Undrblog - Rants

How apple is stifling innovation.

nospam@example.com (War) — Sat, 22 May 2010 21:14:38 -0400

Has anyone else noticed this? I have, for a very long time, been opposed to the popular game in town, and instead rooted for the little guy. In high school I never strove to be popular, I ran cross country instead of trying to get on the football team. A junior in high school, i started trying to move to linux, getting away from Microsoft. I've always done things based on my own research, what works for me, and not based on current trends. So read this article, knowing that I personally feel that Apple is becoming "Trendy", and I am somewhat bias against "Trendy".

Next time you're at a high school, shopping mall, college campus, grocery store, or anywhere that a lot of people with cel phones. Look around. Look at people using their phones, and see if you can identify some of what you see kids fiddling with while theyre waiting in line to check out, what devices people are hugging to their cheek. You may notice an abundance of iPhones. Ok, so I see a lot of reasons for that. First, Apple is very good at marketing. Apple is also very good at writing decent software. And on top of all of that, well, the iPhone is indeed a slick device. So what the hell am i complaining about?

There are a ton of touch screen phones out there. A ton of popular smart phones in general. Ever hear of a little manufacturer called BlackBerry? Theyve been producing phones for much longer than Apple. It's easy to see however why the iPhone is more popular, its more fun, its got a slicker interface, and apple's marketing machine is no less than stellar.

So you're still wondering what I'm getting at.

Ok, here we go. How many people out there have left Microsoft to go to Apple? I'm going to say... a lot. Now, how many have left Microsoft to go to Linux? Not nearly as many. How many people do you see going out and spending less on a PC, and then installing linux on it. Versus how many people you see spending a fortune on similar hardware, for the privilege of using an Apple? Linux could kill Microsoft. Linux, a project which is free for anyone to install/use. A system which is more secure than windows. A system which is infinitely customizable. A system... which is only used by geeks and open source activists.

This is my point. If apple weren't so popular, if they weren't convincing people that the privilege of using an apple was worth the extra price tag... Then other projects might get more attention. There are projects that have been terminated because of apple's success. An example is HP's slate. It was dropped shortly after the release of the iPad.

Look at MP3 players. The mp3 music sales industry caters to the iPod, and all other mp3 players need to live up to the standard that the iPod has set. Even if these other players may feature more options, other features, more storage space, if theyre not a clone of an iPod, theyre not accepted. Everyone wants the iPod.

Am i saying everyone should boycott apple, and start looking for other products? No, i'm just ranting. Take it for what its worth.

Columbine...

nospam@example.com (War) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:24:15 -0400

Today is the 10th anniversary of the Columbine shooting. A number of news agencies are running articles regarding what happened that day, and what is different today. I just finished reading one very interesting article: http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/04/20/col ... index.html

It's regarding the "myths" behind Columbine. I remember this event pretty clearly. Because it sort of hit close to home. I was just out of high school (graduated in 1998). I was a gamer, and for my last 2 years of high school, I wore a black leather trenchcoat. This was before "goth" was popular. At least not in my town. I was an outcast, i had a very small group of friends. I'll admit though, that this was mostly by choice. I didn't really like most of the people in my class all through grade school. At about 5th grade, when kids start turning into teens, they start to notice that everyone's not the same, and they form opinions on who's worth their time and who's not. Well I was always pretty open, and friendly. I didnt pass judgement on people on my own. People were people to me, other kids my age were just other kids. I didnt care what kind of clothes they wore, or whether they looked rich or not. Unfortunately everyone around me was starting to form those opinions, I didnt have the cool clothes and those $100 sneakers. I didn't play sports. So I was slowly removed from the cool groups. Everyone else started to "mature" and i just kept doing what made me happy, not what they dictated as the cool stuff to do. This could very well be why I didnt get into drugs, and under-age drinking.

But I'm getting off topic. My point is, I was those kids, as the newscasts described them. A loner (sort of), semi-goth (trench coat, no piercings, eye makeup, or 100% black wordrobe), and I was into violent computer games. I liked explosives (see the tennis ball bomb post!), and guns. The big difference between me and the image the media portrayed? I like to think I was more in control of my life and psychological state. I respected things that could kill me, or others. I never saw my high school as a level in Doom.

So for the past 10 year's, I've felt like I could sort of relate to these kids. I don't in any way condone what they did, just that I could see where they were coming from. Ridicule in High School is terrible, and to a kid thats already depressed or unstable, it could easily turn into what happened in Columbine. What they did was terrible, but the picture the media painted, almost made them look like as much a victim as the actual victims!

