Planet Xdroop

xdroop: is watching a HP/UX 11iv23 install. This is so slow it brings back bad memories. Welcome to 1996! Faster please!

2010-03-12T17:31:26+00:00

xdroop: is watching a HP/UX 11iv23 install. This is so slow it brings back bad memories. Welcome to 1996! Faster please!

Unteachable Disaster Recovery

2010-03-12T15:45:53+00:00

I’ve got another column up at Simple Talk: Sysadmin today. It’s called Unteachable Disaster Recovery Techniques.

This is a true story, and it happened last week. I felt so strongly about it that I wrote the entire entry in one sitting.

Please give it a read through, and remember to rate it using the stars! Thanks!

GPG: Formula 1 Stats

2010-03-12T14:16:40+00:00

xdroop: Welcome to Firedrill Friday!

2010-03-12T13:26:27+00:00

xdroop: Welcome to Firedrill Friday!

NHL Rule Book Is Flawed

2010-03-12T10:17:33+00:00

(Still sick. You don't care. I know. Moving on.)

I have to admit I don't care much about the current controversy of head-shots in checking. I think there should be some kind of reasonable protection, but since physical contact is part of the game, any rule must take that into account.

But as a side effect of this discussion, Quisp at SBNation pointed out something interesting: there is already a rule which covers this situation.

43.1 Charging - A minor or major penalty shall be imposed on a player or goalkeeper who skates or jumps into, or charges an opponent in any manner.

Charging shall mean the actions of a player or goalkeeper who, as a result of distance traveled, shall violently check an opponent in any manner. A "charge" may be the result of a check into the boards, into the goal frame or in open ice.

Quisp rightly points out that this makes absolutely no sense, because any check, and most physical contact, would be covered by this rule. And that's why it isn't called.

(It also begs the question -- when charging is called, exactly what is it that is being called? Is this the two-step rule?)

So finally I start to understand why the officials, both on-ice and off, "interpret" the rule book rather than just calling it: the rule book is inconsistent with the game, both as-played and as we would want it played.

I don't think that rules should be written around injury; Quisp's suggested replacement rule for 54.1 imposes penalties on plays which result in injury. This is a game for big boys, and it is fast. Guys will get hurt on some of them, that's the nature of game. I think the rules should be written around intent. That is, if someone intentionally attempts to injure another player, successful or not, that's at least a double-minor and a rapidly escalating number of games suspended.

If you don't like head-shots, then write the rule that says head-shots are not permitted the same way that knee-on-knee hits are not permitted.

But the bottom line is that the NHL rule book obviously needs more than a little tuning; this can't be the only rule which if called as-written would totally change the way the game is played.

xdroop: is at that point in the sickness where reality's texture is different.

2010-03-12T03:31:34+00:00

xdroop: is at that point in the sickness where reality's texture is different.

Day 5: Still Not Well

2010-03-11T14:29:27+00:00

It's Thursday, and I'm still get up, coming down with the sickness. So no thoughtful essays from moi.

However, I must stress to every one of my artist-style pals that this is perhaps one of the finest articles I wish I'd ever written. I think the overall premise ("I think The Karate Kid ruined the modern world") is a little off, but the sentiment here? Perfectly spot-on for most of us mundane people struggling to be beautiful. (And it's done by the author of "John Dies At The End," which I've been meaning to read for months now.)

So read this today: Fuck the Karate Kid.

The De-Stinkers

2010-03-10T04:45:36+00:00

Ottawa’s Green Bin program is, if not exactly in full swing, then at least in semi-swing. There have been a few problems:

The city suddenly realized that it was going to have problems meeting their contracted targets with OrgaWorld Canada. One of the issues seemed to be that the bins are too small to collect the 80,000 tonnes a year necessary.
A lot of homeowners are miffed about the entire program; some refuse to use it; some have their own composters; some think the bins are too small; some just like to complain about everything the City does. But then there are other people who love their Green Bins a lot.
Meanwhile, OrgaWorld, it seems, is not even operational enough yet to process the waste that has been collected so far. They have until April 1^st or the City can cancel the whole contract. I wonder what will happen then?
There was some significant hue and cry about the extra $68 per year the city will be charging each household in taxes in order to pay for the bins.
And, as the warm weather slowly creeps over Ottawa, people are starting to worry about what this means for their Green Bins. Maggots will move in to enjoy the goodies. The bins full of compost will start to smell; which in turn will attract rodents. As the weeks go by the bins will get kind of gross and people will become more and more reluctant to use their Green Bins.

Well lo and behold, some smart cookies are capitalizing on this last issue and have formed a Green Bin cleaning company called Bin Aces Inc. They’ll come to your house or business with their magical cleaning truck and clean and disinfect your green bins, recycling bins and even garbage bins for a modest fee and on whatever schedule suits you best.

The coolest part of this company is that they are able to process and recycle the water they use for cleaning so that they can clean 200 bins using the same amount of water a regular joe would use to clean just two bins. They use only environmentally-friendly detergents and none of their waste water will contaminate our rivers, lakes or streams.

All cities with green bin programs have spawned these bin cleaning companies – not all of them are environmentally friendly and not all of their prices are this reasonable.

In the interests of full disclosure I should mention that while I’m not getting any benefits whatsoever from mentioning this company on my blog, the owners of Bin Aces are related to a co-worker of mine, which is how I heard about them.

I wanted to acknowledge them because I like to mention local, small business-owners – especially when they’re first starting out and they’re doing something interesting. Also, I don’t want to see the already beleaguered Green Bin program fizzle out because people will start to turn against their Green Bins when they’re no longer shiny-new and daisy-fresh…..which is likely to happen in the next six months.

So, while I know this is a very boring post for non-Ottawans, I’m hoping you’ll at least be amused over the fact that the capital city of Canada just recently got on board with a composting program – a good decade behind most other cities. Or, that you might be amused over the fact that Ottawa had about a thousand other cities from which to model a green bin program, and yet still managed to get so much of it screwed up.

Or, if you’re still bored, we can just talk about Paris some more.

Tagged: Bin Aces, compost, maggots, Ottawa Green Bins, rodents, smelly bins, waiting waste

News flash

2010-03-10T02:52:00+00:00

A popular blog truncated its RSS feeds to boost site pageviews. It’s like last week, when The Atlantic changed to partial-content RSS feeds. And that was like every other week, when some publisher did something that some readers didn’t like to make a few more cents.

I dislike the intrusive advertising on Salon, so I don’t read Salon. I dislike Michael Arrington, so I never read anything on TechCrunch (even when they write about me or my products) and have taken technical measures to ensure that I never even land there accidentally and give them whatever tiny profit that one pageview is worth. I don’t like the timebombed, Unicode-breaking Clickability print-friendly view for New York Magazine, since I like reading NYMag-length pieces in Instapaper and Clickability doesn’t work well in it, so I just don’t read NYMag’s articles. I don’t like Ars Technica’s paginated articles, but since I don’t want to pay for a subscription, I just read every page separately, give them all of their separate-page ad views, and save each page to Instapaper if I want to read them that way.

One reaction I’ve never had is to think that I deserve anything from these publishers.

Valid point: [Publisher] should consider doing it some other way because this will alienate some readers.
Invalid point: [Publisher] should do it my way because all content deserves to be free/ad-free/full-RSS/single-page.

I see a staggering amount of entitlement every day in the form of arguments and blog posts like the latter.

