Ramble On

Most days when I get to the end of the day, I can’t remember half of what I did that day. When people ask me what I did - I can’t really tell them. This, of course, is horribly demoralizing because I begin to doubt whether I actually did anything, or maybe I just zoned out doing my TPS reports.

This isn’t some “woe is me, I’m soooo busy” statement. Or some arrogant “I’m so important, I do all kinds of things” statement. I’m not relatively busier than anyone else in similar positions (or in dissimilar positions in our specific team) - and my importance is like the Dilbert carton that showed up a few months ago where Dilbert had a choice between doing an important anonymous activity - or doing something useless that looked like an accomplishment and then attended meetings until he couldn’t appreciate the difference.

Nope, not remembering is more a natural function of most system administration positions - there’s a number of clearly distinct, interrupt-oriented tasks that don’t lend themselves to spending any quality, concentrated study time (which most technical tasks really need) - and add to that the information overload of aggregated feeds, twitters, IM’s that I let myself indulge in and whammo! there goes the memory.

I can’t figure out whether the current position is worse for the amnesia or my last position (more management oriented) was. The current one has more distinctly separate technology pieces, but the last one involved way too many meetings and a lot of EDS-esque cat herding. I think the current one is, maybe because I’ve gotten older, or maybe because our project is trying to tackle too many completely different scopes at the same time.

Anyway, I actually remembered what I did yesterday. (well, almost, I remembered the two or three big things - and went back through my email and IM and console logs for the others) And the more I thought about it - the more that yesterday was a completely typical day in my Life as a Grant-Sponsored University Systems Manager. So I present to you - a day in the life (maybe will start a meme. I doubt it though).

Arrive at work - 7:51 am

Run mail.app. Run Adium.

I review my overnight email, trash the spam, make sure the expected email that comes from some of the overnight processes that indicate they completed is there. Check all the shared folders and make sure all those mails came in from the overnight processes. Some days this is a “gut feel” check - I make sure what’s supposed to be there is there, and is about the right size. Some mornings I read each of the emails. It depends on what’s going on. I usually catch up with everything by the end of the week when I don’t read all of them every day. Yesterday I read about half of them because I started IM’ing with James about some changes I made to our pubsite application the day before to fix issues we were having with underscores, plusses, and %20 characters all being treated as spaces and the side effects of that.

We also talked about one of us trying to explore the mediawiki python bot to see if it could do anything to help our colleagues do any mass changes to categories in our mediawiki acting as a CMS for our public website.

Sadly, I volunteer to do this

8:30am

I download the python wikipedia bot. I respond to some comments on one of my flickr photos, go through anything that looks incredibly interesting in Google Reader and Del.icio.us. Decide to go ahead and update the three wordpress installs to WordPress 2.1.3 and put it in the blog

8:55

Start IM’ing with Daniel - who works with me part-time. He’s trying out the custom Locomotive Bundle I put together to our own gem server. And I remember that I need to open the conf rules on that to allow folks at home to point to our gem repo instead of limiting that to campus. So I make the change, check it into svn, update the server’s conf, and restart Apache

9:15

Got an IM that a mistake was made in deploying a bug fix to our public site application, and some other code that hadn’t cleared through all our internal discussions got deployed - along with db migrations that make it impossible to revert the change. Whoops. Big Whoops. Huge Whoops. And the content needs to be refreshed for the site because some bug fixes were also in that code that make it necessary to reimport content to make sure the timestamps are right. I put the site in maintenancemode and got to that.

9:30

Help another staff member debug a problem with Google Reader and the feeds for some of our applications.

Chatted with Ben about some user interface things that could help ease the transition of the code change we just made and how putting in certain changes just might exacerbate trying to describe to folks how it really works.

9:45am

Return to the python mediawiki bot. Get the CVS directories yanked out of it, turn the .cvsignore’s into svn:ignore - and check it into our deployment repository. Create the account for the bot. Start reading all the instructions for configuring the thing.

Start cursing.

Problem #1: the bot doesn’t understand our redirection on login to https:// I don’t know python. But I know enough ruby and perl and php to hack - so I hack. I figure out where in the world in the login script for the bot to change it to understand SSL. But I don’t have much hope that it’s going to work. I change httplib.HTTPConnection to httplib.HTTPSConnection and pray that it works - and wow, wonders upon wonders that it does. I begin to praise Guido van Rossum and temporarily overlook that the language requires proper indentation.

