Koozie Notes

SysAdmin Day

Today is SysAdmin Day.  What, you do not know about SysAdmin Day?

SysAdmin Day is celebrated once a year on the last Friday for July.  There is even a web site which advocates this celebration and provides some nifty gift ideas for them.

So go find your sysadmin and let them know how much you appreciate them with a great big hug. :-) 

-Chris

Note:  Also take a look at Sysadmin of the Year.

Perl Survey 2007

If you are a perl programmer, the perl community would appreciate if you could spare five (5) minutes to complete the 2007 perl survey.

Take part in the 2007 Perl Survey!

The Perl Survey is an attempt to capture a picture of the Perl community in all its diversity. No matter what sort of Perl programmer you are, we'd love to hear from you.

Be sure to read the privacy policy and complete the survey before September 30, 2007.

-Chris

Custom Printer Forms: How to print to non-standard sizes

Am I the only one who feels that Microsoft keeps changing how to setup custom paper sizes for printing with each new version of Windows? 

Today, I needed to configure an XP machine so that it could print correctly to an impact printer loaded with 8.5" X 7" tractor feed paper.  Lucky for me I finally located a solution.

1. In Windows XP, start the printer control applet.  (Start -> Printers and Faxes)
2. Select the Menu Bar labeled "Printer Tasks". (also you may need Administrator rights)
3. From the File menu select "Server Properties" (Print server properties)
4. Select the "Forms" tab
5. Check the box labeled "Create a New Form" and enter the page sizes you need.
6. Type in a form name in the "Form Name:" box.
7. Click on the "Save Form" Button.

-Chris

Custom FTP URLs

Today, I helped out another user with a ftp file download issue.  They needed to be able to download files via ftp and didn't want to use another program like FileZilla or even the command prompt on windows.   I did a little searching and found a link to the RFC for building custom ftp urls for use in their web browser of choice.

ftp://username:password@ftp.example.com

Now they don't have to learn how to use another application.

-Chris

==========================
3.1. Common Internet Scheme Syntax  [RFC 1738]

   While the syntax for the rest of the URL may vary depending on the
   particular scheme selected, URL schemes that involve the direct use
   of an IP-based protocol to a specified host on the Internet use a
   common syntax for the scheme-specific data:

        //<user>:<password>@<host>:<port>/<url-path>

   Some or all of the parts "<user>:<password>@", ":<password>",
   ":<port>", and "/<url-path>" may be excluded.  The scheme specific
   data start with a double slash "//" to indicate that it complies with
   the common Internet scheme syntax. The different components obey the
   following rules:

    user
        An optional user name. Some schemes (e.g., ftp) allow the
        specification of a user name.

    password
        An optional password. If present, it follows the user
        name separated from it by a colon.

   The user name (and password), if present, are followed by a
   commercial at-sign "@". Within the user and password field, any ":",
   "@", or "/" must be encoded.

Note that an empty user name or password is different than no user

   name or password; there is no way to specify a password without
   specifying a user name. E.g., <URL:ftp://@host.com/> has an empty
   user name and no password, <URL:ftp://host.com/> has no user name,
   while <URL:ftp://foo:@host.com/> has a user name of "foo" and an
   empty password.

    host
        The fully qualified domain name of a network host, or its IP
        address as a set of four decimal digit groups separated by
        ".". Fully qualified domain names take the form as described
        in Section 3.5 of RFC 1034 [13] and Section 2.1 of RFC 1123
        [5]: a sequence of domain labels separated by ".", each domain
        label starting and ending with an alphanumerical character and
        possibly also containing "-" characters. The rightmost domain
        label will never start with a digit, though, which
        syntactically distinguishes all domain names from the IP
        addresses.

    port
        The port number to connect to. Most schemes designate
        protocols that have a default port number. Another port number
        may optionally be supplied, in decimal, separated from the
        host by a colon. If the port is omitted, the colon is as well.

    url-path
        The rest of the locator consists of data specific to the
        scheme, and is known as the "url-path". It supplies the
        details of how the specified resource can be accessed. Note
        that the "/" between the host (or port) and the url-path is
        NOT part of the url-path.

