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Eric's Cyber SoapboxConnoisseur of words and verbal embellishments May 19 A Writer's TrapDo you want to hear something funny? I have been writing a lot lately and the words were just flowing out of my mind onto paper. I got to the point where I figured I should finally create an outline so I worked on it over the weekend. I outlined almost an entire book except for a few things at the end. When I started writing again yesterday I thought I would write even faster with a guide in place but I found it more difficult. Today I looked at what I wrote yesterday and it is terrible. I sat in the hot tub after work and read a bit of "Writing down the bones", a book Aimee got me for Christmas that I had never gotten around to reading. Anyway, the author talks about writing spontaneously and freely. I realized that the outline I created is a cage rather than a guide. I am no longer free to write what I want. Now I have to follow the outline I created. My thoughts are always changing so what I may have felt when I wrote the outline is not what I feel now. I created a trap for myself. I am not completely sure of what to do. I think I will just take my outline, print it, delete it, and then file it away for days when I have writer's block. May 15 Mapping a Fantasy NovelI have been working on a fantasy novel for the past few weeks. I haven't exactly followed good writing principles but I am enjoying it. I just sat down one day and started writing it. I still have only a partial outline. Last night I reached the point where I really needed to define where my main characters were in this fantasy world so I spent my lunch break making a map. Making a map, eh? Most of us would sit down with a pen and paper and start sketching land masses, mountains, cities and the like. Well I am a computer guy so my first move was to look for map generating software. I stumbled across the Greenfish Relief map generator, a completely free application that requires no install. It was developed by a Hungarian software developer who makes only free software. I downloaded the application in a few seconds and then ran the program. It was very easy to use. I specified the size of map I wanted, water density, colors to be used for the water levels, plains, hills, and mountains, and the level of detail. The program instantly generated a map. By changing the random seed I was able to generate a few hundred maps in about 15 minutes. I saved off a few of my favorites as image files and then added labels to the image in Microsoft Visio. It only took about 30 minutes to put this map together. Less time spent mapping gives me more time to write.
You can find the Greenfish Relief map generator here: http://greenfish.extra.hu/downloads.php
 March 13 SolarisI watched the movie Solaris (2002) the other day and I was struck by the pure description of grief that Kelvin, the main character in the film, is going through. He says: "I work in the city now. After work I wander and lose myself. I am silent and attentive. I follow the current. I make a conscious effort to smile, nod, stand, and perform the millions of gestures that constitute life on Earth. I will study these gestures until they become reflexes again." March 06 Hitachi Storage TrainingA co-worker and I attended the Hitachi THI0515 course on the modular storage arrays and I passed the HDSCP exam yesterday. Overall, we were very satisfied with the course. The class size was small so we received a lot of individual attention. The course covered storage options for the Hitachi modular storage platform including the SAN we use and the new ones released in December along with several key software applications that work with the SAN for management, replication, tuning, etc. We had several goals going into the training and we achieved them. (1) We wanted to be able to better utilize the storage investment we have made. (2) We wanted to become certified in the product. (3) We wanted to gain a better understanding of the technology so that we can make more informed storage decisions. We learned a number of things that we plan to put into practice in our own storage environment to better utilize our SAN investment. In the training we learned a lot about replication both within the system and between multiple arrays. This will be very helpful in differentiating between future replication options. Of particular interest was tiered storage. We learned how Hitachi can migrate data from high speed disks to lower speed disks automatically based on how often data is accessed. The main advantage of tiered storage is that it can provide clients with faster access to their data using a mixture of drive types and speeds. The cost of providing fast access to the data would be a fraction of the cost to host all data on fast disks but it would have almost the same feel to the clients because the migration of data is done on the back end based on their use of the system. There are a variety of other vendors that offer tiered storage solutions that work with Hitachi products. Hitachi requires various hardware and software upgrades for it all to work which can get expensive quickly. Most of the course content was on the SAN but we were pleasantly surprised to find that there was some content on the Essential NAS. The discussion on the Essential NAS was basic but it did help place the product within Hitachi’s overall strategy and it helped us understand the NAS role and possible integration options better. I made a study guide out of my notes. You can find it at http://scholarlyportal.com/hdscp.php March 02 March Research UpdateBefore I started working on my doctorate I always wondered what took so long and what was involved in pursuing a doctorate. Now that I am doing it I thought I would send and update with what I am currently working on. I am just starting a course called Feasible Problem Driven Research in Information Security. The course has 3 components: (1) Access to