit is. You and I both know the dirty secret- this is usually the fruits of a hypothesis, a well-educated guess.

And indeed, most admins will be able to nudge some broken piece and fix some problem, ad nauseum, til the end of days, and be able to do this just through experience. The better admins will nudge the one script and get things working before anyone notices, and quickly attach that script to a monitor. Set alarms for thresholds that kick up scripts to fix the things that are going to break before they are broken.

CAVEAT: don’t overscript to the point where you can barely understand the stuff. keep things simple, and don’t build things you don’t need.

We can verify the business value of Operations, and generate a piece of communication that may be valuable to the course of the company. We can use this data to help make the tough decisions easily (which product line can we cut? what features are expensive? what code should we build to make our storage more efficient? can we actually build this awesome feature that product / engineering wants?). Doing this can save money, or in some cases, save the whole company. Conversely, not trying to do so runs the risk of doing the opposite.

Especially working with the internet industry, knowing that, indeed, the latest marketing campaign has had good effect on the traffic to the site allows you to confirm your suspicions that you do indeed need to add additional appservers to maintain a consistently fast response time to your newfound users. You can then do something that would be central to the core business of the company (use the cloud to soften the blow of a daily intended DDoS from users).

At many companies, there’s a huge team of people doing this stuff. I dare you to do better.

The Systems Interview - "What do you plan on doing in the first month?"

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 08:42:00 -0400

As I’m once again getting ready for an interview for a position that involves Systems Administration, I’d like to share some notes on the topic, so that you guys can be better prepared for an interview, from both sides of the table.

Most of these are open-ended, with explanations.

Q: What are the tasks on the shortlist of things you’d do in the first month here?

The candidate has to have a feel of the size of the company and its industry in order to answer this question convincingly. It shows that they actually care about the position and have done their research. The openers will also show the personality of the admin - seasoned admins have more sophisticated answers while newbies might just pay lip service to things which are way out of scope, such as single-signon, which are unrealistic and disruptive.

Pragmatic admins going into an environment with existing or departing admins will likely say that they’d go into an operational mode to handle outstanding tickets in the first week in order to understand the existing infrastructure.

Admins going into a startup environment have different challenges. If there was never the guiding hand of a seasoned sysadmin, things may be so out of wack that he/she may choose to completely redo the infrastructure. If you are supporting developers, the major pluses are to improve developer workflow. The most costly resource is people, and making people more efficient has tremendous value-add compared to the incremental savings achieved by reducing system footprint. Things to improve developer workflow may be deployment and continuous integration, which currently still unfortunately involves abit of scripting (someone ought to make a framework for that whole piece).

Light systems refactoring and building up useful pieces towards the ideal, asymtotic “perfect setup” by prioritizing generally low-hanging fruits is massive win for your organization and are great answers.

Large corporate systems positions will require a great deal of teamwork and coordination with other admins. This makes emphasis on monitoring and other communications tools extremely vital (yes, monitoring is actually a valuable communications tool - think about it). A lone sysadmin dealing with a few dozen machines can get away with very lightweight monitoring - a team of sysadmins with a shifting rotation of on-call cannot do anything but have very good monitoring set up.

Admins coming to and from a cloud or otherwise hosted environment are going to be app-centric in their way of thinking. An admin that seems to be extremely paranoid or unwilling to leverage third party services is either correct (because it’s wrong for your business) or actually terribly incorrect (either stuck to archaic principles, unable to balance and juggle risk, and unable to plan in general). The truest mark of a bad sysadmin to the above point would be someone who gives a very firm, almost religious-sounding answer to the above during the first interview. The right answer is, almost always, “it depends”. Unless you’re applying for the NSA, there’s no reason to dictate infrastructure decisions without baseline data and information on hand.

Admins that are inward-facing, who usually just deal with the servers and never interface with end-users or customers will be the type who excel at core systems stuff and don’t really have a bias towards any one particular group - besides the servers themselves. In that sort of back-room position, the most important things are the traditional things - make sure there are backups of everything (make sure you always have an undo button), make sure all systems can be rebuilt (again, undo button) and things are well documented (so others can find the undo button).

Bonus points to admins that can quickly focus on the weak links in your infrastructure quickly and provide viable, easy solutions to bring the survivability and recoverability of your setup up.

