Recently in Geek Stuff Category

I'm pleased to say that the Second Edition of High Performance MySQL is now available for purchase from Amazon.com.

Baron, Peter, Vadim and Arjen did an excellent job updating the first edition, bringing it current to support 5.0 and 5.1 flavors of MySQL, expanding the content of the previous edition by more than doubling its size (from a first edition page-count of 275, to a second edition page-count of 708). There's a lot of good stuff in there, and if MySQL administration is your daily grind, picking up a copy would be well-advised.

This will be meaningless to a good chunk of you. Just ignore me, if that's the case.

Don't ever buy 0U PDUs. If you're thinking about it, don't. If you're still thinking about it now, slit your own throat before you can verbally agree to the purchase. If you've already verbally agreed, chop off your hand so you can't sign. If you've already signed, then the phrase "down not across" should become your new mantra.

Seriously, there isn't a single fscking vendor out there that does them right. And heaven forbid you're stuck with a cabinet configuration that's not the Official Sanctioned and Blessed Configuration Manufactured By The PDU Manufacturer, because then you'll be lucky if you can get the PDU anywhere near the right location, even if you use arc-welders, chewing gum, and duct-tape.

Don't do it. Self-performed Lasik surgery would be a more productive use of your time, and far less painful.

Yahoo!!!!! You got some 'splainin' to doooooo!!!!

Dear Lazyweb,

After this past summer's "desktop replacement" cycle, I acquired one of our older/retired iMac computers. When it was wiped for public use, it had the "campus desktop image" installed on it. The problem is that the desktop image is a "managed" image -- e.g., it somehow phones home every time you log in and grabs some managed preferences from the "mother ship", including telling it to use the campus update server.

Obviously, this is "my" computer now (well, rather, my wife's), and not the college's, so I'd like to know how to "untether" it from the update server. Some pages had suggested holding down "option" while logging in as her, however it says that account "D" is not part of any workgroups... and then proceeds to set up a bunch of managed-preferences anyway.

I'm sure this is freakin' trivial to do, but nobody on the Apple Support discussion forums has answered this question after like a month, so I'm turning to you, the great wide lazyweb. Help me lazyweb, you're my only hope!

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.

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. :-)

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.

Terry Semel is finally out as Yahoo's CEO. I can only imagine the dancing in the aisles over at Big Y. The list of people who have engendered "less love" than Terry is amazingly short. I think Stalin may be on it, but that was a given.

But in Jerry Yang's blog posting about the change in leadership he writes:

Since coming on board in 2001, Terry has given Yahoo! six of its best years.

Dude, what planet are you on that you say that, other than "PR World"? When the long history of Yahoo is written, Semel's reign will be compared to Scully or Amelio at Apple -- that long dark tea-time of the soul as it were.

But let's look at the numbers (derived from these)... Terry has been there since 2001...

Was 2001 one of the best years? I dunno, a massive drop in stock price leads me to think, "not so much."

Was 2002 one of the best years? Not quite so massive a decline but still at the end of the year, the stock was down off its 1/1/2002 price.

Was 2003 one of the best years? 2003 actually saw some growth. 12/30/2003 closed at 250% the price of 1/1/2003... but come on 1998 saw the rise to 400% of its Jan 1 value... 1999 it rose to another 400% increase.... so yeah, maybe 2003 was "one of the best", but let's continue on.

Was 2004 one of the best years? Dec. 2004 was about 150% of Jan, so maybe "slight growth".

Was 2005 one of the best years? The stock rose at years end by like 4%. Not quite "stellar".

Was 2006 one of the best years? With a 45% drop in price? Hardly.

Was 2007 one of the best years? Well, it's only half-way over, but the six-month chart really hasn't moved all that much over the course of the last six months ... unless of course you count today as all the traders were celebrating Terry's removal from power.

Score:

• 4 declining years


• 1 neutral years


• 1 decent year


• 1 good year

As a Yahoo shareholder, I say this: If you continue to say that Terry's years were "six of the best", then you're delusional and shouldn't be in control either. If you want to spin his departure, that's one thing, but outright lying and handing containers of Kool-Aid to shareholders isn't the way to go. Cut him loose completely and get back to the roots of what made Yahoo work in the first place.

One of the things that was a common joke when I worked at Yahoo was a derisive "We're number three in that market! Woot!", mocking our corporate inability to set our sights on "#1" in anything. It was true of Auctions (so much so that finally Yahoo just recently gave up the ghost on that and put it out of its misery... all four of its users are distraught), and is true of so much of the rest of Yahoo.

They're content with #3 and #4 market positions, and it's kind of sad.

Which makes this story that they're chasing after the "#3 social networking site" for acquisition that much funnier.

Like many folks, I have my e-mail protected by various anti-spam features. However, there's also companies I deal with that I want to always receive their mail, and I don't want it tagged or blocked as spam. So for those companies, I create custom addresses, and set them up in my mail server so that they are never ever spam-protected.

