Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/04/08/biz-vs-gov/
Mayor Michael Bloomberg on the contrast between business and government:
“In government, everyone thinks that in business you say jump and everybody jumps. That’s not the way a good company is run. Good companies are run by leaders who delegate and build consensus. In business, people think that everybody in government is lazy and incompetent. That’s also not true.”
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/04/07/current-tv/
A while back, Al Gore bought a cable channel that replayed foreign news broadcasts. Yayoi and I used to watch the English-language Japanese news broadcast from Tokyo. Pretty groovy. Though, they never could keep to a straight schedule.
Well, this puppy has had time to incubate and morph in to a new creature, that will air short videos of between two and five minutes, and they are inviting viewers to submit content. Sort of television meets Internet blogging.
If you visit their web site, at http://www.current.tv/, you can sample the very first fruits of this effort. Unfortunately the web site requires Shockwave and you can not, as far as I can tell, sit back and watch the videos full-screen. Nevermind that . . . you can watch short videos from the winners of their first contest on there, and you’ll see things like: (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/04/06/kwiruto/
I recently caught myself typing the word “quilt” when I meant to refer to a “kilt” because Yayoi’s pronunciation merges the two together. They say that married couples eventually start to look like each other, but it is a bit different to have your language start morphing on you.
Which brings up a different anecdote. When I was young I overheard some British people refer to the process of “repatriation.” I later learned that this is because they were “ex-patriots.” It seemed kind of harsh that these people should be treated as ex-patriots simply for spending some time in a foreign country. (In America, “patriot” means Paul Revere, and anyone who becomes an ex, in need of re, is not someone you would respect.) I wondered if repatriation involved classes on the Monarchy and Parliament and other stuff to get the Americanness out of their systems, and if this was common for people returning to their countries — If I ever left, would I have to attend classes and re-take the Constitution test before I could be trusted to behave as an American again?
With time and an improved understanding of Latin word roots, I figured that they had been referring to the process of repatriating expatriates. There is no English word “patriate” but in Spanish and French the patria is the country-side, derived from Latin pater, for father . . . so, the land of your father. (The derivation of “patriot” is similiar.)
English is a twisted, gnarly language, even for native speakers, so if I should mistake a “kilt” for a “quilt” because my wife can’t wrap her tongue around the kw- sound, it is only fair.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/04/05/freebsd-faq-measure-swap/
Q: How do you measure swap utilization in FreeBSD? (Assuming you are writing a script to gather performance metrics.)
A: If you are writing a C program, check kvm_getswapinfo(3) and maybe take a gander at the bottom of /usr/src/usr.bin/top/machine.c.
A: If you are writing a Perl script:
Measure swap activity:
sysctl vm.stats.vm.v_swapin vm.stats.vm.v_swapout vm.stats.vm.v_swappgsin vm.stats.vm.v_swappgsout
(I believe these results are COUNTER type values, like you get from netstat -inb. You could establish “swap activity” by plotting changes in this value.)
Measure swap size:
0-13:38 djh@mito ~> swapinfo Device 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity /dev/ad0s1b 1022224 0 1022224 0% 0-13:38 djh@mito ~> swapctl -l Device: 1024-blocks Used: /dev/ad0s1b 1022224 0
If you are trying to accomodate n+1 swap devices, try this:
0-13:44 djh@mito ~> swapctl -lsk Device: 1024-blocks Used: /dev/ad0s1b 1022224 0 Total: 1022224 0
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/04/04/yay-groupthink/
Mom and Grandma came to town last week. They did dig the scenery, the thrift stores and Walnut Creek’s quilting shop. We didn’t make it to Napa, or drive along the coast, but it is good to have things to do for next time. We did make it out to Alameda to see Joyce and Harlyn, and we parked behind a bumper sticker that read “IMPEACHMENT HELL GET A ROPE” which Mom got a good chuckle from. She recounted this to Joyce, who is working now for theological scholars, and she answered that one thing she likes about her job is that even though she is a non-believer among serious religious folks, they feel the same about President George, whereas if one were to express themselves at the bank where she worked previously, that might cause some discord.
And, while I like to have intelligent people I can argue with, it is nice to come to work and rap with our office manager, an intelligent person who offers that Monday has been magnified by the shift to Summer Time, and I demure “oh, don’t get me started on my rant about Daylight Savings Time,” and she goes “oh, I hate it too.” So, I got to rant a bit, “if you think waking up earlier is a good idea, then wake up earlier! Don’t screw up the clocks!” It felt good.
The rant was augmented by some research I did on a lazy Sunday after dropping the folks at the airport. Because of this, it may at some point be composed in to an essay which I may post here, or at kuro5hin.org. And yes, I know it is called “Daylight Saving Time” without the s.
Oh, by the way, you WordPress users might want to go in to the Options menu to manually decrement your UTC, as WordPress doesn’t have a proper notion of timezones.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/29/unfortunate-commuter/
I left my camera with Yayoi this week. And the Sidekick has no zoom, but maybe just maybe we can make out that this lady is using her Blackberry while driving down the third lane of I-680 southbound, somewhere North of Danville.
Riding the bus, you get a good view of certain tragedies that you do not personally know, such as the woman who needs to be able to check her Blackberry during her commute, but also has to drive while doing so. Poor, unfortunate lady; Us privileged souls on the bus get away with taking pictures of you and posting them to the Internet while the CCCTA chauffers us to work, while you must risk your life to sneak glances at your communiques. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/28/chabot-mirrors-and-flickr/
In honor of Joe’s Birthday, we visited the Chabot Space Center in Oakland on Saturday. It is a pretty nice place, for a planetarium. They have some large telescopes set up out back, and it is really more of an observatory that has sprouted a planetarium to entertain kids and other members of the public. Yayoi wants to go back some night and peer through one of the telescopes . . .
