The Greatest Game Out There

Ahh... the political season is upon us again.

After a quite summer and a real sleeper of a Provincial Election (The only excitement I saw during the election was when a voter at the poll refused to tell me his name -- that's another story) we're back at it full force.

Harper has made a strong opening move with this week's Throne Speech. In my opinion, he's forcing an election. Let's look at his recent statements plus the throne speech:

• He has stated that if the opposition parties vote to pass the Throne Speech, they have an obligation to pass any and all legislation mentioned in the speech. (Also known as, "I double-dog dare you to vote this down!")
  
• A clear abandonment of the Kyoto Accord.
• Scrapping the gun-registry.
• Several violent crime and anti-terror bills which were voted down in the last session have been combined into a single omnibus bill and is first up on the order paper. This bill has been specifically designated as a matter of confidence.
• Extending the Afghan mission to 2011.

Naturally, Layton and Duceppe immediately stated that they would not support this while Dion has been conspicuously absent. Ignatieff gave a brief interview where he spoke lots, but said absolutely nothing.

Layton and Duceppe can bluster with impunity. If an election were called tomorrow, or 6 months from now will make very little difference to them... what do they have to gain or lose? A dozen seats? Out of 304? Most likely insignificant. It would take a near-complete collapse of AT LEAST one the major federal parties (ie: Liberal and/or Conservative) to install Jack Layton at 24 Sussex as anything higher than the gardener and, with respect to Gilles Duceppe the numbers just aren't there. Quebec only has 75 seats.

Edit: I suppose it IS possible... assuming that the Bloc sweeps Quebec with 75 seats and the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP each win 74 seats, the Green Party wins it's first seat ever, then 10 more (maybe some Independents and fringe parties too) we could have a separatist Prime Minister.... and I thought I had has conflicts of interest in the past!

75 Bloc
+74 Liberal
+74 Conservative
+74 NDP
+11 Green and Other
-----
308 Seats

But, back to the original topic, it looks to me like Harper is trying to goad the opposition into forcing an election. He can then use the Throne Speech as his campaign platform. What could be better than having the Governor General make your first campaign speech? He can then play the wounded man and talk about how he wanted the parliament to work, he wanted to do what was right for Canadians, he was sabotaged by an opposition who are only thinking of their own opportunism. Bullshit! As I said to Paul Martin in 2005, treating a minority government like a majority is a good way to ensure your next job is Leader of the Opposition.

All that being said, Harper has the most to gain, or at least the least to lose at this point. Lets face it, the Liberals are bleeding from every orifice right now plus a few others they've just found. I'm sure Dion is looking for a way to oppose the Throne Speech while still letting it pass (I foresee a flu epidemic in the Liberal back benches in the next couple of weeks). Even if this works, he'll still have the Crime Omnibus coming up for vote in as little as three weeks, back to square one.

The short answer though is, that if we're going to the polls anytime soon it's 100% Stephen Harper's doing. How much do you want to bet that most people won't get that?

Running a DoS... on myself

For a few days I had a client whose main NetWare server would practically hang every afternoon for about 1/2 hour(The server did this for a few days... I didn't have the client for a few days). It was the craziest thing until I saw what was actually happening...

This server is one of those small biz servers that does practically everything. File, print, GroupWise, FTP, routing, BorderManager Reverse Proxy, iFolder... get the idea?

When the server was misbehaving, I happened to look at the BorderManager screen and saw that is was going nuts... hundreds of requests per second. Shutdown BorderManager and activity returned to normal, start it up and within a minute we'd be back in the thick of it.

Now, this was by no means a "standard install". In order to secure the system (there's a fair bit of organizational paranoia and an inordinate amount of money - not for IT - considering there's only 25 users) with no real budget we had setup BorderManager reverse proxy for a web server they had inside the network. We also configured it for GroupWise webaccess which ran on the same server as BorderManager (but a different IP). Of course, this affected ALL web services on that IP including... wait for it.... iFolder.