I came home from Easter dinner last night to find that I had 50 or so spam messages in my inbox. This was highly unusual, one or two is about average. Turns out, the super-secret e-mail address which has only ever been given to Intuit/Quicken ... is the recipient address.

In other words, Intuit's quicken billpay contact list has been compromised, near as I can tell. I won't claim that it has, but short of random attacks on my mail server to find a working e-mail address that isn't exactly "common" (no evidence of which, by the way, is in my mail server logs), I'm hard-pressed to offer up any alternative hypothesis. Their No-Sharing Practice page seems to indicate there's no significant reason this leakage should have occurred.

I've looked over my transactions online and see no evidence of wrong-doing, so it doesn't appear as if they compromised my financial data (but then again, who knows?). I've filed a ticket with Intuit and asked them to call me today to discuss the matter.

So, if you use Quicken Bill Pay service, you may want to take a hard look at your transactions and make sure that nothing crazy is going on.

I hope this woman gets every penny Yahoo has and then some.

I can remember all too well a conversation I had, sitting in a cubicle with Filo and Zod, wherein I told them what a horrible thing it was to be doing business in China, and how we needed to intentionally stay out to encourage them to change their ways if they wanted to join the rest of the world.... let them create their own little fiefdom if they wanted to, but if they wanted to continue to treat their citizens like shit, then we didn't have to be a part of it -- and oh how I predicted that "we" (now they, thankfully) would be a part of it. Heck, it almost sounds like the story they tell is the hypothetical I proposed in that cubicle meeting.

That meeting, as I look back on it, was really one of the defining moments for me in my Yahoo career, wherein I realized I didn't want to be there any longer. I came to the point where I felt... dirty, for lack of a better word... every day when I came home from the office.

My impassioned speech about considering the potential consequences, and the position Yahoo would be in when they were served with the Chinese equivalent of a subpoena, so that the government could identify and abscond with one of its own dissidents who wanted nothing more than the rights we hold near and dear to be his own as well... that speech was disregarded with a comment from Zod that just made we recoil: "How can we turn away from that many eyeballs?"

The answer: By maintaining your dignity. Something Yahoo hasn't had in a while.

I've been using Thunderbird lately for my e-mail, but am starting to get really annoyed with something. I'm sure this is just a setting of some sort that I can't find, but if someone knows how to do it, that would be sweet.

I find that Thunderbird doesn't update the "unread messages" count on folders in the sidebar unless I actually open the folder. This doesn't help me too much as I often have mail server-side filtered into, say, a deep subfolder where a particular friend's e-mail address is "pre-sorted".

Ideally, I'd like it to boldface and put an unread count on any folder automatically (or at least, every so often double-check such things... right now if I wanted to see if any of my server-side filters worked, I have to individually open each folder and see "what's new" so it will reprocess that subfolder).

Any thoughts? What am I missing. I'm sure this is just "Derek being blind as a bat," but any help is appreciated.

Zawodny's Law

"Don't Fuck With Simple"

- Jeremy Zawodny, (from his blog)

Damion and I took the train down to DC last night (for LISA).

Now, I've owned Battle Royale for months. I've loaned it to people (including Damion). But I've yet to watch it myself. Mostly this stems from 'how' I usually watch movies -- I'm doing something else in parallel, they're on the TV and I look up at them when things seem interesting but I'm listening to the dialogue and keeping pace with the story that way.

Except that Battle Royale is subtitled, which means I really need to be a captive audience watching the screen for two hours.

As I was prepping for the trip, I was ripping a bunch of DVDs to MP4s to store on my hard drive for the trip down. I decided to add Battle Royale to the list. After all, I had a three and a half hour leg from Penn Station to Union Station.

So I start watching this movie, and seriously, it's just as cool as it sounded, and just as interesting as people had told me it would be. And then, at 1:25:52 into the 122-minute movie, it just "ends"... right in the middle of a fairly dramatic scene, too.

Near as I can tell, Handbrake got confused on a layer-change maybe? or I aborted it by accident in the middle of ripping? All I know is that the climactic 37 minutes of the movie are nowhere I can easily get at them!!

I'm half-tempted to ask D to FedEx me down the DVD so I can stop the suffering.

Has anyone ever seen a plugin for MovableType that will allow a blog owner to moderate entries? e.g., I could give people access to compose blog entries, but only I could make them go live? The sort of thing you might use in a shared-blog type of situation where someone wants to be sanity-checking the things that people are making live to the world?

Alternatively, are there any decent pieces of blogging software that handle this nicely with similar feature sets to MT?

We're in the middle of installing a dozen or so APC cabinets in our server room, a complete replacement of all existing cabinets and racks. APC cabinets (like many others) have what they call "0U" slots on the sides of the rear of the cabinet, for hanging things like vertical power strips, or cable-management trays. There are two on each side, an "inner" and an "outer", with the outer being closest to the rear doors of the cabinet, and the inner being closest to the vertical rails of the cabinet itself.

