Posted by knorby on April 29, 2008 under advertising, internet | 
I was randomly browsing last night, when I came across some eBay sniping service. I was recently sniped in the last 5 seconds on a VAX I was bidding on, so I viewed the site with a mild degree of interest. I started to read through the user testimonial page when I noticed a little gem on the page. Each one seemed to be fine on its own; I never really trust these pages, but I could believe that these were real, until I noticed these two:
| Not your Daddy’s Sniping Service!!! |
March 27, 2007, by lambykins |
Hello, I have used a few sniping services and none of them really did it for me. I found BidSlammer and it was just totally different. Very intuitive. I can move fast. Good job guys. Slam-It is awesome, BTW. Wm. Howard, citro_cell
| This is the best one |
March 24, 2007, by lobster_soss |
Hello, I have used a few sniping services and none of them really did it for me. I found BidSlammer and it was just totally different. Very intuitive. I can move fast. Good job guys. Slam-It is awesome, BTW. Thanks, Jeff
It seems that the only things they bothered to change in these two were the title, month, “username,” and end line. The worst part is that they put these two right next to each other. I guess it just goes to show how much you can trust advertising.
Posted by knorby on under Uncategorized |
I was randomly browsing last night, and I came across some random eBay sniping service. I was recently sniped in the last 5 seconds on a VAX that I was bidding on, so I viewed it with some mild degree of interest. I started to browse the user testimonial page
Posted by knorby on April 27, 2008 under Linux, personal, rants |
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t quite get the point of “big deal” versioning and upgrading with something like Ubuntu. I use Ubuntu on my laptop and one of my desktops. I like it on my laptop, because I rarely have to spend time configuring anything. I use it on my desktop, because it is an AMD-64 machine, I like Debian, and Ubuntu has better support for AMD-64. There are some things that Ubuntu does pretty well. For core packages, Ubuntu’s packages tend to be more up to date, and there is less stupidity. As far as the actual distribution, it is pretty nice.
What I find annoying about Ubuntu is the community around it. Mostly as a result of StumbleUpon, I come across all sorts of blog posts that show you how to make your Ubuntu totally awesome by installing a few standard and obvious packages. Worse are the Ubuntu forums, which always seem like a clusterfuck of stupidity from the linux world. Maybe I am being harsh; I remember posting some fairly obvious questions to Linux Questions when I was first using Linux in high school. Still, it is just the feel I get whenever I come across a post.
As I mentioned, one of the features of Ubuntu that really annoys me is the emphasis on versioning. Each one has some clever name, and each one is made into a big deal on the internets. There was an upgrade made available recently, which I have installed. I could see that it was putting aptitude through a gauntlet, but I don’t quite see what was changed. Some packages were made standard, and some were taken out. You are always given an “option” if you want to remove all the packages that are no longer supported or not, but aptitude never stops giving you crap afterwords until you do. Last time I upgraded, I discovered that I no longer want to use xmms. Actually, I started using audacious, and I have been happy with it. Anyway, it seems like they just reinstall most packages for some reason. I know Ubuntu does some stuff to a few packages to get them to work better together. There were also some new utilities, but still, it all seemed like something that could be done by aptitude normally. I just don’t get the big deal made over it…
Posted by knorby on April 22, 2008 under Apple, Solaris, coding, google, personal, rants, uchicago |
I haven’t been posting a lot recently, so I thought I would just kind of outline a little of what has been going on recently.
Some members of the RAS installed the weather station on the roof of Ryerson today (I wasn’t involved in the efforts today unfortunately). In addition, the web view now works (not me again), which I started on. It is still temporary, but it is currently up. I will be assembling a better website, which will be more permanent. I was fearing we wouldn’t be able to get it onto a POSIX operating system, but then wview came to the rescue. I will put up some pictures soon. It was really great to see it finally on the roof. It was some random idea I had a while ago, and it finally materialized.