So back to the article. Apparently, these kids were not the loners that the media made them out to be. They were not the victims of bullying that the media made them out to be. Apparently, they weren't even members of this "Trenchcoat Mafia" that they were so linked to. The group that actually called themselves the trenchcoat mafia had graduated a year before. My guess is that they just tied them to that group because of their coats, and the fact that the group was so fresh in everyone's memory. All of this information came from eye witnesses (students and whatnot interviewed afterward). You know, the kids that actually knew these guys. Their goal was actually to bomb the school, and not go on a shooting spree, according to their journals.

So, at any rate, theres the dump of my brain for the day. Hope you enjoyed the reading!

-War

Stimulus... what a crock!

nospam@example.com (War) — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:35:06 -0500

Ok, so who else is following the current "stimulus" package? In the past year or so i've actually started making an effort to keep an ear on politics. See what's going on in the world of our government and the elected officials we've chosen. I do this mostly by listening to a few talk channels on XM. One is Fox news talk, I can't say i like all of their shows, but one I do is Brian and the Judge. I like how they seem a little more balanced than most radio shows. A lot of shows have one host, who has his own opinions on how things should be done, and he tries to convince all of his listeners that his way is right, and everyone else is a freakin moron. Anyway, this show has two hosts, and they bring in more than one point of view, they don't just agree with each other all the time. They even argue with each other if they dont agree.

They've been following this new stimulus plan pretty closely. Did you know that they're talking about a sum of $925,000,000,000.00 this time around. Now, it seems like just yesterday that the government decided to take $700,000,000,000.00 of the taxpayer's money, and then threw $350,000,000,000.00 at a number of banks, businesses, and whatnot, and from what I'm hearing, it didn't help! The recipients took the money, put it into bonuses, jets, limo's, vacations, whatever, things that AREN'T helping the economy! So now we're talking about taking more money, which I assume is to come from the taxpayers, and giving it out to more businesses and agencies? On top of that, a ton of the proposed money is to go to things like the FBI, and Police harley's?! What does any of that have to do with stimulating the economy?

I heard this morning from someone they interviewed, sorry, I missed her name, but they were talking about this bill, and how it got so bloated. She said something along the lines of: The bill has to have enough "pork" to please the democratic members, and it has to be lean enough to please the republican members.

Ok.. WTF?! I have a better idea.. How about they steal just enough of our money to FIX THE DAMN PROBLEM. If they think that this stimulus can work, ok, that's all well and good, if they really think it'll work, and it works, then I guess it's worth it. I can't claim to be some economist, so I'm not going to say it wont work. I feel like it wont work, but I've been wrong before. Anyway, if it's going to work, why not focus on making it work, and not what we can tack on to it?

The other thing I don't quite understand is how this is going to help. How can spending more money get us out of all of this? Wouldn't the point of a stimulus be to put money back into the pockets of the citizens. So they can in turn spend that money on things, thus improving the economy? Make some decent jobs to get the unemployment down, maybe cut some taxes so a little less of my paycheck gets taken away from me and put into some government account, that I then have to hire a damned accountant to get a little back at the end of the year.

I'm not blaming Obama just yet. I can't say that I've heard any real evidence that he's behind the whole thing, it sounds more like the senate/house to me. Everyone's quick to blame the president just because he's in charge, and I don't approve of that, I think it's better to see who's really behind things before just blaming the leader. So I'm not going to go ahead and say it's all his fault. Because right now i don't think it is.

At any rate, I think cutting costs, rather than spending money, is what's going to help us out the most. It's very possible that i don't understand all of the things at work here. So maybe I'm wrong, but some of the reports I hear about this stimulus bill, just burn me up.

-War

Windows Hatred.

nospam@example.com (War) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:07:24 -0500

Call me a bitter unix user if you must, but after today, I need to vent some of my Windows related frustration.

Today, we found that the scheduled tasks we have setup on one of our, rather important, servers, just decided to stop working. When they run, as scheudled, as a user, they return a result code of "0x80", and do nothing. If you run them as a logged in user, they work perfectly. What's up with that?! Turns out that this is a bug! Yes, microsoft managed to screw up the TASK SCHEDULER, of all things. The problem is, that this bug was supposedly fixed in SP2 for Windows 2003. Guess what? The server in question already has SP2 on it! You know what they say to do to fix this now? Delete all of the tasks, reinstall SP2, reboot, re-add your tasks.

What? You want me to uninstall a core OS update, on a production machine?! Why in the hell would iw ant to do that?! All to fix the task scheduler? Mind you, this scheduler worked perfectly until just a few days ago. No updates were installed, no permissions changed, nothing, the issue arose on its own, as far as we can tell.

This is so frustrating. You have no idea. It's no secret that i'm a Unix/Linux fan. This very site runs on Linux. When was the last time i had a cron job spontaneously stop running? Let me think..... NEVER! unless there was a problem with the target of the job, which isnt cron's fault! In this case, the program which is to run works perfectly, its the scheduler itself that's busted.

