Rants

Posts in which I fly off the handle.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Meet the Neighbors!

Ever have one of those moments when you have the perfect thing to say; the wittiest, pithiest and most devastating comeback in the history of the world, but it doesn’t come to you until 30 minutes after it would have simply rocked to have said it?

Yeah me, too. All the time.

Except this evening, when I actually spat it out. (Though as usual, I kind of feel bad for having said it. I should be more mature.)

Sit back and let me spin my yarn…

Neighbor, let’s call him “Bob” (please note, his real name is a four letter name and I am studiously avoiding calling him by my preferred name for him, i.e., “Dick,” but “Bob” will do) is out mowing his lawn. I am driving myself and the kids home. He steps into the street to spin his mower around. There is an oncoming car with its blinding high beams on, so I can’t really see him. But I do see Bob in plenty of time, so I don’t smash into him. Not even close.

He stops his mower and turns and screams a few choice obscenities at me, telling me to slow down. (It’s the F-bomb, kids! And I don’t drop that, but take my word for it.) I have all my windows down, so I and my kids can hear every lovely syllable of his oath filled rant.

I stop the car and get out to tell Bob that “Hey, I’m sorry, but I didn’t see you because of the oncoming car. I’m sorry if it looked like I was going to hit you for a second there.”

I don’t have a chance to get that out my mouth, because Bob is yelling at me as I walk toward him.

“You need to slow the f. down. You are f-ing going to kill my dog.”

“I’m sorry, but your dog was nowhere near the street and I was pretty blinded by that car. And I wasn’t driving that fast.”

“You need to f-ing slow down on this street.”

This is my street, too, by the way.

“Well, I don’t think I drive too fast. I’ve never hit a dog, cat or child with my car in my whole life, but people can have different opinions about this kind of stuff and heck, everyone thinks they are excellent and safe drivers, so sure, I’ll try and slow down. No problem.”

Really. I was that reasonable. You’ll just have to believe me on that score.

But he’s still yelling at me about how I am the f-ing fastest driver on the street and that someday I’m going to f-ing kill his dog.

“Well, I disagree with your over generalization that I’m the fastest driver on the street, but fine, people can disagree about that kind of thing. I’m sorry.”

Apparently, my people skills worked their magic, because he admonished me a little more and then seemingly mollified, he introduced himself to me, “Anyway, my name is Bob.”

“My name is Jon. I live right up there.”

“I know where you live. You also need to do something about your backyard.”

I need to interrupt and explain something right here.
Our backyard? Until a couple weeks ago, it was a total mess. I hadn’t mowed all summer, weeds were everywhere and it was a disaster. Of epic proportions.
Really. A whole commune of hippies could have been back there practicing free love and burning a giant peace sign on the veritable forest the lawn had become and we would not have known. Our front yard is fine, by the way. The way our property is, we don’t have a front lawn, it’s all flower beds and walkways. But you can’t see into our backyard AT ALL from the road, so it’s not like it’s an eyesore or depreciating precious property values.
My only excuse is that I have a busy life and I kind of loathe yard work, so making the backyard acceptable is low on my priority list.
But it is on Reha’s list, so a couple weeks ago, I finally started working in the back and it’s in “OK” shape. It’s nowhere near great, but we’d at least know to evict any hippies.
And though technically the current condition of our backyard isn’t germane to the rest of this rant, I thought you should know that it’s WAY better now. Bob’s info about the state of our backyard is out of date.
Carry on.

Let me repeat him again and please note, the yelling about me and my awful driving was over.

“I know where you live. You also need to do something about your backyard.”

“I’m sorry, what?” I had thought once he formally introduced himself to me that we were moving into the congenial “I’ve said my piece, now we can be friendly” stage. He was pretty calm by this point and I’d apologized for the mere possibility that I could have killed his freely roaming dog in the street. (I also hadn’t brought up that his dog was A) sniffing my crotch constantly while all this went on, B) his dog is much more likely to get hit by any car if he lets it scoot around unleashed, but that’s because I didn’t want to argue with him. For I am Jon. The generally laid back and non-confrontational Peace-maker.)