Our initial design called for the inner slots to be vertical cable-management, and the outer slots to be vertical Power Distribution Units (PDUs). The thinking at the time was that the power cable would come in from the server horizontally, go directly into the vertical cablemanagement, and come out to the outer-mounted PDU where it needed to. It seemed like a great idea on paper.

However, for those of you who some day go to design these things, don't do it. It simply doesn't work (it so doesn't work, that as I type this I have our two student interns correcting every one of our cabinets to fix the problem). The reason it doesn't work is because the prongs from the vertical cable-management (which hold the cables) extend too far horizontally. Initially, we thought the limit of the effect of this was that they sometimes can interfere with the horizontal cable-management rows, but that was something we could work around easily enough. Worse, though, is that we found out this morning that they also interfere with the servers' rails, if those rails extend at all past the rear vertical rail (which often happens).

So, learn from my experience -- PDUs on the inside, cable management on the outside. Your life will be a lot easier, even if does mean that your power cables cross the PDUs to get to the cable-management.

UPDATE: Ignore all this for reasons to be disclosed later.

UPDATE 2: OK, so here's the deal. If we swap those around, then the rail extensions block the power outlets that are in the PDUs. Also, the circuit breakers at the top of the power strip completely block access to the vertical rail mounting squares. That last part is fine if all I ever mount are quick-connect devices, but if I should ever need to put in capture nuts, I'm screwed.

We've contacted the manufacturer of the gear to find out "what is it that other people do, because surely this has come up before?"

I recently installed the MySQL module for our backup software at work. Noticing that the new version has PIT restore capability I gleefully clicked to enable that, aimed the backup software at the master database, and away it went.

The way this software implements PIT is to do a level 0 backup of the database, send the database a RESET MASTER command so as to remove any existing binlogs, and then (later) just backup all the bin logs since they'll be replayable from the level 0 it created, etc., etc.

Except that sending a RESET MASTER command completely hoses any slaves that are replicating off the master you're backing up.

So I opened a trouble ticket with the vendor, asking them, "How do you think I'm supposed to do this, given how this interacts with my slaves?"

Their response, in a sentence:

"It shouldn't cause any issues with the replicas themselves."

Yeah, no shit, pal. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Backing up the master shouldn't break the replicas. But it does.

Sometimes we get really really smart support engineers with this vendor, and sometimes, you wonder if they've read the ticket.

Yesterday, after a long month of waiting impatiently, my 17" Intel Mac Book Pro finally arrived. I tore open the packaging and started the process of migrating my settings over from my 15" G4 Powerbook. About 20 minutes into the migration, the Mac Book Pro rebooted itself spontaneously. "That's odd...." I thought, but after a second (three hour long) migration attempt, it worked like a champ, so I didn't think too much of it.

That was, until later, when it started rebooting itself every 30-60 minutes. Sometimes even more frequently. Doesn't matter what I'm doing, either (I'd set it down on my desk before I went to bed last night with nothing running... woke up to a login prompt).

Since "random reboots" is often a sign of bad memory in AppleLand, I had one of our Apple gurus swap out my 2GB of factory RAM for 1.5GB of RAM that was "known good". It lasted a whopping 45 minutes. Willing to overlook one transgression, it happened again 20 minutes later.

So now I'm wiping it... it's going back to "virgin" so that none of my data is on it when it goes back to Apple as a "DOA". It took a month for the first unit to arrive, $DEITY only knows how long it'll take for the replacement to get here.

So apparently, Yahoo has completely redesigned the front page of their homepage. It's supposed to be all neat and cool, so I go to the URL mentioned in the Yahoo Search Blog entry to see how cool it is.

When I get there, using the "default" browser for any Macintosh computer, Safari, what do I read?

Thank you for your interest in the sneak preview of the new Yahoo! home page.
Unfortunately, you're using a browser we don't support today.

Check back again in the coming weeks - we plan to support additional browsers soon.

It makes the Baby Jesus cry for a number of reasons. First, this can only mean that the home page is becoming bloated. I can remember clearly the days when someone with an extremely low employee number (hint: employee # "1" or "2", I have no idea which one he got when they founded the company) told us how many dollars per day an additional single byte cost on the front page. It was like a shitload, though, that much I remember.

Now, it's completely bloated and full of useless crap.

Second, there's the whole concept -- long since thrown to the wind -- that the home page should be viewable on anything, because it should be using very simple basic standards-based HTML. That concept is now, apparently, tossed to the wind. The new homepage will be one that if you are not using one of the "blessed" browsers, you're screwed.

Also, I'm not really holding my breath for any kind of real Mac support. After all, the last official update for Yahoo Messenger was over two and a half years ago. I'm told, of course, that there is a crack team of Mac developers making a new version even as we speak. But, well, I've heard that a couple times. I heard it in 2001, when there were two developers assigned to work on the Mac version. Then one got pulled off the project. The other got laid off. Then in 2003, someone managed to dig up the code out of CVS (which, BTW, is still written against all the ancient libraries, which is why it still looked like an OS9 app), and push out a new version, probably to fix a security bug, not to actually give it features or anything.