How can microsoft get away with charging so much money, for such crap? Yea, i know Unix isnt bug free. There are plenty of very nasty bugs and exploits which will ruin any unix admin's day, but at least theyre not with core OS utilities, like the task scheduler!

I cant remember the last time i rebooted my server. I bet if i were to go check uptime right now, it'd be 100+ days.

[war@www ~]$ uptime

18:02:26 up 264 days, 22:51, 1 user, load average: 0.06, 0.08, 0.03

There you have it, 264 days. That's what, 9 months? Sure, i've seen windows servers up that long too, but not if you plan to actually keep the system up to date. You;ll be rebooting once a week if you run updates as often as you probably should. 90% of the updates i run on my server wont reboot the server. And if a reboot is requred, i'm not forced into it like on windows. Most things can be reloaded without a reboot. Why cant Microsoft grasp that idea?

I think i;m going to try to convince my boss to move his sql database and his parsing scripts to MySQL and linux. I'll let you know how that goes over.

Global warming eh?

nospam@example.com (War) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:57:34 -0400

What a crock.

For as long as i can remember, scientists, eco-freaks, and politicians have been moaning about global warming. Greenhouse gasses are eating away at the ozone layer and causing global heat increases... Meanwhile, here we sit, it's the middle of august, and it's all of 75 degrees outside. What a bunch of crap. Where's this global warming? It's certainly not here in PA. August is usually the hottest month of the summer around here. All hot, humid, and sticky. This year, it's like fall came a few months early.

I can remember back in the 90's. i was still a young teen, my Dad used to tell me that he didnt buy into the whole global warming thing either. He said that this planet was so old, and modern science was so young (comparitively) that it was impossible for these scientists to know what they were looking at. What if this was just some cycle that the plant goes through? He didnt know himself either of course, but it made a lot of sense to me. Seemed like just another issue for people who needed a cause to latch onto. Sure enough, scientists say we're now in a state of global cooling. You know what theyre calling it now? A cycle that the planet must go through. Turns out my dad was pretty close to right on his educated guess after all.

Moral of the story? Don't rush out looking for a cause that you know nothing about.

-War

Protect me from myself, please!

nospam@example.com (War) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 07:35:16 -0500

I work in an IT firm. Well, i guess thats what you'd call us. We do web hosting, development, a little internet access. We do more than just hosting, so i dont really think calling us a host is broad enough. I do Admin work, i administer a mix of Windows, and *nix servers. Theres two of us, and between the both of us, we do a pretty good job of keeping things stable. The servers stay up, we keep them up to date, we're constantly working to improve on the things that were put in place by earlier admins (who more often than not, did things wrong!).

All along though, it seems that our biggest hassle is the mechanism's put in place to help "protect" everyone from viruses. Not believe me, i know how important it is to prevent the spread of viruses. Try managing 100+ Windows servers sometime, you'll know what i mean.. I really think it's gotten out of hand though. In the position we're in, it's common that we need clients to send us things. Content for their wesite, half finished site designs or web applications, databases, programs to inspect, install, or whatever. What's the easiest way to send files to one another across the internet? You got it... E-mail! We use an exchange serer, so of course, we use Outlook, in order to take advantage of all of the "Features" that microsoft has so graciously packed into its overbloated answer to an e-mail server. Outlook strips attachments on its owrn. Yesterday i was working on a task from our shared task list. I wrote a perl script that needed to be deployed on a number of servers, and along with its deployment, a command line compression utility had to be installed. So i attached them both to the task for "safe" keeping.Well when i saved the task, Outlook tells me that i've attached "Possibly unsafe files" and that they might not be available to me if i re-open the task. I assume it's talking about the installer for the command line utility, and figure, what the heck, and just tell it ok. It's not that important that the file is attached to the task anyway.

Well i come back to my task later, open it up, and as i expected, the .exe is no longer attached. No big deal. The perl script is still there. Ok, back to work. Once I've made some updates, and want to save my task, it tells me that the same damn file is "unsafe"... It's not there! I can only assume that instead of removing it, outlook has hidden it. Which is just great. Now my task takes up an additional 3MB of storage on the exchange server, because of a file, that i cant even access. BRILLIANT! On top of that, i tried to replace my perl script with a newer version of it, and guess what.... It crashed Outlook.

Anyway, the point of the story is this. At what point does security become more of a burden than a tool? We have to keep things so locked down anymore in the IT field, that we need to find a way around our own security whenever we want to get some work done...

-War

Daylight Savings Time...

nospam@example.com (War) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:23:07 -0400

Why in the hell did congress decide that it was essential to the survival of the country to change DST?!?!?!

From an IT standpoint.. what a bloody nightmare. I manage a number of servers, ranging to Windows 2k, 2003, FreeBSD, and Linux. All of which require a different update for the DST changes. What a pain. I should have dealt with these back in March, but such things happen when you've only got 2 admins to manage over 100 servers....