He then goes on to tell me that he has dinner ALL THE TIME at our immediate neighbor’s house and they can see into our “ratty” backyard from the deck and that I should fix that. He’s detailing not only how bad it is and questioning not only my gardening skills (such as they are), but also my fitness as a human. And repeating that I obviously want to kill his unleashed dog with my car.

At this point? I got a wee bit annoyed. I hadn’t argued with him about his perception of my driving, I had apologized and said I would be more careful in the future. But holy mushrooms on a frozen banana, I could not let that pass.

So I popped off. To wit:

“OK, Bob. So we’ve established that you think I’m a Formula One driver out to kill or maim all domesticated animals on this street and possibly a few children, never mind that I live here, too. Fine. I disagree, but I can accept that. In your eyes, I’m a horrible driver. Check. But now, completely out of the blue, you’ve pointed out that I’m a terrible homeowner and a slovenly gardner. IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE? Is there anything else you feel the need to say about my person or character, now that we are meeting here on the street FOR THE FIRST TIME? Let me help you, I’m a little overweight. Maybe you could say something about that. You don’t like my beard? Let’s hear what you think of it! You don’t like my shirt, maybe? My kids are in the car, I could go get them and you could say crappy things about them, too. But I’ll tell you what, Bob, here is what I have learned about you in the past five minutes of your screaming and swearing at me. You never learned a fundamental lesson which I can only assume your parents either failed to teach you or you simply passed over as unimportant drivel: ‘You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.’ Just exactly what did you think was going to happen by your dropping that crack about my backyard into the discussion?”

“Um. I don’t know?”

“Did you think you were telling me something I didn’t know? That I’d be surprised about it? Or that I would suddenly drop everything else in my life and start cleaning up my backyard right this second, because, ‘Oh, there is a person named Bob down the street who disapproves of how I take care of my backyard?! Screw everything else I have on my plate, BOB IS UPSET about my unholy disaster of a backyard that can’t even be seen from the road. I better get cracking!’ Probably not going to happen, I have to be honest with you, Bob. But mostly, I just wonder why, once this thing about my driving seemed resolved that you felt it necessary to pile on like that and bring up the dilapidated state of my backyard?”

“I don’t know. I just said it.”

“Delightful.”

Anyway. I met Bob tonight.

Jon scribbled this mess on 08/12/08 at 11:27 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post Rants. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Hi, I’m OS X Server, Leopard Edition! Let’s Waste Some Money Together!

Normal (non-nerdly) updates will resume tomorrow. I just kind of had to get this off my chest.

Let’s start with these two screen grabs:

This is a graph of my company’s weekly bandwidth usage. The blue lines represent the data we downloaded from the outside world. The green lines are the data we sent out to the IntarWeb Planet.

And another one:

This is zoomed in view of the “hourly” usage.

What do we see here kidlets? We see TREMENDOUS spikes occurring at regular intervals and then stopping.

What do we think is causing all this data transfer? What pray tell, are we downloading off the Internet? Have we suddenly developed a taste for P2P file sharing? Are we downloading every movie there is from the iTunes Store? Is someone at my work a voracious pr0n hound?

Nope.

That is one of my Xserves, screwing me with my pants on.

Yes, I am quite annoyed.

The problem lies in Leopard Server’s Software Update service. (10.5.1, even) This is a neat little thing where the Server downloads all software updates from Apple and then distributes them locally to all the computers in the studio. It’s lovely for a couple reasons. One, it saves on bandwidth costs, since machines can just go to MY server instead of Apple’s servers to get 10.5.1, updates to iLife 08, etc. Yes, a 150 MB OS X update isn’t that big a deal, but multiply that out by 20 machines and it’s a whole lot of usage. Two, it’s way faster to get updates locally than to have to truck all the way to Apple’s servers.

So I use this little function quite a bit. It’s very handy.

Except that it’s horribly, horribly broken in 10.5.1.

First off, upgrading from 10.4.11 ruined the Software Update setup. When I tried to turn that on, I’d get an error. Unfortunately by the time I started digging around I already knew that I’d be re-installing the whole she-bang (because Open Directory/Kerberos hates me, but that’s a whole ‘nother story I won’t go into now). So I didn’t make a note of the error. But as I recall, it has something to do with a .bundle not being updated properly. So the fancy new Leopard stuff is trying to use a creaky old Tiger .bundle Theoretically, you could extract the new Software Update .bundle off the Leopard Server Install DVD and plop it into the proper location, after making sure all the permissions were correct.

