Crumbling

Posted on March 26, 2013 by bluedepth

Since I had all the Twitter traffic from @MichiganDOT and @MDOT_Southwest automatically sent to my phone via SMS I’ve been able to catch various things that they post on their Twitter stream. One of those things is a political advertisement from Michigan farmers and their campaign “Just Fix The Roads”.

I stand behind the farmers for improved maintenance of our roads and I certainly support Michigan DOT in their efforts to raise awareness of our crumbling infrastructure problem. Every day I have to dodge potholes, wide cracks, poor drainage, and bridges that I really don’t trust completely. Every day I cross many bridges, across train tracks, across the Kalamazoo River, those sorts, and I have faith, weak as it is, that my trips across the bridges and over these roads won’t put me in danger. It’s faith, have to have it that way because our infrastructure has been ignored for so very long that what once was new and strong is now weak and crumbling.

After watching that video on YouTube, I can’t help but think back to around 2003 when we, as a nation, decided that declaring war on Iraq and Afghanistan was a really great idea. Back then it was before the housing bubble broke and before the criminal banks were unmasked for being as corrupt as we eventually discovered – and we thought two unfunded wars would be just neat as hell. Well, now that we have made our bed, it is time to sleep in it. I sympathize with the Michigan farmers, and I certainly support infrastructure repair, but what money do any of us plan to assign to such an expensive endeavor? It’s going to take a whole lot of cash to do correctly what must be done. Where will that money come from? The Federal Government can’t help – they just beat out the sequester, the federal budget is a rotten mess, congress is idle, filled with backbiting idle celebrities behaving poorly. So it’s up to the state to fix it’s roads, again, where is the money?

So this is what two unfunded wars get us. Awesome cosmic military powers come at a cost and surprise! This is what many of us on the left were trying to say while the right was busy getting it’s patriotic on. There is a lot of blame to go around, most certainly, but in the end it does the rest of us no good. Not only do the farmers struggle with our crumbling roads, but also the rest of us who have no choice but to dare the paths that Michigan calls roads and to dare our rusted out bridges. It was going to be expensive before the unfunded wars, now it might actually kill us. Either the roads will kill us (slowly, by a billion paper cuts) or financial apocalypse will because we’ve saddled our government with prosecuting wars when we should have been directing them to work on internal matters, like roads.

So, feel good about our proud military. They’ll have the funds and resources to do their job. Their incredibly important, more-important-than-everything-else job in Iraq and Afghanistan. Feel good, wrap yourself up in the flag, and be the proudest chief patriot when the bridge your car was on failed, the roadway crumbled and you ended up with the front-end of your very expensive SUV stuck in the mire of the filthy Kalamazoo River.

photo by: Kecko

Rather Than Fix The CFAA, House Judiciary Committee Planning To Make It Worse… Way Worse | Techdirt

Posted on March 26, 2013 by bluedepth

Rather Than Fix The CFAA, House Judiciary Committee Planning To Make It Worse… Way Worse | Techdirt.

This is wretched and wrong. The TL;DR here is that there is a law already on the books called the Computer Fraud And Abuse Act and this bill is seeking to amend the law on the books and take it in very wrong and upsetting new directions. One of the biggest things that I spotted on that really has me upset is the redefinition of talking about an offense as equal to actually completing that offense. If you say you are going to do something that breaks this law, save your bus fare, you’re already guilty of committing the crime! The other part is even more insidious and that is even if you are given authorization to access a machine, if you use it for a different purpose, then the authorization is void and you are committing a crime.

This makes my work more complicated. Now I have to be careful about what I say, as this bill, if passed would curtail my first amendment rights to free speech and then that second bit would legally prevent me from noticing anything else wrong with a computer if I was just fixing something adjacent or unrelated to the original problem.

What a mess. Encourage your congress-critter to vote no on this bill!

Goodbye Notify!

Posted on March 22, 2013 by bluedepth

I subscribed to the Notify service from the Weather Channel. It was cheap and easy and kept me alerted to weather issues. They just sent me my “FINAL NOTICE” at 12:23am last night because my work credit card was replaced and they couldn’t auto-bill me. Then at 12:24am they sent me another email telling me that my account was cancelled.