We don’t deserve anything. Publishers can do whatever they want. If you don’t like it, don’t send them nasty emails or browse their sites with ad-blockers: just don’t support them. Don’t read their content, don’t link to them, and don’t talk about them. Since money’s not usually involved, vote with your attention and read elsewhere.

xdroop: Why does #scanpst willfully create .pst files that nothing can deal with? #microsoft #fail #rhetorical

2010-03-09T20:26:20+00:00

xdroop: Why does #scanpst willfully create .pst files that nothing can deal with? #microsoft #fail #rhetorical

xdroop: TRON go: http://tinyurl.com/y9vvxah

2010-03-09T19:26:15+00:00

xdroop: TRON go: http://tinyurl.com/y9vvxah

xdroop: @ajventer Ah, that's alright then.

2010-03-09T17:52:45+00:00

xdroop: @ajventer Ah, that's alright then.

xdroop: @ajventer Conceded. But the question is: why would I run Linux?

2010-03-09T17:47:03+00:00

xdroop: @ajventer Conceded. But the question is: why would I run Linux?

xdroop: @ajventer I'm a unix admin, and Windows doesn't get in my way. You asked why I use it.

2010-03-09T17:29:55+00:00

xdroop: @ajventer I'm a unix admin, and Windows doesn't get in my way. You asked why *I* use it.

xdroop: @ajventer this is probably an essay question. :)

2010-03-09T17:26:41+00:00

xdroop: @ajventer this is probably an essay question. :)

xdroop: @ajventer Fiddling while Rome burns. What about the two big items: why do it, and fiddle-time-isn't-billable-time?

2010-03-09T17:26:06+00:00

xdroop: @ajventer Fiddling while Rome burns. What about the two big items: why do it, and fiddle-time-isn't-billable-time?

xdroop: @ajventer @s1zwe http://tinyurl.com/yhyotl6 -- it is from 2008, but if you change Vista to Win7-64 it is still fundamentally true.

2010-03-09T17:18:52+00:00

xdroop: @ajventer @s1zwe http://tinyurl.com/yhyotl6 -- it is from 2008, but if you change Vista to Win7-64 it is still fundamentally true.

xdroop: @ajventer could be worse -- he could like 32-bit Vista. (BTW, I run Win7-64 on both my main systems.)

2010-03-09T17:13:50+00:00

xdroop: @ajventer could be worse -- he could like 32-bit Vista. (BTW, I run Win7-64 on both my main systems.)

xdroop: RT @rands: Two intriguing ideas I found today that I don't know what to do with: "Information Laundering" and "Sustainable Vintage"

2010-03-09T14:07:17+00:00

xdroop: RT @rands: Two intriguing ideas I found today that I don't know what to do with: "Information Laundering" and "Sustainable Vintage"

NDAs don’t suck, but most of their uses do

2010-03-08T20:23:26+00:00

I want to start this article by saying that I’m bound by NDAs all over the place. The company that I work for, being partners with a variety of companies, has NDAs in place for each vendor that results in me being under an NDA as well. Thus, I’m not going to:

Break any NDAs
Advocate violating NDAs

I’m bound by those NDAs in what I write on this blog – I attend partner briefing con-calls/presentations etc., periodically, and get told about upcoming features or more generally roadmaps going up to 2 years out. I’m involved in beta testing – version and feature – and I so I get to see things before a lot of other people. I also get to talk directly to product management at vendors too. So to any vendor reading this, I hope they’ll understand that I’ll still follow all your NDA processes.

Just because I’m bound by NDAs doesn’t mean I can’t talk about where I think they’re wrong.

There’s a growing chorus of “NDAs suck” at the moment, and I’m not laying claim to the idea of blogging about the suck-value of NDAs on my own. I’ve reached the point of wanting to blog about it based on the previous efforts of Grumpy Storage in “Show me the Money (Information)“, and more recently in Matthew Yeager’s “First, execute with urgency. The rest is commentary“. (Incidentally, that’s two people you really should be following on Twitter – ianhf and mpyeager respectively.)

Over at Grumpy Storage, Ian, as an end-customer, wrote:

I need electronic copies of any & all materials discussed or presented – no exceptions, without this I can’t use it as reference material in my internal strategy planning. If you hide behind “it’s beyond NDA”, or “NDA prohibits” then I’ll interpret that as “you don’t trust me personally or respect me professionally” and the relationship will be difficult from then on.

This is a pretty damning comment on Ian’s part, and realistically represents how a lot of customers feel about NDAs – and this may be the surprising part – how a lot of suppliers and system integrators feel about them too. (I think he’s wrong about where the trust issue lays, and I’ll get to that soon.)

Matthew drew up an excellent summary of how NDAs protect intent over execution, and some possible solutions to this, and I’d suggest you consider reading both Ian’s and Matthew’s articles in full before continuing with what I’m going to say.

My argument is that NDAs themselves don’t suck. However, I do feel that in the vast majority of instances in which NDAs are applied do, indeed suck.

Trusted partners/suppliers are often “piggy in the middle” when it comes to NDAs. Where we frequently add value is by being closely aligned to our customers (who we prefer to also call partners), working at understanding their business requirements and delivering solutions and information that are tailored to suit those requirements. We recognise that time is precious, attention is a currency, and that the work of IT managers and staff isn’t to be sold to by a business, but to deliver to the business. By having the time to work directly with businesses, we offer a value-add that bungee-vendor sales rarely if ever can. That’s why a lot of companies choose to work with integrators and suppliers rather than vendors directly. As such, perhaps more than end-customers, as an integrator I can look at the various information I know that are locked away under NDA and really, really regret that I can’t readily tell my customers to help them with their forward planning.

So in that sense, NDAs are a constant case of “Here’s some really good information! But. You. Can’t. Tell. Anyone.”

Now, my beef with NDAs is not that they exist – I’m a fierce proponent of intellectual property protection. My beef is in where NDAs are applied. Or perhaps to be more succinct – in the frequency with which NDAs are applied. It’s too often. It’s across the board on a range of things where it logically makes no sense, and it’s often for the wrong reasons.

Ian at Grumpy Storage sees NDAs as a trust issue. I agree, but I think he’s (understandably) missing where the trust-issue really exists. You see, in big companies – and most vendors fall into this category, few people have “authority”. In this case, by authority, I’m talking about authority to discuss information on unreleased products or features with non-employees. This goes to the heart of corporate secrecy, and if companies should understand anything by now it’s that social networking is eroding this. So it’s trust alright, but the trust issue is in companies mistrusting their staff to make sensible judgment calls, or mistrusting the market to such a degree that the wrong disclosure decisions are made.

Recently, a senior vendor employee told me the following in relation to consulting:

“giving away info” is exactly what consultants need to do — controversial, but effective

Here’s the rub: the same applies to most situations where NDAs are pulled out. That is, in places where information is currently bartered (“I’ll tell you, but only if you sign this document that says I can sue you if you tell anyone else”), it should be flowing freely. (Call it the next step in the Cluetrain Manifesto if you will.) This is something that’s imperative to turn around. It’s already important with this generation, but just think of how important it’s going to be in a business environment saturated with Gen-Y’ers, all whom thrive on interchange and connectivity. (I’ve not said it so succinctly before, but I think Gen-Y is going to cause one of the biggest upheavals ever experienced in business communications, practices and procedures.)