(I should point out though, that it doesn't really bother me the whole YMsgr thing... mostly because the instant I sign onto YMsgr, on those rare occasions I do, I am flooded with IM spammers trying to pimp out chinese sneaker knockoffs, other "forbidden" Yahoo IDs, you name it... pretty much the only time I sign into YMsgr is when I absolutely have to speak to someone who works at Yahoo still, because they've got to eat their own dog-food. And even then, I'll use Adium, not the "official" client. )

But anyhow, suffice to say that it saddens me to see things like this, and makes me value my Google stock all that much more.

Spotted this on Kotaku, via a reference on Gizmodo. I have to agree with the Kotaku commentary though... only Bungie could give you a two minute preview which has no gameplay at all in it and still leave you at the end eager for Master Chief to bring the whoopass.

UPDATED: If you want a really nice resolution version of this trailer, go here instead.

So George Lucas apparently lied when he said that "the original material simply didn't exist" to create unaltered versions of the original trilogy.

.. Because this September, Lucas has decided to milk that cash cow one last time, and make available DVD versions of the really-and-truly original version (with "Star Wars" even having the '77 crawl that simply says "STAR WARS", and not "EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE").

How cool is that? Then, when those are released into the wild, Lucas finally becomes irrelevant and there's no longer anything we need him for.

I say that because I have a hard time believing the "oh, we heard your cries," and all that crap. I don't think I'm alone in my belief that this was the plan all along. Tell all the fans, "You'll never get the original trilogy, so you'll have to make do with the Special Edition," at which point they pony up the money for movies they don't really even want. Then, a year or so later, you can milk them again (just in time for Christmas, and only for the limited time only thing, a la Disney's Vault) for more cash.

Pretty much everything I've ever said about Lucas has just been proven true.

At work, I just got a Treo 650. Given that the form-factor of the Treo is not at all ideal for telephone use, a headset is a necessity. The standard (rather, sub-standard) "bud" headset that comes with the unit is every bit as crappy as one might expect it to be.

On the other hand, the Plantronics Voyager 510 that Vassar got me to go with it positively rules. I don't know exactly what its weight is, but I know that I wore it to work this morning, and then started messing around rewiring in the crawl-space behind three racks. Two hours later, I was done cabling, and only then did I remember I'd been wearing the headset the entire time. It's light enough that I'd simply forgotten it was even there, which (in my opinion) is an ideal situation.

I've always been a fan of Plantronics, ever since my days working in a GTE call center, when I had a choice between a Plantronics unit and (ack!) a Hello-Direct model. Plantronics has never done me wrong, and near as I can tell, this Bluetooth model is no exception.

Dear Lazyweb,

I remember reading an article a couple years ago about this guy who got a complaint from his users that "they couldn't reach any site greater than some number of miles away," and he mocked them because "networks just don't work that way", and after a couple days of poking and prodding he discovered that, lo and behold, the users were right, they couldn't reach sites greater than some number of miles away. Much investigation ensued, with some really wonky error being at fault but having exactly the described effect.

In the spirit of April Fools, (because this is not an April Fools gag, and see my post two posts down about that disclaimer) ... does anyone have a link to this story?

UPDATED: Here we go. Link to the story.

I'm in the midst of preparing my GenCon '06 event, and Friday night is our live playtest of it. I'm potentially going to have a few slots open. If you are local to the Poughkeepsie area, and are a regular reader of my blog, and want to spend an evening playing D&D on a fun (at least I hope it'll be as fun as the previous two years) event, drop me an e-mail (or comment on this entry) ASAP.

We're installing a massive wireless LAN on campus. As part of this, we're installing a bunch of Cisco Wireless LAN controller gear, including Cisco 4400 controllers.

One of the network contractors came into my office this morning and asked me to "Add a DNS hostname for hostname pointing to 1.1.1.1" ... I told him no goddamned way, that's a real IP address, even if it is presently reserved by ARIN, and that they would have to make do with RFC-1918 space like everyone else.

Unfortunately, the configuration documention from Cisco says to use

Step 8 Enter the Virtual Gateway IP address; one fictitious, unassigned IP address (such as 1.1.1.1) to be used by all Controller Layer 3 Security and Mobility managers.

Now, you might think you could just use some RFC-1918 "reserved for private use" space there. Except that there's no netmask applied to the network it uses. So who knows how well it will "behave" along-side existing 10-net or 192.168-net usage. Further, when the contractor contacted Cisco about the issue, Cisco gave them the whole "this is the way it's supported, you should use 1.1.1.1" argument, this despite the contractor making the case that 1.1.1.1 isn't reserved, and could some day be a real honest-to-goodness conflict.

So, despite my better judgement, there's now a DNS hostname pointing to address space we don't own, and Cisco has earned my "retard of the day" award. Bastards.

My employer will probably be getting me a Mac Book Pro here in the next few weeks (yay!). However, today I've got a Lind Travel Adapter which plugs into the cigarette-lighter-outlets on an airplane and my existing PowerBook G4.