Flexibility and agility is almost always more important most everything else and if one of your most key employees cannot adapt to an ever-changing set of requirements, and things take months not days, then they’re going to be difficult to work with.

That’s just my first shot at a braindump, I’ll focus on more nitty-gritty things as I get to them. I stayed away from core tech on purpose since you can easily google that stuff anyway :)

"If I can’t get your software running optimally in 30 minutes to an hour, is your software..."

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:33:09 -0500

“If I can’t get your software running optimally in 30 minutes to an hour, is your software actually any fucking good, and are most people going to even be able to find out or care?”

don't remove spotlight you fools

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 03:09:00 -0400

if you want to stop spotlight from indexing your drive and making your system perform like shit, just add your porn stash to private under the system settings. killing the spotlight daemon will break tons of shit silently, since various software uses the spotlight api to find stuff, most notably the apple mac app store.

so stop riceing out osx it’s not worth it.

install geoip_city ruby gem on osx with brew

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 03:07:00 -0400

brew install geoip
brew link geoip
bundle install
(with geoip_city in them Gemfile)

that’s fucking it. thank you, homebrew.

portal 2

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 22:35:00 -0400

too short. levels, though varied, were not as challenging as the first game (perhaps because they’re saving the hard levels for co-op, or perhaps i’ve gotten better?).

~~will do co-op and update this space.~~

coop sucked, game sucks.

turbotax protip for virtualization weirdos

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 13:03:21 -0400

Howdy,

So I’ve been trying to do my taxes with turbotax; I’m on a Mac so I run Virtualbox to run a windows VM for turbotax. I stupidly enabled 3D acceleration on my VM, so TurboTax actually throws an exception trying to render an image; the hint was the stack trace referencing all sorts of accelerated video rendering shared libraries…

Disable 3D rendering and you’ll be back to doing your taxes.

Whee!

vim boot camp / hell week

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 06:35:33 -0500

taking out a whole week to learn an editor (beyond just vim-tutor) might sound like overkill (it might very well be), but if any vim gurus out there are offering some sort of super advanced in-depth class on vim, I’d totally sign up.

Marvell AppleYukon MacOS X

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 07:11:00 -0500

Howdy.

The Sonnet Presto Gigabit Pro PCIe [GE1000LA-E] card: http://www.sonnettech.com/product/prestogigpciepro.html

is in actuality this:

Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8053 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller
Vendor ID: 11ab
Device ID: 4362

On MacOS X (Snow Leopard), it works out of the box, and uses the (com.apple.iokit) AppleYukon2.kext (version (3.2.1b1) at the time of this writing).

I could not find this chipset information anywhere else on the intertubes, even on the various OSX86 and hackintosh forums (most folks seem to just opt for those crummy realtek cards); I hope it helps you make a better informed buying decision. :)

Dr. O here @ 4pm. any info i should report to him? open up my bridge?

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:09:00 -0500

Dr. O here @ 4pm. any info i should report to him? open up my bridge?
i don't really have anything for Doc O, tbh, need to figure out why the jobs aren't exiting properly for lustre, but was dorking with vmware thepast few days
asking about if we replace kefel, if one of the 48-core amd boxes is okay, but that's kind of a different thing altogehter
H: redouble efforts to poll for hpc candidate?
besides that, "thanks for the opportunity, sorry things didn't work out"
HPC people seem like a rare breed and difficult to find
that sounds expensive
so jobs exiting oddly on lustre, and kefel supplement/replacement
what sounds expensive?
the description
not so much expensive; rather they want bigger and better toys
...which we don't have
right. that still sounds expensive.
they are looking to hire an associate dean of scientific computing. meeting one this week
:)
an applicatant i should say
i think boinc was most definitely born out of necessity; bless those folks who saw the opportunity and ran with it

Microsoft SkyDrive

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 23:41:00 -0500

It’s 2011. And I’m using Office 2011 for the Mac.

Why doesn’t Microsoft support some sort of Azure-powered or otherwise cloud-based storage support for Office so that I have access to all my documents everywhere without being a geek who knows how to set up FUSE and a WebDAV server (or, pay for MobileMe and use iDisk, lol)?

Actually, I asked myself this, because it’s not immediately obvious that in actuality, Microsoft *did* include that capability in the form of the SkyDrive.