   The url-path syntax depends on the scheme being used, as does the
   manner in which it is interpreted.

Dilbert & Linux

If you enjoy Scott Adams's Dilbert comic strip, then you will probably get a good laugh from his strip posted on the 25th.

-Chris

time.gov

I tried to use the time.gov web site this morning to re-set my clocks, but the webmaster posted a note that their animated clock is down due to heavy demand.  Ouch.

Background on Daylight Saving Time.

-Chris

Security Now Podcast

While listening to podcast over the weekend, Leo Laporte, who also runs the twit podcast, plugged his new audio show with Steve Gibson called "Security Now."  I listened to half of episode #3 this morning while driving to work.  Steve & Leo discussed the pros/cons of  software versus hardware firewalls.  Pretty interesting material.  Check it out.

-Chris

Update: 7 SEP 2005

I listened to shows #1, #2 last night and I must say they are putting out good material.  Show #1 covered the zotob worm and #2 covered Micosoft's new Honey Monkey project.

Outsourcing IT Pain

If you have a few minutes, I would recommend anyone considering outsourcing part of their company's IT services to read "Backsourcing Pain", an article in the September issue of CIO.

JPMorgan Chase's decision to first outsource IT and then bring it back in-house stands as a cautionary tale for any CIO considering an outsourcing megadeal.

-Chris

Limbaugh Publishes MP3s

Yesterday, while running some errands, I tuned into Rush Limbaugh's daily radio show and was surprised to hear him boast about his new podcast service for premium members.  I guess this podcast craze is catching on to the mainstream.

Limbaugh joins four other Premiere programs already being offered as subscription-based podcasts: Coast to Coast AM with George Noory and Art Bell, and the Phil Hendrie, Glenn Beck and Bob and Tom shows. Future podcasts are also planned for the Dr. Laura Schlessinger and Jim Rome programs.

On a side note, Rush stated that he had to remove all his bumper music from the MP3 version of his show because he could not get permission from the copyright holders.  Interesting.

-Chris

[LA Times Article]

Another OS X Review

I read through Joshua Wood's review of using OS X for his desktop os this afternoon and generally agree with his points.  I used to dual boot between Windows and SuSE linux on my old laptop and basically got tired of having to flip back-and-forth.  I prefer using the bash shell for some of my computing tasks and for other tasks I prefer a nice GUI with commercial apps.  Apple's OS X fits me nicely in this regard.

-Chris

Reed Hastings & NetFlix

Slashdot posted a link to a story by Gary Rivlin on the success of NetFlex, a mailorder DVD rental company.

Today, the company operates 30 distribution centers around the country, but in the late 1990's, it operated a single facility near San Francisco, so DVD's could spend days in the postal system traveling cross-country. "It wasn't a very consumer-satisfying experience, except in the San Francisco Bay Area," Mr. Hastings said. Now, one of every nine residents of San Francisco is a Netflix subscriber, he added.

I'm still an ardent fan of Netflix, even though I have trouble finding the time to watch all my movies.

-Chris

iPod and Me

About two weekends ago, I purchased my first portable music player, Apple's 20gig iPod.  Since I finally got to use a $100 Best Buy gift card, I'm only out $200 plus tax.

I've been holding off on purchasing a music player for some time, because I never thought I would really have a compelling use for it.  I really don't listen to music very often and I prefer tuning into a good radio talk show while driving.

After two weeks of playing with my iPod, I came to realize that my assumption that the iPod was just for music lovers was completely wrong.  I just found a new tool for listening to wide range of talk radio programs, via podcasts and the iPodder software.

At first, I just manually downloaded mp3 files that I thought I would enjoy like the talk Steve Wozniak gave at Gnomdex 4.0 and Adam Curry's presentation at Bloggercon.  I just stuffed these mp3's into iTunes and sync'd my iPod.  After listening to Adam's talk, I installed iPodder and downloaded even more podcasts to sample. 