I’ve been lazy about deciding whether to keep or kill this service. It’s more annoying than useful and now that there are apps galore that alert you over the phone, something like this is just a waste of money.

I think I’ll let the entire thing just lapse. They have cancelled my account, let it rot where it dropped. Feh.

God I Wish… Ah!

Posted on March 13, 2013 by bluedepth

At work I’ve been thinking about a particular system administration subject on and off for a few days now. When Mac is first installed all the “Optional Sharing Services” are all shipped defaulted to off, which makes sense and is fine. Generally speaking I’ve been fine with using Apple Remote Desktop to share the workstation, open System Preferences, and turning on whatever sharing bits I need to have on for the client workstations and that’s that. However that’s not really that elegant and I’ve been looking for a way to programmatically do it on the command line. As it is, Apple Remote Desktop can send Unix commands to connected workstations. All my client workstations are assembled in a neat little pile on my Apple Remote Desktop screen, as easy as you please. How can I turn on or off these Sharing services without having to upset the user. Ideally I want to turn these on without even sharing their workstation, to in a way, do it under the covers.

Enter the command systemsetup. G’duh. There’s even a handy-dandy template in Apple Remote Desktop that I’ve overlooked all these years that even has the details of the options laid out. So, in Apple Remote Desktop, select the stations you want to change, click the UNIX button, in there select the right template, change the user to root and send the command. Moments later, and in this case, SSH is up and running on the client workstation as easy as you please. Boom. No futzing with sharing workstations, no mucking about with System Preferences. Just simple, easy, like I knew had to exist. Now I know how.

This is actually the way I prefer to learn these things. This was something I sussed out, so it’s worth more than if I just spotted it in some bit of documentation. It took time and energy and it’s mine. The solution is worth something to me, and so I blog about it so I can celebrate Mac OSX and keep a little log in case I forget in the future. It’ll always be here.

Hooray for Mac OSX!

photo by: marcopako 

Goodbye Carl

Posted on March 7, 2013 by bluedepth

Carl Levin is not going to run for office in 2014. For the guy that pushed NDAA (AKA American Citizens as Enemy Combatants) and said nothing in 2000 when all it took to prevent George W. Bush from being president was one single senator… Goodbye Carl. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out!

Now we can think about getting a real honest democrat in that seat. NDAA. *cough*

Empty Nests

Posted on February 22, 2013 by bluedepth

I’ve given up on Twitter. I won’t be removing my account as Twitter still has some use to for browsing the stream but there really isn’t any compelling interactions on that service for me any longer. The only things that will end up on Twitter really are links to blog posts and maybe the one-off comment.

Ever since Twitter enabled the data download feature on my account, I took advantage of it. I downloaded the entire archive and discovered to my pleasure that Twitter stored all my tweets as plain text in a CSV file. I spent the last months migrating my old Tweets into my Day One application. I will hand one thing to Twitter, it did keep me “logging” along for a long time. I’m switching that impulse over to Day One. It’s impressive just how much of my past I have recorded. It turns out to be about 2600 days, or about 7 years of my past – recorded and in some ways with a lot of resolution. For that I will always be thankful for Twitter. However…

The reason why I am leaving Twitter is because it is too exposed. I didn’t feel it was useful to have a private Twitter account, so I left it public and this decision was made with a devil-may-care attitude, that anything I tweeted wouldn’t matter. As it turns out, it does. Mostly this is because of my workplace, in that I do not trust them or anyone who works there. It’s not really anything meant to be hurtful or anything, but I can’t risk my job and I certainly feel that sharing on Twitter threatens my employment. For as far as I trust Western Michigan University, it starts and ends with the partitioned, compartmentalized version of me that works there professionally. Not the true honest authentic me. Being honest and sharing freely would just upset everyone and lead to needless drama at work, so I unfollowed a bunch of coworkers and people whose tweets would have gone to waste on an ignored account.

