Author Archives: bluedepth

Hindsight – 2/5/2004

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As I was looking over my old LiveJournal posts I found this gem from 2/5/2004, a whole 7 years ago! Gosh how time flies! Enjoy!

Busy Busy Busy… Buzz Buzz Buzz

Whew! Just got done polishing the new chrome on the new database system here at work. We had a rep from the vendor come in to deliver the first cut of the converted database and then walk us through all the errors that came up in conversion so we can take specific steps to make sure our database that goes into the second (and final) cut is as good as it’ll ever be.

Of course, the road to happiness is riddled with potholes. The rep, Yvonne, arrived, installed the new database but nobody told us that the new database was ZIP’ed using WinZip 9 beta and all we had was WinZip 8.1, so we couldn’t unzip the database. Adding insult to injury, the server we were working on was so well secured that getting WinZip 9 beta proved to be herculean in its own regard. We eventually got it, unpacked the database and installed it. >mini-fanfare< Then we fiddled around with establishing OLAP cubes for a subsystem that might only be used by at most 2 people – then once that was done we went back to Walwood and I worked on getting our replicated database on our report server to work.

The rep from our vendor came in and created a queue for us and told us that it would work. I then spent the next two days listening to all the errors present in the data and in-between times when we weren’t talking about the conversion errors I was working on getting the replicated report server to work as it should. For three days I was smacking my forehead against a brick wall, errors ranging from “can’t login” to “can’t add NULL value to table yada yada yada” and I even went so far to discover to my chagrin that a database I thought I needed wouldn’t replicate in a merge dynamic properly, only transactionally. This semi-solution would break down when you deleted or added any report criteria, since it would add a table to the primary server and then cause the replication process to panic. As it turns out, one of the settings the rep from the vendor made was wholly incorrect, instead of pointing to our report server it should have been pointing to our main database server instead. Once I fixed the setting I realized that I didn’t need to replicate the report database at all and once I fixed that – everything fell into its proper position – now you can add and edit and delete criteria willy-nilly without causing replication errors because there is no need to replicate that part of the database. Whew. After three days of being unable to make any of the replicated server work I had a little Eureka moment and did a happy dance.

What I thought would take nearly all day today was done by 9:30am. I still have a very busy day but at least now with a major part of it deflated it doesn’t seem like such an impossible task. A part of me gets all twitchy that I, an untrained yo-yo can figure out the vendors product and fix what the rep broke. A part of me is glimmering tho, when the rep was here she asked me “So, did you go to class for SQL 2000?”, “No.”, “Do you at least have a manual or a guidebook?”, “No.”, “Well, how did you figure out how to do what you are doing?”, “I just did it, didn’t seem too hard to me…” and of course she just sat there staring at me like I was growing antlers.

And people wonder why I question the value of certifications. Bah. 😉

 

Java

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I’ve written before that my feelings for technology are strong and passionate. I regard Apple with a nearly perfect halo of saintly perfection despite all the Chinese workers committing suicide and some of Apple’s darker acts in regards to the iOS App Store, but despite all that they are still as pure as driven snow in my eyes.

Not so with Sun Microsystems’ Java. It’s not that I hate Java in and of itself, actually I appreciate Java for what it has accomplished with the tools available. What I hate is tangential but squarely placed against Java. Here at work we have two really big monolithic database systems. The first is our in-house alumni database, Millennium. The second is SunGard’s Banner Student Information System.

What do these two pieces of software have to do with Java? Well, that’s the core of my agony. The two have to be used at the same time, but one needs Java 1.5.10 and the other 1.6.3. It’s impossible to expect people to understand Java versioning and when they accidentally upgrade their Java installation with 1.6.3 or later for Banner use, their Millennium client goes completely out-of-spec and makes their lives a living hell, mostly with stupid script errors as code written against 1.5.10 scrambles at the cliffs-of-insanity of 1.6.3 or later.

What is our solution? It’s ugly but it works. We split the software by virtualized operating system. Two XP’s running side-by-side, one with Java 1.5.10 the other with Java 1.6.3. It isn’t elegant, and it starts me thinking about why exactly Java is in any of these products to start with. For Banner it’s pretty clear, Banner is written against Oracle and the client software is exceptionally poor, it’s called jInitiator and I feel ill and tremble even when contemplating it. It’s the kind of software that I fantasize about staking to the earth and watch the sun rise as it burns and screams, hissing and spitting giant gobs of ichor everywhere as it slowly burns to dust.

Millennium isn’t as bad, but there is Java still. Why? It could be wholly a W3C compliant application, I mean, that’s where it’s headed, and if you want fancy bits you could always use JavaScript or even AJAX tricks to do the same things that they have Java doing. Thankfully I’ve bullied the authors into promising that by version 9 of the software, that Java will be a sad sorry memory.

