Archive by Author

Wikipedia lists are AWESOME!

So I’m a huge fan of Wikipedia lists.

Lists in general are extremely good – informative, yet delivering the information faster to you than any pie-chart, graph, or spreadsheet ever could.

In particular, Wikipedia lists are great ‘cos they offer information in one central repository of information – great for people like me who need critical info about things NOW.

Instant gratification for the win.

Anyways, here are some of the top Wikipedia lists that I use on a frequent basis.

  • List of Stargate Atlantis Episodes, Season 5
    This list is awesome – Stargate Atlantis is awesome, and so is Season 5. I use this list primarily to find out when the new episodes are broadcast, as well as seeing extra info for each and every episode.
  • List of Top Gear Episodes, Season 10
    This list is also awesome for the same reasons that the Stargate Atlantis list is awesome – broadcast dates and episode listings. Top Gear is awesome too, so I suppose that helps…
  • List of Intel Core 2 Microprocessors, Quad Core Mobile processors
    Intel processors are the best of the bunch (in this writer’s opinion, anyway) and this is another one of those awesome lists that deliver info on critical things like core 2 duo processors. I’ve been looking at the release dates on Quad core mobile processors to try and gauge when Apple are going to be putting them in their computers, to be honest. Once upon a time I did use this list for processor spec comparisons between Yorkfield processors for the gaming rig I was building, but then I bought a Mac šŸ˜€
  • List of Operating Systems, Smartphones
    The Apple iPhone is an awesome piece of kit and I’m proud to say that it’s OS is listed under smartphones. I was actually looking at this list as research for some of my previous iPhone posts – as well as doing some future research for some upcoming iPhone posts, because, as you know, I’m a huge fan of apple gear. Enough said.

So Wikipedia is awesome, and not just because of it’s lists. However, there are times when it just goes far too far, and into the realms of insanity.

Deletionpedia is the place where Wikipedia articles go to die, and it has one of the most massive lists ever…

The Weapons of the Imperium (Warhammer 40,000)

It was either this or a Simpsons list of all the chalkboard gags that was labelled “fancruft”. LOL. That’s mind blowing. Who in their right mind would make that?!

And finally – today’s WTF…

List of Unicode characters

Just, WTF. I’m astounded. :O

A massive pain in the neck…

So some of you may know that I was sick last Tuesday (23rd September) – I missed a day because I had slept really wrongly the night before and managed to stuff my neck real bad.

It wasn’t very nice – lots of cramping, spams, pain. Ugh.

Well, I’ve decided to educate you. I refer you to the following diagram:

The sternocleidomastoid muscle (highlighted in grey) was the one that I had managed to over-stretch or something – it was all swollen and stuff…

Anyway, I’m sure you all know someone who is a constant pain in the neck.

I’ve now experienced that pain, and I doubt anyone could annoy me that much – if you can annoy me to the point where performing basic tasks such as walking becomes a real pain in the neck (haha, pun fully intended), then you’ve done a good job.

<sarcasm> Yeah. Good one! </sarcasm>

Pain in the form of physical isn’t too bad – normally, I’m pretty okay with it.

I went ice-skating with friends on Saturday (congrats, Adam), and I fell over. No probs, I was a little wet, but not hurt. Righto, so I continue on skating – until oops, not 10 seconds later this guy (Ayden dM) just slams into me, totally taking me out. I fall harder this time, and am a little more wet, but oh well, stuff happens. Right – so I get up and continue skating – when I look at my palm, and there’s blood all over it! Whoa!

It was just a little cut in the end (didn’t take off skin, just cut it a little) but it was bleeding profusely. I got all bandaged up, and that was that… Missed my vein by a couple of centimetres, though. Had a bandage which made me look emo (for cutting myself), lol.

Anyways, pain is your body’s way of telling you that something isn’t right – and when that pain manifests itself as emotional pain, it means you’re in an emotional situation where something just isn’t right – so make it (right)!

That is all. Comments below.

iHaz iPhone 3G

So the first day I tried to get an iPhone was Tuesday the 16th September 2008. I woke up, go ready, and was totoally pumped to be getting an iPhone today.

I caught the 8am bus out of my place of residence, and right after I had been to see Wall-E with a friend at 9:30, I popped into Next Byte in Hobart with the plans of picking up an iPhone there and then. By that time it was around 11:30ish.

Unfortunately, this didn’t happen as the guy that was most familiar with the sign-ups wasn’t there. I did, however, get a look at the new iPod Nanos, Touch’s, and Classics! Win – but no iPhone 3G for me. Strike one.

