Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/29/sysadmin-brain/
Well, the holidays were nifty but they are chased with half a week on the East Coast redoing the install I did last month that needs redoing for a variety of reasons you don’t want to be burdened with. So, move from the uber-chill four-day weekend without a lot going on beyong setting Grandma up with her new Mac (early Christmas present due to the death of her old Mac) and enjoying family time, especially wifey time . . . and we’re back in the data center demonstrating our mastery of the Linux operating system. Nyahh!!!
So, just an anecdote, I caught sight of a baby breast-feeding. How wholesome, I felt, hooray for breast feeding . . . that must feel intensely wonderfully intimate . . . hey, without my notice, baby is on the other breast, and I had my SysAdmin brain moment.
“Oh good, load balancing.”
Thank you, and goodnight.
-danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/01/penis-cake/
The Red States have their NASCAR, their “Professional Wrestling.”
The Blue States, thanks to Al Gore, have the Internet, and the Internet contains the story of:
PENIS CAKE!!
YES!!
(Well, it is good if you’ve been working hard after the holiday weekend and are about to get some sleep.)
Thanks, benley.
-danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/02/google-recuiting-secret/
Well, I have heard time and time again, and experienced myself, that getting a job at Google is a long, slow, frustratingly mysterious process that takes weeks, if not months, in most cases. Typically, you’ll submit a resume for a position, get called two months later for an entirely different position, get a phone screen, then two weeks later get another phone screen, or maybe an on-site, but they’re still not sure, so you’ll get another interview, and each time there’s a week or two delay until the recruiters and hiring managers can complete their meetings, and before they can send you a job offer, your case will be reviewed by Larry and Sergey.
They are very very careful to hire only the very best and brightest. I think it was Marc Andreeson who said that if you start hiring sucky people, they will go and hire more sucky people, and ultimately they will all conspire to destroy your organization. Back at Tellme, we were told to only ever hire people we thought were smarter than ourselves, but that seemed problematic, given that a lot of the first few employees were from MIT. (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/05/early-retirement/
I think my mom once said that she tried to send money to one charity a week. I thought “hey, that’s a neat idea.” So, I tend to cut checks . . .
. . . but, honestly, I’m sick and tired of the massive volumes of direct mail I receive as a consequence of my good intentions. My favorite are the environmental charities that send me mailing labels . . . I have like 6zillion mailing labels already, right? So, let’s kill s’more trees.
Well, here’s the final straw: (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/05/gilmore-v-gonzales/
If you are free to visit San Francisco on Thursday December 8, then this may be an interesting activity. Even if you can’t go to this thing, you may be interested in your freedom anyway:
On the 4th of July 2002, John Gilmore, American citizen, decided to take a trip from one part of the United States of America to another. He went to Oakland International Airport — ticket in hand — and was told he had to produce his ID if he wanted to travel. He asked to see the law demanding he show his ‘papers’ and was told after a time that the law was secret and no, he wouldn’t be allowed to read it.
He hasn’t flown in his own country since.
On December 8th 2005, oral arguments in Gilmore v. Gonzales will be heard before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. At stake is nothing less than the right of Americans to travel anonymously in their own country — and the exposure of ‘secret law’ for what it is: an abomination.
You may think he’s crazy, but it is good when people challenge the government–read more at http://papersplease.org/gilmore/facts.html.
Thanks, Jeff!
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/05/sony-is-fony/
In Sony’s defense, they are renting the walls that they are defacing:
Coming on the heels of widely publicized news that Sony music CDs infected customers’ computers with security-hole-inducing spyware, Sony has hired graffiti artists in major urban areas to spray-paint buildings with simple, totemic images of kids playing with the [PSP].
dannyman says:
Corporations who think they have Street Cred are kind of lame an awkward, like White People who think they can Rap. I’ll grant you, there may be a Corporate analog to Eminem, but it aint Sony.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/07/starbucks-not-evil/
I am not a big fan of Starbucks. It’s not merely that I’m anti-trendy, but it just isn’t my idea of a nice coffee shop. (My idea of coffee doesn’t encompass “twenty ounces served in a paper cup with a plastic lid,” unless I’m stopping at a gas station on the Interstate.) But they give benefits to part-time employees, and as far as I have ever heard, the company conducts itself in a decent manner uncharacteristic of many greedy megacorporations. The latest evidence comes from AP / Yahoo: (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/07/pkgwhich-rpm-qf/
Aye. So, let us say you want to know what package a file comes from.
On FreeBSD:
0-17:16 djh@web3 ~> find /var/db/pkg -name +CONTENTS | xargs grep -l pdftex
/var/db/pkg/teTeX-1.0.7_1/+CONTENTS
Ugly, eh? Which, I think the portinstall stuff has a pkgwhich command.
Update: On FreeBSD, one may use:
pkg_info -W `which pdftex`
Linux?