This is just plain cool. 

-Chris

Computer Consulting

(via Slashdot) Steve Friedl wrote a candid piece titled, "So you want to be a consultant?" His post reminded me of some of the points Grant Barrett made in his two part series covering freelance tech support, that I reposted.

I got a kick out of Steve's use of the term, Warm Fuzzy Feelings. He makes sense: Give your customer the warm fuzzy feeling. Or better yet, just take great care of your clients.

-Chris

Suing Your Customers

Stephen R. Walli writes about IP, patents, open source, and litigation in a piece titled, "When are you going to sue your customers?"

Customers have even been known to sue their vendors in specific situations when the vendor fails to deliver on the promise in a contract.  Oddly enough vendors never sue customers in any sort of broadly applicable way.  There is a really simple rationale behind this.  Once a vendor sues a customer, they have essentially told that customer they never want that customer's business again.  That might even be appropriate in a narrow situation where there exists some sort of explicit dispute between exactly the two parties.  If however the dispute is over something like “patent infringement” that can easily be applied broadly to many customers, then all the vendor's other customers are put on notice that this vendor does not care about the relationship and  continued business.

Mr. Walli even brings up the two suits SCO filed against its customers, Daimler-Chrysler and Autozone.  I never really understood why they sued these two customers. This action makes more sense when your business model is not really selling products and services, but a "legal play to siphon money out of the system."

-Chris

Review of dmp3's Ripping Service

(via Gizmodo)  LiveDigitally posted a review of a new music CD ripping service, dmp3.  Like RipDigital, dmp3 will convert your music collection to mp3 on DVDs and/or an external hard drive.  New features include personal in-home tech support and quick turn around time.  Looks pretty reasonable at a $1.25 per CD.

-Chris

Netflix Offers Multiple Queues

(via Gizmodo) Hacking Netflix posted an in-depth review of Netflix's new feature of setting up different queues for each family member.

Netflix today launched a new Web site feature that enables customers to create up to five separate "profiles" for family members. Internally called the "marriage saver," this should end a lot of arguments over rental choices. The main account is the administrator, and new users can be added in the My Account section of the Web site. You switch between users by using the new profile selector in the header graphic.

I can see another use for this new feature, watching a DVD series without inconveniencing your regular movie distribution. For example, I just finished watching the six DVD anime series, Cowboy Bebop. Since I'm on the three (3) movies out plan, I carefully orchestrated my movie queue so I would only check out a single Cowboy Bebop DVD at any one time. That way, my wife and I could still enjoy two regular movies during the week.

-Chris

New Tools for Tivo

(via PVRBlog)  I'm glad to hear that Tivo just release additional tools to open the Tivo platform to third parties.  This could get really interesting.

The three new tools are TiVo Video Publisher, TiVo Multimedia Web Services API and TiVo Service Integration.

In other new, I completely enjoyed my time off from work.  I spent Christmas with family and friends and loved every minute of it.

-Chris

History of the Graphing Calculator

Scoble linked to an interesting skunkworks story about two software engineer sneaking into Apple Computers to work on their canceled software project.

There was one last pressing question: How could we get this thing included with the system software when the new machines shipped? The thought that we might fail to do this terrified me far more than the possibility of criminal prosecution for trespass. All the sweat that Greg and I had put in, all the clandestine aid from the friends, acquaintances, and strangers on whom I had shamelessly imposed, all the donations of time, expertise, hardware, soft drinks, and junk food would be wasted.

-Chris

Linux Consultants Making $75-$250 an Hour

I enjoyed Corinne McKay's piece on Linux consultants titled, "Linux consultants find a niche in growing market."

With Linux consultants reporting billings of $75 to $250 and up per hour, while working flexible schedules and freeing themselves from the strings of a large employer, consulting seems an appealing field to enter. At the same time, successful consultants stress that entrepreneurship requires a mix of skills that is often the opposite of what's appealing to a corporate employer.

