JF :: Brain Farts :: Archive of June, 2006

Archive of June, 2006

The (Almost) Infinite Canvas

June 27, 2006:

These two links I found (thanks, Howard!) make rare use of the browser's near-inifinite ability to scroll, but showing us just how much nothing there is in the universe.

First off, the solar system to scale. The smallest planet, Pluto, is a single pixel at the far right edge of the page. Everything else -- other planets, the sun, and the distances between them -- are to scale. The sun is about 560 pixels across, and Earth looks to be about 8x8. (I'm actually not sure the sun isn't supposed to be much bigger than that, but I'll take their word for now.) If your monitor resolution is 96 ppi, the page is about four tenths of a mile wide.

And that's not the big one. Move on now to an atom. The proton (they used a picture of Neptune) is in scale to the single-pixel electron way off to the right. There are fifty million pixels between them. At the standard resolution of 96 ppi that's a web page 8¼ miles wide. Clicking and holding in the scroll bar's gutter, it takes about three seconds for the slider to move at all. And remember, there's absolutely, positively nothing between that proton and that electron. Nothing.

Sitting where I am now, with the computer screen roughly pointing north-south, the page runs roughly in the direction of the office. When I'm looking at Neptune, which is slightly larger than will fit on my screen at once, that one-pixel electron is twice as far away as my desk at work. Unfortunately, Google Maps doesn't understand "8 miles south of [address]", so I had to make a rough guess using Photoshop. Here's how big this web page is:

And that tiny little pixel down on the other side of Manassas is all that keeps us from passing through everything else in the universe. Cool, huh?

Well, That Sucked

June 26, 2006:

The router at work died late Thursday night. I came in Friday morning to find all the WAN lights showing errors, and a power-cycle just made them all go dark forever. Which is only a problem for however many dozens of web sites we run, and about three dozen clients' e-mail.

After doing some testing with Verizon to make sure everything else was OK (they were able to test the like right up to the patch panel in the rack area) we called in an emergency tech to get our old Cisco working.

Late last year we were running out of our allotment on IP addresses, so we requested, and received, a block of 64 to go with our original 16. These two sets of IP addresses aren't contiguous. Since we didn't have the manuals to configure the router ourselves we just waited until we got the dual T1 put in a couple months later. The old Cisco can only handle a single T1 so it'd have to be replaced anyway.

The new router, that had all the IP addresses in it and handled both T1s, is the one that failed. We really wanted to get that second IP block on the Cisco to avoid disruption of services (especially secure web sites, which have to use different port numbers like www.example.com:444 when they share an IP address), and because our name servers were both on the new block of addresses. We needed someone who knew Cisco routers, and that's who we were told we'd get.

This guy wasn't what you'd call an expert. After half an hour he'd managed to do a password recovery (that was another obstacle to us updating the thing) then spent the time from 12:30 to 4:30 -- at $190 an hour -- failing to add the second IP block to the Cisco. At 4:30 the boss told me to have him just get the old addresses working again (they'd come and go as he futzed with the thing) and transfer the web sites and name server off the new block until our replacement Tasman router (yay, warranties) comes in on Monday.

So at 4:30 I started making the changes to the web servers, to run each server on one of the old addresses. This required disabling the streaming media server for the weekend, but oh well. Then I modified any sites that used SSL to do the different-port thing I mentioned before. After that I made the changes at NSI (to point to our name server's new address) and updated the bare minimum of A records.

While I was doing that, the other person in the office (boss and his wife were finishing their vacation) started calling all the clients I had phone numbers for to let them know that things were fixed, and that in some cases it may take a few hours to everything to get back to normal.

So all the work I was planning on doing Friday will now have to be done Saturday and Sunday, since the project I'm working on still needs to deliver when the clients' butts hit their chairs Monday morning. The long weekend for Independance Day can't come fast enough.

Edit, 6/26 10:29 AM: And it turns out that with only one incoming line, you can't have discontiguous IP blocks. You'd really think an "expert" would know that...

Jason's Cooking Tips

June 22, 2006:

Let's say you're cooking up some Rice-o-Roni for dinner. As always you get the stuff up to a boil, then reduce the heat and cover it. Let's say then that you come back a few minutes later to stir your concoction and find that it looks somewhat pale and un-appetizing.

Don't worry, there's a simple solution. Step away from your simmering rice and return to your prep area. Now pick up the flavoring packet you forgot to add when you dumped the water in, and actually follow the instructions this time.

Yep, that's me. College educated. Senior software developer. Came within a couple minutes of irrevocably screwing up a fire-and-forget dinner. Maybe tomorrow I'll top myself by putting my shoes on the wrong feet or something.

Bridges, or DC's Lack Thereof

June 20, 2006:

Pittsburgh does a lot of things wrong. The city's effectively bankrupt and nobody has any plans to fix it -- building a half-assed attempt at a mall in the middle of downtown, when the existing department stores are leaving probably isn't going to fix things.