a research site, (2) Access to a sample of your population, and (3) A problem-driven topic and a dependent variable. I also need to be able to complete my research in a reasonable amount of time and my research must be structured well enough that a dissertation chair will be able to supervise my research. In a few months I will need to market my research proposal to a group of faculty so that one of the faculty members will be interested in my research. I will need to use research tools and techniques that can be verified by my Dissertation Chair. The Dissertation Chair must be able to confirm that all aspects of my work meet academic standards. Additionally, the Dissertation Chair puts his or her reputation on the line when they sign off on the various deliverables because they are vouching for fact that my research meets the high academic standards of the University of Fairfax. January 29 Gas Station TerroristsThe Patriot Act allows the government to classify unruly activity by passengers on airlines as acts of terrorism. Some individuals have been treated overly harsh because of this. For example, the following article describes a woman, Tamera Freeman, who was charged with a federal felony because she cursed at a flight attendant and threw her tomato juice on the floor. (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-airline-felonies20-2009jan20,0,5468299.story) As I was at the gas station I thought about the potential dangers we have all been warned about such as smoking at the gas station, talking on a cell phone, and filling your car while the vehicle is running. These acts could all cause a massive explosion resulting in loss of life. What if the government, realizing this potential avenue for terrorism, decided to treat gas station violators as terrorists..... A man pulls into the gas station and begins to fill his car with gas. As the meter slowly climbs he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a box of cigarettes and a lighter. He lights up and takes his first puff. Before he can begin to enjoy the cigarette a bucket of cold water is thrown on him and he is tackled to the ground. Rough hands pull him up and drag him to the back of the gas station where he is beaten and then chained to the bathroom urinal until federal agents can arrive. In the mean time his car is impounded. Imagine another scenario. A woman pulls into the gas station. Her kids are bouncing around in the back seat and you can hear their playful voices as she steps out of the vehicle. Her phone rings as she begins to fill the car. "Hello?" she says as she answers. "Oh yes, we are on our way home. I just stopped at the gas station. We'll be home soo..." She is cut off mid-sentence as a bullet tears through the phone sending fragments into her ear and shoulder. The man with the gun commands her to get on the ground. In her panic she looks to her children as they begin to scream. Another man vaults over the hood of the car and sprays pepper spray in her eyes while pushing her to the ground. She is handcuffed and led away. Agents arrive later to collect evidence from the scene and take custody of the woman. A social worker begins speaking with her children. Sound plausible? December 06 Expensive WatchesI was reading the GQ Watch guide and I read this statement: "The cheapest service for a luxury watch is about $400. And if you have a minute-repeater tourbillion or something, it'll come to four or five thousand dollars. But you're talking about a watch that can cost around half a million. So it's reasonable. Really." (http://men.style.com/gq/fashion/landing?id=content_5588) I couldn't believe that someone would pay $500,000 for a watch. The number is astounding. It makes me wonder how a watch designer puts themself into a position to charge that much for a watch. You could not fit enough precious stones into a form that size to justify the value so I wonder how it is marketed. Surely the effort behind promoting a watch like that is genius. September 15 Security Spending and ROII read an article by Bruce Schneier called Security ROI in CSO magazine. http://www.csoonline.com/article/446866/Security_ROI_Fact_or_Fiction_ Here is an excerpt from it: "Assume that all the new airport security measures increase the waiting time at airports by -- and I'm making this up -- 30 minutes per passenger. There were 760 million passenger boardings in the United States in 2007. This means that the extra waiting time at airports has cost us a collective 43,000 years of extra waiting time. Assume a 70-year life expectancy, and the increased waiting time has "killed" 620 people per year -- 930 if you calculate the numbers based on 16 hours of awake time per day. So the question is: If we did away with increased airport security, would the result be more people dead from terrorism or fewer?" I thought, what an interesting way of looking at this. Now take this creative tidbit with the knowledge that his point in the article is that the ROI calculations performed by companies to validate security products they sell are bogus and highly biased. Read the entire article. I recommend it. August 28 Kinetic RecallHave you ever completely forgotten how to do something until you just started? As a technology professional I find that it happens a lot. I call it Kinetic Recall. Let me start with some examples. You go to the phone to call your best friend but you can't seem to remember his or her number. As you place your hand on the numbers your fingers seem to remember the sequence better than your mind. As your fingers dial the number it comes back to you. This kinetic recall happens when internalized actions have been habitually reinforced to a level where you can perform them on autopilot but it can be impossible to verbalize or conceptualize it without first performing the action. Some other situations where kinetic recall comes into play would include driving to a familiar location, performing routine tasks on the computer, and tying a tie.