What I do have to ask is, why isn’t it the *default* way you save documents…? It’s still very clunky in the way you use it in the different apps (y~~ou have to log back into skydrive for every app~~ oh wait, just add your password to the OS X Keychain. boom, done.), especially in the nonintuitive way of saving (you “share” the document into skydrive). Opening is also a pain, and I got a Javascript error trying to open a Word Notebook file from Skydrive using the Document Connection app. :(

Anyway, kudos to Microsoft for at least trying to do the right thing, and I’m really enjoying the new look. If they can get the cloud storage stuff right, these apps are a lot better to use than Google Docs (sadly). Here’s hoping that they improve sharepoint, or better yet, make it a free SaaS…

sewage and cold

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 05:36:00 -0500

So this past saturday, my brother texts me at 6:30am:

“Hey dude, the boiler room is flooded with sewage”

There was a blockage somewhere in our sewer line, and the results manifested themselves in the form of a 1” layer of poop and toilet paper stew on our boiler room floor. His bathroom (he lives in the renovated basement directly below, on the same level as the boiler) was an ecological disaster area; a flush of the toilet resulted in a mini shit-fountain from the shower drain that sprayed the stuff all over the walls.

I have a handyman that I usually call, but I’ve relied on him quite a bit and I really enjoy his work a bit too much to subject him to a literal shitstorm on a Saturday morning. so I decided to call Roto-Rooter, thinking that they’re usually the best folks to deal with this exact case.

The dispatcher we got from Roto-Rooter’s 800 number told us that they’d be here sometime between 8am and 10am. My experiences of being on-call as a Sysadmin has tempered by expectations of others in times of crisis, and that seemed like a reasonable timeframe for a guy to get in a truck and load it up with various plumbing equipment, and given our desperate situation, we made no complaints about this schedule.

So, in the quality alone time we had on our hands with our predicament, we tried things. We searched around for a way into the sewer, and found a hole in my garage. I logically concluded that we could probably clear the obstruction somewhere between the bathroom and the street. If this was stuck toilet paper or grease, a kettle of boiling water followed by a blast from a garden hose usually did the trick for me in the past.

Naturally, the screw securing the pvc grate to the hole was rusted and worn, so I grabbed a chiseled hammer and broke it open. I poured three kettles of boiling hot water down the drain, leaving an impressive cloud of water vapor and a satisfying local gurgling sound down that 4 foot pipe that I imagine led to the obstruction somewhere down the street. I then followed up with about a ten minute blasting from a garden hose.

In hindsight, these are acts of a desperate amateur. A garden hose can be really handy, but it really does not have enough output to dislodge a significant amount of impacted matter. Pouring hot water down a pipe is risky, because there’s always that off chance you’d crack something from the sudden heat expansion. Lastly, what is usually ultimately needed is direct, physical removal of the obstruction, and this most always means a plumber with a powered auger (drill), lovingly dubbed by the general public as a plumber’s snake. I knew this, I did not have a power nor even a hand-cranked snake in my house, but in time I will know that it wouldn’t have mattered.

More importantly, my desperate acts worked, to the extent that the shit fountains were defeated - I had partially cleared the obstruction and bought us some valuable time. This would prove to save us.

We followed up this effort with an initial mopping. The crapstorm left a gradient of brown in the boiler room which thankfully started off a light coffee near the entrance. My brother is quite abit weaker-willed in these matters, so it was up to me to mop this up, again thankfully with one of these, so direct contact was minimal, but it was a slow-going process nonetheless:

I soaked up about two 8-gallon buckets full of this shitjuice and dumped it into the sewer grate out on our street. A lot of work for not too much result, but it was more manageable - we weren’t going to get our sneakers saturated with digested lunch.

8am passed. For my brother, being an unemployed, OCD night-owl who has yet to kick his post-college sleep schedule, it was time for bed. He decided to catch a few winks before the plumber showed up. I was going to stay up and wait for the guy to come and save our asses. I went upstairs and googled for sewage-clearing solutions, watched some how-to videos on youtube, and brainstormed some ideas for a better way - motorized mini-drills fed by power over ethernet and a waterproof head unit controlled by an arduino with a usb cam…

Folks who’ve lived through this kind of thing will tell you - the hardest part about living with any situation like this in home ownership is not so much the work involved. The work ends up being a sort of therapy - be it administrative work of coordinating a task force, moving aside furniture, mopping and later shoveling fecal matter from the floor - at the time, this is theraputic because it keeps you from worrying and overthinking. You’re doing something to help the situation, and so you alleviate your feelings of helplessness as the situation becomes more dire. You stop blaming, or imagining all those things could’ve prevented this (proactive monitoring, regular maintainence, dilligent application of some imagined ideal behavior), because true or not, that’s just not important right now. After a certain point, you just have to accept the situation and not let it consume you.