The biggest news for me today is that I was accepted to Google Summer of Code on the Globus Toolkit. I will be working on a diagnostic administrator interface framework; essentially, it is more Python+XML work, but with Globus. This will also be the third summer in a row that I have done XML work with people based at a national lab (Globus is based at Argonne–not the same as actually working there for the summer, but I will be visiting soon). I will also be working at the Maclab, which should be fun and a chance to do some real work on projects there.
A lot of people are leaving the maclab at the end of the quarter, so I will end up with quite a bit more on my plate it looks like. After the last two weeks or so, I look foreword to that less. Over the last break, I converted many of the servers to Leopard Server, Apple’s latest rendition in bloated bad design. From that experience alone, I lost all respect for Apple (there wasn’t much there in the first place). What kind of upgrade on a server edition of the Operating System overwrites the most basic of configuration and files on upgrade? This last week, our web/dhcp server went down at the same time as our print system, our two most vital systems. From what it looks like now, DirectoryService, the LDAPesque utility that Apple now uses for local accounts as well. epically failed, and I do mean epic. There are some other problems as well; the actual cause is still allusive, but we at first presumed hackers, which can’t be ruled out. The print system? As far as we can tell, the problem is that Leopard is a horrid piece of shit that ruins every piece of software it touches. The implementation of CUPS on it is horribly broken (to a vast extent), despite the fact Apple owns it! I will spend more time in the short future on a series of posts that outlines my points of hatred for it. Dealing with the problems rated pretty high on my rankings of stressful events, and there is still work to be done.
Together with another failure, this time from NSIT, I think I know fully grasp an important life lesson: assume incompetence. NSIT made a pathetic effort to announce that they were going to switch the LDAP server from OpenLDAP to a Sun-based implementation . Apparently, they had a test server, but they neglected to give the address out, or test it on their own machines. NSITE/USITE has its own Macs, even another Maclab (I think of it as the bazarro Maclab; the imaging work is handled remotely, the none of staff know much computers from what I hear, there are few users, and the software is up to date), of which at least some run Tiger. No one tested these to see if logins would, you know, work. Anyways, all our tigers failed to login after the switch. It turned out to be some check box on some security page (in fact the only check box on the security page), for which it took 7 people 48 hours (I think that’s with few breaks in it) to find the fix. We decided to let them deal with it as it was their problem. Incompetence really explains this whole thing well. When we were switching to Leopard on the servers, the ServerAdmin presented us with a catch-22; it was impossible to save setting on one page without saving the settings on another, but it was impossible to save settings on the other one without first saving the changes on the first. What accounts for this flagrant error in the GUI? Why incompetence of course! I experienced a similar sort of situation on a Sun box I work on; everything program I used seemed broken. I e-mailed the sysadmins for a while at which point this golden rule struck me. I ended up compiling any program that failed to work on something. For example, there was some weird error with make. so I compiled and installed gmake to my home directory, and it solved all my problems. I suppose it is not fair to just call this incompetence; laziness should be added in there somewhere.
Some other stuff has been happening, but that makes for a decent mind-purge. It’s nice out again! I can where sandals and shorts comfortably!
Posted by knorby on April 10, 2008 under Apple, Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, humor, shell scripting |
I had some good old fashion fun today on the shell today. I stumbled across this “gem” of an expression:
yes xargs | xargs yes
This expression can be repeated infinitely (mostly) many times without changing the output and without loosing symmetry when joining on the yes’s. In other words, the last expression is equivalent (in regards to output and symmetry):
yes xargs | xargs yes xargs | xargs yes xargs | xargs yes xargs | xargs yes xargs | xargs yes xargs | xargs yes xargs | xargs yes xargs | xargs yes xargs | xargs yes xargs | xargs yes xargs | xargs yes xargs | xargs yes
You can throw some rot13s (with care), cats, and a few other commands in there with the same effect. I am not sure exactly how it functions; it seems to work different on different OSes. I have tried in on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and OpenBSD, and all seem to be a bit different. They seem to run a bit differently, and the output is different. It’s all very fun.
Update: I thought I should clarify that last little bit. The way pipes are treated seems to vary some; the actual functionality is trivial.