I’d wager that the following two reasons sum up most of the times that NDAs are waved around:

Vendor employees are insufficiently empowered as to be able to make a judgment call that the people they are speaking to can be trusted. Lacking this empowerment, they must take the safe approach. (Hey, they need jobs too.)
Vendor management and legal frequently resort to the knee jerk reaction (sometimes due to a lack of empowerment themselves) of trying to hide as much information as possible.

These, of course, are on top of the actual valid reasons why we have NDAs – to protect key components of intellectual property. However, those valid reasons are definitely in the minority. If a picture helps, I’d suggest the following breakdown is fairly indicative of why vendors ask people to sign NDAs:

The net result is that within the IT industry overall we’re awash with NDAs. It reminds me of the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, from my favourite book, Catch-22:

Almost overnight the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was in full flower, and Captain Black was enraptured to discover himself spearheading it. He had really hit on something. All the enlisted men and officers on combat duty had to sign a loyalty oath to get their map cases from the intelligence tent, a second loyalty oath to receive their flak suits and parachutes from the parachute tent, a third loyalty oath for Lieutenant Balkington, the motor vehicle officer, to be allowed to ride from the squadron to the airfield in one of the trucks. Every time they turned around there was another loyalty oath to be signed. They signed a loyalty oath to get their pay from the finance officer, to obtain their PX supplies, to have their hair cut by the Italian barbers. To Captain Black, every officer who supported his Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a competitor, and he planned and plotted twenty-four hours a day to keep one step ahead. He would stand second to none in his devotion to country. When other officers had followed his urging and introduced loyalty oaths of their own, he went them one better by making every son of a bitch who came to his intelligence tent sign two loyalty oaths, then three, then four; then he introduced the pledge of allegiance, and after that “The Star-Spangled Banner,” one chorus, two choruses, three choruses, four choruses. Each time Captain Black forged ahead of his competitors, he swung upon them scornfully for their failure to follow his example. Each time they followed his example, he retreated with concern and racked his brain for some new stratagem that would enable him to turn upon them scornfully again.

Sometimes it seems we’re stuck in the middle of a Great NDA Crusade, and just like in Catch-22, we need a Major –– de Coverley, who can say:

“Gimme eat.”

Instead of eat, Corporal Snark gave Major –– de Coverley a loyalty oath to sign. Major –– de Coverley swept it away with mighty displeasure the moment he recognized what it was, his good eye flaring up blindingly with fiery disdain and his enormous old corrugated face darkening in mountainous wrath.

“Gimme eat, I said,” he ordered loudly in harsh tones that rumbled ominously through the silent tent like claps of distant thunder.

Corporal Snark turned pale and began to tremble. He glanced toward Milo pleadingly for guidance. For several terrible seconds there was not a sound. Then Milo nodded.

“Give him eat,” he said.

Corporal Snark began giving Major –– de Coverley eat. Major –– de Coverley turned from the counter with his tray full and came to a stop. His eyes fell on the groups of other officers gazing at him in mute appeal, and, with righteous belligerence, he roared:

“Give everybody eat!”

“Give everybody eat!” Milo echoed with joyful relief, and the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade came to an end.

(Catch-22, ISBN 978-0-999-47046-5, Joseph Heller, First Published in Great Britain in 1962. Thanks also to The Sheila Variations website, that saved me from retyping those sections by having already quoted them.)

I want a vendor who will be the Major –– de Coverley of the industry. A vendor who will stand up and say “enough is enough” to frivolous NDAs that do nothing more than stifle discussion.

I’m not calling for an end to NDAs. There are some NDAs that should be preserved. For instance, I’d never argue for the cessation of NDAs when it comes to alpha/beta testing. I’d also suggest that long term forecasts should fall under the realm of NDAs too. (That’s two examples of where the “20%” or so that I estimate of NDAs that are valid come from.)

But what’s long term? That’s a year out, at least. Within that time frame? You should be confident enough in your development programme that you can talk about it to everyone, not just people under NDA. Hell, even if you want to bring this back to only six months, there should be a “forward looking” period that vendors are comfortable talking about without NDA shields. After all, let’s face it: everything published under an NDA still starts with various comments such as:

The items discussed in this document contain forward-looking statements that reflect … blah blah blah … it is our aim to get there … blah blah blah … but don’t hold us to anything if we don’t get there.

So it’s not as if the information discussed in NDAs is so rock solid that you can take bets on it anyway! So then … make those same caveats then pull out the useful information about upcoming features!

For information about features and products that are going to come out within 6-12 months, there’s no point for that to be under NDA. In fact, it does more harm than good, especially when you’re talking to a company that wants to buy something, but needs to know where it’s heading. It leads to situations where products are say, disqualified for consideration because they don’t have a feature yet, but because it’s so tightly bound up in an NDA, even though it will be available by the time the purchase decision is made, the message doesn’t get heard.

I know there’s the argument that new features, or perhaps more importantly, upcoming features, need to be protected from competitors. Does anyone seriously think NDAs shield anyone from this? Employees routinely shift from vendor to vendor, and while they’re usually under non-compete clauses, and clauses that restrain them from discussing products and features they were working on, those clauses only last so long – in most cases seemingly limited to 12 weeks or so. In short – if vendor A wants to know what vendor B is up to, they poach staff, or watch who they’re purchasing and make educated guesses.

Not only that, every vendor that has a clue has fairly heavily populated product development strategies ranging from 6 months to 2 years out, and just hearing that someone is going to implement some technology doesn’t mean that a competitor can instantly slot in development resources immediately on it in order to ape that functionality too. (Assuming they don’t already have the technology – it can be a case of “catch up” sometimes.)

So, would much change under reduced disclosure via NDAs? It seems bloody unlikely.

“Ah“, some would say, “It’s not just the competitors. It’s also the risk of being sued by a company if they purchase X on the basis of us implementing some feature A that we’ve talked about, but for some reason we don’t get around to it in the specified timeframe.”

“Um, so what?” would be my response to this. There’s two very important rejoinders to the above arguments:

Make forward looking statements with the standard caveats that are already heavily applied to NDAs anyway; i.e., it works for an NDA situation, so why won’t it work for an ordinary situation?
Only talk about things that are well within development scope – again, we’re talking about that period of up to 6 or 12 months out from now. That should be things that you’re reasonably confident of achieving.

“Ah“, some would say, “Then there’s stymieing by proxy – even if competitors don’t intend to implement the same thing we’re doing, they’ll just talk about doing it to convince people to stick with them, or buy them instead.”

To this I would say: Companies that repeatedly talk about products or features they then don’t go on to release in time (or at all) quickly get a reputation for vaporware. So don’t get too hung up about that – the market usually deals with vaporware vendors very efficiently.

“Ah“, some would say, “But what about the Osbourne Effect?” To this I’d say that particularly with mature product ranges, there shouldn’t regularly be an upcoming update that’s so earth shattering that it would cause someone to hold off buying until that is released. If someone needs a backup product now, or an array now, or a tape library now, they won’t keep on indefinitely putting it off just because there’s bigger and better things around the corner. Guess what? We’re all in IT here –– we all know that products have a fairly defined ride between superiority, regularity and obsolescence. Or as the old saying goes: if you keep waiting for the best computer to be released before you buy, you’ll never buy a computer.