Problem #2: the bot really hates that we eschew wiki style and allow category (and page) names that start with lower case letters. I begin cursing again, because this one is really buried, and my debug-by-print attempts are throwing syntax errors because of the indentation issues.

James tries to help, because he actually likes python. I curse James for liking python.

I fix that problem, and feel proud and smug because I actually made it a configuration option. I give up while I’m ahead and go have lunch with the wife.

11:30am

Lunch with the wife. Best part of the whole day.

1:10pm

Get back to the python mediawiki bot. It doesn’t appear to work at all for editing the content in the test wiki. Waste the next hour and half of my life running python interactively, importing the bot libraries, creating my own site and page objects, and trying to figure out what’s wrong - and why then page content was blank, and traipsing through the code to figure out how the thing parses the edit page to get at the content (it parses for the textareas)

And then come to find out, an add-on to mediawiki written by our colleagues to try to make it a little easier to pick images and templates for an article is full of a bunch of hidden javascript-presented blocks with - you guessed it - a bunch of textareas. Turn off the plugin for a bit, and voila! the bot works.

2:45pm

Start talking with James about whether or not this is ever going to work at all. (the bot, not the project) We don’t really resolve out whether or not the bot is going to be useful. But we now have enough information to run with if it does come up again

3:00pm

Go traipsing through the shared mailboxes - including the inbound and outbound mail out of our support system. See that a colleague has entered a support call about how article summaries aren’t showing any markup. Go looking through our code to figure out how the summaries are created and how the tags are stripped to make sure that the summary truncation doesn’t break things due to dangling tags. IM my colleague and explain what was going on with the summary thing and ask her thoughts on trying to actually do anything with it. (begin to contemplate how in the world to even do that, probably white listing em and strong tags and making sure they are closed. groan thinking about the regexes)

3:20pm

Read through the staff list mails about some of the issues that resulted from the morning’s premature deployment. Write up some explanations about how the mediawiki include functionality works (the mediawiki includes are used in some of the content preparation to reproduce content nav blocks in pages that eventually display on our public site). Try to clarify some additional confusion that results from how we look for specific category tags to display specific content pages (like in a sidebar - it’s very blog like)

3:45pm

Talk with James for a bit about ongoing issues and group priorities

4:00pm

Talk with the wife for a bit in IM. Catch up on the day’s Google Reader.

4:15pm

Start figuring out again the find command to let me grep a string in all the files created in the last day. Settle on find . -ctime -1 -print -exec grep -i jason {} \;

The goal, because I have 75,000+ spam emails sent to our server in the last three months and because it was choking up Mail.app so bad to occasionally browse through that looking for any false positives - that I pulled the account out of Mail.app and went to the server side to poke through the spam folders looking for that.

4:45pm

Run that in the wrong directory. Whoops!

5:10pm

Start reviewing the meeting items posted for the all-staff meeting the next day. Send Kevin some questions on
e-commerce and what was discussed at the meeting retreat the previous week.

5:30pm

Leave for the day. Head home trying to figure out someway, somehow to ask questions in our staff meeting about our focus and direction.

—-

Pretty typical actually. (usually less time spent on one problem like the python bot problem) Some days are a little longer. Some days have more Google Reader Some days are more systems, less dev, some days more dev, less systems.

And that folks, was the way it was, April 4 2007 A day in the life of this systems manager.

Lake Raleigh on the NCSU Centennial Campus - at sunset (through a polarizer)

Episode moved to its new home at conversationswithplasticdinosaurs.com

Episode moved to its new home at conversationswithplasticdinosaurs.com

Hi Software/Hardware Vendors,

I can’t say enough how I appreciate academic discounts on your products. While I know that’s usually because your products are front-and-center with faculty and students who go on to spend thousands upon thousands in corporate environments, and it’s a likely write-off for you, I still think it’s nice. So I hope that you’ll know that I actually like you with the rest of what I’m about to say (except for you vendors that have ridiculously asinine dongles and license management schemes, but thankfully I don’t have to deal with you anymore).