Another problem with Twitter is the loss of engagement and dimensionality. Everyone on Twitter is a three-dimensional person with all the complexities that come with being alive. Twitter’s relationships seem stuck in a one-sided mode of conversation. This very thing struck me most powerfully as I was migrating Tweets into my Day One app. I caught out of the corner of my eye tweets that I had made to people who were popular or famous. They were wasted messages. At first this concerned me, but then I realized that what was really going on was that the people who had thousands and thousands of followers were so far beyond their social horizon (that 150 limit I’ve written about before) that they simply cannot socially relate to anyone beyond their subset coterie of social contacts. It’s not that they are mean or being ignorant, but they just cannot process that level of interaction – it’s more about how our biology is colliding with our technology. So for the really famous, the really popular, that’s where the dimensionality comes in. A regular person is three-dimensional. The others are one-dimensional. They are human billboards. They stand there and output information and you stop thinking of them as individuals and start relating to them as “sources” instead. Robbing them of their inherent humanity. They don’t have feelings, as billboards don’t have feelings.

So, we’re all done with that. Twitter will still be a link-dump for my blog. Most of my actual sharing will start in Byword, then be copied to Day One, then from there shared to Facebook under my “Sharing” security model. If you don’t see lots of things on my Facebook wall, that’s because you aren’t in “Sharing”, and mostly that’s because I can’t allow my honest self to interfere with my work. — Gosh, writing that out felt wrong, but at least I’m honest.

If you follow me on Twitter and want to keep your lists tidy and unfollow me, I won’t even notice you leaving. So go in peace.

Saving your bacon with Dropbox

Posted on February 10, 2013 by bluedepth

Several days ago at work I had someone approach me with a terrible tale of woe. They were helping a graduate student with a technical problem and wanted some guidance from me. The graduate student had a USB memory stick that had their entire academic production stored on it and they didn’t have backups anywhere else. This student went to Wal-Mart to print out pictures that were stored on this memory stick and when they had returned to Walwood they found that the memory stick no longer worked.

Then I got involved when the staff member helping this graduate student came to me with proxied panic about the data that this graduate student had lost. I plugged the device into my iMac thinking that at least the Mac would be able to display some sort of basic block device even if the filesystem was corrupted or damaged somehow. The USB memory stick was very old and my Mac noticed the device but refused to even display the block device details – so while the controller was apparently working, the channels further along towards the flash memory chips was not working as expected. There was nothing I could do to help the graduate student or the staff member and I felt just terrible. That there are no backups just made the panic more present and awful.

What could the graduate student do to mitigate this? The answer is in the clouds. I told the staff member that it wasn’t enough to simply tell graduate students that they should get some sort of cloud infrastructure to put their information on, but that they had to be stronger about it. That they had to insist that all students get some sort of cloud infrastructure to store their data. The cloud infrastructure that I prefer hands down is Dropbox. I use Dropbox and I love it, but when I tried to extend Dropbox services for the University I ran into some legal issues which pretty much precluded me using it – but none of that would preclude graduate students from using the system.

What is it about the cloud that drives me to it so strongly? It takes away a huge issue in one firm slash. The question of backing up your data. Using the cloud effectively abstracts away storage from the user, takes it elsewhere to be handled by people who spend their entire time only considering the proper storage and backup of data. Dropbox relies on Amazon S3 for primary storage and it’s Amazon that does the backups and the media shifting and everything that if you were to read an older “protect yourself” blog post would encourage you to do yourself. Instead of relying on you to do all the heavy lifting, which lets face it, we all want the benefits of that protection but sometimes getting to that point can be daunting, having it abstracted away makes a lot of sense. If there is a problem with Amazon S3, then the Internet has a bigger problem and if that’s the case, I would argue that Earth has a problem and that singular condition trumps the conditions of your backups because there are other more important things to consider. Now, please note that I am not directly advocating loading your data into Dropbox and then ignoring secondary backup completely, but for the majority of people out there, I do believe that Dropbox and Amazon S3 is enough to ensure your data security and persistence enough to stop here. Nothing stops anyone from duplicating their Dropbox contents on another storage medium but only those who are really invested in technology really need to move beyond what Dropbox provides.

I think every student should get a Dropbox account. The basic one is free and you can store up to 2GB and Dropbox has several ways you can win more space, such as referrals and such. For the panicked graduate student there is little that can be done beyond perhaps using a data recovery service such as the one I had previous experience with, Secure Data Recovery but the price tag on recovery with them is very expensive. You only use their services because you have to, and it’s a blessing that they are there, for when shit hits the fan.

