Diary of a Network Geek

I finished Iron Council by China Mi�ville last week.

It was good, but not quite as good as his last two.
This one dealt with an attempt to run a transcontinental railroad across Bas Lag, home of New Crobuzon. Something goes wrong and the people building the railroad rebel and become their own, moving, city. While the idea is interesting, and the descriptions of magic and struggle are compelling, the book focuses elsewhere. Specifically, it seems as if Mr. Mi�ville has a social message to impart to us. A rather anti-capitalist, socialist message.
While there's nothing wrong with that, per se, it does take away from the story in this case. The book seems less about exploring the world of Bas Lag than either Perdido Street Station or The Scar . It is not, by any means, his best effort.
However, it was a good book. I certainly enjoyed the previous two more, but I was not sorry that I bought Iron Council and read it.

If you're already a fan, Iron Council will be worth it. But, if you're new to China Mi�ville, it would be better to start with either Perdido Street Station or The Scar .
(Oh, yes, this first appeared on my other blog.)

I may have another candidate after all....

Okay, this Libertarian guy, Michael Badnarik, just might be on to something. I don't talk politics much in my blog, mainly because I think too many people already do, but this strikes me as important.
America has forgotten that we're NOT a two-party system. We have more choices than just voting Democrat or Repbulican. Among others, there are also the Communists, the Socialists, the Family Values Party, the Reform Party, the Green Party (actually, two of them), the Labor Party, and even, yes, even the American Nazi Party. But, for some time now, the most reasonable "Third Party" has seemed like the Libertarians. (You can see all the parties here at Politics1.)
I've known about them for quite some time, and I've alwasy felt like they were closer to my personal ideal of government, but, it was this article at Slashdot that really got me thinking. I mean, this guy is really answering the questions like he's thought about them himself and isn't trying to give the "right" answer. When was the last time a politian did that!?

Well, I haven't decided, yet, but the more I look, the more I like the Libertarian Party. No matter how you feel, though, get out and vote. Nothing you do as a United States Citizen is more important.

I love the smell of burnt circuits in the morning!

Actually, no, I don't, but it was a good, catchy line. So, it turns out that, yes, my DSL router got kissed by lightning and cooked. Actually, just the DSL modem part got cooked, but that was enough to keep me from getting to the Internet. And, to add insult to injury, I also lost several network cards. So, I spent the better part of the week scrounging up network cards, testing them, findind drivers for them, and replacing dead cards at home. Saturday afternoon, I had a tech over who took all of about 10 seconds to confirm that it was, in fact, my DSL Router that had gone all crispy.
In fact, his whole visit lasted all of about 15 minutes. I wore my new Novell Cool Solutions Tip T-shirt, in lovely Hunter Green, which arrived Thursday night, just so he could see I was a real geek. He took one look at that, my Wall O' Computer Books (most of which are terribly out of date), all the equipment laying about and basically got out of my way. He metered the line, then offered to sell me a router out of his truck. It cost at least twice what it was worth, but saved me the hassle of configuring it and let me test while he was still there. Another 10 minutes to change out the last bad network card and reconfigure my BorderManager firewall, then I was back up and running.

Actually, I did get a bit more reading done than I would have otherwise this past week. And, I was less obsessive about the new game I'm playing on-line (more about that on Friday). Still, it's nice to have e-mail again. And, I think my wife likes having access to the 'Net again, too. So, it's back to wasting time as normal for us. Wee!

Arr, matey, there's still time.

Avast, ye scurvey scum! Ye still have time to learn how to talk like a pirate for International Talk Like A Pirate Day. In fact, ye've got two whole days. This year, International Talk Like A Pirate Day falls on the 19th, which is Sunday. So, drop yer grog ya' son of a biscuit eater and get over thar so you can be learnin' the sprogs in your squadron how to talk like a pirate.

Yarr, mateys, it's Friday, so leave the landlubbers behind and go on the account! By the powers! No one minds a Jack who embarks on the sweet trade after getting loaded to the gunnels on a Friday! (An', the lasses like a bit o' the privateer, as well!)

Well, that was exciting!

I fried two power supplies last night. And, I think either my DSL router is toasted, or two of my three PCI network cards are. Apparently, we got hit with lightning yesterday. I say "apparently" because I wasn't there, but my wife described at "big flash and a boom" that sounded like it was "right here". And, of course, right after that, my DSL stopped working. (So, yes, I'm posting this from the office.)
Anyway, I was up until about 1:00am troubleshooting that, but with little effect. I'll try and scrounge a new network card at the office, but I'm not holding out much hope. Oh, and I blew the two power supplies while trying to get everything into a new machine, just to elminate that as a possibility. I finally scrapped my poor wife's Linux machine and made it the new firewall. Unfortunately, I still can't get it to see both network cards! Ah, well, I guess I'll work on that tonight...

So, I have one entry in the queue and that'll be the last one for a bit. At least until I get the firewall working again. *sigh*

Gee, what a novel idea!