So it’s not really that I’m angry at Java, but I am angry at these companies that write in ways that permanently fix a version of Java on a machine and that only invites issues like viruses, security breaches, and these horribly gross incompatibilities and there is nothing I can do to address them other than apply virtualization technology like a cure-all salve. It’s quite like hunting fleas with a BFG. Annoying.

So for those out there who are thinking about using Java to make your software shiny or somehow cute, just skip it. Your customers won’t really appreciate what neat shiny you can bring to the table and the admin tasked with keeping it all together will thank you for one less versioning nightmare to have to deal with. I blame Java because without it, my life would be much easier. One just has to wait for things to get better, at least there is hope.

 

Bats In The Belfry

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Maintenance Services has been doing some drilling in my office building and apparently upset a bat. My boss caught him in a box and moved him down to the basement where it’s dark and quiet, we’ve hope that he’ll find someplace to hang and sleep, and if we’re really lucky he’ll slip back into hibernation.

This of course is a hope of mine. It got me thinking about what people might do if they find out there is a resident bat in our building. What bothers me the most is when people immediately rush to “Lets Kill It” and spend exactly no time thinking about how we share this world with our animal companions, we don’t rule over it. I know this runs against what is written in several holy books, but I’ve never been one for those sorts of things, I respect my own instincts and my own beliefs than those “given to me” in some silly old book. I’m sure I differ in my opinions from a lot of people, whenever there is an animal caught after attacking a human the response is always the same, they kill the animal. It’s almost a reflex. This even happens when humans invade areas set aside for animals, like zoo enclosures. Nearly every year you hear a story about some inattentive parent who lost track of their child and the child scaled the enclosure to a bear exhibit and was mauled by the bear or killed. The response is almost always the same, “Kill the monster!” and this bothers me on a very fundamental level. I don’t do anything to hide the fact that I don’t think very highly of my own species and if one of us is stupid enough to invade an enclosure then mauling is the least they deserve. The animal doesn’t deserve to die for human stupidity.

Tied in with this, I received a message about how the US Congress was considering a bill to let the northern states conduct wolf culls and that really upset me. Haven’t we damaged enough of our world or do we need to do some more damage based on our greed and gluttony?

When it comes to animals, I really don’t see us as being any more worthy of survival than them. I see the world as belonging equally to every species, we just impose a will and think somehow we are more worthy than wolves or bears or birds. Based on population alone, the value of a single human being is 1 out of 6.8 billion. Compare that to say a wolf pack where there is 1 out of a thousand left and you can see which is worth more.

Next time you face an animal and there is a choice to be made, please select the humane trap-and-manage route and never ever the kill route. We share this world, we are not its dominators. Anyone who preaches that we are the master of this world should consider how easy it is for nature to kill us off in droves with storms and floods. We aren’t on top, the world is.

Stuff I Just Can't Throw Away

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Spy Hill Landfill – 2

I can’t throw away plastic supermarket bags. My reluctance is because they are such a waste of difficult-to-degrade plastic if their only purpose is to sack up food for conveyance from a store. I believe deep down that if you are going to sack your food in plastic that once you get it home, those bags ought to have a second or third life in the home, a kind of active recycling. In my household plastic shopping bags are used to hold bottle and can recycling, used to contain too-old leftovers so they can be thrown in the garbage without their degradation becoming noticeable, and finally being handy receptacles for cat exhaust. If the bags just go right into the garbage from the market then their 10 minutes of use and 3000 year lingering feels like a horrible sin. If you can get them to do a host of other things, then I believe you should. People look at me oddly when I tell them to save the bags, some people just immediately throw them away, but I hope by answering this Plinky prompt, they understand why that isn’t right.

Powered by Plinky

Jerusalem UFO

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Pretty neat group of videos from Jerusalem. Is it real or a hoax? Anything like that that hovers right on top of the spire of the Dome of The Rock and accelerates like that I don’t think has a human pawprint on it. It’s not a hobbyist rocket, but it could be a focus for a series of laser beams that converged right on top of the spire and were angled so that the convergence point appeared to move with that sort of acceleration. If it was made up of matter, the inertia alone would have had to kill anyone inside. But then again, wether real for not, it’s a great conversation piece.

 

Is This UFO Caught By Multiple Cameras a Real Alien Spaceship?.