Yeah, a big freaking chore and one you might not get right. If you have upgraded to 10.5 and things aren’t working right, plan on re-installing. Or praying that the 10.5.2 update fixes all this crap.

Second thing with Software Update, which relates to the graphs above:

After the clean re-install, I got it to work fine and I went about setting up all ten of our new Mac Pros. (And upgrading three or four other machines to Leopard). All is right with the world, except that I was sleep deprived.

But then!

Sunday morning at about 1 AM, the Mac I was setting up could no longer reach my update server and the Software Updaters on the other Macs were spewing “can’t find index.sucatalog at server_name” and no updates were going out.

“Hrrrrm,” I said sleepily, “That’s odd. I haven’t changed anything on the server. Why isn’t it working?”

I stopped and started the Software Update service and there was No Joy in Jonville.

Fine.

Reboot the server.

Nope. Still not working. Same error, they can’t find the file they need on the server. Let’s look at log files! Whee! In the Software Update Error Log we find:

[Mon Feb 4 01:55:34 2008] [error] [client 192.168.0.51] File does not exist: /usr/share/swupd/html/index.sucatalog

OK, let’s SSH into the box and see what’s there. Where is the index.sucatalog file? Maybe I can just manually find the little bugger and put it where it’s supposed to go. Or I can just change the config of the Software Update process to the right location.

Turns out that index.sucatalog is merely a symbolic link and the real catalog file is here:

/usr/share/swupd/html/content/catalogs/index.sucatalog

Fine.

Except.

When I dig down in the “content” directory, guess what I do not find? If you guessed “a directory named ‘content’,” you win a cookie. There’s a directory called “downloads” and in there is where all 18GB of Apple Software updates can be found, but no “content” directory. Which is how the Software Update service does its mojo. It keeps track of everything on Apple’s servers and itself and syncs between the two.

See? No “content” directory.

It’s royally hosed.

But the thing that is flummoxing to me is that not only is the service hosed from the outside and my Macs can’t get their updates (even though I did NOTHING), but it’s fried internally as well. Because it just keeps downloading the individual software update packages OVER and OVER and OVER again. It would start in the middle of the night, go for 7 hours and then just stop. And then later in the day it would start up again, completely saturating our 7MBit connection. All told, it download about 70 GBs worth of crap.

Our “normal” bandwidth usage in a MONTH is around 55 GBs. We only pay for 75 and everything over that is $MONEY.

So this clever little custom apache process called “Software Update” that is supposed to save me money on bandwidth? Will end up costing us a grundle.

I hope the irony is not lost on you.

I called Apple Enterprise Support (We have Premium support for servers). This is the gist of the conversation:

Me: YOU ARE KILLING ME.

Apple Enterprise Support Droid: Yes sir, we know about this issue.

Me: For the love Pete on a popsicle stick, when are you fixing it? Can it please be VERY SOON? I’m feeling very fragile over here. I’m not well.

Apple Enterprise Support Droid: We are very sorry about it. A fix is coming very soon.

Me: OK, let me know, please. I’ll be the geek in the corner, weeping quietly into his caffeinated beverage.

Here’s the hack/fix/workaround:

1. Make sure the Software Update service is off in Server Admin.

2. ssh into the server and remove ALL the directories BELOW /usr/share/swupd/html/ (Yes, any updates you have already downloaded will be nuked.) BE CAREFUL while slinging around the rm command, OK?!

3. Restart the server.

4. Start up the Software Update service.

5. The service should auto-magically re-make the index.sucatalog file and all the appropriate linkages. Log back into the box and see if it did.

6. Go away for a while and go outside. Talk to human beings for a bit. When you come back, see if the updates are making their way down to your server again. Note for the 800th time that though the Software Update service is pretty ginchy and useful, it would be EVEN nicer if there were some way to gauge how long the downloads will take. Progress Bars. LET ME SHOW THEM TO YOU.