Billing from $75 up to $250 seems like a pretty decent gig to me.

-Chris

What are .DS_Store Files?

This morning I finally got around to researching Apple's .DS_Store files.  I've notice these files on my Windows server, whenever I connect my powerbook to move files.  I have found .DS_Store files on my USB thumb drives as well.  If you use Apple's OS X operating system, you probably have these files littered all over your file system.  The best explanation I found on .DS_Store file is listed below. (via TinkerTool)

The .DS_Store files are created by the Finder during its normal course of operation but they are invisible by default. The Finder will automatically put a .DS_Store file into every folder you have opened. These files are used to save the positions of icons, the size of the respective Finder window, the window's background, and many more view options. While professional users consider the .DS_Store files to be a design flaw of the Mac OS X Finder, a mechanism like this is necessary when opening Finder windows for exchangeable disk media to give former users of the classic Mac OS the same user experience they had in previous operating system versions. If you don't like to see the .DS_Store files, replace the Finder by a better file management application.

I located another site, Rixstep,  discussing .DS_Store files with an Apple employee.

If you need a short script to remove these peevish files, try the one-liner I found on Macromedia's site.

sudo find / -name ".DS_Store" -depth -exec rm {} \;

-Chris

Knoppix Rescues

Kyle Rankin, author of Knoppix Hacks and a sysadmin, writes about a few of his Knoppix rescue stories.

As a battle-hardened sysadmin, I've seen a lot of broken systems (some I broke, and some were broken for me). I've carried a number of rescue disks, including tomsrtbt and the LinuxCare Bootable Business Card, but over the past year or two, I've started to rely completely on Knoppix as an all-in-one rescue disk. Below are some real-life accounts of how I've saved some broken systems with just my Knoppix CD.

Looks like I need to go pick up a copy of Knoppix Hacks for myself.  I haven't  played with Knoppix recently, but I did used it to get data off NTFS formatted hard-drive by booting up Knoppix and running the included ssh daemon.  Very slick.

-Chris

Bosworth Doctrine

I'm glad Chad Dickerson brought to my attention Adam Bosworth's post which expounds the Bosworth Doctrine.

Software which is flexible, simple, sloppy, tolerant, and altogether forgiving of human foibles and weaknesses turns out to be actually the most steel cored, able to survive and grow while that software which is demanding, abstract, rich but systematized, turns out to collapse in on itself in a slow and grim implosion.

Around the office I follow a similar system I picked up in college, "Keep it simple, stupid." Choosing the simplest solution, even though it might not be the best, will work and make future troubleshooting easier.

-Chris

Perl Journal - Nov Issue Online

The Perl Journal (TPJ) released their November issue today, so I downloaded their PDF and printed out a hard copy. If you enjoy slinging Perl code, I would highly recommend a subscription.

I do wish TPJ would offer a slick paper magazine instead of having to download a PDF. I would be willing to dish out a few more bucks for the paper option.

-Chris

Starbucks Feels the Heat

According to this article in MobilePipeline, it appears that Starbucks is starting to feel threatened by other coffee shops that offer free Wi-Fi to their patrons.

I'm not sure that will happen any time soon, but John Yunker of Byte Level Research thinks it is inevitable. In his monthly wireless newsletter, John bluntly concluded: "The only question is when, not if, Starbucks will offer Wi-Fi for free." To which I can only add a hearty "amen, brother."

I love how the market can force people to reconsider their business practices without having to get the government involved.

-Chris

Four Million Emails a Day

(via Slashdot) Story on News.com.au reports that Bill Gates in the most spammed person in the world.

"Bill Gates (is number one) because he is Bill Gates. Bill literally receives four million pieces of email per day, most of it spam," Mr Balmer told a conference.

Think about that-- four million messages a day.    That's 166 thousand per hour or just under 50 emails per second.  Wow.  That is just astonishing.  I'd really be interested to hear what kind of equipment Microsoft maintains to handle that load.