The next morning, I woke up bright and early to go have another crack at attaining this mythical device they call the “Second Coming” – also known as the iPhone 3G.

Once again, I caught the 8am bus. This time, a friend who also lived nearby caught the bus with me – he had a 9am driving lesson. While this made my bus trip considerably more enjoyable, it wasn’t until yet another friend caught the bus that things started to become really scary. Coincidence? Or something more…

Speaking of bus trips, there have been bus trips that could have been something life changing – but that’s for another time.

Anyway, I dropped into Next Byte again, at 9am sharp – my thinking behind this was that I would catch the guy that was most familiar with the iPhone sign-ups. Of course, there was no way I could miss him at 9am, so I managed to catch him. We filled out all the forms, and were on the phone to Telstra about to activate my phone, when they dropped the bombshell that I had to be 18 to start a post-paid (plan) contract. I knew this was going to be a problem beforehand, but I thought we could give it a crack anyway. Didn’t work.

A quick call to my mum later, and Dad is now standing in the store with me. By this time, it is about 9:30ish. The plan from this point was to sign me up in my Dads name – but alas, no! It was not to be.

Since I was on a plan before I changed to pre-paid, the current account was in my Mum’s name, with my password (which I didn’t know at the time). So naturally when I tried to transfer the name of the account to my Dads name, it didn’t work. Obviously, the next logical step was to get the account transferred into Dads name – which I needed the password for. D’oh!

My Mum rang up Telstra, confirmed her details, and the person from Telstra gave her the password to my account. All good, right?

Wrong. We tried to put the post-paid sign-up through again, and once again, it didn’t work for some unknown reason. By this time, it was around 10:00 and so it was time for breakfast. My Dad and I headed off to Banjo’s where I enjoyed a toasted Bacon and Egg pita with BBQ sauce – yum! 10:30 came, and it was time to go back to the store.

By this time my Mum had rang Telstra and confirmed exactly what needed to happen for the account to be transferred into my Dads name – my dad had to apply for the transfer (by ringing Telstra), and then my Mum would confirm the transfer by ringing Telstra. So it was only painfully obvious that when we rang Telstra to apply for the transfer, that Telstra had got it wrong and my Mum needed to authorise/confirm the transfer before it actually happened – WTF, Telstra.

By now I’m getting sick of explaining to the guys in India about my situation, not to mention dialling 1258880. On the off-chance that I managed to reach someone in either Sydney or Melbourne, they were very helpful (and I could actually understand them).

So the end result was that my Mum confirmed the transfer via conference call between her, the Telstra guy, and my Dad. Finally! The account was in my Dads name and we could continue on… This was at 11:15.

Now I had some pre-paid credit on my phone before I made the switch to post-paid – this disappeared into the ether as soon as I made the switch to 3G post-paid. I rang Telstra once again, and they said they didn’t have any record of any credit against my pre-paid account. Of course I had tried to transfer as much credit as possible using the *125# thingo – but alas, a $10 limit per 24 hours applied. Again – WTF, Telstra. I tried to manually transfer the credit when I was on the phone with the Telstra guy, but since the person I was transferring the credit to didn’t know her password to her account, I couldn’t. By the time I had come home and she had found out the password, it was too late – the credit had disappeared.

We finally got out of Next Byte at around 12 – a little over 3 hours had been spent there. I’ve never been one to complain about Telstra’s service – for which you get what you pay for, in this case mobile coverage all across Australia, and second to none 3G data speeds – but seriously, they need to get their act together.

So, why Telstra? Their coverage is indeed, second to none. I went with Telstra as I knew I was always going to have coverage (unless I ventured into the 2% of Australia that isn’t covered by their excellent NextG network), and unlike some Optus users, I wasn’t going to have massive headaches with 3G/GSM coverage in capital cities, for instance.

Sure, I’m in total agreement of the fact that I do pay a little more than I would if I went with Optus or any other carrier – but seriously, in Tasmania it’s probably worth it. How much more I do pay isn’t as much as people think it is. No, I don’t have to sell my firstborn son/kidneys/any body parts to pay for my iPhone.

However, if you take a look at Google, you’ll find that there are multitudes of forum-ites (forum-goers?) who are complaining that the government shouldn’t have sold Telstra off as a whole company as it did – as now that non-government owned Telstra has complete monopoly of the telecommunications network in Australia, leading to the fact that shiping data from Melbourne to Hobart costs SIX TIMES more than it does than from Melbourne to the US.

I blame Telstra.

Everything is falling apart…

If you’re like me, you’re in Year 12 and taking Chemistry as a pre-tertiary, then you’ll know the Second Law of Thermodynamics like the back of your hand.