7. Profit!

Tune in tomorrow, because I’ll be back to “regular programing” with a story about how my oldest son is either a genius or criminal mastermind in embryo! Whee!

Jon scribbled this mess on 02/06/08 at 04:01 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post Rants. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Friday, February 23, 2007

Dear Microsoft

Gotta say this right up front:

Microsoft, I loathe you.

Apparently my site looks like ass in IE 7. If you are visiting my site using IE 7… I apologize and am so sorry. I’ll fix it this weekend. There is a whole little world/column o’ stuff over on the left side of the page that you can’t see. Again, my apologies and now I’d like to get back to ranting. Thx!

OK, look I’m humble enough to realize that my layout might suck and it actually may be my CSS coding problem and have nothing to do with the way IE interprets the code. Could be. I’ve been wrong plenty of times in my life. Just ask the kids about the time with the mangoes and the chocolate pasta. Plus, I know that I can be dense and not figure things out properly the first time. Or even the fifth.

But I’m also pretty sure that my CSS is vanilla and not awe inspiring or really even all that tricky. Three columns, header and footer. Nothing really goofy about it. There is an IE 6 “fix” in there, so who knows… And I can see from the apache logs that the stuff that is supposed to load over there on the left is loading from the server, but IE 7 ain’t rendering it. It’s also there when one does a “View Source” on the page.

I’m also sure that these Microsoft people are the same people who broke the box model way back with IE 5.5 and thus begat the IE 5 “box model” hack.

Now I’m all sweaty and grunting and bugged.

And I had a really funny story to tell, too. It was all about me and the time I almost got killed by a West Valley City, UT cop. An Arby’s sandwich figures prominently in the story so you know it will be good. But I can’t get to “the funny place” right now.

This is me, rolling my eyes, knowing that I have zero time to screw around with this crap right now. Or tomorrow.

grumble. grumble. grumble.

Jon scribbled this mess on 02/23/07 at 12:04 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post Rants. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Monday, September 25, 2006

Site Update

Welcome to the New Look™ of this place.

If you don’t like it: I don’t care. (You aren’t the first.)

If you think the fonts are weird looking: I don’t care. (It’s the web, kids, not like I have a whole RANGE of type styles to choose from.)

If you wish I hadn’t changed anything: I don’t care. (I hated the old look, OK? It was essentially a standard template. It was icky.)

If you wish that your favorite TV show hadn’t been cancelled: I don’t care. (And I was sad as well when they cancelled Melrose Place.)

If you think it’s too minimalistic: I don’t care. (It loads fast, is light weight, mostly standards compliant and uses white space fairly effectively.)

If you think the new logo is facile and boring and stupid: I don’t care. (And since when did my Mom start using the word “facile?")

If you want me to go away and never waste any more electrons on this site: Caring? Not so much. (But you’d think my own family would be more supportive.)

(OK, none of that is true! Please let me know what you think!)

(And please love me!)

(I care! I really do!)

(Have a nice day.)

(and please come back soon!)

(I love you, too!)

(I know I don’t say it enough, but you know that I care deeply about you, right? *You* are my favorite reader! All the others meant *nothing* to me! I swear!)

That’s it… I’m changing it back. Or hiring someone.

Jon scribbled this mess on 09/25/06 at 10:02 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post Rants. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Three Headed Dum Dum

Kerberos on OS X Server is way ginchy and cool when it works, but when it doesn’t, it’s a huge pain in the patooty.

Kerberos is Greek for the three headed dog that guards the Gate of Hell. In the geek world, it’s a set of standards (from the really clever folks at MIT, for encrypting and storing data, especially user info and passwords. Works like magic. Except when it doesn’t. Then the big dawg just rolls over kicks it’s little chihuahua feet in the air, all three tongues hanging out and it plays dead.

I was going to go off on a whole tirade, but now I’m just fed up and going to go to bed.

Jon scribbled this mess on 08/03/06 at 11:09 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post Rants. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Rants

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Meet the Neighbors!

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Hi, I’m OS X Server, Leopard Edition! Let’s Waste Some Money Together!

Friday, February 23, 2007

Dear Microsoft

Monday, September 25, 2006

Site Update

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Three Headed Dum Dum

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