However, I cannot find any functional equivalent that has the new MagSafe connector that the Mac Book Pro ships with. Has anyone seen a travel adapter designed for the newest laptop?

Had a bit of a hardware issue, but we've gotten through it, it looks like relatively unscathed. Sorry for vanishing like that.

But remember kids, Google's supposed to be the not-evil alternative to the Yahoos of the world.

But, don't kid yourself, Yahoo is just as evil.

Kinda makes me sad to think I'd ever considered working at one, or that I ever did work at the other.

I had read an article that talked about how the iTunes Music Store was going to have the pilot episode of NBC's new show, "Conviction", as a free download.

Imagine my surprise as I saw that the description:

The newest legal drama from D**k Wolf

I understand iTMS tries to be "family friendly" at the 10,000 ft. level, but it still shouldn't be bleeping a guys' first name, especially since it's not like "Dick" is an uncommon first name.

ArsTechnica reports that HBO plans to use the much-reviled "broadcast flag" to tell DVRs that they are not permitted to record any HBO content on them.

First, is HBO really that stupid? DVRs are the trend in home television watching. What could they possibly be thinking trying to swim upstream like this?

It's not like HBO has a revenue stream that is threatened by commercial-skipping. NBC, CBS, etc., I could almost see feeling threatened. After all, if you watch their shows on your DVR, you're likely to skip the commercials. The less commercials watched, the less valuable they are, the less NBC, et al, can charge for them, and that's a theoretical path to lost revenue. I don't think it's as bad as all that, but at least I could see "some semblance of logic" to that.

But with HBO, I pay them a monthly fee. It doesn't matter if I watch Sopranos, don't watch it, or record it on Sunday and watch it two weeks later. They still got paid just as much as they ever could have.

HBO wants to slave you to their timeslot, force you to sit down on Sunday evenings and watch what they put in front of you.

Well, I tell you this right now: I will have none of it.

If HBO decides to do this, I will happily discontinue our HBO subscription, because the only thing we use it for is to watch Sopranos or Entourage episodes. If I have to "sit down when HBO says to sit down", I'll simply refuse, save myself $15 a month, and, here's the kicker, I'll just download them off of BitTorrent, and push that HD stream out from the computer to the TV screen (and anyone who thinks that the broadcast flag will really prevent hackers from getting HD streams to share, please lay off the pipe).

I want a device that acts as an SMS/GSM node, sending messages directly to my users' cell-phones. It should either be something that I can talk to via ethernet and TCP/IP (using something like SNPP preferably, but any protocol I can decipher will do), or alternatively be something I connect to my Linux box with some software and it transmits whatever the USB/Serial/Parallel/whatever connection tells it to.

Solutions which include the phrase "... and it connects to our web server ...", "... and it will e-mail through your GSM provider's mail server..." or "... it connects to the provider via the Internet and delivers..." are not acceptable. *grin* The whole point of the exercise is "how do I alert the staff that the mail server, internet router, etc., etc., are down?"

Last night, I did something that I had actually had some significant doubts as to whether or not it was even possible, let alone whether or not I could do it.

I reached level 60 in World of Warcraft. That's not the amazing part. The servers are full of level 60 characters. The difference is that I did it by solo'ing almost the entire way. On a PvP server, to boot.

I think I may have grouped with one of my fellow guild members (Nagista, my party member in the screenshot, who was intentionally not doing much but wanted to be around for when I hit 60) like two or three times, that's it, and then he really only provided backup while I was taking on the monster itself. No groups, no instances, nothing. I may be the only 60 without a single piece of blue on him because of it, but it's true.

Now I just wish I hadn't accidentally fat-fingered F12 before I hit F13 for the screenshot, so everyone can see how freakin far away from having enough money for my epic mount I am. LOL.

I have neither the patience nor the time to download this from Usenet, nor can I find a set of torrent files that actually continue to work. What is it I'm looking for?

A complete set of MAME ROMs and such, specifically that would work with MacMame 0.97u1.

If you are a collector, and have got your personal repository, or you've got an ISO of a DVD with the ROMs and those hard-drive images, and all that jazz, please let me know. Your anonymity is assured.

I had a set a long time ago, but it is many many many versions out of date, and when I tried to audit my ROMs, like ... 4 ... passed muster with the new version. I used to love MacMAME as perfect "airplane flight fodder", passing the time playing games.

Any assistance you can provide, dear Interweb, will be appreciated.

So yesterday, Apple made two announcements, the total impact of which I don't think will really be seen for a while yet.

• A "video iPod" capable of viewing MPEG4 video on a compact screen.
• iTunes 6, which includes support for downloading MPEG4 videos from the iTunes Music Store, including but not limited to music videos and -- much more importantly -- first-run television programming 24 hours after it airs.

For years, the defense of the "TV episode bittorrent downloaders" was "They broadcast it for free over the air, and if I miss it, I have to wait til they randomly re-run it, or until it comes out on DVD." This was usually followed by some plaintive cry about "If only they'd offer a download service, where I could download the shows I want."