It just so happened that the SQL server would do a regular database dump every afternoon into... you guessed it... an iFolder. This wasn't a problem until we added the BorderManager proxy. Suddenly, we had an 800MB file being transferred accross a 1Gbps link to BorderManager, then being retransmitted (again at 1Gbps) to another IP on the same NIC. In essence this file upload was trying to transmit itself 3 times over (1 - SQL to BM, 2 - BM to Apache (send), 3 - BM to Apache (receive)).

Essentially a DoS on myself.

A question for all the twins out there...

I was thinking the other day... in the case of identical twins, do you really know which twin you are?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not questioning whether or not you're a separate person, of course you are. Is it possible though that when you were an infant and your parents hadn't figured out how to tell you apart, since they hadn't known you that long, and they mixed the two of you up? Maybe you're not the elder one after all?

Just a thought... courtesy of Ian's Damaged Mind....

Single Letter Domain Names

Yesterday, I was having lunch with my friend/colleague Andreas when the subject of single character domain names came up. Between us the only one we could think of was x.com which redirects to PayPal.

This morning I did a non-comprehensive WHOIS and found the following:

q.com: Qwest
x.com: Paypal
z.com: Nissan

In addition 0.com through 9.com are registered to VeriSign but don't appear to be in use. All the other single character names are listed as IANA_RESERVED since 2001.

My brain does it to me again...

This morning I was dropping Benjamin off at school when I saw a poster in the hall for "Elements and Emotions". This is supposedly an art show being held at one of the local high schools, but my brain took the title and ran with it...

Hmm... elements... hmm... emotions...

Suddenly I start thinking of things like Hydrogen Happiness, Selenium Sadness, Arsnic Anger and Iridium Indifference. Then it truly hits me. Hard.

The Beryllium Blues (insert standard blues riff here)

I'm an alkaline metal,
Used for space industry.
I'm the lightest metal,
but toxic to humanity!

I've got the blues, I've got the Beryllium Blues...

Somebody shoot me now!

School Shootings

Ok... time for me to come off as the callous ass you think I am...

Ecole Polytechnique, Columbine, Taber, Dawson College and now Virginia Tech. There is no question that North American gun culture has had an impact on our society.

It's a sad commentary when someone who has some issues... maybe they don't have many friends, maybe they're pissed off about something, maybe they just can't seem to "fit is all together" decides that the best thing to do is grab a gun, go into a school, and kill a few people beofre killing themselves. What is going through these peoples minds?

At the very least, instead of finding a place where the best and brightest can be found, like a university, can't they at least find a place where you're more likely to find average or below average people? Why can't they do this at Wal-Mart instead? If they're going to go out in such an anti-social fashion the least they can do is to help to shore up the gene pool by culling from the shallow end.

SMS Lingo in Business Comminications

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DST - More annoying than Y2K

Today I'm not ranting about the grocery store...

Today, my bone is with the US Department of Energy. That's right, the same people who brought is weapons grade uranium and plutonium are screwing with us again.

With the passage of the Energy Policy act of 2005 the start and end dates for Daylight Savings Time have been moved three weeks ahead and one week back. Here in the IT sector that has made for a LOT of extra work.

Every server, computer, switch, router, and handheld device with a clock needs to be updated. What makes this more annoying is that most software vendors (RIM just announced their patches YESTERDAY, giving us a whole 14 days to get every single Blackberry in North America (excepting Indiana, Saskatchewan and a few other spots).

With Y2K we had years to get ready, teams with dozens of members and budgets. Also, we could simply check out hardware and software against a database... package A is compliant, package B is not. Check one PC from each model you have on site to confirm that they're compliant. That's one of the reasons that Y2K came off without a major failure. We had the luxury of time and consistency.

We have consistency with DST as well... it's consistently screwed up. We've been handed the problem at the 11th hour and told "when you have a minute make sure that you get this done too". Just add it to an already overworked IT person's plate. Plus with DST we KNOW that every machine will need to be updated. Can't test one and know that it's good for everything, EVERY SINGLE MACHINE NEEDS TO BE TOUCHED.