In situations where there’s potential upheaval, have a clear upgrade strategy that clearly states and amortizes the cost appropriately – most companies will thank you. On the other hand, what they won’t thank you for is a situation where they buy a product from you that gets end of lifed or shelved shortly thereafter without any advance warning or clear roadmap of a way forward. I’ve seen multiple instances where vendors have permanently soured relationships with managers at customer sites. This makes the technical person at the site that recommended the purchase look bad, or worry about looking bad. And it also makes the manager who authorised the purchase worry that they “look bad”. Such issues don’t remain at that customer site – unresolved failures in customer satisfaction roll forward into every site that a person moves on to. Trust me – I’ve seen it, I know managers who refuse to buy products from vendor X for exactly that reason, and they’ve carried it through as policy on sites they’ve moved on to.

Being upfront on the other hand encourages customers to believe you have their best interest at heart. For instance, companies are still happily buying LTO-4 tape libraries, particularly from vendors offering free LTO-5 drive swap-ins, or even in situations where they know there’ll be a (relatively) small fee.

What we need is for the vendors to start to frankly evaluate where they’re slapping NDAs about. Sometimes it’s like navigating through a sea of pamphlet wielders at a train station – or a voting booth.

Come on vendors – reappraise where and how frequently you’re throwing NDAs around and prove to us that you actually live in the same information-rich world that you want to supply products to. Tone the NDAs down and use them appropriately, and use them sparingly. If you want another analogy – it’s becoming a bit too “boy who cried wolf”, quite frankly.

http://www.securitywarriorconsulting.com/security-incident-log-review-checklist.html

2010-03-08T16:41:32+00:00

xdroop: Oh Monday, thou art a scornful, terrible mistress.

2010-03-08T13:09:24+00:00

xdroop: Oh Monday, thou art a scornful, terrible mistress.

The most fascinating article on Scurvy that you will read this week.

2010-03-08T07:43:28+00:00

Scott and Scurvy

I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be mixed in with sailors' grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long ocean voyages.
But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened? [...]
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another.
An unfortunate series of accidents conspired with advances in technology to discredit the cure for scurvy. What had been a simple dietary deficiency became a subtle and unpredictable disease that could strike without warning. Over the course of fifty years, scurvy would return to torment not just Polar explorers, but thousands of infants born into wealthy European and American homes. And it would only be through blind luck that the actual cause of scurvy would be rediscovered, and vitamin C finally isolated, in 1932.

xdroop: "I won’t make it any more broken than it is now." http://tinyurl.com/y8wpz2d

2010-03-08T02:54:25+00:00

xdroop: "I won’t make it any more broken than it is now." http://tinyurl.com/y8wpz2d

5K on ServerFault

2010-03-07T21:24:02+00:00

Hooray. Broke 5K on ServerFault today.

(Previously.)

Healthy Leafs Barely Beat Sick Senators

2010-03-07T13:43:27+00:00

...or something. I didn't watch -- I was sick.

But really, the first two games back from the Olympic break have had the terrible dialed up to "10" here. I was watching the New York game, and the color guy was talking about the New York coach's decision to call a time out after an icing call to rest his guys... he says: "this is a smart decision, he knows this game could break out either way any time now."

And I said, are you and I watching the same game? Yes, the Senators are pressing, but it is a disorganized pressure -- the Rangers are playing smart, simple, steady hockey in their end. And when the pressure starts to go the other way, the Rangers are still playing smart, steady hockey, while the Senators are running around in their own end. And the Rangers then get rewarded with what, two or three quick goals?

I watched LeClaire's return two nights later, all seven minutes of it before he got the hook. I didn't blame LeClaire on either of those goals, they were clearly the fault of the guys ahead of him on the ice. Unfortunately for LeClaire, Clouston can't hook the rest of the team... Elliot played well in relief, but showed what kind of night it was when he left his net for the sixth attacker late in the third and the empty net goal goes in before Elliot even gets off the ice. (Was Karlsson laughing or crying at that?) Add in both Alfredsson and Spezza being unable to convert on a break, and it just wasn't the Senators' night.

I still can't believe that Murray thinks this team is set for a deep playoff run.

“Just in Case” Versus “Just in Time” Learning. Or Why Am I Learning This Useless Crud !?

2010-03-06T20:20:46+00:00

You need to learn what you don't know to succeed in Networking. Understanding "Just in Case" instead of "Just in Time" learning might help you to understand why.

xdroop: Time Lapse in NYC: http://vimeo.com/9679622

2010-03-06T04:08:28+00:00

xdroop: Time Lapse in NYC: http://vimeo.com/9679622

Secret agents: Make SNMP work for you | Network Administrator | TechRepublic.com

2010-03-06T04:01:14+00:00

Learning From The Olympics

2010-03-05T23:27:30+00:00

StayClassy discusses how the NHL could learn from the Olympics. I'm going to cherry-pick his list:

4-on-4 overtime: I like this idea. I've always liked 4-on-4, because even in the "gritty" NHL the players can't piss around hitting each other when it is 4-on-4. Also usually when you get to overtime in the regular season both teams want the win, so they put in the effort. I consider this a compromise between the there shouldn't be any difference between playoff OT and playoff regulation except sudden ~~death~~ victory camp and the dude just do the penalty shots and give me my winner now camp.
Less is more: Again I approve. Instead of sending 16 teams to the playoffs, just send 8. And drop the stupid division-leaders seeding, let's get the teams which can do the business to do the business. The hockey will be better and we'll start our summer two weeks earlier. This will never fly because the playoffs are not about hockey, the playoffs are about revenue.
Shorter broadcasts: I like the reduced TV time-outs and the general flow of the play. Again, this won't happen because of the lost revenue that fewer TV time-outs would cost. If I had a choice between fewer TV time-outs and shorter breaks between periods, I'd take the fewer TV time-outs because I can always go to the fridge while Don Cherry is on. Lets face it -- the talking heads talk during the intermissions because there's nothing else to do. What would you prefer -- a live shot of the lineup to use the can?

Overall I didn't care about the olympics. I think I watched the gold medal game more from withdrawal than any other factor. That said, it was a pretty good game.

xdroop: @ajventer google is your teacher.

2010-03-05T22:42:19+00:00

xdroop: @ajventer google is your teacher.

rands: Take the egg and Canadian bacon from the Egg McMuffin and put it on the McDouble: http://j.mp/aBX3DO

2010-03-05T22:03:26+00:00

rands: Take the egg and Canadian bacon from the Egg McMuffin and put it on the McDouble: http://j.mp/aBX3DO

xdroop: Cde -- it isn't dead yet!

2010-03-05T21:21:22+00:00

xdroop: Cde -- it isn't dead yet!

xdroop: @ajventer You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house / You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife

2010-03-05T16:57:39+00:00

xdroop: @ajventer You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house / You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife

If Nerds Can Learn Linux, Why Can't They Learn Not To Interrupt People?

2010-03-05T16:04:14+00:00

After my rant on The Big Bang's nerdy ol' Sheldon Cooper yesterday, a couple of people wondered: If nerds can master such arbitrarily complex things as the Linux operating and the complete rules of D&D, why can't they learn the rules of social norms?

Let me try and give you the answer from a nerd's perspective.

Imagine, if you will, you have just joined a company where showing your fingernails to someone was a grave offense. Like most polite societies, acquaintances usually wouldn't tell you that you'd just done the equivalent of walking out of the bathroom with toilet paper on your heels - they'd just snigger, and think less of you.

