One of the recurring problems I have with Zenoss is fixing the swap threshold issue. Basically, if your swap space is less than 1G, you’re stuck with an alarm informing you that there’s less than 1G of swap total. The options are to hack it to increase the threshold (by decreasing the minimum-free threshold), or to make the alert use a percentage of the total.
Posting it here since it’s the second time I’ve had to find this…
I’ve got Excel 2010 Beta installed on my PC at work, partly to play around with it, partly because I need something to do all the myriad spreadsheets I’m required to do.
As before, Excel 2010 allows you to open multiple workbooks with that maddeningly weird pseudo-MDI interface that is always a little jarring. I know the point of the taskbar shortcuts, and I know how they’re implementing it. Doing so changes the taskbar from a window management tool to a document management tool — albeit incompletely because the same doesn’t apply to sub-documents on non-Microsoft applications. In the end, it’s just an irritating adjustment from a working mental model to a broken one.
But that’s not actually the stupid part. No, the stupid part is that there’s a single, global undo history. Yes, that’s right, all your documents share undo history. In practice, this means you can usefully edit one spreadsheet at a time. It assumes that your life is a single stream of changes, and you want to rewind that life to a particular indistinct place in time. In my own usage, that isn’t the case. My life is a series of parallel streams of changes, and I want (read: need) the ability to rewind any one of them to any given point in time, and Excel has apparently broken this on purpose — at least, I don’t remember this madness from 2007.
It’s hard to talk about this without also discussing the Ribbon, and why the situations are different. Non-geeks who got used to muscle-memory-ing1 through the old Excel were upset with the Ribbon, because it meant that their carefully crafted training was useless — it’s like being switched to Dvorak. I personally like the Ribbon, because it let someone like myself, who’d never used Excel for anything before 2007, learn and use the tool. You break how people find features, more people can find features.
But this isn’t the case with breaking how a particular feature works. IMO, that’s just dumb.
Reading the utopianism of worldchanging.com after watching a TED talk from the founder of it, I tried calculating carbon footprint more accurately than I had previously. Catching up on missed blogs, I’ve gotten myself going on dopplr a moment ago, following a Lessig commenter’s idea to use it to calculate carbon for offset donations — which is a pretty cool, IMO.
I’ve been using Tasque for a couple weeks now and it’s extremely useful for keeping myself organized. The only downside was the lack of instant-access to it unless I’m sitting in front of my laptop. Trying to remedy that I signed up for RTM and got their MilkSync to work with my Crackberry, so the tasks I enter on my laptop end up on my phone and visa-versa.
Sigh. Being impressed with sync is very ten years ago…
I was sort of on the fence about the counting calories thing, at least until I saw the WeightBot screenshots, which sold me on the idea: eating healthy to look better and live longer? Meh. Eating healthy for the sake of a new toys? Win.
Unfortunately WeightBot is only for the iPhone, which I don’t (want to) own, so that rule that out. Instead I googled for online tools and came up with livestrong.com, which has a “MyPlate” thing that keeps track of all this, along with “X food has N calories” and such. It also has a Blackberry thing for entering all that as well that’s on the “Blackberry App World”.
The upshot? App World is a gigantic ripoff of Apple’s App Store, and something they should have had from the beginning.
Update: Commenters have pointed out a few things:
daemon function call a script that looks like this:
#!/bin/bash exec 1>&- exec 2>&- exec 3>&- nohup myPropApp & 2>&1 > thelog.txt
That code was from another website who’s URL I lost, and I posted the solution below based on another, alternate method that I hadn’t tried but sounded simpler.
daemonize(1), setsid(1), and the bash builtin disown (which I had prematurely rejected as ksh-only).Back when I was using Debian, one of the nicer things about it was their helper tool for startup scripts: start-stop-daemon. Particularly, it’s ability to daemonize any process with the -b flag. You notice how handy things like that end up being when you’ve got an in-house or otherwise proprietary app that can’t daemonize itself properly (e.g. Java-based services).
Somehow I’ve managed to get away with not having to write a script that daemonizes a normally-foreground process on an RH-based distribution yet, mainly because I’ve been using Debian almost exclusively for servers, and have only worked for tiny startups, where luxuries like init scripts are the last thing on anyones’ minds.
Everyone is familiar with the nohup & trick, but that still leaves it associated to a terminal, so after you log out, your terminal/ssh session will just hang because stdin is still open. As it turns out, you can close your standard in from bash first by redirecting your standard input from nil (e.g. someapp <&-), and that will let it just work.