But it does do one thing right: They build bridges. There are three rivers in the Pittsburgh area -- the Allegheny on the north and the Monongahela on the south, forming the Ohio on the west. If they followed DC's example the city would be crippled during rush hour. Fortunately the Yinzers were smart at one point.

First off, here's DC's setup.

In order we have:

1. I-495/Capital Beltway
2. Glebe Rd.
3. Key Bridge (US-29)
4. I-66
5. Arlington Bridge
6. I-395
7. Um, 11th St?
8. I-295
9. Wilson Bridge (offscreen) (I-95/I-495/Capital Beltway)

Not much, especially considering that two of those bridges connect parts of the city that could be accessed from Maryland by other means. Also, a lot of traffic goes between DC and NoVA, making that handful of bridges insufficient.

Now, I'm zoomed in pretty far (though one step farther out than the Pittsburgh map below). I'm missing a few bridges here. Way off to the west, past Leesburg, VA, there are small bridges for US-15 and US-340. From that point there are no more bridges until you're well into West Virginia. To the southeast, there's US-301. After that you're at the Chesapeake Bay. The next place you can get from Virginia to Maryland is over the Delmarva Peninsula. So let's be super-kind and call it 12 bridges.

Now remember, this is one step zoomed farther in. This covers less ground than the DC map.

1. West End Bridge
2. Fort Duquesne Bridge (I-279)
3. 6th St. Bridge
4. 7th St. Bridge
5. 9th St. Bridge
6. Crosstown Blvd. (I-579)
7. 16th St. Bridge
8. 31st St. Bridge
9. 40th St. Bridge
10. Fort Pitt Bridge (I-279)
11. Smithfield St. Bridge
12. Liberty Bridge
13. 10th St. Bridge
14. Birmingham Bridge
15. Hot Metal Bridge
16. Glenwood Bridge
17. Homestead Grays Bridge

Not pictured, off to the northeast: The 62nd St. Bridge and the Highland Park Bridge. That's nineteen bridges in a much smaller space, just to get people moved around the various parts of the city. Not bad for a population that currently can't find their collective ass with both hands and a map.

I realize it's harder to build bridges acros the Potomac, since there are different states (or state-like things) on opposite ends of the bridge, but this is just ridiculous.

S*P Reader Gathering

June 19, 2006:

I was going to write about this a week ago, but I got distracted by the Steelers quarterback trying to Darwinize himself. Then I got lazy. I'm sure you know how it goes.

About a week ago, there was a Something Positive reader gathering in Richmond. I drove down and got there about an hour after it started. Randy Milholland (the author) was shooting the breeze with his fans and giving away sketches of characters. Most people ask for Choo-Choo Bear, Davan's hairless, boneless cat. I asked for Piro.

That's right, I went to an S*P reader gathering and asked for a Megatokyo character. A couple years ago, MT had a "linkup" box where the people who run the site could put links to stuff they thought was cool. They've since gotten rid of it, probably because they can issue a pretty good approximation of a Slashdotting by linking to someone. But anyway, I first started reading S*P because of an MT linkup. Since Randy has such a different drawing style compared to Fred Gallagher (MT's artist) I figured it'd be fun to see them draw each other's characters.

I haven't met Fred yet, but Randy had no problem giving me his take on Piro:

Very different from Fred's style, but very recognizable as Piro. (Actually he kinda looks like Davan with PeeJee's bangs, but Piro has a kind of girly hairstyle anyway. It works.)

Later in the evening as things were starting to wind down a bit, the girl sitting at my table* asked to "steal" the ketchup from Randy's table. For some reason I decided to be silly and asked in a kind of retarded surfer voice, "duude, can you, like, draw Choo-Choo in ketchup?"

He thought about it for a couple seconds, then provided the following:

That amused me muchly. I think the muffled "murrrr?" is what did it. All in all I had a good time, even though I did my typical anti-social dork thing. Pity this'll probably be the only one of its kind.

* Seating was limited at Carytown Burgers and Fries (the gathering location) so people were sharing tables. The girl who wound up sitting with me was fairly cute. She was also 20, a student at Slippery Rock in western Pennsylvania, and had a boyfriend. As I've said before, the more willing a woman is to talk to me, the more likely it is that she's involved.

Yinzers 'R' Us

June 15, 2006:

The clock-radio (the only radio I listen to nowadays) is set to whatever station Elliott in the Morning is on. They were talking today about how Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers quarterback, trashed his motorcycle Tuesday morning. Nothing too serious, it would seem: a broken face and a probable concussion. And riding without a helmet. Well, it's not like football players are known for being bright.