According to this article on the IEEE website, Today's Engineer, an IEEE member has finally convinced the US Congress to take a somewhat more dispassionate look at the effects of outsourcing. Specifically, the House of Representatives approved a "mandatory" appropriations bill that coughs up $2 million for an "independent study of the effects of offshore outsourcing on the economy and employment" in the US. What's frightening to me is that this hasn't been done before. With all the hoopla on both sides, doesn't it seem obvious to have an independant, unbiased agent of some kind look into what effects off-shoring is having? Um, DUH!?
Of course, I'm a little biased because I know a number of people who have been directly effected by the outsourcing/off-shoring trend of the past few years. Still, while I am willing to admit that it makes sense in some cases, no one has proven that it's a "good thing", as Martha Stewart used to say. I certainly don't think that it's the cure-all that so many executives seem to have thought it was for the past five years. And, they may be finally waking up to that fact, too. On the other hand, they don't seem to have snapped to that at my old company. Yet, anyway. Well, at least some folks are starting to do something about it!
It's an important subject, I think. Especially for our industry.

I have no idea what this is.

They tell me I should put this in my blog:
This is my new blogchalk:United States, Texas, Jersey Village (suburb of Houston), English, , Jim, Male, 36-40, writing speculative fiction, Novell Netware and Linux. :)

I'm assuming this is like warchalking, but softer and gentler. And, for blogs.
No seriously, I know this is about driving the right kind of blog reader to my blog. Maybe it'll mean I have more than three readers soon! If you click on my BlogChalk over on the right-hand side of my blog's front page, you can get your own.

Top television scientists are muppets!

You know, I always love Beaker and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, but I never thought of them as "scientists", per se. Never the less, according to this article on CNN.com, they've been voted the favorite TV scientists by viewers of the BBC. They beat out such luminaries as Mr. Spock from Star Trek and Dana Scully from The X-Files, not to mention Dr. Frankenstein, Frank N. Furter, of the Rocky Horror Show Picture Show, and Dr. Strangelove. Quite a feat indeed!

Anyway, it's a fun article, and a Friday, so go check it out.

A few comments about my Cool Solutions solution.

First, it's best to run this as "perl --noscreen dfmail.pl". Of course, this assumes that you copied this to your sys:perl\scripts directory first. I've gotten several e-mail (already!) about "errors". Those shouldn't show up with the --noscreen option. In fact, I think they're just informational messages because I used the "-w" option in the first line of the script. That means "show warnings" to the PERL interpreter. If you remove that, just the "-w", the script should run without those problems.
Second, you have to have the settings right on your mail server or it won't send mail! If you're getting a message that says "failed to connect", or something similar, that's what's happening.

To be honest, I was somewhat suprised to see that this old thing had gone up on Novell's Cool Solutions website. I actually wrote this stinker last year and posted an entry about it in February. I sent this to them about two months ago and just heard back. I had totally forgotten that I'd even sent it!
Anyway, it's a pretty "quick and dirty" solution to an ugly problem at my old job. I ended up not even using it because we were so strapped for disk space that I had to actually delete PERL from those servers. Anyway, it's a free monitoring tool that uses the "duct tape of the Internet", PERL. You can see the actual entry here. If you like it, vote for it!

UPDATE: J�rgen Schmitz from Germany discovered that PERL version 5.06, which is native on netware 6 if you haven't done any upgrades, etc., needs UCSExt changed to Perl2UCS
So, replace the first couple of lines with:
use Socket;
use strict;
use Perl2UCS;

my $server = Perl2UCS->new("UCX:Server") or die "Can't get UCX:Server object";
my $sname = $server->{"NAME"} or die "Can't get NAME from ucx:server
object";
my $volume_mgr = Perl2UCS->new("ucx:volumemgr") or die "Can't get
ucx:volumemgr";

That should do it!

Actually, this happened more than a week ago.

She passed away on August 24, according to her website. I heard about it via a blog just yesterday. If you're not familiar with her, she's the one responsible for the Five Stages of Death and Dying. She was an interesting character who contributed quite a bit to the psychological community, even though she developed a bit of an odd reputation at the end there.
I present this as a "Personal" entry because my father worked with her. Most folks don't know about it, but the "legwork", so to speak, for her book On Death Dying was done through a hospital chaplaincy program. A lot of her work involved administering surveys and questionaires to hospital chaplains who were working with people that were in the process of grieving. My father was one of the people who helped make that happen. One of the two, in fact. As memory serves, he was working for the AMA in a religious capacity. Something to do with morality and ethics in medicine, as well as the religious components contained therein. In any case, it's one of those personal anecdotes that my father has collected over the years. I hope I'll have a few one day.

(Well, I already do. Sometime I'll have to write about how I met the #4 boss in the Chicago "Family". Or, Milton Erickson, for that matter. And, even how I exchanged e-mail with the inventor of ping, Mike Muuss.)