Very sweet for writing initscripts.
Your network engineer orders four T1 lines from locations in City A to a datacenter in City Z via a large telco. He leaves the week before these are to be dropped, and of course, does not document what he was doing or even keep copies of the contracts.
Either way, the lines are in the process of getting installed, and no one you have the contact with at the large telco can tell you the information you need. The order manager “has no cross connect info”, and the sales support engineer tells you to ask the order manager. Naturally, all the contracts and documents restored from the e-mail backups simply describe the datacenter’s address as the A-side location — without any of the specifics you’d need to order a cross connect from the datacenter.
Meanwhile, the installer is turned away from the Z-side location because they didn’t call ahead to schedule an appointment. Call the Z-side building manager and forward the information required to get past security to large-telco. Large-telco tells you that making an appointment in advance and providing the information that security requires to get in is impossible. Somehow this location’s 6000 other private lines were installed through magic.
Moral of the story: However irritating it is to troubleshoot something through a reseller, it is far worse to get something delivered from a large telco.
I notice I tend to start blog posts like an awkward attempt to jump-start a stalled conversation: “So, I was looking at…” or “So, I was doing X…” It’s a little cowardly on my part, afraid to just jump into something without some sort of warning — in this case, the word “so”. Either that or I dump some random self-referential crap.
I was panned by IBM for an accessibility position last summer because I didn’t have a college degree. Their loss/that’s OK, since they dropped all that work this June. A few months later I was cold-called by Google for a position in New York, but I umm-aaah-huh (flubbed) a question on the sticky bit so that fell through. (Within a month I could recite from memory the appropriate section from the chmod man page.)
I didn’t take the interview completely seriously, since I was to the offer stage with a job at a startup in downtown Chicago. I put up with the four-hour/day transit time for a couple months before moving to the North Side with a co-worker from my campus-paper admin days and one of his friends. Our living room looks like a tornado hit on a datacenter, but since I’ve somehow managed to avoid stepping on the numerous case screws, that’s cool.
I’m well into SA territory, filled with all the standard hoariness of a layer-zero build-out — BTU/hr, VA, UPS — thrown atop our wonderful Xen setups, OpenVPN, etc. On the downside, we’ve had a minimal layer of management introduced, complete with weekly status meetings and “action item lists” (a term I had figured would be shamed out of existence well before I got out of college based on Palaniuk’s star power alone).
Life is good, but I re-discovered today that reading pgo is still more fun than all the social democrat blogs combined.
Sometimes life works. Other times it doesn’t. Hopefully you get to the point where you can spot the “doesn’t” parts in advance…
Kinda sad how it devolved from useful information into straightup whiny bug reports, isn’t it?
A few months ago, I was supposed to get some help on my job. Specifically, someone to work on the .NET side of things, which would free me up to do the job I was actually hired to do: PHP development. He wasn’t my first choice, but he was second, in large part because of his masters degree and (minor) experience with .NET. In reality, though, finding someone to do .NET CF development is a total pain, let alone on a startup company’s budget.
On his first day, he never arrived. I called and called, and three days later he informed me that he was in India on an emergency, and had asked a friend of his to return my calls if/when I called him. His “friend” never did, so it fell through. About a month after that, the first-choice candidate called me up out of the blue and asked if we were still looking for developers.
I said sure, and he came onboard for the same salary as choice #2 (the main sticking point for him the first time around). He was supposed to start on or about the first of November, though the owner and him had those conversations and it was never quite clear what exactly was said as far as a definite start date (if anything was). So last Monday, I called him up, and he was in Austin. We worked out that he would start yesterday at 8am.
He too, never showed up.
Five more messages and 30 hours have passed since he was supposed to start working here. Reading Glen Greenwald today, I come across this little tidbit, which he quoted from an Associated Press story from Monday (emphasis is Greenwald’s):
In court documents filed with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., the Justice Department said a new anti-terrorism law being used to hold detainees in Guantanamo Bay also applies to foreigners captured and held in the United States.
Immigrants arrested in the United States may be held indefinitely on suspicion of terrorism and may not challenge their imprisonment in civilian courts, the Bush administration said Monday, opening a new legal front in the fight over the rights of detainees.
The story also goes on to note that the “test case” of this is a Quatari programmer living in Peoria, IL (yes, that Peoria) — about an hour and a half south of my house. Nice that some geek is now simply a test-case of Presidential TortureAlternative Interrogation Procedures, not a human being with a wife and four kids. If I were an immigrant, I’d get the fuck out of the country and not look back as well.