If ABC sticks to this, and expands their lineup, this could be a huge shift in the way people deal with television programming.

Let's go to this hypothetical future, where television programs available as for-pay downloads are ubiquitous. Let's assume you spend about $100 a month on the "get every cable channel" package, because there's some network stuff you want to watch, some extended cable stuff, and you want to get your episodes of Rome. Who knows.

What if you didn't have to pay $1200 a year for cable? What if you could subscribe to the TV show itself as a video podcast? Every Wednesday, your computer happily downloads (legitimately) that week's episode of Lost. Every Sunday, it's grabbing Rome. Every Thursday, it's getting you your fix of The Donald.

The "full-season" price that iTMS is charging for Season 1 of Lost right now is $34.99. Let's double that. Let's say that they decide to be greedy in exchange for offering you this automated television download service. Let's call it $75.00. And maybe HBO, with its superior programming, charges $100.

At that rate, you can get your favorite programming for ($100 + $75 + $75) = $250 a year.

Now, take it one step further. What if the BBC is part of this venture? Now you can add "new episodes of Dr. Who to the list, or Spooks, or Eastenders, or whatever particular BritShow sparks your fancy.

The mating of legitimate television downloads, combined with automated tools for getting that data onto the living room television, make for a huge win for both consumers and content providers, and could mean a huge warning for cable television providers, if done properly.

What are the obstacles?

One obstacle is HDTV. The versions you can presently download from iTMS are SDTV-grade videos, if that. Right now, if you're an HDTV nut, you'd still much prefer to see "what's inside the hatch" on your big-screen in HiDef than you would to download the lo-def video. But the ability to download HiDef content is only a matter of time. Services like Verizon's FIOS service, bringing up to 30Mbps downloads to consumers, are only going to make it easier to distribute HD content going forward.

Another is the cable companies... right now, I'd be very surprised if they started rolling out FIOS-like bandwidth to their users. It's far too easy for consumers at that point to be like "uhhh, no, just give me bandwidth, I'll get my content from somewhere else." A program like this could completely marginalize cable providers, turning them into "just another broadband bandwidth provider".

Where's the win, though?

Consumers have wanted "a la carte" cable programming for a while. Instead of being forced to buy bundles of 120 channels to get the 6 they want, they've wanted the ability to buy just those channels and (more importantly) pay for just those channels.

This has the potential for changing this dynamic even further, allowing people to buy their shows a la carte, and to eliminate many middlemen in the process.

Let's assume I'm paying $100 a year for Rome and let's assume that Apple keeps 25% of that. So the rest goes to HBO, who now sees $75 a year from me. That's probably more than they're seeing now, right up front. But if I also decide (and, please shoot me if this happens) that I want to watch Curb Your Enthusiasm, they'll see an additional $75 a year from me.

There's a direct relationship between "programs people want" and "profits content-owners make". There's no worries about "sponsors", because when you multiply those numbers onto the larger scale, they don't need commercials any more. People are paying directly for the content they wish to see.

Take it one step further. Who needs an "HBO"? What does "HBO" become in that new future except a television studio that creates content?

What if this model had been around while JMS had been fighting for editorial control on Crusade or Jeremiah? Instead of fighting with a network to pitch an idea and get them to air it, to get them to choose when to air it so it does well, etc., etc., you could simply get investors who believe in the value of your content, produce it yourself, and push it out to iTMS and let people view it whenever they want. The small-studio television producer sees huge return here, because it makes them a lot more money than they probably would have gotten from a TV Network that was buying a show they didn't really believe in, and get a lot less hassle in the process.

All this potential from a 5 oz hunk of metal, plastic and silicon, and some software to drive it.

Seriously, I think there's a non-trivial chance that we will look back on this point in time right now and say "this is where television changed completely."

UPDATED: Apparently, Mark Cuban, former broadcast.com CEO, and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, seems to have reached much the same conclusions and has the numbers to back them up.

The blogs have been abuzz about the latest not-yet-announced interoperability agreement between Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger.

But, interestingly enough, this announcement comes at a point in time when I've been seriously considering shitcanning Yahoo Messenger entirely. Granted, I've talked about this before but something always drew me back... former Yahoo co-workers I wanted to chat with that didn't have AIM, you name it.

But, over the last 60 days, something has changed. I have been getting a metric fuckload of instant-messenger spam, all of it from Yahoo. I'm signed in with Adium (not the three year old, neglected, steaming pile of rancid filth that Yahoo passes off as a Mac client), and while I have yet to get a single AIM spam, I must deal -- at least ten to fifteen times a day -- with Yahoo Messenger spam, including but not limited to:

• Twelve lines of what is either gibberish or something not at all resembling a western language, with a link buried in the middle of it all.
• Some person in some backwater third-world country who "wants to be friends".
• Occasionally, some backwater third-world resident who is convinced I already am their friend.
• This posse of Nike/Adidas sneaker salesman who appear to be skimming sneakers off the top of their production run in their sweatshop and are trying to hawk them to me... consistently, every couple days.