However, if you don’t, here it is again. Think of this as early revision for your end-of-year exams that are coming up.

Entropy is always increasing.

Not strictly correct, but that’s the version that I’ll be using for today’s blog post.

Now I’ve never thought of entropy outside of the Chemistry lab apart from when I’m setting the level of Entropy on some FPS (First Person Shooter = computer game) I’m playing, but it apparently has applications in natural science, as well!

As an aside, I’m astounded by the number of adults who don’t know what a LAN party is. We get together with computers and kill other people, take over their land, or orchestrate our enemies’ fiery demise. How simple is that?

Anyway, I’ve now finished Physics of the Impossible (Amazon) by Michio Kaku as mentioned in this post. It’s taken me this long because of numerous, continual interruptions, coupled with the fact that if I read it for too long, my brain will explode. The topics mentioned are a little too advanced for me, so I just have to take lots of little breaks, otherwise I’ll be catatonic for the rest of the day.

Talking about the book itself, it’s really good. If you like Physics, and have an insatiable need to read books on it, I highly recommend Physics of the Impossible and Visions, both of which I own. I’m yet to read Hyperspace, though, and I probably want to.

The book is also the inspiration for this blog post – if entropy is always increasing as it is according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, then you’ll also find that everything is falling apart. How so? Well:

It is far easier to destroy than to build.

Every time you look in the mirror and see a new wrinkle or a new white hair you are observing the effects of the Second Law. Biologists tell us that the ageing process is the gradual accumulation of genetic errors in our cells and genes, so that the cell’s ability to function slowly deteriorates. Ageing, rusting, rotting, decay, disintegration, and collapse are also examples of the Second Law.

So yeah.

I’ll just leave you to mull that over for a minute or so – truth be told, though, I’ve just had a writers spasm. Not able to write anymore.

If you’ve finished mulling, then take a look at this XKCD comic:

Comments below.

There are two sides to every story…

…and as such, two sides of every coin.

If you missed my post about why professional IT is going down the drain, hit it up here. It’s highly recommended for what I’m about to say, because then you’ll know what I’m actually talking about.

However, it is the length of a small essay, so I’ll provide the executive summary here:
Professional IT is going down the toilet because the “professionals” aren’t – they’re mindless, spineless robots who don’t diversify themselves into many different IT fields, choosing to instead specialise (and then even barely) in one particular field, one vendor, one solution. When faced with a challenge, they recommend their one and only solution, backing away from everything they’re unfamiliar with – even if the unknown could be a far better solution than their “tried and true” solution.

BUT! There is one problem – we’re only looking at one side of the equation, coin, story. We know that the IT professionals are becoming less and less professional – but why?

Well, I have the answer.

It’s you.

It’s probably not me, but it is the people that put huge demands on their respective IT professional.

I know a person that is an awesome guy – nice to hang with, has good morals, etc – but he does work in IT. He is also damn good at his job. Over the last couple of months though, I’ve seen that even though the quality of his work hasn’t deteriorated, his attitude towards it has.

You might be asking yourself how you’re the problem. Well, end-users are now expecting so much of people in the IT industry – to me, we’re becoming an increasingly selfish culture who only see ourselves as the centre of the universe.

Everything, all the time, is about “Me, Me Me!”, and it doesn’t matter that there is a queue for services, or that there are other matters to be attended to before people can deal with your problem. People aren’t seeing the big picture – in the grand scheme of things, you don’t matter.

Maybe this is turning into a rant, but even worse is when end-users like you complain bitterly about the service you’ve received. I mean, what the hell, man! We’re trying to help you, and the thanks we get is “I iz gonna call the [insert security organisation/complaints department of choice here] on your ass!“? Thanks, but no thanks. I’d rather not serve you next time – and I’m sure my colleagues feel the same way.

Judging by the reactions of some people who have lost years of data because they [stupidly] never backed up and were “surprised” by a massive hard drive failure (it happens, trust me, it happens), then it’s no wonder professional IT is going down the drain! Seriously, calm down and while you’re thinking about your precious data that we’ve inadvertently lost, think about how it’s all your fault. These kinds of failures, while rare, can happen and are totally preventable. To this end, I’m issuing a community service announcement: back the hell up. If it’s important to you, back it up. At a bare minimum, back up anything you’ve created yourself, eg all your school documents, essays, presentations, spreadsheets. If in doubt, back it up.