I also think as a sidelight to this, that people invest in a diversified storage layout, especially when using public systems like those at Wal-Mart. Flash drives are very cheap now and it’s easier to kill a cheap throwaway “sacrificial lamb” than it is to watch your entire life disappear in a puff of logic from an overused terminal and it’s possibly damaged or shorted-out USB port. It is also my strong professional recommendation that people put lifespans on the devices they depend on. USB Hard Drives should be replaced after five years, no matter how long they have been running or not. USB sticks should be replaced every six months. Flash technology is not bulletproof, these devices degrade over time and it’s best to be safe and not sorry and if it costs a little extra or seems wasteful, then my argument is, so be it. Better to waste money on devices you don’t need then have to spend a thousand times more to recover data from a device that you errantly depended upon for far too long.

If I were in the academic sector at my University I would take this threat very seriously and as a value-added service to the student population I would find some way to set up a “University Cloud” storage system, and open-source variant that provides the same functions that Dropbox provides, alas, I am on the wrong side of the aisle on this, so all I can do is load my good ideas into my professional trebuchet and lob it over the walls of the ivory tower. Maybe someone will read this and it’ll spark something. Just some cursory searching on the network has led me to some possibilities:

Thanks to Quora for this list

Above and beyond everything else, when your life is becoming more and more digitally based it becomes a new vital thing to protect yourself from loss. The maxim “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is more relevant and important than you may have originally considered. Don’t end up being pushed up against a wall, protect yourself, backup your digital life!

Administrator’s Eyes

Posted on February 8, 2013 by bluedepth

Working in IT in Higher Education for the past 14 years has taught me many key survival tactics. Life in Higher Education is special because of the unique specialness of the needs that many of my coworkers have. I don’t want to call anything specific out, I’m not here to hurt anyones feelings.

One of the first things you learn is that no matter what the patina is that people do their level best to project, right underneath it is some of the most kinky, clever, sneaky freaks you will ever meet. I hate to be picky but there is quite literally a 10 out of 10 chance that the truly kinky will be the boys. Perhaps this is higher education, perhaps not, but gentlemen, you are filthy. Damn.

When I started working in my profession I made some basic decisions which have saved my bacon more times than I care to even contemplate. First and foremost of those is cultivating “Administrator’s Eyes” which is the very state that I enter into when I help anyone with their technology. I started it as a habit and now it’s become a perception-altering meditative practice, nearly. When I am helping a client (I don’t call them customers, that’s inappropriate, they are clients) and I am sitting down where they normally sit I will focus my entire attention on the parts of the screen that contain only those pieces that enable me to render assistance. I do not let my eyes wander. It’s not out of some lofty sense of propriety that I picked up over time but more specifically battle-earned knowledge. I cannot, I will not handle the kinky freakish things that my fellow human beings get themselves into. Often times people will say “Oh, certainly nobody does that in a professional setting!” and I point them to teenage boys that spend way too much time in the bathroom with flimsy Scientific American magazines that appear to be on their last legs to keep their covers from falling off… these boys grew up into men and being a boy who grew up to be a man, I can say with authority that the only thing that honestly changed was that our hair started to thin or fall out.

It’s a habit that I recommend every IT professional adopt. It saves you from social embarrassment, even by proxy, and at the core of it stands this central question which each one of us in the IT field must eventually answer: “Can you handle the answers?” This is the first thing I consider before I even allow the questions to occur to me. Almost always the answer is no. A huge orchestra-blaring no. I can’t handle knowing anything. I can’t handle knowing usernames, passwords, websites, or anything at all beyond the thin border of a web browser. It’s not that knowing would endanger my professional life, but it would change my relationship with my clients and I simply cannot risk that. I have relationships that I must preserve, beyond everything else. I cannot perceive porn webpages, anything blah-Tube, even if it’s just online banking, trips to Amazon.com, or the stray Solitaire game being played. I have a deeply rooted and vested interest in knowing as little about my clients as I can manage beyond their presentation to me in the professional setting at work. It really is self-preservation. I do not perceive anything that would naturally be upsetting to anyone else so that the material in question does not change the fundamental relationship between IT professional and client. I suppose in a way, medical doctors take a “Do No Harm” oath, and I suppose I am advocating for IT professionals to take a similar oath “Do Not See”. Help with getting whatever it is up and working properly with sample data or bogus Lorem Ipsum if you can manage it, and even if you can’t and you have to look directly at the entire screen, once you engage the habit of “Do Not See” hard enough you might be able to pull off maintaining this state of blissful ignorance the entire way through your day.