The funny thing is that I'm used to all the place-names mentioned on the news where (almost) nobody else here is. Elliott and his sidekick were talking about the other driver's residence -- Squirrel Hill -- and saying how it didn't sound like it's the wealthy part of town. "Oh, you have money," they said in hushed tones, "you're from... Squirrel Hill."

Highland Park, they decided -- Ben's residence? -- sounded much wealthier.

It really stuck out as I was thinking about it how well I'd learned my way around the Pittsburgh area in the decade I spent there. How to get from Point A to Point B while bypassing X road under construction. Where to eat. Where to get a good beer. I know almost none of that here.

And given my hermit-like nature, I'm not learning very quickly. I suppose if I spend enough time here I will, but I'm coming up on 15 months here and that's a bit of a long time to drive around like I don't know where I'm going.

Little Factoid

June 13, 2006:

While I was poking around Wikipedia today looking for information for another hare-brained idea of mine, I came across an interesting bit of information: No municipalities (cities or towns) can be created in a county that has a population density of more than 1000 people per square mile.

The two counties to which this applies? Fairfax and Arlington. I'm guessing the rest of the state got worried that we'd start forming municipalities up here left and right, and stack the deck in the state government. Except both the House of Delegates and Senate seem to be done by population within the state, not municipal/county boundaries. So, it doesn't really make any sense to me. What does it matter?

Nuggets

June 12, 2006:

· The car's doing much better now since the repairs. After adding a couple splashes of coolant to top off the reservoir, it made it from Centreville to Richmond and back (two hours each way) with no problems. I don't remember much of the trip, since I was paranoidally (is that a word?) looking at the temerature guage half the time.

· There's a Five Guys opening in the shopping center just across 28. Maybe now I can see what all the fuss is about.

· Just a couple months after praising myself for staying away from the new IHOP up the street I'm now there once a week. I have no willpower.

· As part of the setup for [Client], the boss set up a VPN connection at work. As an added bonus I can now VPN into the office network and do stuff instead of Remote Desktopping in to one of our front-facing servers just to RD into my (back-facing only) desktop machine. It makes things go a lot faster. On the downside, it's really easy to forget you're VPNed in and spend the better part of a day routing all your internet requests through the office. Luckily this was on a Friday night...

· We're starting to hire contractors to take up some of the smaller projects at work. This doesn't lighten my load any, but it does make me less behind than I was.

· As I pointed out to a Slippery Rock student on Friday, it took me almost 18 years to realize that the official name of one of the NFL teams wasn't "The Pittsburgh Fucking Steelers". Well, when that's what you've heard them called all your life...

· Women have it easy. They can "decide" not to turn 30 and everyone just humors them and thinks it's cute. With The Big Three-Oh less than five months away I've realized that if I tried something like that people would look at me like I'd just grown an extra head.

More Stupid Web Sites

June 09, 2006:

The Kenwood in my car is acting up. Frequently it'll fail to play the CD in the head unit, eventually showing me the code E-99, and other times it'll spit out a E-04 right away and flash the LED that says I have a CD in the unit.

About half the time it'll actually play the CD.

I also think it's damaging the discs that go into it; my Tom Petty CD was skipping pretty badly, but burning a copy of it and playing that made the skipping go away. My FMHg disc also plays more reliably now that I'm using a copy.

I've tried using one of those head-cleaner discs, which didn't seem to do anything, and may have accelerated the problem.

Anyway, ranting about the player itself is only part of the reason I came here today. The other bit is about the Kenwood web site. If you go here, you'll see all the in-dash CD players they offer. Please note that the KDC-2025 is not among them. The archaic unit in my car is from 2004, so maybe that's not too big a surprise.

My next stop is the support page, where they give a link to get owners manuals online. Well, that's a good start. Now to be honest, if I could ever remember to do this while I'm at home I could look in the real manual, wherever I hid it, but this is promising.

I click the link and get:

Yep, too many people are using the web site. I didn't know Kenwood was hosted by Geocities. But given how much attention they apparently pay to technological things, I have to say I'm not really surprised.

Random Memory

June 08, 2006:

On one of the web forums I read, one of the posters was railing against the tendency of guest speakers to ramble on incessantly instead of getting to the frickin' point.

I don't remember much about my high-school graduation, and I can't even remember who spoke. Definitely can't remember if they took too long to finish. But I did remember that I had to give the valedictory speech. I was one of six, actually.

We weren't all tied, mind you. My GPA was just a fraction higher than everyone else's -- 4.22 to 4.19 was the closest, I think. I didn't mind, since the only reason their grades were lower was because they had taken music classes and thus "diluted" their AP grades in a way that I hadn't.

But this wasn't the school's decision, or the students'. The report from the computers downtown automatically assigned the #1 ranking to anyone whose GPA was 4.00 or higher. No checking to see who had straight As or anything like that. Just, if you had a 4.0 or better you were #1.

So in the Akron public school system, not even the computers can do math worth a damn.