Anyway, being an observatory, they are naturally intrested in mirrors, and have an exhibit on this topic. As you can see, we had a bit of fun with our reflections in one of the demonstrations. Another thing that was totally interesting is this video camera they have set up with a variable delay between the top of the screen and the bottom of the screen. Some sort of illustration about how images get distorted when you have to deal with how slow parts of the image may get to you. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/22/no-escape/
There’s just no escape from Terri Schiavo. Honestly, I don’t care except that I hear about it on the news constantly, and it is very annoying to have Congress and the President try to usurp the authority of Florida’s courts, after the Florida legislature and governor have failed at doing the same. It is naked, disgusting opportunism of the slimiest kind, designed to appease right-wing Christian WEENIES. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/20/america-still-relevant/
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I wont say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
Having a poem in your head is like having a song in your head, only quieter and easier to identify. This morning I had Ginsberg’s “America” in my head, so I went to read it again. I like this poem so much that I have a copy right here, on the web. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/18/microsoft-security-efforts/
I have been surfing a lot this morning, trying to track down some technical, hence professional blogs that I can look at from work. That way, when I feel the urge to “slack off” by surfing the web, I can turn my slacking in to learning. I will try and summarize some of the publications I have found, but for now, I need to recommend Richard Bejtlich’s excellent review of current Microsoft security efforts. Even for Unixy people like me, it is useful to know what Microsoft is thinking, and this is a great summary of what Microsoft is thinking. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/17/happy-1111111111/
<recursive> mmagin@dt ~% date +’%s’
<recursive> 1111094490
<recursive> getting very close to 1111111111
<Nimbex> 1111094473
<recursive> hmm
<Nimbex> I need to run ntpd on neb.
<SmooveB> recursive: damn, that’s in like 4 hours
<dman> I’ll be around SysAdmins this evening.
<Nimbex> And I bet you forgot to register a domain for it this time, dave!
<Ark> SmooveB: I thought it was tomorrow
<recursive> jwz’s LJ says: 1111111111 = Thu Mar 17 17:58:31 2005 PST
<Ark> wacky
<dman> 0-13:23 djh@mito ~> date -r 1111111111
<dman> Thu Mar 17 17:58:31 PST 2005
* dman sets up a blog entry for 17:58
<Ark> what a great and arbitrary number we have a boner for
Yes, children, two minutes before 6PM Pacific it will be 1111111111 seconds since the start of the Unix Epoch, which commenced at 00:00:00 UTC, January 1, 1970. A couple hours later, and I’ll be at Apple HQ in Cupertino, to hear about LDAP.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/17/punctuality/
People, I will not beat around the bush. The old slogans convey a variety of disparate mission statements, which in turn only muddles up our message. I have had the mar-com team work on this for the past two months, and after a lot of process, and vetting, we have a new creative that consolidates our message in to a single slogan. I think you’ll agree that this captures the essence of punctuality, in a single, strong, coherent message:
A hand-stitched early bird in time gets to save nine worms in the bush.
You’ll find in your briefing packet a selection of tee-shirts, coffee mugs, letter openers, and tape dispensers all bearing this new slogan. We’ll be measuring over the next few months whether this new campaign has proven effective in improving on-time performance of key deliverables.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/14/tmobile-makes-good/
Last week, there were serious troubles with the Sidekick data service. It was mostly down for about two days, and seriously flaky for two more. That really sucked.
At the end of the outage, T-Mobile sent everyone an e-mail noting that there would be a $20 credit due to the troubles. Basically, a refund for one month of Sidekick data service. They’ve also promised more free goodies in the downloads section for their loyal customers.
I feel better. And I think T-Mobile deserves some credit for trying to do well by their customers. Sh!t does happen, especially with bleeding-edge technology. It makes a difference when a company is pretty good with answering the phone, as T-Mobile has always done for me, and when they take proactive steps to apologise when things break fantastically, as they did last week.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/12/devastation-beauty/
When we moved in, we noted a large collection of long-abandoned small houses and shacks and sheds and an apartment complex next door. And lots of beautiful trees. This area had been condemned, I’m told, for the past two years. Well, they finally got around to doing something with the condemned buildings, which is to tear them down to make room to build hundreds of condos. I can not blame them for building hundreds of condos so close to the BART station, but we were hoping that they would keep some of the trees around.
Wednesday when I got home, the buildings had been razed, except for a masonry structure down on the corner. About half the trees, mostly the taller ones, were still standing. On Thursday evening, I note that miniature forest that stood throughout the lot was completely gone. There are a few trees yet along the fence line, but the devastation is sad.
Those had better be some awesome condos.
On the other hand, one neat thing about Walnut Creek is that there is a lot of unspoilt land that we can walk to and hike around. This weekend we wandered around some of the foothills of Mount Diablo. We walked through a muddy area where Yayoi learned that there is nothing to fear about free-ranging cows. The views were awesome. I understand that things aren’t normally this green, but the current flora blows the mind.
All in all, I can’t complain so much. We will likely lose our view of Mount Diablo in the distance as the condos are built, but we still won’t have far to go for natural splendor.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/11/hooray-for-rojo/
Two years ago I started work and eventually gave up on toldme.com. The main reason is that it was a little too ambitious for my project management and database skills, not to mention my interest level relative to free time. (Getting a paying job can really destroy your ability to work on personal development projects.) (more…)
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