[root@novadb0 pdftex-1.30.5]# rpm -qf /usr/bin/pdftex
tetex-2.0.2-22.EL4.4
Schweet!
3 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/09/americans-cut-some-slack/
Well, so we know that Americans put in a lot more time at work than our counterparts in Europe. We get fewer benefits, but higher salaries. Of course, we tend to commute by car, and live in very hot or very cold places, so we spend a lot more cash on energy, or we would, if our government were not structured to keep energy artificially cheap. As a consequence, we convert valuable cropland into large suburban houses, and spend more time driving SUVs around the freeways.
Anyway . . . higher pay or not, I’m jealous of the five weeks of vacation that I’d get if I worked in Europe. On the other hand, Wired reports that American employers have mostly come to accept the fact that Internet access means some amount of employee slack time:
Companies are growing more accepting of the idea that workers will fritter away part of the workday shopping online, according to purveyors of employee internet-monitoring tools. Most employers engage in some sort of monitoring of workplace internet access. But rather than block all shopping sites, employers preoccupied with productivity are more apt to set time limits on access. Today . . . employers commonly permit use of non-work-related sites for around an hour a day.
(more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/10/blog-strategy/
So, Jakob Nielsen is the “cranky old man” of web design, but he’s mostly right. Still, when I saw the title “Weblog Usability” I scoffed . . . weblogs suck! Criticizing “weblog usability” sounds a bit like criticizing children for watching cartoons.
But, like I said, he’s usually right. How does my “weblog” . . . I call it a “web site” with an “online journal” that predates that awful awful word, “blog” but . . . I’m running WordPress, this is a . . . a . . . blog . . . well, how does dannyman.toldme.com stack up to Nielsen’s standards? (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/11/wordpress-last-month-next-month/
I was tweaking the site navigation–and I welcome any feedback a reader may have–and I had to grab a plugin to allow me to link to next month / previous month / next year / previous year:
Next Archive Date / Previous Archive Date Plugin from scriptygoddess
I appreciate scriptygoddess’ work, as I’m using her paginate plugin as well. Unfortunately, the example on her site is kind of nasty. So, if someone is casting about on Google, here’s the code in my sidebar template:
<?php if (is_year()): ?>
<p><b>By Year</b><br />
<?php previous_archive_date() ?>
...
<?php next_archive_date() ?></p>
<?php elseif (is_month()): ?>
<p><b>Last Month</b><br />
<?php previous_archive_date() ?>
<p><b>Next Month</b><br />
<?php next_archive_date() ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>
Thanks for the code, Jennifer!
3 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/16/tellme-jazz/
As far as I know, Tellme doesn’t have a “Tellme Labs” in the manner that Google does, though I did spend some time on my own researching the intracies of LDAP and of PXE bootstrap and OS installation.
So it was nice when I was recently clued in to Tellme Jazz. This creature doesn’t explain itself much, but I find:
- You can collaborate on a shared addressbook. For example, the “Former Tellmes” group, or set one up for you family, peeps, co-workers, and everyone in the group can help add or maintain the data.
-
You can record messages, tossing in various “dazzlers” and send them along to individual friends, or groups of friends. (Think “audio Greeting Cards.”)
- Alternatively, you can send text messages . . .
(more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/19/crazy-naked-woman-yay/
You know . . . I have uploaded over 3,000 images to Flickr, and I occasionally like to check out which are most popular.
Of the images that I have taken, the second most popular is this: (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/20/utahs-memorial-crosses/
The January 6, 2006 issue of _The Week_ reports that:
“Atheists are suing the Utah Highway Patrol to remove roadside crosses erected to honor fallen officers. At issue are 14 12-foot-high crosses, each bearing the name of an officer killed in the line of duty. All the fallen officers were Christian, and their families are unanimously opposed to the crosses’ removal.”
(more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/23/akita-sushi-buffet/
It would seem that the dinner sushi buffet is back for Walnut Creek, on weeknights, for a limited time only. When it first opened, the dinner sushi buffet was a wonder to behold! Giant servings of raw, delicious fish. It was too good to be true, and indeed when they realized how much money they were losing, they stopped it.
Well, tonight I was thinking “spicy tuna roll” and found the buffet back in action. But it is a far cry from “too good to be true” . . . more like “dude, what do you expect from a sushi buffet? Fool!” Oh well. Maybe Gourmet Sushi will actually re-open soon. The sign says he will open before Christmas, but last I seen, the windows were still covered with newspapers and there was an envelope from the IRS sticking out of the mail slot. If he skips town . . . well, restaurants come and restaurants go, but that guy has this intense aura about him that kind of reminds me of Basil Fawly, except with inscrutable Asian powers. I’m going to miss that guy.
I’m not feeling too good . . . but if I survive the indigestion I get to fly to Chicago tomorrow, and see the fam.
Happy Solstice Holidays to you!
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