9am. No truck, no doorbell, no salvation. 10am. We called the dispatcher again:

“Sorry sir, the technician will be late. There’s quite abit of traffic… He should arrive at 11am.”

There was still a lot of snow and ice on the driveways around my town from the blizzard the last week, so I was accepting of this reality. But make no mistake - Roto-Rooter is on my shit-list. I was exhausted. I took a nap on my couch, woke up after an unsuccessful attempt, played some Dragon Quest IV on the Wii, and just found ways to get my mind off the situation.

The guy arrives at 3pm. Let’s call him Bill. Bill looks like a plumber’s plumber, an older, stocky gentleman with a reassuring air of mastery and experience. He greets me, “Hello, young man. You ready for this?”

I’ve been cleaning shit all morning. I was beyond “ready” for whatever he was going to do, so I nod. ”Thanks for coming, it must’ve been an adventure for you to get here”. He shrugs and proceeds to takes a look at the boiler, and recoils at the sight. ”MY god, listen, could you hose this down, for your sanity?”, he gasped. I didn’t have any preconceptions about plumbers, and I was quite thankful for his presence despite it all, so I shamefully complied, thinking that I probably screwed up. I didn’t believe that it would be okay to hose down the room since the boilers were in such close proximity. I was afraid I might damage the electrical components, such as the gas or hot water valves that led to the thermostat, and just plain afraid of doing something that might worsen the situation.

“So you’re sure this is okay?”, I asked Bill.

“Yeah, do it”. I got the hose and sprayed, unleashing a beam of clear water and revealing the cesspool in its full glory. The solid wastes swam through the room now, motivated by my hosing and swirling through the room with no destination in particular. I’d successfully diluted the soup, but there was no place for it all to actually go. The drain that this all originally gushed out of was already clogged in the first place. I stopped after about five minutes of hosing. Bill was already working in the next room with his power auger by now. After a few minutes of this, he tells me to flush the toilets upstairs. I comply, and come back to a sad-faced Bill.

“Son, I’ve got bad news. You ready? Your drain is under your boiler. I don’t know what idiot did designed your sewer”, Bill said. All the crap that was in the boiler room was coming from a drain under the boiler, which was why I couldn’t see the crap fountain like I did coming from the shower in the bathroom. This is an important fact: crap had been spewing directly into my heating system’s boiler every time someone flushed the toilet. More importantly, Bill said he couldn’t do anything at this point, because that boiler’s 500 lbs, and he needed to get under it with his auger to clear the obstruction. Since it was the weekend, he “doesn’t pack the camera”. So I had to wait until Monday for them to camera the line and see if he can find “another way in”.

At this point, I’d like to underscore that I don’t really know this stuff very well, but for those who are googling for answers, search for your sewage check valve. Hell, do it now, so you know where it is. Mine was the culprit for all this (a ball of paper towels had prevented the valve from opening), and it was 5 feet away from where Bill was standing as he gave me the bad news, underneath an iron access floor plate.

After making a call to dispatch, trying to get someone else with a camera to my house, it was nearing the end of the day, so he bid me farewell and good luck. It was going to be a long haul until Monday. THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE EMERGENCY SERVICE. However, Bill is a licensed master plumber, so I accepted his diagnosis that it is a complex problem, so I accepted my fate.

I downed a few glasses of Shiraz that night and played Dragon Quest IV until I was thoroughly docile and went to bed.

Sunday morning. The heat went out in the middle of the night. I was sure the pilot went out, but it’s pointless (and prohibitively disgusting) to relight. Home Depot trip - picked up a shop-vac, a hand auger, some small plumbing tools. Tried clearing the garage hole again. Nothing of course (since the clog was behind a closed flap). Very tired. The basement reeked of death, but what came out of the boiler drain was now mostly liquid. My initial investment of effort was still paying out in that there were no new occurrences of solid waste, but what was already there was starting to reek. My brother later commented that we were “lucky” this happened in winter, in what was one of the coldest days in recent memory. Sent an email to my boss that I’d be out on Monday to deal with home issues.