Edit: I just remembered something else: If the computer had used straight As as a determiner, I may not have been one of the co-#1s. One of the art classes I took, I got a B in one grading period. For the semester I grabbed an A, but if they counted each of the 6 grading periods per year instead of the 2 semesters, I wouldn't have had to give a speech. Which would have been a good thing, because I do remember the speech I gave and it stank on ice.

Oops

June 06, 2006:

Last weekend I bought a stack of DVD-Rs from Staples. When I tried to burn them I failed on 3 of 3 -- data verification errors. Since I'd successfully burned some older DVD+RWs until I ran out, I figured I got a bad batch and returned them.

Then my first burn with the new discs failed also. I reinstalled Nero, just in case, and tried another. Failing the exact same way, and having reduced five DVDs to coasters, I decided it was time to go online and see what the heck was going on.

Turns out the culprit is low system resources. I'm currently casting the stinkeye at BOINC, the SETI At Home screensaver. I'm upgrading Nero to the newest version of things, then I'll reboot and suspend BOINC while I try one more burn. If it succeeds, it will mean I just had a run of good luck with the +RWs and bad luck with the -Rs.

Sorry, friendly Staples cashier. I didn't mean to put one over on you.

Edit, a little while later: Nope, upgrading Nero and shutting off BOINC didn't work: For some reason it just doesn't want to write those files to disc. I'm not pushing the limits of the storage at all, and the errors are happening at about the 2/3 point anyway not at the end.

It's fouling up the burn so badly that I can't even generate a checksum for the files on the DVD. I find it unlikely that I managed to get two bad batches of DVD-Rs, even if they were from the same store, so something else must be wrong. Is the DVD+RW format more tolerant of errors than DVD-R? Is Nero going back and fixing its mistakes on the +RWs and it can't on the -Rs? Is my burner in the process of shitting itself?

Edit, Monday night: Well, a firmware upgrade had an effect: I only got a single batch of bad data this time. I also burned a different group of files that only used about 4200MB. Google has nothing for me, so I'm just going to hope the hard disk doesn't fill up, or start buying +RWs again.

Dumbest Thing I've Seen on TV In a While

June 05, 2006:

Now I'll admit I don't watch sitcoms any more, so the bar might be pretty low.

There's a commercial out by some kind of special-interest group, talking about questions the American people should be asking the oil companies. Some of them make sense if you think about them: What are you doing to research alternative energy sources?

That really does make sense: If the peak-oil people are right, the oil companies are going to need to find new sources of income. Likewise, if prices keep going up and people start getting sick of paying for gas and the companies are going to lose some of their economies of scale.

But like I said, that's not the dumb one. The dumb one was: Why does worldwide demand for oil affect the price I pay at the pump?

Let me repeat that for you, since you may not believe you just read it: Why does worldwide demand for oil affect the price I pay at the pump? The sheer stupidity of that question is almost too much for me to bear. I realize not everyone out there has gone to college. Maybe some people slept through their high-school economics class. But are there so many people out there who are so dense as to be unaware of the law of supply and demand that the commercial will encite them to question the way things work?

I'm guessing these people are already pissed at the oil companies because gas was cheaper when they were kids (90¢ for me, if I remember right) and now they're looking at $3.00 per gallon to fill their H2s.

So, just in case any of the tools who would write to ExxonMobil, or Shell, or any of the oil companies are reading this: Yes, the more people who want a good or service, the more expensive it will become. If you want to question Big Oil about something I'm sure you can find it -- the record profits do seem suspicious to me given their oligopolic nature, but I don't know if they track well with crude prices -- but if you're going to question supply and demand you should probably just walk everywhere.

Duct Tape and Chewing Gum

June 02, 2006:

Well, my car's trying really hard to make itself into scrap metal. After one of my coworkers informed me that it was hemorrhaging coolant, I drove it up to the nearest garage for a quick look. Leaks near the thermostat, at the top of the radiator, and near the radiator cap. They wanted $530 to fix it up right.

The car can't be worth more than $800 right now.

I took it up to Chantilly and asked them to fit it in. I flat-out told the guy: I will not own this car this time next year. If I can get 12 or 13,000 miles out of duct tape and chewing gum, I want duct tape and chewing gum. If you need to replace the radiator, get a refurb.

It's really a shame -- Honda builds an engine that can run a quarter-million miles easy, but the rest of the car just disintegrates around it. Still, the thing is 13 years old and is just shy of 130,000 miles... maybe some of it is to be expected.

Even for the trouble the Civic has given me lately, I still like the Accord V-6 six-speeds. But if my duct tape and chewing gum doesn't hold up I won't get the IRS paid off in time to buy one. Well, a new Civic wouldn't be all that bad I guess. Maybe get one with a VTEC in it this time.

And definitely one with air conditioning.

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