It's times like this that I want to disappear and go herd goats in Tierra del fuego...

My NEW local grocery store

So the files are still copying...

I've mentioned before that the grocery store seems to provoke a lot of these posts... here I go again.

I used to have a Loblaws a block from my house.

It was a strange store, shoved onto a too small lot. They worked hard to make it work though, building it on stilts above it's own parking lot. It was strange but it worked. The store was accessed via stairs, elevator or, if you had a cart (especially on the way out), via a long ramp which granted access to the store proper.

About 10 months ago it closed under the guise of renovations. It re-opened recently as a Fortinos (still in the Loblaw family). The renovations are very nice, but I don't like what they've done with the entrances.

Both the stairs and ramp are gone. They still have an elevator, but people are discouraged from using it. Now to get in you use the escalator and they have a special conveyance for carts (I think they call it a cart-veyor). It's kind of like a cross between an escalator and a roller coaster, there's a linkage a the bottom of the cart which drops into a track and the cart is pulled up or eased down. The actual shape of the device is such that the cart stays level at all times. It's very cool, but it's energy intensive.

The new entry/exit features of the store annoy me. I can't enter or exit without riding some electircal appliance. I have to take an escalator up and down. These escalators and cartveyors are running all the time, whether someone is on them or not. Continually sucking up power, be it from fossil fuels, uranium or falling water. Wherever it comes from it's energy we'll never see again. I don't like to see this kind of coddling continuing wherever you go these devices "make your life easier". Heaven forbid we might have to climb a flight of stairs, open a door or push a grocery cart up a gentle incline.

This has to be contributing to the epidemic levels of obesiety in Canada. Recent statisics show that 1/3 of Canadians are overweight or obese (I'm one of them). The fact that they don't have to exert themselves isn't helping.

I, for one, will continue to do most of my shopping elsewhere.

Life in IT

So here I am again... it's 11:30 on a Tuesday night and I'm wandering around an empty office building while I wait for files to copy.

I've been here before.... too many times to remember let alone count. I figure I probably work 10-20 nights/weekends per year like this. It's a strange place to be...

For those of you who aren't in the IT biz here's a little taste. It's almost midnight and you're still at work. It's not your office though... it's the office of a client... you spend a fair bit of time there, but it's not your space... it's not completely comfortable. You've been working for a good 15 hours... most of the last 5 have been spent waiting... backing up data... restoring data... time consuming, dull as hell. You can't just go somewhere else though since something may go wrong and you'll need to take remedial action. You've passed the point of no return... if this doesn't work (usually by this time you're on method #4 since the first 3 just didn't pan out the way you had intended them to) you know you won't get the system online by the time the staff gets here... you really don't want to see their chipper faces in the morning. All you want to do at this point is to be done. All of your idealistic plans that you were finalizing at 3:00 are no longer important... working is all you really care about.

This is usually the time when I start to wonder why I went into this business... and why, after 15 years, I'm still doing it. I mean, really, what's the best result you can hope for? The absolute best result from a server upgrade is that NONE OF THE USERS REALIZE THAT ANYTHING HAPPENED. That's it... the best I can hope for is that my phone doesn't ring at 7:30 tomorrow morning with someone who wants to know if the Internet is down.

In case you haven't realized, I'm feeling tired and a little low at the moment... I know that when I walk out of here I'll be feeling good... very tired but good. The feeling you get when you know you've done a good job. There's no feeling like that one (especially at 4:00 AM).

I'll be better tomorrow... for now say a quick prayer to the Server Gods and, time permitting, sacrifice a chicken to them. My eternal thanks will be with you for that.

Dole's plastic jars

It seems the grocery store is a good place for me to get agitated about things...

On a recent trip I took a closer look at Dole's "Fruit in plastic jars" (formerly canned fruit). Looking at the bottom I see that they are type 7 plastic, as seen in the recycling symbol.

