June 16, 2009
mitch @ 12:17 pm on June 16, 2009
For lunch today, none of my co-workers were present today so I went to Subway(3197 S Redwood Rd, West Valley, UT), right at noon. The nearest one to my day job is usually busy but I believe the ladies that work behind the counter have the sandwich making down to an art. They’ve become very efficient at their little piece of the process. That doesn’t have much to do with the point just wanted to give them some credit where it’s due.
Anyway, it’s noon so naturally it’s busy and there are probably 15 or more people in line, and the short man(figuratively and actually) in front of me starts complaining after maybe a minute of waiting to his friend/partner/acquaintance, that he doesn’t understand why it takes so long to make a sandwich… And follows it up with something more snotty that I didn’t quite hear about how he’ll pass the time playing cards on his phone. Because of my mood from work I just about told him right there that the bulk of the wait time was because the people in the line ordering don’t know what they want(and I believe that to generally be the case for most fast food places… Some are definitely more efficient than others like the ladies at this particular subway), but I decided to take the higher road and prove my point. I timed this asshat in front of me to see just how long he himself took, and no joke he took 53 seconds to order the meat and bread he wanted. Through various changes to the order mid stream and the resulting clarifications the lady behind the counter had to make to make sure she made the order right. I timed it on my iPhone… I knew it
Life — No Comments
June 1, 2009
mitch @ 9:59 am on June 1, 2009
So… Aside from my issues with HP’s PolyServe/Clustered Storage pile of crap. And the fact that the HP EVA storage system is WAY over priced for the lack of throughput you get from it. ($2k a disk 500GB or 300GB depending on being FATA or FiberChannel respectively)
But my purpose is from their support. Its HORRIBLE! Whats the point of a systems serial number if it doesn’t tie in the rest of the equipment? HP Support seems to want the serial number of the system THEN they want the serial number of the part thats failed… WHY? why waist mine and your time HP? You should have every number thats part of the system linked to the systems serial number! And they also seem to always want some part number too… which seems to be also unique to the system… Whats the point? really? I mean, I like your ProLiant systems HP… but honestly… support on them is becoming very irritating… and I don’t want to deal with it. I’m busy, I have many things going on at any given point… support I PAID FOR, should not be difficult. And because I have experience with others, like Dell and IBM… I will use them… I remember Dells support fondly… while the usual hoops of did I swap the part around to make sure it actually has failed and such is understandable… but why must you insist on multiple numbers and have the server serial number not mean a damn thing? Fix it or my influence on never buying HP hardware will be enforced through out my reach as a IT Consultant….
Uncategorized — No Comments
May 24, 2009
mitch @ 1:26 pm on May 24, 2009
I went go-carting with my brothers yesterday. I’m not real sure about them, but I had fun.
Since racing itself is expensive… go-carting is considerably cheaper.
Anyway here’s our results, I’m cart 17:
Raceresults
Cars — No Comments
April 22, 2009
mitch @ 1:14 pm on April 22, 2009
My house basement has flooded since the day we moved in… don’t ask, I’m not going into all of that… We finally have gotten that taken care of… only to have the kitchen faucet explode. Lots of fun.
House — No Comments
April 5, 2009
mitch @ 8:44 pm on April 5, 2009
I have a special need for my mail server. Whatever the reason is that you can’t get postfix compiled with mysql support in even the one off repo’s for CentOS is I’m not sure. However, I still have a need for postfix with mysql support. Anyway, I don’t feel like maintaining my own version for CentOS at the moment for lack of time… and with the latest release of CentOS5.3 or Update 3 for RHEL 5, I didn’t want to upgrade, and have it break my postfix until I removed the newly installed version with the older release with mysql and postgres support. In the effort of avoiding that, I found a very nice yum module called “yum-versionlock”. So I installed it with:
yum install yum-versionlock
And Then I was able to add my postfix release I found from doing
rpm -qa | grep postfix
Then I added the output of the above line to: /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/versionlock.list
After that, I was able to run yum upgrade without issue. I believe I’m liking yum more every day over apt…. just wish debian could do some updates to apt and make it a bit more user friendly… As I much prefer more things about debian systems more than I do Redhat ones anymore. Mostly the flexibility that’s put into the packages and the modularity of the default configs.
Debian· Fedora· RedHat — No Comments
April 2, 2009
mitch @ 1:40 pm on April 2, 2009
The 10-31 Project. I love Colbert!