Could you perhaps, maybe, recognize the fact that many (most?) Universities have wildly decentralized support/systems teams? That the mere fact that my colleague in a far-flung department is not in my department and just because they ordered a product/service/contract doesn’t mean that I want to be combined with them at all?

I’d really appreciate this.

K’ thanks bye!

Yes, in case you were wondering, my wife left to go run some errands.

So I came into the office today to find this on my voice mail:

To Review Your Message, Press One (mp3)

Transcript:

Hi,

This message is for Mr. Jason Young. Hi Mr. Young, my name is Colleen Sullivan. I’m with Congressman Tom Cole in the National Republican Congressional Committee in Washington. We would like to recognize you sir, it’s with our National Leadership Award. But I want to talk with too about a press release, because we do want to send that out to you. So again, my name is Colleen Sullivan. My number is 1-877-213-0603. So please call as soon as get the message. Thank you sir and you have a good day.

I knew something was pretty well scam-tastic about it, so I started trying to check Ol’ Tom and Colleen out - which didn’t take long to find out that the National Republic Congressional Committee is tele-spamming multiple people with this little “award” thing But I want to make sure they get their word out - so I’ve provided a helpful translation of their message:

———

Hi,

This message is for Mr. Jason Young.

Dear Sir INVESTMENT INQUIRY

Hi Mr. Young, my name is Colleen Sullivan. I’m with Congressman Tom Cole in the National Republican Congressional Committee in Washington.

My name is Barrister j.c.don a Legal practitioner and member of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and Institute of International Affairs in my country.

We would like to recognize you sir,

I am forwarding this proposal to you out of the intuitive confidences I have about you and your ability to assist in the executtion of a certain straightforward transaction.

it’s with our National Leadership Award.

The transaction involves a cash investment of the sum of US$40,500,000.00 (Forty Million, Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars) in Estate business or buying of shares in a strong reliable company in your country. The investment will be under your supervision, control and on behalf of my client, a former Military Governor of a State in Nigeria during the immediate past Military Regime. As a result of a very personal and political reason, he has decided to maintain anonymity for now pending a confirmation of your willingness to assist and co-operate in execution of the project.

But I want to talk with too about a press release, because we do want to send that out to you.

As soon as I receive your confirmation of assistance, I will forward all relevant details that will ensure the smooth hand over of this money to you. these details would include a breakdown of exactly what we want, conditions of investment and percentage of commission that my client will give you for the services you will be rendering in that respect.

So again, my name is Colleen Sullivan. My number is 1-877-213-0603. So please call as soon as get the message. Thank you sir and you have a good day.

This inquiry requires response, as it deserves to be treated with exigency in order that I do not make further contact for same abroad. Reach me via the above email address immediately indicating your willingness to assist in execution of the project

Yours sincerely,

j.c.don

———

Hopefully this will accurately capture and promote the National Republic Congressional Committee’s message. If I can be of any more assistance to you guys, please call.

Episode moved to its new home at conversationswithplasticdinosaurs.com

Aaron Koblin’s Visualization of FAA Flight Patterns (via Collision Detection)

The more faculty we get using modern tools…, oh what am I saying. I have no hope there. The more graduate students that are the next faculty that we get using modern tools…

So I can’t type all that fast and I already knew the wife could type much faster than me - but… well, you have to read the transcript.

me: http://labs.jphantom.com/wpm/
brown-eyed girl: 71 wpm, 91 wpm, 92 wpm
me: well
me: I was 67 wpm with 8 mistakes when I tried it
brown-eyed girl: well
brown-eyed girl: I kicked your ass!
brown-eyed girl: 94 wpm, w/ 6 mistakes
me: I think I might have to blog the “I kicked your ass!”
brown-eyed girl: OOOO
brown-eyed girl: 115!!!
brown-eyed girl: and NO mistakes!
me: show off
brown-eyed girl:
brown-eyed girl: damn straight!
brown-eyed girl: I can’t believe I bested the boy in something computer-related!!!
brown-eyed girl: wow!!!
me: never take on a copy editor and english major in a typing contest

Time to take high-school typing again. “Now is the time…”

I think it’s this one:

But I enjoyed taking a number of pictures this weekend and other than busting my rear on the rocks at the old lassiter mill (”save a camera, fall on your elbow”) - I was happy with a few of them.