This is something I encourage in all my assistants and people who work with me on IT tasks. I try to impress upon them that their coworkers may not be as pure as the driven snow and that through the adoption of Administrator’s Eyes they can learn a way to avoid the awkwardness that comes when you accidentally stumble onto a terabyte of stored data that people ought to keep at home, under a blanket, probably with a hot shower at the ready. It saves you from ever having to ask yourself that most torturous question “Can you handle the answers?” because I know I cannot. Therefore not only do I not ask the questions, but I don’t even consciously perceive anything that would lead me down that dark alley.

If there are any IT admins that read my blog, what are your thoughts on Administrator’s Eyes? Do you agree or do you think differently? Please comment here or on Facebook, I would love to know, as long as you’ve washed your hands in hot soapy water for a count of twenty. 🙂

Decameron

Posted on January 28, 2013 by bluedepth

Influenza is a wildfire that is blazing through this state and my office. Many of my coworkers are out sick and at first what I thought was just the standard Influenza might be a few other things. WMU, through the health center and ultimately through the CDC pushed the 2012 Influenza vaccine shot which we later popularly discovered didn’t apparently take into account the strain that is blazing through Michigan and our office. I have talked to a few people who characterized this new flu as “Flu Type A”and I don’t know where they got that moniker from. I also heard that another virus, the Norovirus was blazing across the US, sourced from Sydney Australia. Are these tag-team illnesses or are we mistaking the Norovirus for the Influenza? For me it’s just idle speculation as the practical upshot is, I’m slowly being surrounded by sick people and eventually my resistance will falter, something will happen – either a surface I thoughtlessly touch or some aerosolized agent that I somehow come into contact with.

This has got me thinking about all the popular culture illnesses. Nothing as awe-inspiring as Captain Trips from Stephen King’s stories, but even movies like Hot Zone all lend themselves certain weight to the idea of control, quarantine, and the eventual lapse in vigilance. I haven’t gotten sick (knock on wood) and for that I’m very thankful, but something is knocking on the door and I don’t know if I’m doing enough to protect myself. Much of what I do is probably just a placebo, taking extra doses of Vitamin C, a dose of Vitamin D-3 (which I need anyways, and it probably doesn’t do anything else) drinking lots of hot tea (hot water can’t hurt) and regular drinks at night. Nothing comically appropriate like getting piss drunk every night, but a wee something regularly, wine, liquor, cider, beer. Does it help? It’s not hurting, so why not?

Beyond the things I eat and drink, vigilance visits me in what I do at work and at home. I often times worry that I’m starting to develop a germ-phobia laced with a touch of obsessive compulsive disorder. I know at least somewhat clinically that this activity of washing my hands before I eat (and sometimes afterwards) is only really a mental illness if I am paralyzed because I cannot proceed without cleaning my hands or it somehow impacts my quality of life. There is a small part of me that is concerned that all this handwashing, in hot water, for twenty seconds using rather aggressive soaps is just hastening my seasonal skin issues on my hands. The colder the weather, the drier the climate the more dry and cracked and bloody my hands get. My hands and my legs bear the worst of it, but my legs get a respite as I have them covered up almost all the time, where my hands don’t and pay the price. All this handwashing is just pushing them even harder. At what point will I have that breakpoint of diminishing returns? When will washing my hands mean nothing if I’m bleeding from the cracks from the angry skin on the back of my hands? What to do to cope? I’ve decided that Dove Soap’s line that caters to men, with their moisturizer as part of the soap may be my best effort. I’ve also got a pump bottle of moisturizing sanitizer however as I discovered tonight, sanitizer doesn’t touch Norovirus. Not that I’m really convinced that Norovirus is chewing through the office, but if it isn’t, then it’s on the heels of Influenza Type A.