For the uninitiated:

1 - Polyethylene Terephthalate (PETE): This is the easiest to recycle, cleanest and "safest" for food purposes. Used primarily for beverage containers and other food purposes.
2 - High Density Polyethylene (HDPE): Slightly more common than PETE, fairly east to recycle.
3 - Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC): One of the nastier plastics out there. Not easy to recycle (most recycling authorities landfill it), leeches toxic chemicals to contents. Used for detergents, piping, etc. I put products in PVC back on the shelf in favour of PETE or HDPE.
4 - Low Density Polyethelene (LDPE): Also common, mostly in bags and softer containers (margarine lids for example).
5 - Polypropylene (PP): I don't know too much about this one. I see it a fair bit and I know that none of my local recycling authorities can/will recycle it.
6 - Polystyrene (PS): A hard, usually clear plastic. Also often used as foam (Styrofoam - a registered trademark of Dow Chemical). Not commonly recycled.
7 - Other: Plastics other than what is listed above. If they don't tell you what it is, good luck recycling it.

Back to our original topic... Dole fruit.

It really irked me that they switched (admittedly, a couple of years ago...) from metal cans to these plastic ones. The old steel/aluminum cans were one of the most recyclable substances on the planet, the new jars are not.

I will continue to not purchase them...

Buddha's hand citron

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." -- William Shakespeare

This seems to apply to the grocery store as well.

I had thought I was well read, experienced, maybe even jaded. I thought the produce section had no real surprises left for me. Then I found a fruit that reminded me of nightmares I've had.

The Buddha's Hand Citron aka: Buddha's Hand, Fingered Citron. Like nothing I've even seen in real 3D space. Smells and feels a lot like a lemon, looks like Cthulhu. It's something I'd consider trying but didn't feel like spending $7 for one piece of fruit though.

This world is getting stranger...

This bloatware it getting ridiculous!

This is getting crazy...

My 1st computer was a 486 back in 1992. At the time it had a largish hard drive (120MB). That was a lot of disk space. A basic install of MS Office could be squeezed into under 10MB (while still maintaining most of the features in the current version which can consume up to a gig). I worked quite nicely with 9MB of free disk space.

Today, I needed to download a new driver for my Logitech mouse. Just a driver (my 1st mouse driver took less than 100k). How much did it want? 42MB!

How much lazier are these programmers going to get? There is no reason why we can't have small, fast code being written. But hey, disk is cheap, RAM is cheap, processors are cheap... why bother doing it well? Just throw more power at it.

Just imagine where MS Vista will take us!

Motorola does it again...

A few months ago I purchased a Motorola HS50 Bluetooth headset for use with my Blackberry. It's been invaluable to me, since the Blackberry isn't a very good phone (If a phone were my primary requirement I'd never get a BB).

In any case, my headset went missing last week... I knew it had to be somewhere though. The last place I epxected to find it though was in the dryer. Uh-oh! I must have left it in my shirt pocket and it went through the wash! I try to turn in on... no luck. Also, no surprise, it was just immersed in water several times then subjected to the heat of a commercial dryer.

When I got home, just for kicks, I plugged it into it's charger. Shockingly the blue LED lights up, indicating that it's charging. I give it a few minutes and try to turn it on again. OH MY GOD! It's working! Make a call... it works just fine.

What does it take?!?! I have never been able to destroy ANY of the Motorola products I've had. I've always sworn by their phones. Over the years I've had a LOT of phones (of 10 phones, 5 have been Motorola), never had I broken one. The same can't be said for some of the others.

Kudos to Motorola for making REALLY TOUGH products.

I love my shopping bins...

A while back I was looking for something under the kitchen sink. It was nearly impossible because there were plastic grocery bags EVERYWHERE (and this is a 4'x10' space). I hauled them all out and got rid of them, compressed they filled an entire green garbage bag.

Halton Region (where I live) as well as the City of Toronto can not/do not recycle them, so they all go to landfill (or you can throw them under your sink and have them form their own "micro landfill").