So, for those interested here's what ive come across:

Windows 2000: Microsoft has a utility called "tzedit" which will allow you to manually update the DST info. I dont know for certain, but i think they later released a Windows update to automate this.

Windows 2003: Same as 2000, except that the Update was released earlier than the update for 2000 was, so the need for "tzedit" is removed, unless you tried to update it before the update was released.

FreeBSD: Apparently the guys at FreeBSD shipped 6.2 with the new DST info pre-packaged. Lucky for me, the newest FreeBSD server i manage is 6.1! With the majority being older. So if you're in the same boat, use Ports to update the zone info. First Update the ports tree, then install /usr/ports/misc/zoneinfo. Afterward I ran tzsetup to make the changes take effect, I dont know that this is necessary.

Linux: We run Fedora, and CentOS, so the yum package repository of choice. yum update tzdata gets the update, then system-config-time re-set's the clock.

Hope this helps someone avoid my headache...

-War

Windows Server...

nospam@example.com (War) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 18:10:22 -0400

How has Windows Server gained such a foothold in the IT field?

I work at a Webhost, we probably have 75% of our clients hosted (at the client's request!) on Windows servers. Part of this is becuase a lot of our customers are ColdFusion users, which we only run on Windows. The other day, we had a problem with a new customer which we setup on one of our Windows 2000 servers, with Front Page 2002 extensions. They were unable to login. Front Page gave a nice vague error of something like "You are not authorized to preform the current operation".

I spent two bloody hours troubleshooting this! It sounds simple right? Permissions? I'd say so, but you'd be wrong. Well, actually, I can't say you'd be wrong, because I don't know for sure what fixed it! I spent most of that 2 hours repeating the exact same steps in different orders. Which eventually fixed the problem. I found documentation from Microsoft that says that the site must be configured to accept Digest authentication for FP to work, but then i found another doc that said that Digest authentication will break FP's extensions, and you need Basic authentication. Now, Basic authentication is CLEAR TEXT! No encryption, just plain old text. Let's hear it for security. Basic authentication ended up working, along with resetting some permissions, reinstalling the FP Server Extensions (at least twice) and running the "Check server extensions" deal at least twice.

What a load of crap this OS is! 2003 is only slightly better, it'd added a few new features that make it much more bearable, but still just as cumbersome at the same time.

And what about error logging? Windows does a terriffic job of logging just enough data to tell you there was a problem, and not enough to give you even a hint at where to start digging. Why?! My CentOS server not only usually gives you a descriptive error message, but also tells you (gasp!) what file you might be able to find that error in! What a concept!

I guess Micro$oft has a better marketing department, and that's what really matters anymore, not stability, or dependability, or even optimum use of resources. No, pretty gui's, and apparent ease of use is what draws in todays customers. I've been running this server on a 670Mhz Intel PIII for years! It's up all the time, runs a database server, web, mail, and a host of other little gadgets that i tinker with. It serves as a development platform for my projects, hosts my personal mail server, and every site i've ever thrown at it, and aside from my initial investment in hardware, it's ALL FREE!

Yea, it takes some knowhow to make it all work, but isn't that what IT admin's get paid for? I thought so....

-War

Credit Cards are Evil

nospam@example.com (War) — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 21:07:28 -0400

Are you young? College kid maybe? Or perhaps just never owned a credit card, and youre thinking about applying?

DONT DO IT!

Credit cards are pure evil. Everyone has one anymore, and if they keep things under control, they love them. They just keep them for emergencies, or for that little spending once in a while.... Well, I'm telling you right now, theyre just a sick fuggin game that banks like to play. They take a kid right out of high school, or just getting into college, give him a $1500 limit, and a fscking ginormous interest rate, and make him think its a free pass to luxury. Well dont buy it!

My first credit card has a modest $500 limit. I thought, how much trouble can i get myself into with a $500 limit? Well that wasnt the problem, i coul dhandle the $500 limit, even if i maxed it, at most it took me one or two paychecks to pay it off. But it built my credit up a little, so when i decided that it was time for a better card, i got one at $1500.... Still not terrible, a little more dangerous, but nothing to get too bent out of shape over, a few months of cutting my spending can cover $1500 right? Well before I knew it, i had a Discover Platinum card, with a $7500 limit! Before i knew it, i had a few THOUSAND DOLLARS worth of stuff charged to it! It adds up quick! After i got married, we consilidated a bunch of other junk on to that card, and maxed it.... Then i enrolled it, and a few other cards (between my wife and I) in a debt consolidation program, we pay $140 or so a month to that card... and guess what? From that $7500 that we started with... we just broke $6000. Un believeable.

So, dont do it, dont get a credit card, dont fall into their game of interest rates, fee's, and bullshit. It's not worth it...

-War