When told, you'd probably nod at first and go, "Oh, yeah, got it." But it's unnatural to walk around with your hands bunched in fists all the time, pressed against your chest. The amount of time you'd spend orchestrating how to reach for your soda during a meeting without flashing those impolite nails would seem unreal to you. And you'd have years of habit where you'd just reach out to type something without hunching over to hide it, and wham. People are insulted.

You'd probably forget a lot, because - as noted - only your good friends would tell you when you'd screwed up. You could nail-flash nine times out of ten and have people just quietly walk away, shaking their heads. You don't have a consistent mechanism to punish failure.

Furthermore, it seems so arbitrary. You'd look at your fingernails for hours, thinking, this? This is what people are mad about? That's so tiny a thing, it can't be. It would slide off your mind because it just makes no sense. You might think that there were other things you could do to make up for it, or conclude that the people who told you about the nails had to be overreacting to the seriousness of it.

But no. It's nails. It makes no sense, but they fuckin' hate fingernails here. And internalizing that would take years, if you just didn't decide that the whole thing was stupid and you just didn't want to play.

That's what it's like for nerds. I mean, it's crazy to me that people will think you're less intelligent if you have a stain on your shirt. In a sane world, I think, people would listen to what's coming out of your mouth and decide based on that, because cleanliness and grooming habits are a very separate thing from intelligence. But poor dress marks you as a yokel to many.

Likewise, to cite a more recent and subtler example, I'm continually amazed by how much better people react if I remember to arbitrarily throw "I think" before I state an opinion. I mean, it's coming out of my mouth, and it's not like there's some external arbiter of which sitcom is funniest, so of course it's an "I think." That's assumed. But, apparently, if I go out of my way to remind people that it's my opinion with a marker that makes little sense to me, they relax. So I do it.

Society makes no logical sense. And nerds? Nerds crave logical sense, to the point where they seek out hobbies that they can fuck up with their logical sense. If nerds become the dominant consumer of any given entertainment, it's fucking doomed.

Nerds want every question answered with a reason, even if that question shouldn't have one. Why is Superman strong? He gets his powers from the sun. Why does he get powers from the sun? Because his skin is a solar battery. Well, why is he still strong at night? Well, he's charged up for years as an adolescent, he has a lot of stored power. Ah ha! Well, in issue #626, the Parasite drained him of all energy before Batman saved him - shouldn't he be back to zero and weak by dawn? No, they say, because of...

Nerds want a Unifying Theory to everything. If Mulder said he grew up in Albany in one episode and in Long Island in another, it just won't do to say, "Well, it's a continuity error." Nerds will spend hours in forums, devising an some elaborate explanation to explain the Albany/Long Island error - an explanation so complex that it puts JFK assassination theorists to shame.

Once nerds infiltrate the creating sector of entertainment, they will destroy it by writing episodes that a) answer every question ever posed, and b) are so incomprehensible and dense that outsiders have no chance of enjoying it, ever.

There's no Unifying Theory to society. "Why is messy hair considered unsightly?" "Well, because it looks messy." "But... that model's hair is also uncombed, and yet you think he looks hot." "That's a styled messiness. That works on him." "Is there a rule that explains why some tousled hairs are messy and others are sexy?" "Not really. But you can memorize it, I guess."

So nerds? It often takes them years to fathom that a complex, inconsistent, and arbitrary system is in fact the way the world works. They'll often spend years trying out other hypotheses, certain that there's some other hidden mechanism that really makes things tick. And some, frustrated by the lack of coherency, will default to the "do unto others" rule - and be a royal pain in the ass, because many nerds actually like being interrupted in mid-sentence when they're wrong.

Which is not to say that there aren't a lot of nerds who have learned to read people correctly. You just don't notice them, because they have successfully passed in your world. I suspect a lot of the readers of this journal have internalized these crazy rules, even if they don't understand them, and as such you may not mark them as a terminal case.

Deep down, though, even though you may think of them as "normal," they're secretly baffled and often irritated by the way things are. Yet unlike the lost nerd segments, they've shrugged and knuckled under as a necessity. Then they go to favorite forums or cons, where they can, for a weekend or an evening, interact in the way that they feel is sane.

TechRepublic Network Administrator: Secret agents: Make SNMP work for you

2010-03-05T14:00:43+00:00

Blogger Mark Underwood lays out the ways you can use SNMP agents to monitor network devices, and even set it up to send software alerts as well.

—————————————————————————————

Out there, working for you, are agents. Feed them a little port UDP/161,162 and they’ll deliver a dossier on many network devices, in the form of a Management Information Base (MIB).

Just got hired after the last network administrator got promoted to CIO? Grab a free network management tool that has an SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) agent listener (SpiceWorks, Net-SNMP, NetXMS, Nagios, Zenoss and many more), then head over to the local Wi-Fi-enabled coffee establishment. Chances are good you’ll have charts and diagrams to visualize what you’ve gotten yourself into.

SNMP considerations

Here’s a list of pros and cons for using SNMP agents, which I’ll discuss in more detail below.

Pros

Intrusion tripwires
Quick network overview
Indispensible for switches representing single point of failure
Proactive warnings for failing hardware
Enable performance monitoring
Detect software failures and anomalies
Best practice for industry standard, interoperable device descriptions with ontologies

Cons

False Positives
Log management
Too much information; can’t see the forest
Complex monitoring environment
Configuration Management
Agent authentication and default public settings
Multiple agent message formats

SNMP basics

The basic notion of SNMP is that of an agent-based notification system. Each device, even many low level switches and printers, is equipped with an agent ready to do your bidding. The notification, or “trap,” can be generated by an agent developed by the device manufacturer, or listener software can monitor systems for specific events, such as particular items of interest in an event log, and send traps to an SNMP trap handler or other network management tool.

SNMP can be thought of as one framework within a number of overlapping frameworks that include Microsoft Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), the Web Based Enterprise Management (WEBM) and the Common Information Model (CIM). CIM has evolved into an entire object model that DMTF describes using graphical language taken from the Unified Modeling Language (UML).

SNMP does Windows or Linux

Microsoft has fully embraced the CIM model in WMI. For example, open a command window on many Vista, Windows 7, or Server 2008 machines and type:

winrm enumerate wmicimv2/Win32_ComputerSystem

The tool will list a machine’s basic hardware information such as the motherboard manufacturer, but also Domain membership, status of the administrative password, server roles, current user name, machine name, boot options, and more. Using WMI, you can deck out the walls of your cubicle with ample justification for upgrading the server farm. Figure A shows such SNMP-enabled charts. Similar monitoring capabilities are available for Linux. For instance, the free WebNMS product implements an SNMP agent but also offers management through HTTP.

Figure A

Click to enlarge.

Windows Graphs from SNMPBOY.MSFT.NET

Worth the effort and cost?

The hurried and harried network administrator would be right to question how much effort to put into studying SNMP and related topics. The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), primary custodian of knowledge about SNMP and related topics, insists that its tutorial documents are suitable for “management application developers, instrumentation developers, information technology managers and system administrators.” That may be over-reaching. Scott Neumann of the CIM Road Map Task Force describes CIM as “the most developed and widely accepted model for describing an electrical network.” That said, the subject is as deep and as complex as big or heterogeneous networks can get.

SNMP for software?