Grocery stores in the Loblaws family (Loblaws, Fortinos, Zehrs, Great Canadian Superstores) offer shopping bins (pictured left, for purposes of scale the model is five years old) for their customers at most of their stores, they also use a slightly different cart design which allows for five bins to be places in the cart at once, all accessible. They cost about $4. On my next trip to the grocery store I purchased one to try. It was a good experience and the next time out I snagged another one.

I've been using them for about 8 months now and they make life so much easier, especially at the checkout. I can unload my cart onto the conveyor in under 10 seconds. It's also much easier to carry them into the house, one in each hand.

I purchased them for the convenience factor as well as the environmental factor (mostly for convenience though, it's nice when the two coincide... far too often are they in conflict). But, as an added bonus the Fortinos I go to gives a $0.03 discount for each bin you use to acknowledge the fact that you're not using bags. Three cents means nothing... I like to see it on my receipt though.

Now that the City of Toronto is considering a levy of $0.25 per plastic bag these may become more popular. Ireland has done something similar on a national level and reduced plastic bag usage by close to 90% in the first year.

'Tis fit for neither man nor beast today...

Good Monday morning!

As I write this the inclement weather continues. The freezing rain that began during the night (leaving 1/8" of ice on everything so far) has now turned to ice pellets as the temperature drops and is expected to turn to snow as the day goes on. It's currently -4.

To hell with it all, I'm working from home today!

(Later the same day....)

Well, shortly after posting the above I got called out out to Mississauga to deal with a dead server. 30 minutes of scraping (breaking both of my scrapers, the ice on the windshield was closer to 1/2" thick). Once that was done it took 1 1/2 hours to get to the client... those poor bastards... they weren't able to get email until almost 1:00.

A pilgrimage is required....

Here we go...

As my regular readers are aware I've been going through a rough time lately... damn this being an emotional being!

For the past several months I've been feeling the call of Lake Superior. I lived on the north shore from 1981-86 (ages 7-11.5) and did quite a bit of growing up there. The town in question was Schreiber, about 1/2 way between Thunder Bay and Wawa. Not the middle of nowhere, but you could see it from there. A great place to be a kid... I think we left a just the right time though, I wouldn't want to be a teenager there though. Everyone I spoke to after I left had issues with alcohol, drugs and teen pregnancies.

Moving to and from Schreiber was major culture shock... this is a Northern Ontario Railway town, 9 miles from a Mill town. Most of the men in Schreiber worked at the Kimberly Clark mill in Terrace bay, the rest worked for the CPR (I was, at least partially, raised by the CPR). Nearly all the local businesses were run by Italians... the Figlomenis, Costas, Cebrarios, Spadonis and Cacamos ("The Five Families of Schreiber"). There are, of course, exceptions to this but in general it's the way of things.

I hadn't thought much about the place in years, I haven't been closer than Sudbury (unless you count flying over) since '86, but recently it's really come back to me. In the past 10 years I've re-visited nearly every site from my childhood, except this one. As I exorcise demons I have fewer and fewer to deal with, so the same ones come up more frequently. If you've read ,y earlier posts you know that the biggest has been/is being dealt with right now. All that really leaves is Schreiber and its demons.

I need to go... I need to go soon, but I'll have to wait until spring. Winter is not a good season for tourism there, besides, at least two major spots I need to go to are in the bush... the snow's deeper there.

Until then, I'll just keep hanging on.

Doing a B&E on the house of God...

Last night at Beavers Benjamin has a rather trying time...

It was his first day back at Thistleoaks after Christmas and he was tired (they all were). We had arrived a little early (since I'm a leader we always do).. while we were going around the gym, both of us trying to stay awake...

I heard a door slam behind me, Benjamin had closed the door to one of the activity rooms... with himself inside it. He startes banging on the door... he's unable to get out. I go to open the door... locked.

I talk to him through the door trying to explain the concept of unlocking it but am not getting anywhere. By this time another parent had come to drop her son off, I asked her to keep an eye on things while I go to see if I can get the window open. Cut through the screen... no luck, the window is locked. Try to jimmy it with my 9" tool (leatherman supertool), can't do it... damn my lack of a misspent youth!