Of course, it’s also possible that dude is just an asshole, and the whole “we can disappear you” thing is just a coincidence. Not that it really makes the “we can disappear you” thing much better, simply less immediate.
BTW, where are the Democrats on this? Or was the plan to just get elected and let Bush’s phony “bipartisanship” nonsense prevent them from actually doing anything lest the media paint them as “Terra-loving San-Franciscamites”?
[Kinda sorry something this snarky is the first post to PGO in months, but this particular paranoia-kicker is a little close.]
Update: Turns out dude had a “personal life crisis” that meant he had to stay in Austin, and would’ve called except for his dead cellphone battery. I guess Texas is worse than I suspected, since they apparently don’t have pay-phones or e-mail there either… *fume*
I come into the office early this morning, in the hopes of getting a head start on the backlog I’ve got:
Naturally, before my laptop even finishes booting (i.e. before it gets to the login screen), I get a call from a customer, who wants me to walk his secretary through the client-site installation procedure. Apparently their sysadmin has logged this person into her machine as a Domain Admin, but can’t be bothered to visit our website, where the installation procedure for the software which needs to be installed is enumerated in painstaking detail — including such strange sub-sections as “New Installation,” and “Upgrading from Version 2.x.”
So they call tech support. But since it’s well before 8, nobody else is here to field the call. So I have to walk a secretary through the installation procedure.
And by walk her through it, I mean, quite literally, walk her through it. “Open a web browser” “go to xxxxx.com” “click on software” “click on this”, download this, listen to her read all five “Welcome to the Blah Blah Blah InstallShield Wizard” screens. Completely. Tell her to click Next fifty times. Explain what the little “underline” button in the top-left corner of the screen does.
What I mean is: come on! Someone took the time to write out installation instructions for each little page. I personally took the time to write out three pages of instructions covering multiple installation scenarios, detailing what you need to download, and why. I even have tables with friggin’ pictures of the hardware we support along one axis, and software packages along the other, just in case users can’t be bothered to know the make and model of the piece of junk they lug around all day.
I don’t think it’s too much to ask that people read the fucking things. But they get into this zombie robot mode, where they just spam my ears with welcome screen verbiage (yeah, it bugged me that much). Except they are human beings! What kind of fucked up bullshit is this, where people willingly go all *dummy mode on*, and consent to becoming zombies requiring they be told when to click the “next” button, or the “install” button — when there’s nothing else you can do on the whole screen except “cancel”!
What I mean is: Jesus Christ on a stick! Hasn’t anybody ever tried to figure shit out for themselves? You know, read, comprehend, act, instead of relay information, receive orders, execute orders. You’re supposed to use the machine, not become one.
Fuck.
And yeah, I know that the job was the sysadmin’s, and I could’ve spent thirty seconds giving him the download URIs and hung up, rather than the first hour and a half of my day pretending the person on the other end of the line is actually human despite nagging suspicions I’m an unwitting participant in a Turing test. In fact, I’m pretty sure the level of hand-holding needed is why the secretary’s login doesn’t have permission to install software, even if this protection was neatly negated by the admin intentionally logging her into his account and disappearing.
Ordinarily, I don’t bitch. Except there is nothing in any of those screens that a rational, thinking human being couldn’t have figured out by simply reading them. I mean, really, when “Installer X” tells you “Files are in use, close Program Y and click Retry”, I shouldn’t have to explain that you need to close Program Y and click Retry.
Unless you just want a voice to tell you what to do — in which case we can make you completely humanoid by installing a screen-reader.
Here’s an older web design from work (no before shots available, but it was what you would expect from a Yahoo-hosted MS-frontpage site):
And here’s a more recent design, also from work (the site content is unfinished, so no link yet):
![[Dumoulin Farms Front Page Screenshot]](http://static.flickr.com/84/259841911_64886279ab_m.jpg)
![[Dumoulin Farms Interior Page Screenshot]](http://static.flickr.com/91/259841912_bd2cf9b60c_m.jpg)
The front page has buildings which light up on mouse-over of either the building or the corresponding link beneath the photo (it’s funky). IMO the design is a cut above the scaledealer.com website, so it’s nice to know my skills are getting better, if only by my estimation — I’ll link to it when it’s finished.
![[Home Page Screenshot]](http://static.flickr.com/82/259814176_68c369a15e_m.jpg)
![[Internal Products Page Screenshot]](http://static.flickr.com/90/259836657_5c1aee732c_m.jpg)
Be the first to comment on this...