Here’s where the fun begins. SNMP agents are not only for physical gadgetry. For instance, Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) can be tweaked to respond to alerts from Oracle VM, Oracle Database, or Fusion Middleware. The use case Oracle offers is its Contact Center Anywhere (CCA) application. Oracle walks prospective SNMP users through useful telephony-related traps, but also straightforward problems such as software license failures, “Malicious Call Trace,” Automated Call Distribution Voice Mail, etc. These examples show how an application could be engineered to help managers understand its performance, to automatically escalate certain conditions, or to implement enterprise-specific workflow. These could result in exciting improvements in the way software is designed.

Be advised that there is risk in this Spy-vs-Spy world. SNMP’s original designers were a trusting lot, and security seemed to have taken a back seat to disclosure. SNMP “community strings” function as passwords between the manager and the agent. The community string appears in every packet sent between them. Don’t risk having your SNMP agents become double agents. Don’t accept the default values of “public” or “private” for community strings. “Private” is especially problematic as it may permit an attacker to modify a device’s configuration. When it makes sense to do so, and when the device allows it, limit which IP’s are permitted to access SNMP agents. While not all network devices support it, SNMP Version 3 features improved agent encryption, which reduces the risk of man-in the-middle network attacks that could not only discover how to get out of your DMZ but could potentially reconfigure devices.

Buyer beware tips

A comprehensive buying guide is beyond the scope of this brief post, but here are a few important tips to get you started:

Keep in mind that even a small network will have hundreds, even thousands of “devices.” If pricing is based on a device count, round up. Way up.
“Automatic Network discovery” is great in principle, but it assumes everything is going your way - i.e., that both agent and manager can see one another.
There are hosted as well as internally managed solutions for SNMP monitoring.
Your time investment will add up. It won’t necessarily be all in one sitting. Prepare to invest serious time in making use of SNMP alerts. If you’re on a project schedule, the community / commercial options can be a way to get help without a big investment.

Recommended readings

Whemsolutions.com tutorial on the DTMF Common Information Model.
SNMP Penetration Testing Technical Note from SANS Institute.
TCP/IP Guide’s entry on SNMP Version 3 (SNMPv3).
Cisco’s Guide to SNMP.

xdroop: Look out, #TigerWoods -- your caddy is mad at you http://tinyurl.com/yfz625e ...and this is what passes for news in this country?

2010-03-05T03:27:52+00:00

xdroop: Look out, #TigerWoods -- your caddy is mad at you http://tinyurl.com/yfz625e ...and this is what passes for news in this country?

xdroop: is about to commit the biggest firewall change set we've ever done. Hold on to your butts. #jurassicpark

2010-03-04T20:05:06+00:00

xdroop: is about to commit the biggest firewall change set we've ever done. Hold on to your butts. #jurassicpark

Lets Review:

2010-03-04T10:17:45+00:00

These are new the teams selected by the FIA for inclusion in the 2010 F1 World Championship:

USF1: Dead and finished. Probably permanently.
Manor Racing: Now Virgin Racing. This may or may not be a buy-out, it is hard to tell. They have introduced, and started testing, a real racing car.
Campos Meta: Now Hispania Racing Team, or HRT. Original owners no longer involved. Still waiting for the Dallara-designed and built car to be introduced, although that is allegedly going to happen on Thursday or Friday, a week before Bahrain. This means the first time it does any running, trivial or not, will be free practice session one at a race weekend.
Lotus: so far the most stable of the lot. No ownership changes, and they have introduced a (plain, slow) F1 car and done some testing.
BMW-Sauber: lost their entry while BMW was trying to exit involvement, only to gain it back when Toyota abruptly departed. Perhaps the most ironic team on the grid, since BMW is not involved at all any more, and the engines are Ferrari. Probably the best prepared of all the "new" teams since they really are not that new. We can't really count them as in trouble because all their drama happened last year.

So from five teams, you have one outright failure, possibly two total ownership changes, one very uncompetitive team, and one moderately successful team which again doesn't count because they are not really that new.

Oh, and the FIA has decided that Stefan GP won't be participating this year, even though USF1 has failed.

Now to be fair, part of the problem is that the first group of teams to sign up for 2010 did so when the FIA was planning the spending cap rules. The championship formula that eventually was decided on was very different, meaning that all these teams were suddenly underfinanced. USF1's Ken Anderson claims that the delay in sorting out the regulations for 2010 (there wasn't a peace brokered until mid- or late July 2009) meant that the new teams had no idea what set of goal posts they would actually be working towards until very late.

So you end up with a truncated timeline to meet a standard that suddenly would cost a lot more money than initially planned.

With these factors in mind, it isn't much of a surprise that the new teams would have difficulties.

xdroop: co-worker, on HP/UX: I recommend the consumption of three beers before starting. Ensure that you have cleared your schedule for the day.

2010-03-03T23:33:02+00:00

xdroop: co-worker, on HP/UX: I recommend the consumption of three beers before starting. Ensure that you have cleared your schedule for the day.

There's always an emergency somewhere

2010-03-03T15:05:09+00:00

Citizen writer Leonard Stern shares his horror at the lack of service in hospitals:

The complete indifference of staff was striking. My friend was still waiting for the doctor to see him, if only to offer pain relief, when the doctor decided to give an improptu computer tutorial to a junior staffer.

My comment:

It isn't unbelievable.

Know what? There's always a fire. And in the emergency room, there's always an emergency. (Thus the name). It's probably buried there under a mountain of sniffles and bumps and bruises, but there's probably a legitamete one in there somewhere.

You can't possibly expect doctors and nurses to come to work and treat every walk-in as if he was in trauma-one in ER. You can't run at "emergency" service levels constantly. If fire fighters had to fight fires 12 hours a day, six days a week, they'd get a little relaxed about it. Because, you know, there's always something on fire, and if something's always on fire, there will never be the time to make sure that the hoses are stacked and rotated properly so that they work properly when requied. So some guy would stop fighting the fire, and deal with the hoses, and make sure that the new guy knew how to deal with the hoses. Because there's always something on fire.

Similarly in your job, if there was always someone getting shafted by the system, if someone was going without help because of insufficient funding, if politicians were always treating the laws as something that applied to other people, if innocent people were getting killed by drunk drivers -- well the media would soon start to treat that as a routine state of... oh wait, bad example.

Want to get mad? Get mad at the system which ensures there are not a sufficient number of family doctors. Get mad at the people who come to the ER with a bump or a bruise or a sniffle or to fish for a doctor's note to explain some absence or other.

But that doctor who was making sure the data was entered correctly?

Don't blame him.

There's always somebody waiting on his attention.

xdroop: The problem with public transit is the public: http://tinyurl.com/ykv3fqt #octranspo

2010-03-03T13:12:25+00:00

xdroop: The problem with public transit is the public: http://tinyurl.com/ykv3fqt #octranspo

cmdln.org (a sysadmin blog) » Blog Archive » Automatic session logging and monitoring with GNU screen for the paranoid.

2010-03-03T05:35:03+00:00

xdroop: hates spam. Running an email server used to be fun. Now it is just torture.

2010-03-03T04:25:52+00:00

xdroop: hates spam. Running an email server used to be fun. Now it is just torture.

xdroop: Hey, I still have chips from lunch! How did that happen?

2010-03-02T21:15:27+00:00

xdroop: Hey, I still have chips from lunch! How did that happen?

xdroop: Turns out his dog does have his own IP block, even if it is private.

2010-03-02T21:10:19+00:00

xdroop: Turns out his dog does have his own IP block, even if it is private.