I apologise. Once again, I digress. Getting back on topic, my awesome friend now has a horrible attitude towards work, and it’s all the end-users fault. I once had some other people I know consider suing some computer shop just because they lost their data – this was after they had signed a contract saying that that computer store wasn’t responsible for their data, as they shouldn’t have been. If you’re thinking of trusting your data to anyone else, even those “automated backup” software, don’t. It’s not a good idea to leave your data in someone else’ hands, much less a money grabbing company!

AH! What is with me and backups! Right, getting back on topic, again: My anonymous friend now doesn’t care. He’s completely indifferent to your continual issues with your printer, scanner, and Windows. He just doesn’t care – he’s being paid to fix your problems, but that doesn’t mean he cares.

Personally, I think that’s a rubbish attitude to have, especially in IT. Apple Genii don’t get their jobs by not wanting to help people! Sure, there is a fine difference between not caring and wanting to help. In IT, you could do your job even if you didn’t care. You could still be awesome at your job and not care. However, you wouldn’t excel at your job.

At the end of the day, it’s up to you whether you care or not.

Comments below.

Is this me?

Probably. Maybe. It definitely could be.

This post is going to be a little long, so I’ll cut out as much of the crap as I can. That being said, read on.

I was reading an article the other day on the internet. I’ll just list it here verbatim:

I make a living as a sysadmin. What does that mean, to be a sysadmin? Well, where I come from it means knowing a lot. It means knowing how to config routers and networking equipment, it means advanced firewalling, DNAT, SNAT, it means knowing how to do traffic sniffing and deciphering packet-level information, it means knowing how to build and configure common services like SMTP/IMAP/POP/mail via a dozen different pieces of software on three different families of operating systems, it means knowing how to build clusters for high availability and high performance, it means knowing when to use CIFS, NFS, SMB, GFS and when not to and what the difference is between them all, it means knowing how to configure iSCSI, fibre channel, SANs, direct and non-direct storage, it means knowing SQL and getting information out of databases, it means knowing how to program in a dozen different languages and how to script and automate events in any OS to make life easier, it means understanding authentication and security settings, how to configure any directory service from LDAP to AD to NIS, it means understanding DNS is more than just a optional addon to look up system names occasionally, it means understanding encryption, knowing what terms like Diffie Hellman, AES, SHA1 and others mean, and what parts of the encryption process they apply to, it means being able to make everything you do completely redundant and fault tolerant, right down to you own job, and it means so much more.

…snip…

Why is it that professional IT services today consist of service reps who tell you the things you are doing are untested, dangerous, unsupported, different, not usual, or a host of other words meaning they are scared shitless and unwilling to learn something new? Why is it that I spend my time building things people tell me for 6 months during build and test ā€œwill never workā€, only to have them go into production and work ten times faster for one tenth the cost of the old system? Why is it that IT professionals today choose brand labels over intelligence, and post-justify it by hiding behind ā€œboard confidenceā€ when providing a solid, working, profitable system is the best thing to boost confidence from the board?

…snip…

And every time I leave, I hear the same things. Some new guy comes in to replace me. Within days/weeks heā€™s broken something necessary for production, lost terabytes of data, destroyed the backup/DR/recovery systems, spent hundreds of thousands replacing something that met the businessesā€™ every need with some proprietary/generic piece of rubbish that performs half as well when there were dozens of other things that could have been improved instead. And all because they didnā€™t take the time to understand the business, itā€™s needs, and the solutions currently in place.

…snip…

The hardware is provided by a tier 1, namebrand hardware provider (number 2 worldwide in server sales, I hear). The support guys who come on site are paid absolute buckets of cash and are supposedly the best of the best. These guys come out and utterly bollocks up installs. They constantly tell you things are impossible to achieve, only to stare slack-jawed in amazement three weeks later when they are achieved and working faster than their setups were supposed to provide. They rant and spit when I build things for zero-dollar licensing cost that their multi-hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollar hardware is supposed to be the only stuff that can do the job (my latest GFS/CLVM cluster outperforms their SAN snapshotting, and is free of charge compared to their pay-a-license-per-snapshot ā€œsolutionā€). And of course, their golden trump card is to say ā€œwell thatā€™s fine, but we donā€™t support itā€ when you offend them. Watch the CIOs scramble when their hardware vendors threaten to not offer support! Yet ask them when they last called on the ā€œprofessionalā€ support (other than simple break/fix/replace stuff), and most canā€™t answer.

…snip…

So when did this happen? When did ā€œthe IT guyā€ turn from the person who was cross trained with the breadth and depth of knowledge across a wide variety of systems and procedures turn into a drivelling half-wit who sees more value in a commercial certification than actually learning and building things, and who decides to be ā€œthe Microsoft guyā€ or ā€œthe UNIX guyā€ or ā€œthe Cisco guyā€ and learns nothing but one brand-name item to the ignorance of all others, and often poorly because they canā€™t separate concepts and ideas from brand names and marketing acronyms?