I go back into the church, to find that another parent has managed to talk him through opening the door... he's out! My blood pressure begins to return to high (down from dangerously hypertensive).

This week's demonstration: Lock operation and doorknob removal.
Next week's demonstration: Window screen repair.

Blood Oranges are back!

I've been waiting for this since spring... my favorite fruit has come back into season... the wonderful, yes little known (it seems sometimes) Blood Orange.
Less sweet than most oranges and featuring a reddish flesh these oranges are a joy to eat. It seems that too few people know about them though... I've had the following conversation too many times:

Me: (sitting quietly eating an orange)
Someone else: "What's that?" in a tone that implies I'm eating something unrecognizable and inexplicable
Me: "An orange." Usually in a "What the hell do you think it is?" tone.
Someone else: "It's red."
Me: "Yeah... have some." The yeah is usually one of those "No shit" kinda responses... I've also been surprised by the number of people refusing to try them... it's an orange, not an alien!

So if, like me, you love blood oranges I wish you the best of the season... if not... go buy/try some. They're very good.

Stinkin' Mac users!!

I've been saying this for years... now I have to stop. I have officially gone over to the dark side... er... the light side.. er... (more on this later).

Over the past year I've had three people close to me make the move to Mac... as I think is part of the Apple license agreement they've all become insufferable promoters of the platform (don't be offended, I'm beginning to understand).

When I told Jesse he asked me if I had joined the light side, I commented that it was more like the dark side since going to the light side often means compromising your desires. That didn't seem quite right either since going to the dark side often means compromising your principles. (Besides, I think everyone can agree the M$ is the evil empire...)

I've thought about it some more and have come up with the following: (Continuing the Star Wars analogies)

The Dark Side of the Force: Microsoft Windows (Any version)

• Huge, corrupt (pron: buggy) cumbersome
• Simple tasks can be very complicated, especially if you're trying to do something non-standard
• Everything works "well enough" and if you're willing to deal with the continual security issues

The Light Side of the Force: (Also the Rebel Alliance) Linux and other Open Source Software

• Huge, poorly organized
• No central authority, there are 100 different ways to do everything and there's no consensus as to the best way to do anything
• Everything works "well enough" if you're willing to put an enormous amount of effort into it. Much of it you'll probably have to build yourself.

I'm not really sure how Apple fits in... maybe like Bespin from The Empire Strikes Back:

• Small enough to not really attract TOO much of the wrong sort of attention
• A powerful, simple to use interface with a powerful BSD UNIX OS behind it. (Fully usable if you know what you're doing)
• Certainly not low-cost computing though

The analogy is breaking down on me here but you see my point? There seems to be the fewest compromises here.

I'll try not to be too annoying though.....

This means I'm a blogger now doesn't it?

I don't know how this happened.

Me, who has been denigrating blogging as narcissistic...

Me, who considered anyone who would, essentially, write a diary that they WANT people to read arrogant... spraying their inner-most thoughts across the net hoping that utter strangers will love them...

Me, who described bloggers as "being possessed of a self-love so deep that it borders on masturbatory" (I think that's paraphrased from Will Ferguson).

I have a blog? WTF?

I'm going to need a moment to re-center and re-evaluate my thinking here...

Do the strangers love me yet? Who knows, who cares... probably not. I can deal with that.

This whole "emotional being" business can be damned inconvenient at times

The holidays are difficult at the best of times; I've recently discovered that I'm a workaholic (that's right... I can't get enough workahol). On top of that, the shit has hit the fan in a couple of other areas as well.

My stress levels have been higher than usual of late, the holidays do that to me. In addition, my ex-wife Jenn, who is still a close friend, was admitted to hospital on the 22nd with heart trouble. They've got her pretty doped up (they released her on the 28th) to keep everything in order and want to see her again in a month. Until then she's been order to take it easy. They've also said she can't work (she's a professional driver). We'll just have to wait and see there...