This very story has played out before. It plays out whenever there are communicable outbreaks and the natural question pops up – at what point does it make more sense to just not go to work and expose yourself? At what point do you stop leaving the house? I laughingly call it the Decameron moment as the people in that book, in order to pass the time recount stories to each other and remain away from the city to avoid the plague. I can’t deny the pleasure of reading the Decameron back when I was in college and if it weren’t for the two other books that I’m currently hip-deep in reading, I would take it right up as it’s applicability in this particular situation is undeniable.

So tomorrow I’m going to have to come up with ways to protect myself at work. Bringing my own soap maybe to start would be okay, paper towels are still the best way to dry my hands as we don’t have any hot-air blowers at work. As for surfaces, it’s going to have to be Lysol and Isopropyl Alcohol as I can’t risk using Clorox on the surfaces at work. I know that Lysol and Alcohol will not likely damage the things at work, but I’m pretty sure that Clorox, even diluted would likely have unintended consequences. I will have to have faith that what I have, plus my nearly OCD handwashing and keeping my distance from people is enough. I have been dallying with the notion of pushing SupportPress down my clients figurative throats and only rendering help over Apple Remote Desktop in order to zero out the touching-of-surfaces vector of possible sickness. I haven’t gotten there yet, but it is something I am considering. I sometimes wonder if anyone has done a pathology survey in regards to electronic forms of communication and that impact on disease spread? What happens if we all switch to video links, phones, and email and shun contact with each other even more than we already have? In a lot of ways, each office could be it’s own Decameron, with people holed up, trying to avoid getting sick and passing the time.

I feel excellent. There is nothing wrong now, but it’s coming. The worst part is not knowing, or rather suspecting that something you can’t see is lying in wait for you and at the very best could make you miserable and at the very worst, kill you outright. Another bit of consideration is what the break-off point is for workplaces all around when a majority of staff is actually sick. At what point is going to work and accomplishing nothing cost more than just staying at home, claiming that you are sick when really, you’re just holed up waiting for the illness to burn past you?

Vectors Hidden In Plain Sight

Posted on January 23, 2013 by bluedepth

While walking back from the bathroom and sitting down in my office I looked around and noticed all the devices that I touch. We are currently witnessing a epidemic of influenza and because it’s a clear and present danger to our health I’m spending more and more time considering ways to avoid it. Obviously there are all the classic things one can do, frequent hand-washing, sanitization, Vitamin C (Placebo anyone?), Tea (Paging Dr. Placebo), supplements (Will Dr. Placebo PLEASE ANSWER THE PHONE!) and as I was sitting back considering all the ways you could acquire an active influenza virus it struck me. Much like wondering how invading Aliens were jaunting past the razorwire like it wasn’t there only to find out they were skittering along in the drop ceiling – a hidden vector of infection: Touch Devices.

Ever since Apple (and others, of course) developed tablet and phone technology in the modern sense, mostly iPads, iPhones, Nook HD’s and MacBooks people have been touching these things and not really paying much attention to what all that touching means. If you wash your hands then your hands are clean until you touch an object, then you have doubt. Did that surface that I touched harbor a virus or bacteria that could make me sick? You don’t know. Obviously life goes on merrily and has ever since these devices have been in our grubby little clutches, but still, just to think about it gave me pause. I was using the bathroom, washing my hands, then touching my iPad. Dirty, clean… dirty? I don’t know. It’s the doubt that grips me.

There is one chemical that I know will disinfect non-porous surfaces and most likely will not damage those surfaces and that’s isopropyl alcohol. So at work I have asked my S3 to follow a new protocol during these months when these viruses are on the loose and we’re in the trenches when it comes to being vectors ourselves because we touch a lot of things that others touch. So now, at work, whenever we see an iPad, an iPhone, or a MacBook we grab a microfiber cloth, wet it with alcohol and wipe down the entire surface. Each time. It’s a lot of wiping and a lot of alcohol, but what if we kill a virus that otherwise would have made the epidemic worse? Isn’t it worth the little bit of time and effort to kill a bad thing early on than have to suffer its effects once we’ve succumbed? I think so.

If you have non-porous surfaces that you touch very frequently, like we do, I strongly recommend wiping things with a rag soaked in alcohol. You may very well perform one action which could stem the tide and spare you and the people around you the danger and inconvenience of this particularly nasty influenza virus.

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