…snip…

Iā€™ve had a gut full. Something must come of this. The industry as a whole is in for a rude shock if it keeps going the way it does. We keep packing IT departments full of more people who know less. Things break constantly because unqualified people manage them, and departments stop communicating because the connecting technologies are always ā€œsomebody elseā€™s problemā€. The industry gets flooded with cowboys who have no concept of system and data integrity, who donā€™t take care with the systems they are put in charge of, who donā€™t bother securing things in a proper fashion so that data doesnā€™t leak everywhere. Itā€™s almost a daily event to hear of some horrendously scary security breech that affects millions of innocent people who put their trust in these idiots.

Please not that these aren’t my words, but they do echo my thoughts. If you’re interested, and have an OCAU account, you can read the full thread here, otherwise check here for the full post.

Now, I’m not perfect when it comes to IT; my knowledge is the furthest from complete as it can possibly be.

Don’t get me wrong, I know, and have met people who are exactly like described above – those guys that say they can do “all that”, but in reality can do “none of the above”. On the other hand, there are people I know who aren’t like that. Chris is one of those people. Sure, he can be the slackest person ever when it comes to paying people back, or writing blog posts, but like any good Linux user, he lives and dies by his man pages. If there’s something he doesn’t know about, he’ll probably “wiki” it, or use the Google machine. Mark my words, he’ll become of the those people who know absolutely everything about absolutely anything – and I wish him the best of luck. Better him than me…

There was a situation at work where a UNIX jockey (or who I assume to be a UNIX jockey) came in and asked about getting a Mac. He was relieved to know about the support of X11, the BSD subsystem, the Terminal and all that, but it all started whether he could install a GNOME or KDE environment on it in place of Aqua. I was a little shocked that you would want to do that, but recovered a little by saying that I’m sure you could (or at least hack it so that it worked), but I’m not sure why you would. That was all fine and good, and being the Linux user that I once was, I was pretty confident I could handle the rest of his questions. One for one. Not bad.

His next question was comparatively easy; can I compile my own apps using the GNU C Compiler? Well, yeah, Apple include GCC as part of Xcode, and I’ve even compiled wget (not included by default on OSX) from scratch and installed it on my system. However, there are restrictions: you can’t install whatever version of GCC you like; Apple dictate what version you can and can’t install officially. I also added in that there would be nothing stopping you from installing the version of GCC provided by Apple, and then compiling your own version of GCC from scratch – however this would probably cause untold mayhem and mess. Two for two. Still going strong…

Then he threw me a curveball – he asked me which libraries X11 was built against, and which libraries that BSD subsystem of OSX shipped with. Of course, I had no idea and responded by saying that Apple generally don’t release that kind of documentation (although I’m not too sure about that) as they’re running a closed source scheme. This is where I tripped up a little – sure, the info he was asking for was a little technical, and not out of my reach, but surely I wasn’t expected to rattle off each and every single library that Apple ships with their OS? Surely not. However, I definitely could have (and was capable of) finding out this information beforehand. Why didn’t I? Primarily because I don’t want to memorise crap for the sake of memorising crap, but really – if you’re that dependent on some special library, install GCC and compile it yourself!

This is how I’ve become that “drivelling half-wit who sees more value in a commercial certification than actually learning and building things, and who decides to be” … the Mac guy … “and learns nothing but one brand-name item to the ignorance of all others.” That’s me!

As a closing thought just to make myself feel better, there was another scenario at work where I had stuffed up. Yeah, it happens. Anyways, that affected my confidence for a bit. After a few weeks of under-performance and general moping, I decided to talk to someone at work who knew his stuff. I approached him with my concerns, and he basically said that I do alright for how old I am, and it didn’t matter that I stuffed up ‘cos it was a problem that was easily fixed. After that, I felt a little better.

There’s this other guy at work who “expects brilliance, all the time” from Will and I. He’s a fantastic guy – making it clear what he expects, and what he doesn’t expect. When I don’t know how to solve something, he isn’t disappointed – he knows what I’m capable of. He’s a good guy.

The point is, if you’re thinking of going into IT, don’t be like “that UNIX guy” who know everything about UNIX and nothing about anything else, or “that Mac guy” who knows everything about Mac and nothing about anything else. Read your man pages. Study hard. Sure, worry about your final CCNA exam, but at the end of the day, it’s just a qualification that looks damned good on your resume.

Not that that’s important or anything šŸ™„

Comments below. Apologies for the long post, hope it was worth your time.