I went to Kingston for Christmas to spent it at my Aunt's house (my Grandmother was there as well). Benjamin and I had a good Christmas morning, then I took him to the bus station where his Grandmother (Jenn's mom) picked him up and took him to Montreal to spend the week with her.

I went back to my Aunt's place and enjoyed the rest of the day. Late that evening though I found myself feeling very sad... crying inconsolably no less. It took me a little while to figure out why that was: I was crying because my mother had died. As most of you will remember, my mother died in August 1997. At the time it didn't have too much effect on my... I guess it finally caught up on me.

Since then I haven't been myself... admittedly, last week wasn't a normal week, but I haven't been normal myself. In the same way as when you pull a scab off a wound you find raw, sensitive skin underneath, I've pulled off an emotional scab and have found a raw, sensitive psyche underneath. Looks like I actually need to deal with it this time.

It's been quite some time since I've allowed myself to feel anything; I can't say I'm enjoying it. All part of the process though. I have no intention of returning to the "shut down" state I've been living in for so long.

GroupWise... working despite your best efforts

Last week I was doing a GroupWise 7 upgrade. No problem, 1 Post Office, in-place upgrade... what do you want me to do with the rest of the morning? Naturally there's some prep work to be done, some post work as well.

For the non-GroupWise engineers out there, GroupWise is Novell's premier e-mail and collaboration suite. Novell has a few recommendations to help keep it running well.

1. Try to keep fewer than 1,000 users on each post office
2. Maintain retention policies so that users will have no more than a year or two of mail on the live system. GroupWise and third parties have archiving options for just that reason.
3. Use the built-in database maintenance utilities (primarily GWCHECK) to maintain and repair database errors. A check should be made of the database structure nightly and the contents weekly.

Looking at this system I saw some things to worry about. Between users and resources (read: non-human mailboxes) there were about 2,200 mailboxes in the post office. There were no retention policies whatsoever, the postoffice was/is approaching 200GB (there are items dating to AT LEAST 1998). There were no GWCHECKs scheduled of any consequence. Twice per week there was a check scheduled to check maibox statistics but that's it.

When I ran a structure check on the database I didn't find anything too alarming (apart from the fact that it took 16 hours). Contents was another story. These checks were taking 70-80 hours to complete.

Looking at a recent contents check that had been run at our behest there were tens of thousands of errors, nearly all minor or irrelevant. They did, however, show that there had been almost no maintenance done.

A HUGE number of outdated execution records (expired notifications or alarms). While these are normal, harmless and to be expected, the date stamps were unexpected. Outdated execution records are directly linked to the date an item was created, when a GWCHECK is run they are removed. I was finding outdated execution records dating back to June of 1998... 8 1/2 years. Had a GWCHECK been run in the past 8 1/2 years they would have been removed.

In 1998 we were just beginning to see GroupWise 5.5... that 5.5 (or 5.2) post office was upgraded to 6.0 and 6.5 with these errors in place the whole time.

GroupWise just works no matter how hard you try to kill it.

The 12 Laws of Networking

From the Archives:

Stumbled upon this one today... truer words were never spoken.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1925.html

The Speed of Dreams

From the Archives:

Let's see how much productivity I can kill this morning... it's seems I can occasionally waste everyone's morning with one of these threads.

Ever had one of those mornings where, for some reason, your alarm clock wasn't loud enough to wake you up, only loud enough to influence your dreams? This happens to me on occasion and I find it quite unnerving to hear all about my dreams on the news as I drive to work. Today however, I was slightly more conscious than normal.

The dream in question centred around a single article on Metro Morning (about creating "big courts" for complicated and gang-related trials). I remember hearing the beginning, I remember hearing the end, and I remember a dream in the middle. What surprised me is that, during a period no longer than 8 minutes I had a dream that encompassed several hours, possibly multiple days (you know how funny time gets when you're dreaming, and there were some "skips" as well). I know dreaming isn't a real-time event but I still thought it would take longer than that. I've never had it put so clearly before...

I realize this falls under the "Profound revelations that, later, turn out to be not so profound" category.