Funny· Politics — No Comments
March 19, 2009
mitch @ 7:58 am on March 19, 2009
Its no secret that I prefer linux on my desktop… I’ve been using it since 1996 in one form or another, and its been my primary desktop for atleast the last 4 years, and as a server… is there anything else? Not to say I’m a linux bigot, but I really have a hard time understanding why people like windows… I kinda get the desktop thing, it still just seems to be alot of work, but as a server? In times past the common argument for not using linux on the desktop was that people wanted to get “work” done, instead of the constant tinkering that seemed to happen on linux desktops alot. I will admit that in times past… that was a very real argument. However, over the last three years of using Ubuntu on my desktop… I can honestly say that the tables have turned. Who’s “working” and “tinkering” now? I’ve had to deal with some desktop issues over the last month or two, and they were all a result of Internet Explorer and Windows being unusable by anyone other than someone with Administrator privileges. Spyware, trojans, anti-virus software, and malware removal tools… WHY? Why is it windows guys find this acceptable? Why do you just accept this as “normal”?!?! Are you that naive to think that’s just the way it has to be? It ridiculous! I switched my wife to Apple a year or so ago, and I haven’t looked back. Its been smooth sailing… I run updates and backups for her and she doesn’t have many other problems out side of that. Linux has also gotten incredibly easy to run as well. Things just work, and when they don’t (ie: some process gets hung or whatever…) people are “reboot” trained for desktops that they would just reboot a linux desktop and everything would work again. Not that a reboot is required, but to someone thats not linux savy its still simple enough that’s what they would try first.
Anyway, what I really wanted to post about was that I upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) to the latest Alpha for Jaunty Jackalope. I know I was taking a risk since I did have a few problems with 8.10 originally when it was released even… but this release seems to be alot more stable even in its alpha stage. I’ve also removed gkrellm in favor of screenlets with the SysMonitorPlus Screenlet. I never liked the gnome desklets before,as they seemed to eat alot of system resources and didn’t really offer much. However, these seem to be much more efficient. I’ll post a screen shot when I get my desktop cleaned up.
I did run into one issue with the application Gnome-RDP. That was easily fixed by dumping the database and reimporting it after the new sqlite3 database was created. I will write about any new issues as they arise, but so far so good.
Linux· Microsoft· Ubuntu — No Comments
March 6, 2009
mitch @ 8:22 am on March 6, 2009
So, I was reading my daily dose of digg and I came across a story about a guy with one very upset windows support “tech” yelling at him in a gas station. And, I have to say, its ridiculous. I mean… its been the case for many years that Microsoft has created a whole ecosystem around fixing their Broken OS(tm). But to say that Open Source is the reason these people are loosing their jobs? Pfft, if they couldn’t see that this Open Source(tm) thing wasn’t a fad, then they deserve to loose their job. The Technology Field isn’t about just one Technology (Broken OS spoken of previously), its about many different ones, that all work together (some better than others… see previous comments) and form what’s commonly just referred to as “technology”. Which also has a saying, which even those asshats would know, is that its constantly changing, as soon as something makes it to market… its outdated within a month. Just the nature of the beast, and you learn to roll with it. I would also say that being able to roll with it, and not locking myself down to any one particular technology is the reason I’ve gotten as far as I have in my own career. I definitely have my preferences(see my blog…), but that guy just needs to find his cheese.
Books· Open Source· Technology — No Comments
February 19, 2009
mitch @ 3:14 pm on February 19, 2009
I ran into a slight issue today with OS X (Leopard), where it would ignore the file permissions forced by my samba file server… In order to maintain users and groups with the correct permissions, I have shares setup like:
[share]
comment = share Volume
path = /srv/SHARE
browseable = yes
writeable = yes
Valid Users =@DOMAIN+”Domain Users”
create mask = 0660
force create mode = 0660
directory mask = 0770
force directory mode = 0770
force group =@DOMAIN+Domain Users
hide files = /__TMP__/.DS_Store/lost+found/
so, I should get files that look like:
-rw-rw---- 1 root root 0 Feb 19 15:07 test1
But the default umask on OS X is 022, so I would get files showing up like:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 19 15:07 test2
On the above share… This would prevent other users from changing the files….
Turns out, Apple started pushing for more POSIX compliance and as a result their files would turn up with the permissions assigned to the file on the local system or with their default umask as its created. In a shared world… not always ideal, but I don’t want to have to change the umask on all of the OSX clients…. found an option in samba that I added under the [global] section as follows:
[global]
…..
# Make OS X Leopard play nice with others
unix extensions = off
This fixed my problem.
Apple· Linux· RedHat· Work — No Comments
February 2, 2009
mitch @ 8:33 am on February 2, 2009
Its been quite the year for my ‘08 Subaru WRX… I didn’t write about it, but I was in an accident on Thanksgiving, no one injured, but my Subie had alot of damage…. So much, that I didn’t get it back until the 13th of January… Only to have something still wrong with it (lifters were clicking… but they didn’t tell me what exactly) Which it went back in for that on the 21st, and I didn’t get it back until the 27th…. Only to have it pop up with a check engine light, traction control and a blinking cruise light…
So today its back in for that… This time however, I took it to the Subaru Dealer, but they aren’t sure what it could be… so they will be looking at it, and I’ll write about what it turns up to be when they let me know.
*UPDATE*
It turns out the repair shop had loosened my gas cap, which I didn’t notice until I filled up the morning I took it into the shop and tightened it down. The shop said it was a leaking evap system but everything appeared to be fine. I had them just reset the computer and its been fine ever since.
Cars· WRX — No Comments