Why is it Yahoo Messenger has these problems and AOL Instant Messenger doesn't? What is AOL doing right that Yahoo absolutely cannot seem to manage to make happen?

What I do know is that this time, it's going to take more than "wanting to talk to some person" to bring me back to the Yahoo Messenger fold, and this Yahoo/MSN thing isn't it... from my perspective this can only make it worse, as there are now even more people who could start spamming me.

I've long maintained, even when I worked at Yahoo, that Yahoo did not even pretend to have a handle on their spam issues. Clearly, not much has changed in four years.

If you want to reach me via instant message, and you're on that Yahoo Messenger service, you can try dballing13 on AIM, or dballing@gmail.com on Google's Jabber server.

Once upon a time, I was impressed with myself, because I had built what was, until then, the largest ever Lego product, #10030, the Imperial Star Destroyer.

Now, apparently, that has been superceded. According to the latest mail-order catalog I got, #10143, Death Star Mk.II is the new leader on that front.

They say it's bigger than the ISD model, but the dimensions don't seem to bear that out. Maybe it's just in terms of "raw volume" though, since the spherical Death Star, Mk. II would obviously use a bunch more pieces.

Any way you look at it, it's scary-ass in its size. I'm glad I'd have nowhere to put it in D's house, or I might be tempted. Heck, I'm already trying to figure out where I'm going to put the ISD when I move in.

All I have to say is that I'm glad I'm not a Windows administrator.

Patching three machines to "Current" security-patch levels without the use of the network cables (which are now dangling from behind them in the rack) has to be a pain in the arse.

Glad I'm a Linux guy, and not a Windows guy.

I'm spec'ing out a new backup solution at work, and the current frontrunner is Computer Associates' ARCserve product. We needed to get a couple agents for Solaris added to the quote, to back up a few legacy servers that haven't been migrated to Linux yet.

When the VAR sent us the quote, she said "This is the only SKU I could find, it must be what you want". Whereas the other per-client costs were around $200 or so, this was about $2600 per client. I asked her "Are you sure you're quoting me the agent, not the server itself?" She assured me that she is, and that she spoke to Computer Associates as well. Even when I pointed out "But that product description doesn't say 'ARCserve Client Agent for (fill-in-the-blank)' like the others do, it simply says 'ARCserve for Solaris', which makes it seem a whole lot like the server and not the agent." She assured me again that CA had told her which SKU to use, etc., etc.

I was a little dubious, so I contacted CA directly. I asked them "What SKU should I be getting a quote on for this line item, because this pricing seems dorked?" They told me that a product specialist would call me back.

While waiting for the callback, I did some Googling and found that any number of places would happily sell me the exact product I'm looking for, with a SKU of BABWBR1100S19.

A little later, the CA person calls me back, and asks again what I'm looking for. I'm really clear this time, I spell it out exactly, I even say "Can I just give you the SKU that it looks like is exactly what I'm looking for, so you can bring that up in the system?"

He looks it up. He can't find it. There's umpteen-gajillion vendors selling this product, and CA can't find it in their database.

I totally have renewed faith in the VAR, though, because if CA can't find the product I want when I give them the freakin' exact SKU, how could a VAR be expected to find it?

Anyhow, CA is now tracking down what they need to do to confirm that the SKU I gave them is in fact the SKU I need, but I have to admit the whole situation is comical.

OK, it's no secret I've always abhorred qmail. Now, it appears to have reached an all-time peak.

While trying to diagnose a "what's happening to our mail, it's not getting through" condition, I found lots of this error on the server that was apparently the culprit:

2005-08-11 13:12:31.061306500 starting delivery 2753: msg 34103 to local XXXXXXXXX-deballing@XXXXXXXX
2005-08-11 13:12:31.122103500 delivery 2753: success: lseek_error_29/lseek_errno=29/did_0+0+1/

Yup, you read that right... qmail SAW the error, knew enough to log it, and yet still called it a "success", so it pulled it out of its queue.

I'm looking for two things:

1. Can a qmail-savvy person please tell me that my worst fears are true: That any message which meets that criteria is, in fact, visiting Dave Null and won't be back for a while?
2. What the hell causes that lseek_error thing in the first place, and how does one correct it? It seems to be fairly rare, near as I can tell, given that the only real mentions of it I can find on Google are two people seemingly asking questions about it, and neither of them seems to be seeing the "I got an error, but I'll treat it as a success anyway, and put the queued-item in the bit-bucket." situation we were seeing.

So now I'm officially in a position where I think all the existing sender authentication schemes suck. Previously, I had done all the research and decided that SPF was the way to go. Lightweight, didn't require sifting through the DATA segment to do its work, didn't require potentially lots of private-signing-keys for large organizations, the works. Sure, it had some problems with mail forwarding, but the fact of the matter was that "people who forward mail" are such a small percentage of the world, that the sites that do it, could very easily update their mail-forwarding code to solve the problem that SPF creates, if they wanted to continue to forward mail.