Have I mentioned I really like Adobe Lightroom recently? Man I can’t wait for the 1.0 version.

From Ted Leung

Yahoo Pipes = RSS + Prograph + AJAX.

Nicely executed? Yes.
Useful? Yes.
Overhyped after one day? Yes.

obligatory self-history reference: When I was co-op’ing at GTE Government Systems from 1991-1995 while going to NC State. I, like 50 thousand people before me I’m sure, wrote a hardware and software asset inventory application. First in excel macros, then in HyperCard, and then I tried to write it in File Maker Pro when hypercard became irritatingly slow as more data was added. But FMPro didn’t have the visual constructs that HyperCard had. So I went looking for Graphical-oriented programming tools. When I first saw ProGraph, I thought it was going to be the greatest thing ever, and that all programming was going to evolve to using Visual Programming Languages. I think I even tried convincing my boss to buy it.

Then I tried it and realized that the Visual Programming Language revolution was never going to happen.

However, it still shows up in kid’s programming StarLogo - and I think that one of the Lego Mindstorms software tools is based on LabView. So maybe the VPL’s will one day rule (Heck, I keep wanting to do something cool in Quartz Composer)

So, everyone and their brother’s mother’s cousin’s twice-removed Uncle’s step-children are linking to (and commenting on) Steve Job’s Thoughts on MusicDRM in audio files.

I’ve read about 3 or 4 commentaries. I thought that Ars Technica’s was interesting, and read some other one that said that DRM has made Apple rich (followed by another one arguing that the ITMS is actually a loss leader). (yes, I know, I need sources, but this isn’t quite the point of this).

I usually avoid commenting on what everyone else is commenting on. But I had to add a voice, to a point that I haven’t seen yet, but I’m sure that dozens of others are making:

The labels, their public idiocy in statements aside, absolutely know that DRM isn’t preventing piracy. While they keep pointing that out and sounding completely stupid in their statements about it, the major labels aren’t run by stupid people. They are run by people hell bent at all costs to foolishly control everything they possibly can.

They don’t want DRM to prevent piracy. They want DRM because at their core - if they could make the honest consumers pay some kind of payment each and every time you play a music track “owned” by a major label they would. They want royalties on your own listening to their managed product. They already do everything they can to control production, packaging, distribution, and broadcast - and if they could control listening, they would just be ecstatic.

This unsubstantiated, but correct, opinion has been sponsored by the Eagles’ songs Hotel California and The Last Resort

[Update]: clearly the best commentary on things is at Crazy Apple Rumors

Shortly after Jobs’ statement was posted, Apple was sued by Apple Corps for the unlicensed use of the word “Imagine”.

“Now there’s something you don’t see everyday”

(it is better larger and at original size you get to see how noisy ISO 1600 can be )

So, I was looking at the exif information for one of the photos I took yesterday. The brown-eyed girl and I went walking at Umstead, and made a very brief, very cold stop at the observation deck at the airport - vowing to return another day when it wasn’t quite so cold. I only uploaded a single picture to Flickr, and that was only because I liked how it had this other-worldly day-glo orange look after I clicked “enhance” in iPhoto.

Nothing else I had taken yesterday looked quite right. Which I wasn’t really wasn’t expecting it too. While I absolutely love walking around in Umstead, even in the dead of winter, I’ve never seen any pictures of mine in dead-of-winter woods that I liked. But these were particularly bad, because they were all bluish - and had this washed out look.

Funny that, “bluish” description. You’d think I’d have paid attention to the weird little icon that was in the top LCD all day, but noooooo.

And iPhoto is really quite limiting with the exif information it shows (which is why I hope that lightroom’s official release is faster than the beta, because I will be on it) Flickr shows a lot more exif information - like the fact that my white balance was:

I had set it to fluorescent the night before while experimenting at the Draft Horse Pull and I had failed to set it back. And didn’t realize it until looking at flickr.

Ooops.

But in other news, Lightroom has a great little whitebalance control (even for jpg’s) in the beta - turning:

into

So dead-of-winter woods pictures are still boring - but the correct white balance makes a huge difference.