Has anyone had a similar experience?

Fast food and General Relativity

From the Archives:

Someone actually managed to use general relativity to explain why fast food is so awful....

As you accelerate your food, it takes exponentially more and more energy to increase its velocity, until you hit a limit at C. This energy has to come from somewhere; in this case, from the food's nutritional value. Thus, the faster the food is, the worse it gets.
-- Mark Hughes, comprehending the taste of fast food

The Letter C; Sentimental or Redundant?

From the Archives:

Today on the "Ian's damaged mind" channel we will be examining the letter C.

While the English language is full of contradictions, rules, exceptions to those rules and stolen grammar and vocabulary the letter C has to be one of the greatest wastes. I recall several years ago there was an e-mail joke passed around dealing with the European Union adopting English as its official language (as opposed to French or German). It then went through a five year process of adapting the language to European usage by simplifying the grammar and eliminating redundant letters and letter combinations. In the end they had essentially turned English into German.

http://www.ahajokes.com/eng011.html

But that just serves to underscore the true redundancy of C. After all, what does a C sound like? Most will tell you that a "hard C" sounds like a K and a "soft C" sounds like an S. Based on that information is there ANY word in the language where C cannot be replaced with K or S? I have yet to find any... if you do please let me know.

Please note: Arguments that a certain (sertain?) word "looks funny" or "doesn't parse well" will not be accepted (aksepted?). That is just a side effect of having looked at them in their current (kurrent?) format for 30+ years.

Lucky, you just get to listen to my ramblings on occasion then delete them from your inboxes. I have to live inside this brain 24x7....

What's up with the Liberals?

From the Archives:

What's going on??

Bob Rae skinny dipping on CBC with Rick Mercer... Scott Bryson posing nude for a calendar... are the Liberals becoming the naked party? What's next? Gerrard Kennedy's next job at the strip club?

Although I'm sure most of us wouldn't mind if Belinda Stronach were next...

Personal ads you never see...

From the archives:

My brain concocted this one this morning... Can't it take vacations on its own time??

Looking for:

1 legged man (left) who wears size 10 1/2 wide shoes for ongoing exchange. Large collection of unused left-only shoes available. My left for your right! Long term preferred.

There are probably medications I can take to prevent these thoughts....

NTP Servers

I'm sure that like me you're getting tired of hunting for reliable NTP servers... Sure, we have the old standbys:

time.nrc.ca
tick.utoronto.ca
tock.utoronto.ca

but what else?

Recently I was in Ottawa looking for local NTP sources (instead of hitting the UToronto servers) and discovered that the NTP project manages NTP server "pools". These pools are arranged geographically and hierarchically, with the ability to drill down. For example, the North America Pool has 244 servers in it right now, there are also 4 sub-pools for Canada (23 servers), Guatemala (3 servers), Mexico (4 servers) and USA (215 servers).

Check it out at http://www.pool.ntp.org

Since I discovered this I've been converting my existing servers to use the Canada pool.

They're always looking for new servers to make the pools more reliable, so if you happen to have a NTP server with a static IP please consider contributing it to the pool. I expect to be adding a couple in the next few weeks. Support the community effort.

A geek reacting to advertising...

So, this afternoon I'm driving down the Gardiner and saw a billboard for Dasani. All it was, was a bottle with the caption H5O (5 was subscript). One wonders just how many geeks started thinking about chemistry upon seeing this. I'm sure they were talking about their 5-stage filtration process... all I could think was how unstable H5O would be. We're talking about some serious free radicals here.

Happy Calendar Obsolescence

Here we are again... January 1st (well 2nd actually) and once again our paper calendars are garbage. This has to be one of the more ridiculous times to place the new year.

Sensibly, I would expect a change of year to accompany a change of season. Instead we have it 8 days AFTER the winter solstice... right when everything (here in the northern hemisphere at least) is throughly dead.

I'm not quite sure what Aloysius Lilius was smoking when he decided to put it there...

Anyway, happy calendar obsolescence...