Then, yesterday, I discovered it had such a glaring error in the SPF logic that I was forced to disable it from my server, and start wondering "who was going to do something useful on this front" again. SPF considers "mutual trust" to be a bug. What do I mean by that? Let's say you've got two companies, A and B. They're probably ISPs. They've worked up a mutual agreement between the two of them so that they can roam on each others' networks, and use each others' infrastructure. So A does something like:

a.com TXT "v=spf1 192.168.0.0/24 include:b.com ~all"

... and b.com, trusting a.com's infrastructure, does:

b.com TXT "v=spf1 10.123.0.0/16 include:a.com ~all"

Now, that creates an include loop of sorts, yes, but nothing you can't keep track of simply by tallying "where I've looked before" and not re-visiting lookups you've already done. Instead, though, after discussion with a couple of the folks behind SPF, this is considered "an error in the SPF records" and something that should be corrected. But there's no actual "correction" for it, really. The records describe the trust relationship exactly as they should, and in the only way that they can.

To his credit, when I beat him up about it via Instant Messenger this morning, Meng seemed to become extremely pensive over it, and maybe backed away slightly from his "yeah, that's a bug" of the beginning of the IM conversation, and maybe is going to correct the problem.

But as of right now, any way, SPF is useless to me, because (while I haven't put them in my SPF records yet), I've got those sorts of mutual trust relationships. I've got people who I allow to use my server to send their mail and vice-versa, for in case of emergencies, etc., and according to the spec at the moment, I am a "bug" that needs to change my architecture.

OK, I keep finding lots of references to things which will parse X12 files, but I have yet to find any cool Perl modules to generate X12 files that you might send to a healthcare organization.

Any readers know of code that already does this? I bet if I'd been a dick and kept a copy of the source-tree at Byram, that I might have actually found that code lying around somewhere. Damn my integrity all to hell....

I've been trying to figure out what to do with my massive collection of DVDs. The size of my collection is ginormous, and since I've been pondering where I might be moving to at some point, I've been considering ways to get rid of the DVDs themselves, somehow.

I thought that someone might make a DVD jukebox, the same way Sony, et al, all used to make those CD jukeboxes that held like 100 or 200 CDs. That would be kinda spiffy, and would almost be worth picking up a couple to hold all the discs. But they don't.

Then I found Kaleidescape, which makes a cool product that rips the DVDs to a disc-array, and then makes them all available via a video interface. Also quite cool, but with a 4.4TB version chiming in at $22,000, it occurred to me that maybe there might be somewhat more economical solutions.

I mean, in reality, it doesn't take much.... you need a linux box, a nice DVI and/or HDMI capable video card, a nice audio card with digital output, a DVD drive (you could try to do the DVD-R thing, but I think that's a lot of work and definitely something "Version 2.0" like), and a shitload of disc, preferably in a RAID-5 or similar situation.

You could control it via web interface (ugly) or you would need some sort of IR control which could get piped into the DVD playback software.

How hard would this be? Has anyone seen anything like this in the open source world? It completely pisses on the CSS thing, but it's totally something that major consumers of DVDs would find extremely useful.

I realized the other day that I could pretty much get away with selling my TiVo if I wanted to. I'm a huge fan of time-shifting, playing back live television and all that good stuff, don't get me wrong. But, the fact of the matter is, I've left my TiVo behind, and TiVo seems to have no desire to keep up with me.

First, I switched to HDTV. I have cable, which means that TiVo won't be of *any* use to me for my Hi-Def programming until they support the CableCard standard, and even then I'll have to buy a new unit, and a new subscription to TiVo, etc., etc. Meanwhile, though, my DVR built into my cable box -- while certainly not as pretty and full-featured as a TiVo is -- has one unique feature that TiVo doesn't have: it works, here, now, today.

Second, I haven't had a Windows machine in years. Something about chasing after the virus/worm/trojan/exploit of the week that made me give it up. However, as cool as TiVoToGo might be for me (to sling TV shows over to my laptop to watch at work, on the road, etc.), it won't happen because TiVo has basically said TiVoToGo ain't comin' to the Mac. Likewise, the TiVo Desktop software, which would theoretically let you play iTunes playlists through your TiVo (and presumably through your kickin' home theater) has always been buggy as shit on the Mac (it's playlist generation logic, well, it sucks, let's just say that... if it finds a track with the same Artist/Album/TrackName in two different places in a playlist it positively freaks out, which can be problematic if you have classical music in your playlist where you have something like "Promenade" a couple times throughout a long piece or two copies of the same song remixed differently, etc., etc.)

Basically, TiVo was really really cool, and if you've only got SDTV, it's still pretty much the shit. But for me, it's simply not keeping pace with the way I'm living, and that's a real shame.

Right now, my TiVo basically fills the role of "Third Tuner Bitch". My Cable DVR will record two shows at any time. If there's a third show at the same