-Chris

Lost Data Stories

(via Slashdot) BBC posted an interesting article on computer data loss.

While a large office was being constructed, a steel beam fell on a laptop that contained the plans for the building.

A female user placed her laptop on top of her car while getting in. Forgetting about the laptop, it slid off the roof and she then reversed straight over it as she set off.

Guess what folks, good backups can make your life a happier one.  If you're like me, you won't realize this until you lose something important.

-Chris

Stack or Queue?

Jeremy asks his readers, "Is your email inbox a stack or a queue?"

I prefer a stack. I like to see new emails at the top instead of having to scroll down. If I actually kept my inbox cleaned up, it wouldn't be that big of an issue.

I found some great techniques for dealing with email overload in David Allen's book, "Getting Things Done." I purchased the audio version and listened to it while driving on a long car trip. David presents a ton of tricks for making your life easier. A sample of some of David's tips can be found on his site, www.davidco.com.

If Jeremy brings up Vi versus Emacs, put me down for Vim. :-)

-Chris

Last Wishes

LastWishes.com will e-mail your last messages to friends and family.

Since it was launched last October, the site has drawn more than 10,000 customers who've paid initial fees of at least $39.99 and agreed to annual fees from now till doomsday, all to get in the last word by text, photos and videos for their loved (and maybe not-so-loved) ones.

Why can't I come up with something as clever as this? First I read about 19 yr old who successfully started mobiletracker.net making 55K annually in advertising. Next I'm surprised by LastWishes.com's 10,000 paying customers. Looks like I just need a good idea and a little luck.

-Chris

Not Enforced Silence

I really enjoyed a quote in Paul McNamara's column, "That Sun-HP Fight."

HP would be better served to heed the famous words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who, though he pondered free speech long before the Internet, nevertheless got it right: "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."

I agree with Paul McNamara's position that HP should not have tried to litigate this problem away. They should have tried to beat Schwartz at his own game by publishing convincing arguments to win back their customers.

-Chris

Real Facts: Windows vs. Linux Security

(via NeoWin) Register posted a story titled, "Windows v Linux security: the real facts."

But what's the truth? For every claim there is, somewhere, a counterclaim. But until now there has been no systematic and detailed effort to address Microsoft's major security bullet points in report form. In a new analysis published here, however, Nicholas Petreley* sets out to correct this deficit, considering the claims one at a time in detail, and providing assessments backed by hard data. Petreley concludes that Microsoft's efforts to dispel Linux 'myths' are based largely on faulty reasoning and overly narrow statistical analysis. Even if you think you know this already (as we fear may be the case for numerous Register readers), we think you'll find it useful to be able to say why you know it, what the facts and the numbers really are, and where you can get the document to back up what you're saying.

One can view Nicholas Petreley's report online or as a PDF.

-Chris

Netflix Drops Pricing

(via HackingNetflix) Netflix will drop their monthly rental fee effective 1 NOV 2004.

Our new pricing is as follows:

• 2-at-a-time, 4 rentals per month: $11.99/month
• 3-at-a-time Unlimited: $17.99/month
• 5-at-a-time Unlimited: $29.99/month
• 8-at-a-time Unlimited: $47.99/month

We will automatically change your billing rate to the new lower price at the time of your November billing cycle. You do not need to contact us to get the new, lower rate.

Netflix recently increased their pricing in July '04 and now they plan on lowering their price below my original monthly rate of $19.99 (3 at-a-time). I'm not complaining.

-Chris

Freelance Tech Support Articles by Grant Barrett

Grant Barrett gave me permission to re-post two of his tech support articles.  Slashdot carried his two articles as well.

Sure, you have my permission to repost. Please make sure to link to my current web site in an appropriate place. Thanks for asking. Not every[one] would (or has).
Grant

Grant's current projects include Double-Tongued Word Wrester and American Dialect Society.

-Chris