I think iPhoto is going to be dead to me quite soon. Here’s hoping that Lightroom is a lot faster in release, and that it also shows up in the Adobe Academic store soon.

p.s. the contrast on these looks much better in ecto and safari (I guess ecto uses webkit). They came out as sRGB from Lightroom, and I guess Safari knows how to deal with that and Firefox doesn’t. Have I mentioned how annoying color management is?

Shelly Powers, from her “Falling Out” post.

They asked Dave Winer to be on the planning committee. Yup, three mentos sitting on a stick, just waiting for the diet coke.

Actually that might be quote of the year.

Why couldn’t I have read about this stuff when I was being snarky yesterday?

I think it’s from doing software upgrades all week.

Could someone please, please, please send a bunch of emails about unsubscribing from lists or something? I need an outlet.

Otherwise, I’m going to likely pick on old-skool flickr users (though Chuq already did that better, though not as snarky) or Joe Biden, or John Edwards, or Dick Cheney, or American Idol. And quite frankly all of the latter ones are all boring and have about the same relevance to reality(*)

Dear computing users of the world, please do something stupid so I can make fun of you, followed by the realization that I do the exact same thing, whereupon I can write some hilarious self-deprecating followup.

(* wow, managed to sneak one in, without even meaning it)

No, no, I’m not talking about the “guru” part (although they did change it to “Ranger”). I’m talking about how they interact with the community. I actually have a comment from Ken Case(the CEO), on my “Urug” post, where he passes along Wim’s explanation of the “new” title

I think a better job title would be something like “systems ranger” — think old-West cowboy movie. The systems ranger roams the dusty server-room, righting misconfigurations and keeping an eye on the horizon for trouble approaching. When something goes wrong, he shows up, fixes it, and then rides off into the sunset with the cheers of the grateful townspeople (that’s us) following him. He’s an icon of trustworthiness and security and maintaining the status-quo. He helps with everything from fighting off the Black Hats to finding little Timmy’s lost puppy.

Thanks Ken and Wim. Thanks for having a great sense of humor. Thanks for getting it. From their products to their blogs, to their Pet Testimonials. What a great company.

Clearly, the ranger will need a badge:

(okay, so that’s not hitting on all that much - but that’s the limit of what I can do in OmniGraffle in 10 minutes I’m a miracle worker Systems Manager - not a graphics designer.

I did however pick “Raw Sienna” from the system color picker - that clearly is the most appropriate badge color when I couldn’t figure out how to do cross-object gradients right )

p.s. The first one of the readers that comments with “we don’t need no steenkin’ badges” gets shot on sight.

I subscribe to the Omni Mouth for a number of reasons, one I really, really like OmniGraffle, and two, the blog might be the absolute best example of a small company blog I’ve ever seen. The writers of it have style, pizzaz, and it’s just fun. Really fun. Although, pictures of star-nosed moles really don’t belong in my news list.

(they also have full feeds, so they get it).

But I have to admit that not only did I groan when I saw “System Guru Opening” in the titles list in my unread Google Reader items, and I went so far as to give it a “Say it ain’t so Joe” (which is really odd, because I don’t think any of them are named Joe, but I digress), when I saw that the job was at OmniGroup

Omni, guys, gals, pals, writers of great software. For good grief - don’t hire anyone at all that calls themselves a “guru”

People that call themselves gurus, aren’t. Ever.

However, for any system administration brethren that do Macintosh administration - you very likely want to check the job out. It sounds like a great job and a great place to work.(*)

Additionally, they get serious mad props for being up front about throwing your word-formatted resumes away.

But really, I know they say to put “guru” in the subject line - but for the sake of the whole profession, please don’t call yourself that. If they call you that - well you can’t help that, but you should shirk off and mumble incoherently. Or grunt. But do that after you are hired. I really don’t recommend mumbling incoherently in the interview. Been there, done that. I haven’t grunted though. Guffawed yes. Grunted no.

(* I have zero association with OmniGroup and wouldn’t know any of them if I ever saw them. I just really like their software and their blog).

And word to the wise, don’t use GoDaddy for the service.

Actually, going backwards works well here, - see the <ahem>lawyer </ahem> response first