This Is Not A Rhetorical Question

2010-03-02T16:19:28+00:00

OK, so congratulations to Team Canada for their gold medal (mens and womens). I'll even suffer the cliche-in-the-making Sidney Crosby scoring the overtime goal to win it (although I am not looking forward to the next few months of Tim Horton's ads that this will undoubtedly spawn).

But I have a question.

Look at these two fine gentlemen:

These men picked and managed a USA team that wasn't rated highly. Know how much confidence they had in their team? Everyone was scheduled to fly out Sunday morning at 9:30 AM instead of staying for the gold medal game. And yet, their team managed to school the highly-rated Canadians in the round-robin and worked their way to the gold medal game where they came within a hair of winning an upset victory over said highly rated Canadian team.

The USA team was the best kind of opponent: a highly skilled, motivated team that can beat you. They were, in the best sense, a team worth beating. A team you had to bring, and keep, your A-game for, and hope for some lucky bounces on top of that.

So, having accomplished all that, these fine gentlemen are obviously nobody's fool. They know their business and can compete at the highest levels with an eye towards success.

So my question is:

Why on earth are the Maple Leafs so bad?

No, seriously.

Why have these two not been able to bring the same kind of success to the Toronto Maple Leafs? Why have they not been able to turn the Leafs into a team that can win regularly? A team that, in the best sense, is worth beating?

My Solar System 2.02

2010-03-02T04:36:14+00:00

Time management is like juggling 5 balls

2010-03-02T04:07:47+00:00

Very Short But Amazing Speech by Coca Cola CEO Bryan Dyson

I am created Shiva, destroyer of worlds

2010-03-01T18:00:14+00:00

This is totally cool: an animated simulator that lets you make model solar systems! It’s put together by the PhET Interactive Simulations group at — hey! — the University of Colorado at Boulder.

All you have to do is put in the masses, locations, and initial velocities of the objects (up to four) and then hit "go". What you’ll probably find is that for almost any parameters you use, you won’t get a stable system. You’ll fling off the tiny moon, or drop a planet into the star, or collide two planets (when you do, one survives after a brief comical flash). There are preset conditions that will put together a stable simulation, so I suggest you start there and then tweak the numbers. The most fun thing is to fiddle with the mass and see what happens.

You’ll note a slider that says Accurate vs. Fast. That has to do with bin size. Basically, a simulation like this calculates the force of gravity of each object on every other object using Newton’s law. But it needs a time interval to do this: where will all the objects be after some period of time? You can pick that time step, but the smaller the time step the more accurate it will be. That’s because gravity works continuously. If you take the Earth’s current position and velocity and ask where it will be a year from now by just adding a year to the program, it’ll extrapolate the Earth’s current velocity direction! The program will take that velocity (about 30 km/sec) and multiply it by one year, and get a distance of about a billion kilometers. It’ll then place the Earth there. But that’s not right, because the Earth orbits the Sun; the Sun’s gravity is continuously changing the direction of Earth’s motion. So the smaller the time step, the more accurate the program will be.

At least, I think that’s what’s going on here. I’ve fiddled with programs like this before, and that’s what I’ve found. Roundoff error can be bad too; because the program can’t do the calculations exactly — the decimal value has to cut off somewhere — every step has a little bit of error in it. That adds up, and after a few orbits things can go wonky. This one does a pretty good job of that, it looks like.

Anyway, go play god with your very own cosmic erector set. It’s fun, and before you know it a long time will have passed… but you might get a feel for orbital mechanics. It’s worth it.

VMware Communities: ghettoVCB.sh - Free alternative for backing up VM's for ESX(i) 3.5 and 4.0+

2010-03-01T16:56:38+00:00

xdroop: Nice! Exchange System Manager exports to .CSV without removing the commas in long numbers.

2010-03-01T14:16:50+00:00

xdroop: Nice! Exchange System Manager exports to .CSV without removing the commas in long numbers.

xdroop: wants to know how he can exclude #ExpertsExchange from Google searches. No, I don't want to subscribe to your website.

2010-03-01T14:03:51+00:00

xdroop: wants to know how he can exclude #ExpertsExchange from Google searches. No, I don't want to subscribe to your website.

Great Binoculars For Kids – Celestron 12X25 UpClose Binoculars

2010-03-01T07:29:13+00:00

Are you looking for a great pair of binoculars for kids – but want optics good enough for demanding adults? Then you really need to check out the Celestron 12X25 UpClose binoculars. These mighty little midgets have a whole lot going for them, including a great view at a moment's notice. (...)
Read the rest of Great Binoculars For Kids – Celestron 12X25 UpClose Binoculars (913 words)

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

xdroop: GOLD CANADA GOLD! #olympic #hockey

2010-02-28T14:39:04+00:00

xdroop: GOLD CANADA GOLD! #olympic #hockey

xdroop: @PsychoI3oy md3 : active 241826368 blocks [===>.................] recovery = 18.2% (44107968/241826368) finish=375.9min speed=8761K/sec

2010-02-28T14:27:54+00:00

xdroop: @PsychoI3oy md3 : active 241826368 blocks [===>.................] recovery = 18.2% (44107968/241826368) finish=375.9min speed=8761K/sec

xdroop: It is a February Saturday Night and there is no #hockey on my TV. Mr. Bettman, you must never permit this to happen again.

2010-02-28T00:43:16+00:00

xdroop: It is a February Saturday Night and there is no #hockey on my TV. Mr. Bettman, you must never permit this to happen again.

Jenny McCarthy still thinks vaccines cause autism

2010-02-27T19:34:08+00:00

The web is abuzz about an interview antivax activist and public health threat Jenny McCarthy did with Time magazine. A lot of folks seem to think that McCarthy is backtracking on her claims that vaccines cause autism.

Let me be very clear: that simply isn’t true. McCarthy is still making the same debunked, discredited, and dangerous claims:

Each of these theories [proposed by antivaxxers] has been thoroughly discredited by scientific research, but that has done nothing to silence McCarthy and her Generation Rescue colleagues. "Come and see our kids," says McCarthy. "Why won’t the CDC come and talk to the mothers, talk to the families? Then tell us there isn’t a link."

Sounds to me like she’s up to the same old health-hazard hijinks. So why are so many people saying she’s changed her mind? In some of the emails I’ve received and on a few websites, they’re claiming that McCarthy has admitted that her son never was autistic, and instead had Landau-Kleffner syndrome, a neurological disorder. But that’s wrong; she never admits that in the article — the author suggests that Evan’s symptoms are similar to Landau-Kleffner, but that’s it.

As recently as three weeks ago, McCarthy and her equally deluded boyfriend Jim Carrey both publicly defended Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced doctor credited for starting the modern movement claiming vaccines cause autism. You can find that statement on the Natural News website, run by the equally wrong Mike Adams, who couldn’t find reality with three sherpas and a GPS.

So why is this misinformation that McCarthy has changed her mind being spread so much? Part of the problem is an article in Hollywood Life, which obviously mischaracterizes the Time interview, saying:

And she is also reversing her initial position that the MMR shots caused Evan’s autism.

Nowhere in the Time interview does she reverse her position! Hollywood Life is wrong, plain and simple. In fact, the Time article author says plainly:

…[McCarthy] blames the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine for giving her son autism.

I don’t see how this could be any more clear.

[Note: the URL for the Hollywood life article is even a misstatement: "http://www.hollywoodlife.com/2010/02/26/jenny-mccarthy-says-her-son-evan-never-had-autism/"; McCarthy said no such thing in the interview.]