Triops

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For Christmas 2010 Scott gave me a Triops kit. I’m always fascinated by complex biological systems and in a way, this is my gay tropical fish phase without the fish. The kit was small and cute and meant for 7 year olds. I of course have a little money to spend so for fun, why not give these prehistoric precursors to horseshoe crabs a tank full of paradise? So off to the pet store we went. Two gallon glass tank was $7 bucks (yay discount rack!), fancy food was $4, sand $3, tank ornaments $5. We waited for a while, letting the dust settle from our holiday travels and a few days ago I set up the tank, filled the bottom with sand, placed the ornaments and filled the tank with distilled water. Then I followed the great instructions from the Smithsonian (which boxes up the kit) and opened the Triops eggs and put half of the container into the tank. It looks like someone emptied a tobacco pipe into a big goldfish bowl.

We watched for two days and nothing really of measure was happening. At the end of the second day I spied a Triops nymph swimming about. I did some reading and found out that cold water can slow down their development, so I remembered that I had a heat-lamp in the garage (from last winters kitty-visitor) and I went out and got it. I got the lamp set up and pointed it at the tank and let it run for a while. Everything warmed up nicely, the tank got into the 80’s and the water was nice and warm. Then I saw two more nymphs in the water, totalling 3. I dropped in some pellet food and this morning gave the tank a good stir.

These little guys are voracious, even if they are the size of a flea. Everything I’ve read states that they’ll consume 40% of their body mass in food per day and grow in just a week to several centimeters. As they develop I’ll see if I can get pictures of them to share. Science is just grand. 🙂

Needlessly Complicating Everything

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Today has been a comedy of complications. First it turns out that retail doesn’t give a damn about whether or not the roads are passable. We just endured the Snowpocalypse 2011, and while the sky did fall, it wasn’t as dire or dangerous as people had feared it might be. Overnight we accumulated probably 12-15 inches of snow and they all built up around my car and down my driveway. After I had some breakfast and relaxed a little, as Western had closed for business on Wednesday, I decided to try to get the garbage out to the street side for pickup. I got all dressed up, found some winter boots in the closet that I didn’t know we had, and opened the garage up. I got my shovel and started to heave-ho the snow out of my way. I got halfway down the driveway and one of my neighbors with a snowblower came up and asked if I wanted him to help me clear my driveway for ten bucks. I agreed and he went to get his pint-sized snowblower. He made quick work of the plow-drift that had built up at my driveways entrance and as he was snowplowing I was clearing off about a yard of snow with each push-and-shovel throw. He helped clear my driveway in about 5 minutes, dug out a notch in the snowbank roadside for my garbage trundle and even plowed clean a path for the mailman to get to my front door. All in all worth the ten bucks I think, he didn’t have to help me, I would have struggled through it, but it would have taken me much longer. I think it was an even deal.

But of course I don’t carry cash on me. So he was willing to wait for the money. This is the start of the complications. I needed to get $10 from the bank. This should be easy. It was not.

My first step was, after comics lunch with Scott I dropped him off at work and went to the PNC Branch at the corner of Westnedge and Romence roads. It’s a rather big branch and it was 2pm on a Wednesday, I didn’t think there would be any problems. Well, the bank was closed. The blizzard did that right quick. So no human beings at the bank, so I thought maybe I could pull the money out of the ATM, but I knew that the PNC ATM’s were only handing out $20’s. I thought I could cheat by going to Meijers and buying something cheap and then using my debit card, pull an extra $10 out, giving me what I’d need to pay off my neighbor. I got to Meijers and thought about what I needed or wanted. I couldn’t think of anything off the top of my head so I picked up a six-pack of Labatts for $5 and headed to the help-yourself checkout lane. After proving my age, I ran my debit card and tacked on another $10 to the deal. The Meijers system puked out the transaction and apparently there is a bank/computer glitch that renders all PNC Debit Card transactions invalid. So there I was in the help-yourself lane, with beer that was already ordered and I already verified my age so I bought it anyways using my budget-money, for which I certainly have enough to cover a $5 six-pack of beer. So now I had beer, but still no $10. Frustrated I left Meijers and I was driving home the safe way, which is down Kilgore Ave to Sprinkle and take that home, it has only very gentle grades, and it isn’t Westnedge Hill after a blizzard. On my way home I remembered that all the Speedway gas stations in Michigan are now outfitted with PNC ATM’s. So here I was, all the way full circle. I got to the Speedway, I withdrew $20, I went to the cashier and bought two $10’s with the $20, which elicited a grumpy comment from the gas station attendant – oh whatever – and got back in my car. Then I drove to the PNC Bank on Gull Road (closed as well, what a shocker!) and deposited back the extra $10, leaving me with a six-pack of beer and $10. I took Gull down to Texel, and counted off the addresses. Then I discovered to my chagrin that Texel is even-numbered halfway along and then it switches at the bend. *twitch* I finally got to my helpful neighbors house and knocked on the door. His wife opened the door, I handed her my $10 and thanked them for their kindness.

