September 2007 Archives

We have been fighting for a couple weeks now with a strange issue where some people randomly wouldn't be found in Active Directory when our password change utility would try to change their AD password (along with their other passwords). We finally found a good "test-case" user and started really trying to hack out "why they couldn't reset their password". After figuring out that AD has the username stored in two places (cn, which is case-sensitive for searches, and name which isn't), we thought we had it licked.

But, it turns out we were still bombing on trying to fix this user's password-sync issue. What could it be? So we craft the LDAP query manually against the AD server and find, lo and behold, two records for her in Active Directory. How can that possibly be? I mean, we do the check for (objectClass=person) to ensure that we're only looking at people, and you can't have the same username assigned twice in the tree, so what the heck is going on?

Oh.... the annoyance... from one of the entries...

objectClass: top
objectClass: person
objectClass: organizationalPerson
objectClass: user

Yup, that looks about right, from the other, though....

objectClass: top
objectClass: person
objectClass: organizationalPerson
objectClass: user
objectClass: computer

WTF?!!? How the hell is it both "a computer" and "a person"?? I was pleased to learn that the code I'd written had Done The Right Thing to sanity-check the number of results was exactly "1", because this was friggin crazy.

So now, I've had to add another clause to the LDAP search criteria specifically excluding persons who are also computers. If positronic lifeforms ever start working or attending Vassar, I'm going to be a little screwed, but somehow I think that's a safe bet for now.

I hate Microsoft. I hope they're the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

As Jack Bog notes... forget everything you thought you knew about the currency conversion rate between the US and Canada, because the Canadian dollar is now worth more than the U.S. Dollar.

That's right, as of September 21, US$1.00 will only get you CAN$0.997 ... that money we've been making fun of for years is now a better investment than our own presidential flashcards.

But remember, folks, the shrub's doing a great job leading our economy. He's got a plan, and it's workin' great.

Courtesy of Tera:

Have you not yet seen Superbad? Why not?

D and I went to the late-show tonight, after punking out two or three weeks in a row.

Oh. My. God. Seriously, one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. It may actually dethrone my previous all-time favorite watch-it-a-thousand-times comedy from its throne.

Whatever you're planning on doing tomorrow, call them and cancel. Go see Superbad.

Before yesterday, it'd been a while since I'd blogged, and it hasn't been anything "about me", but more just immediate commentary on something timely that needed talking about. There's been a lot that I've missed over the last few months... didn't blog about spending a week in Ireland for our belated honeymoon, or how D and I went to see The Police at Madison Square Garden on their reunion tour, or any of the myriad other things going on.

Summer was just hellishly busy at work this summer, rolling out a new e-mail system to the entire campus. D and I had plotted out "the weekends we had free to do stuff" and there were, like, three. Total. For the entire summer. That's how busy it's been.

Hopefully now that school is back in session, and the kids are back, things will slow down enough that I can at the very least keep current, and maybe even fill in some of the missing stories.

You may have noticed some wonkiness on the site. I tried to upgrade to MT4 and while it worked fine in my test-install on the privateblog, there's something hinky going on with the main site. You'll notice that the permalinks which are listed on the main page go nowhere. It seems to be that the "the format the index page is using" for permalinks doesn't seem to match "the format which the entries themselves are using".

For now, you can simply slice off the ".php" from the end, and replace it with a "/" and it'll work, but if anyone knows why this is the case, I would be greatly appreciative. :)

UPDATE: Fixed. Damned bugs. :-)

Take this situation from my old home town...

A sixth grade boy asks a fellow sixth-grade girl to go out. Girl's ex-boyfriend, and five other sixth-graders, hatch a plot to literally slash the boy's throat. They build little weapons out of the blades from pencil sharpeners and come up with a whole plan to isolate him from other people, surround him, and then slice his throat open to kill him.

The kids are suspended, put on trial, get probation essentially (WTF on the judicial system there), but then -- are sent right back to school with their fellow students the following fall (now).

The victim is positively scared to go to school. Go figure. He's going to private school now. Who's paying for it? His own parents, because the school district insists there's no danger. Other parents are scared for their kids' lives, and those kids are scared to go to school as well. No fucking shit, man, especially since they're too young to be allowed to carry concealed for self-defense. *grin*

What amazes me about all of this is how fucked up the priorities of school districts are.... You don't have to hunt hard to find stories of kids who were sent-home, suspended, or expelled, because their attire was "disruptive to the educational process" (read there, "it annoyed the old people"). Never mind that 99% of their fellow students probably wouldn't even have noticed or cared, it was disruptive, damn it.

But students having a real, legitimate, founded, fear for their lives from their psychotic fellow students? No, that's not disruptive! Those psycho-kids have, and I quote from the article:

[Superintendent] Rhau said the children involved in the plot deserve an education and a chance to move on with their lives.

How come that logic doesn't apply to those kids who occasionally have a piece of profanity on their shirt? Or wear some shirt that's got divisive political speech on it? Seriously, if the educational process is so important, so sacrosanct, that conspiracy-to-commit-murder can't be allowed to interfere with it, then someone needs to explain to me how a shirt that says "Meet me at 4:20", or "Impeach Bush", or even "Fuck The Police" is somehow fair game for denying the educational process to a kid.

If you ever needed concrete proof that the public school system is simply fucked up beyond repair and needs dissolution, this is it.

(Contact Info: Richard Rhau, Superintendent, 845-247-6500)

So Google is going to award $30M to the first private robotic Moon rover. As I read this I had a really cool idea.

Add to the list of tasks the rover must do to succeed: "Carry a small case approximately 6in. x 4in. x 1.5in in size, weighing a pound or so."

And then have another X-Prize ... with the prize going to a different private organization, who shall retrieve the case by whatever means they see fit, which contains a check for another $20M.

Simply put... go up there with some means capable of fetching the case from the device that's there, and returning that to yourself on Earth safely. If you can accomplish it, you can cash the check you bring back.

Backing up your system can always be a pain in the butt. We've all known it, at some point in time, the hard way. I have to say, though, that the new backup stuff built into Leopard is pretty sweet.

Yesterday, at work, it appears that the plist file containing my Apple Mail preferences got horribly borked. When I got home (and had access to the firewire drive my laptop's backup data is stored on), fixing the problem was simple... I went and found the plist file, clicked on Time Machine, and restored my plist file from a week ago. Lo and behold, Apple Mail was fixed.

No muss, no fuss, .... it just worked.