Monday. The house is freezing cold. Roto-rooter finally arrives, a younger gentleman, let’s call him Dave, who seemed confused after examining the area. ”Why didn’t you call us earlier?”, he asked. I told Dave what transpired, and he blamed the automated 800 dispatch - my area code’s assigned to a county whose center is much farther away, and I would’ve done better to directly call the office of the county north of me. It had also been a busy weekend. Regardless, he begins the berates Bill, since apparently he’s quick to boast around the office but completely missed the mark here.

In moments, Dave locates where my check valve should be. For some reason, it was entombed under not only the iron sewer plate, but under a thick layer of concrete and bricks. He smashes the loose rock with a crowbar and we manage to hit a flash of white - we’d uncovered the exit point of all the sewage that is generated by my home to the city sewer. After some difficulty (the valve’s bolts had long been rusted out and destroyed) he opens the cap…

WOOSHHHHHHgarglegarglegargle

Raw Sewage rushes past beneath us, the stench wafting through the garage. Dave grimaces, but looks up to me and nods. There is so much that it rises dangerously high inside the pit for a while before it graciously empties out into the sewer. We’re finally free, and it had only taken two hours.

Fuck you, Bill. Thank you so much, Dave.

Dave and I spend the rest of the time talking about incompetent coworkers and absent-minded younger brothers… he takes my card and charges me $321. Small price.

I walk back to the boiler room. It was still a disaster. We spend the next hours shoveling crap, hosing down, shoveling some more, scrubbing, vaccing, disinfecting…

When we were finally somewhat clear, I grabbed the lighter and went to fire the boilers back up. I first noticed a problem when I switched the valve to “pilot” and pressed the red button…

Nothing. No sound, no gas.

I checked the unit for the 2nd floor above us and thankfully heard the familiar hiss of gas. But nothing from the 1st and basement floor unit. I lit the 2nd floor unit, using a mirror to guide my hand, since I wasn’t about to lie down with my cheek on that moments-earlier shit-and-piss stained cement floor. The first floor unit had some problem. I knew that it wasn’t the thermocouple, since that would simply cut off the gas after I released the red button - there was no gas for me to light at all.

We needed more cleaning supplies, so my brother and I headed back to Home Depot, stopping by the local diner to get some food. There, I gave my usual plumbing and heating company a call - I wasn’t going to live through another night without heat - and was told that someone will be there in an hour. After dinner we headed home and within minutes the guy showed up (why didn’t I call them instead of roto-fucking-rooter).

The local plumber arrived at 5:15pm and proceeded to diagnose the unit in a systematic fashion with the most impressive United States Marine Corps.-tempered degree of gusto I’ve ever seen and by 5:45pm ultimately found that the pilot gas head / outlet that meets the thermocouple was clogged with shit. He cleaned the unit and reinstalled it, and I had heat. Cost was $175. Told me that if I had called them on Saturday instead of Roto I’d be a couple hundred less poor and would’ve been done with this issue same day. Dude never complained and was by all means genuinely happy to be there working and paying the bills doing something that most people are grossed out by (he had the corner on this market by being not at all terrified by the prospect of wading in a pool of shit). The man is an inspiration (and I’ve now got their number burned into my brain and associated with awesome).

If I ever complain about my job again, I need to read this post to remind me that things can be so much worse, and the best thing to do in a bad situation is to think positive and rationally.

usb serial adapters in osx

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 14:53:00 -0500

before i forget: ls /dev/tty.*

screen attach to them like you do in linux:

to screen attach to a usb serial device with baud 19200:

screen /dev/tty.usbdevice 19200

prolific pl-2303 drivers are here:

MacOS X Drivers

Routing table modification golden rule

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 19:30:37 -0500

Alright so, just to remind myself, hard, remember to just add a /32 route to test first from a test client before adding a whole /n<29 rule in there. This is a golden rule, up there with “FQDN!!!!!!!! Where it matters” and “always add a reverse dns entry you bastards!!!”

An efficient life

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 05:17:08 -0500

You know you’re a geek beyond all hope of redemption when you see the chaos in your wardrobe, trash, and other workflow bits of your life, and see it with much more clarity and approachability as a computational problem than a mundane task.

As the latter, the problem is impossible. The former gets my saiyan blood boiling and motivated to boot.