Now I’m home, I’ve taken care of what I had to and only had to go through this craziness because the banks were closed and ATM’s only spit out $20’s. At least I don’t owe my neighbor anything and that isn’t a cloud over my head.

Hamster Wheel

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A week ago a policy was sent which indicated that the IRS was effectively going to strangle the life out of our wireless infrastructure. Yesterday afternoon I learned that while the policy may be published, it was an error that it was sent out and the brouhaha that it caused was a mistake.

I talked it over with my boss and I commented that the only information I had to act on was the policy sent down and I didn’t have any other guidance. I had sent an email to management but never got a reply. Then my boss told me that sometimes not hearing an answer is an answer – and it hit me – a line right out of Serendipity, one of the best lines that Jeremy Piven’s character Dean Kansky said “So the absence of a sign, is a sign!?!.. They should make pills for this…” hit me and I had to suppress a serious case of the giggles.

So after talking with management, which is apparently dominated by the doppler effect, in so far that the words I hear are modulated by pitch changes as they rush away to another meeting, I got what I was after, which was an ounce of clarification.

So the policy exists and we are moving ahead with a wireless infrastructure. I contacted our Verizon rep and placed the toy train back on the tracks after so violently derailing it earlier and set the track power to maximum so we could catch up. Just as much as we don’t know exactly how we’re going to approach our wireless infrastructure, Verizon doesn’t know how they are going to handle our contract, at least yet. I bet when we make decisions, that will oddly be the same moment that Verizon makes it’s decisions. I suspect we’ll have a bumper crop of Kismet coming down the pike.

Reagan’s 100th

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Poring over the morning news I ran across a news entry that spoke about Reagan’s 100th Birthday. Much like how a very strong odor can key on a memory and bring a flood of remembered things back into your mind, so did this. I grew up with Ronald Reagan as President. I remember the Cold War with the USSR and I remember “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall!” speech that Ronald Reagan gave.

This man has accumulated a halo around him that places him just beneath the Holy Trinity itself for Christian conservatives. The memory of this man and his presidency bring many overheard arguments between my parents as I started to learn that when two people are dedicated to polar opposites, that the law of attraction is mostly relevant for magnets. I don’t think anyone really regards the man, Ronald Reagan any longer. Death has transformed him from a person to a canvas, it has sucked out his 3rd dimension and converted him into a handy surface that anyone can use to their heart’s content. The man is dead, how could he complain at how his memory is treated?

Conservatives pray to him. They read what he wrote, what he said, and what he stood for as slightly less important than the New Testament in the Bible, but way more important than anything else. His political life has been transformed into a conservative ideal, and if you fashion a hand grenade of Reagan’ness and pull the pin and lob it into a GOP gathering they all will turn to the light and get very quiet and pray to the Reagan-y-Explody-Goodness. The fascination they have borders on the fanatical, there are terms for what they are afflicted with – you could call it hero-worship, enthrallment to the cult of personality, a whole host of things. For a segment of our political spectrum Ronald Reagan is the second coming of Jesus Christ. I’m surprised they haven’t tried to force the hand of the church and have him sainted.

Now, for the Liberals, Ronald Reagan is something just as precious, but completely opposite. He’s a flame-eyed monster bent on world domination and more shifty criminal acts than you can shake a stick at. Liberals remember the Contras and Sandinistas, all the underhanded dirty tricks and the policies that brought anger and rage. Death brought Reagan to a canvas and Liberals painted that canvas with their impression of the man, casting him not in a saintly light, but one of monstrousness and epic Mordor-class evil. For the conservatives savior, he’s the Liberals bane.

If ever you want a handy guide to political polarity, simply drop Reagan’s name and watch the response. If you see a halo, wistful eyes, and te-deum’s forming then you have yourself a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. If however you notice some frothing, restlessness, agitation, and perhaps the construction of effigies that are set on fire, then you are facing a liberal.

I personally celebrate the fact that he’s very much dead and can’t form any new political opinions or wield any political power. It’s not that I sought his death, that I prayed for his untimely demise, but I did thank the Light when he did die. This is in stark contrast to the oedipal-obsessed spawn of Reagan’s Vice President. For that son-of-a-bitch (the term is apt) I will hold a very large party and feast upon his death, celebrating the worlds freedom from that unbearable monster. Reagan is just as much a monster, but his corpse in the ground tempers my anger into a kind of wistful fuzzy disgust.

So, for the 100th Anniversary of Reagan’s Birth, I mark it with this blog post, I bite my thumb and I spit on the ground. And that’s all I’m giving it.