So she is still standing by her earlier claims. Mind you, she still says she "cured" her son of his disorder by putting him on a gluten-free diet, which, to be clear, is nonsense. In fact, a lot of people have wondered if her son was ever autistic, and is now simply doing better as he ages; many disorders mitigate with time.

Also, this is a person who claims we are injecting our kids with too many vaccines, but has no issue injecting herself with the most dangerous protein known to humanity, so clearly her viewpoint is somewhat skewed from reality.

I urge people to read the article from Time magazine in its entirety; the author is clear he thinks McCarthy is wrong, that all of science and reality are stacked against her, and he even states simply that she is "dangerous".

I agree. She is a terrible influence on people; her science is wrong, her medical advice is dangerous, and she gives people false hope.

There is hope for parents with autistic children, but that hope comes through understanding the situation, using real evidence and data, and in knowing that thousands upon thousands of doctors are trying to understand autism as well. If there’s hope, it’s through science.

I know that McCarthy loves her son, and I do think she’s trying to help. But I also know that her claims about vaccines and autism are completely wrong, and instead of helping she’s making things far worse — not just for kids with autism and their parents, but for the population as a whole because vaccinations rates have dropped and we’re seeing a resurgence of preventable diseases.

This misinformation being spread about her isn’t helping. Her stance has not changed, and she is still a force for antireality. People listening to her are not helping their own children, and if they don’t vaccinate their kids they are putting everyone else in danger as well.

[Update: Surly Amy at Skepchick has similar thoughts on this.]

Blessay: On Stackable / Fixed vs Chassis / Modular Ethernet Switches

2010-02-27T14:54:18+00:00

The debate on Stackable vs Chassis based switches has a long and proud pedigree. Here is my addition to the debate.

"Since businesses are obliged by zoning restrictions to locate far away from residential areas, most..."

2010-02-27T14:44:06+00:00

“Since businesses are obliged by zoning restrictions to locate far away from residential areas, most Americans drive to every store they visit. This means that store visits are often discrete trips that must be undertaken consciously and planned out ahead of time. As a consequence, shoppers will want to visit stores that carry the most diverse inventory—Wal-Mart, Costco, et al.—and avoid shops that specialize in one particular kind of good—the local paint store or flower shop, for instance.”

- Why Conservatives Should Care About Transit

Planet Xdroop

xdroop: is watching a HP/UX 11iv23 install. This is so slow it brings back bad memories. Welcome to 1996! Faster please!

Unteachable Disaster Recovery

GPG: Formula 1 Stats

xdroop: Welcome to Firedrill Friday!

NHL Rule Book Is Flawed

xdroop: is at that point in the sickness where reality's texture is different.

Day 5: Still Not Well

The De-Stinkers

News flash

xdroop: Why does #scanpst willfully create .pst files that nothing can deal with? #microsoft #fail #rhetorical

xdroop: TRON go: http://tinyurl.com/y9vvxah

xdroop: @ajventer Ah, that's alright then.

xdroop: @ajventer Conceded. But the question is: why would I run Linux?

xdroop: @ajventer I'm a unix admin, and Windows doesn't get in my way. You asked why *I* use it.

xdroop: @ajventer this is probably an essay question. :)

xdroop: @ajventer Fiddling while Rome burns. What about the two big items: why do it, and fiddle-time-isn't-billable-time?

xdroop: @ajventer @s1zwe http://tinyurl.com/yhyotl6 -- it is from 2008, but if you change Vista to Win7-64 it is still fundamentally true.

xdroop: @ajventer could be worse -- he could like 32-bit Vista. (BTW, I run Win7-64 on both my main systems.)

xdroop: RT @rands: Two intriguing ideas I found today that I don't know what to do with: "Information Laundering" and "Sustainable Vintage"

NDAs don’t suck, but most of their uses do

http://www.securitywarriorconsulting.com/security-incident-log-review-checklist.html

xdroop: Oh Monday, thou art a scornful, terrible mistress.

The most fascinating article on Scurvy that you will read this week.

xdroop: "I won’t make it any more broken than it is now." http://tinyurl.com/y8wpz2d

5K on ServerFault

Healthy Leafs Barely Beat Sick Senators

“Just in Case” Versus “Just in Time” Learning. Or Why Am I Learning This Useless Crud !?

xdroop: Time Lapse in NYC: http://vimeo.com/9679622

Secret agents: Make SNMP work for you | Network Administrator | TechRepublic.com

Learning From The Olympics

xdroop: @ajventer google is your teacher.

rands: Take the egg and Canadian bacon from the Egg McMuffin and put it on the McDouble: http://j.mp/aBX3DO

xdroop: Cde -- it isn't dead yet!

xdroop: @ajventer You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house / You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife

If Nerds Can Learn Linux, Why Can't They Learn Not To Interrupt People?

TechRepublic Network Administrator: Secret agents: Make SNMP work for you

SNMP considerations

SNMP basics

SNMP does Windows or Linux

Figure A

Windows Graphs from SNMPBOY.MSFT.NET

Worth the effort and cost?

SNMP for software?

Buyer beware tips

xdroop: Look out, #TigerWoods -- your caddy is mad at you http://tinyurl.com/yfz625e ...and this is what passes for news in this country?

xdroop: is about to commit the biggest firewall change set we've ever done. Hold on to your butts. #jurassicpark

Lets Review:

xdroop: co-worker, on HP/UX: I recommend the consumption of three beers before starting. Ensure that you have cleared your schedule for the day.

There's always an emergency somewhere

xdroop: The problem with public transit is the public: http://tinyurl.com/ykv3fqt #octranspo

cmdln.org (a sysadmin blog) » Blog Archive » Automatic session logging and monitoring with GNU screen for the paranoid.

xdroop: hates spam. Running an email server used to be fun. Now it is just torture.

xdroop: Hey, I still have chips from lunch! How did that happen?

xdroop: Turns out his dog does have his own IP block, even if it is private.

This Is Not A Rhetorical Question

My Solar System 2.02

Time management is like juggling 5 balls

I am created Shiva, destroyer of worlds

VMware Communities: ghettoVCB.sh - Free alternative for backing up VM's for ESX(i) 3.5 and 4.0+

xdroop: Nice! Exchange System Manager exports to .CSV without removing the commas in long numbers.

xdroop: wants to know how he can exclude #ExpertsExchange from Google searches. No, I don't want to subscribe to your website.

Great Binoculars For Kids – Celestron 12X25 UpClose Binoculars

xdroop: GOLD CANADA GOLD! #olympic #hockey

xdroop: @PsychoI3oy md3 : active 241826368 blocks [===&gt;.................] recovery = 18.2% (44107968/241826368) finish=375.9min speed=8761K/sec

xdroop: It is a February Saturday Night and there is no #hockey on my TV. Mr. Bettman, you must never permit this to happen again.

Jenny McCarthy still thinks vaccines cause autism

Blessay: On Stackable / Fixed vs Chassis / Modular Ethernet Switches

"Since businesses are obliged by zoning restrictions to locate far away from residential areas, most..."

xdroop: @ajventer I'm a unix admin, and Windows doesn't get in my way. You asked why I use it.

xdroop: @PsychoI3oy md3 : active 241826368 blocks [===>.................] recovery = 18.2% (44107968/241826368) finish=375.9min speed=8761K/sec