Have you ever thought about this before? If so, let me know as I find it facinating. August 22 Pipe DreamSo I was working on a problem at work today. We can only copy 4000 files at a time and we need to copy millions of files. I grabbed a directory structure with file counts using treesize and dumped that to an excel spreadsheet. Next we wrote a program to take all folders that have more than 4000 files in them and separate them into smaller chunks. The next step was to output batch files with thousands of xcopy commands inside that could run during certain windows on our servers. this is where we ran into a snag. What do you do for folders that have more than 4000 files? We separated them out but we do not have the file names for all the files inside those folders. We only have the folder name and the file count. Well, I came up with an idea. I thought, how about we put variables into the batch file we are programmatically creating and then use a command such as dir to send the files to the copy command. I typed out some pseudo batch file code and we talked about it. Here is what I had.
dir [source] @1 | xcopy [source]\@1 destination\@1
The dir command or some similar command would output all the files in the directory specified as [source] and put them one by one into the variable @1 which would then run xcopy to copy those files using the pipe |. Well, here comes the name of my blog post. The idea was good and well received by the team but the commands did not support a syntax like that so we termed the idea my "pipe dream".
August 19 Interviewing Tips from MicrosoftIn a 2008 blog entry by Steve Clayton at Microsoft he mentions the five things he looks for in candidates when hiring. This information is useful for both job candidates and those looking for qualified people. Here are his five tips:
Read the entire article here : http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecla01/archive/2008/08/18/5-tips-for-hiring-a-star-team.aspx For interviewing help go to http://interviewexcellence.org
July 03 Interview ExcellenceAfter a long time without a proper website, InterviewExcellence.org has a brand new layout. I am working on creating additional content for the site. There is also a forum so if you are interested in being a better interviewer, check out the site and join the forums. http://interviewexcellence.org June 14 Aimee's BirthdayFor Aimee's birthday I took her over to mom and dad's house where I had a bike hidden. That was one of her birthday gifts. We then loaded both of our bikes onto her car using a bike rack and took them down to the metro parks. I hid a picnic basket in her trunk. When we got to our destination I setup the picnic on the edge of the water and we at some fruit and sandwiches and talked. After that we went riding in the metro parks. In the evening we went out for pizza. She had a wonderful time. Here are some pictures from the picnic.
April 17 Full Text Catalog Organ TransplantFull text searching allows more complex searches such as word or phrase searching, inflection matching, proximity searching, and relevance matching to be performed on many different fields within tables. In order for these searches to run SQL server builds and maintains a catalog. We have such a large amount of data that rebuilding a full text catalog can take as long as 14 days. We needed a way to be able to bring the full text catalog back without rebuilding it, essentially, we needed a backup. Microsoft does not backup the full text catalog in normal backup operations and you cannot access it with software while the server is running because it is always in use. You cannot use standard backup commands to back them up and Microsoft does not have any utilities available for the task either. They do, however, have a guide for how to migrate it from one server to another. We needed to do just that. I call the process full text catalog organ transplant because organ transplants require the patient receiving the organ to have the same characteristics as the donor in order for the body to accept the new organ. Full text catalogs need to have a destination system with many of the same characteristics as their previous system or they will not work at all. The characteristics that must be similar are the SQL server version, full-text catalog folders and file locations, full-text catalog folder and file names and contents, and the same database id and table ids on both servers and databases. The first few similarities are easy to recreate on the destination system. The database id is a little more difficult as some DBAs do not even know what the id is for their databases. You can obtain the database id of a SQL server database by issuing the following command: Select db_id() You have to be in the database you want to query first. Use databasename will accomplish this. This database number is generated when the database is attached to the instance. Since the numbers have to match between source and destination, you need to create a situation where the database will receive the same database id when attached to the destination as it did at the source. We found that you can reuse numbers from databases that have been detached so the process involves knowing the database ids of the databases you will import and then the ones in use at the destination. If there is a database using the needed id, simply detach it, attach the imported database, and then attach the database you just detached. The imported database will assume the detached database’s id as long as it is the lowest available number. If you have a gap in numbers such as in this example where there is no database with an id of 6 you will need to fill that gap first. NOTE: master, tempdb, model, and msdb always have the numbers you see below. You can do that easily by attaching the database with the id you want to use first so that it consumes that spot.
If you have a number of gaps and not enough databases to fill them you can create new databases with no data in them to consume database ids. The rest of the process can follow the guide outlined here so I will not go into details on the procedure. I hope this helps you if you are in the same situation. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/240867/ April 16 Caesar and ChristI am still reading Caesar and Christ during my lunch breaks. Durant, the author, is finally talking about the church. It is interesting to read how a non-Christian skeptic interprets the evidence of the Gospels but I acknowlege his obvious bias and the lack of the Holy Spirit's illumination. He has read the scriptures but without the Holy Spirit it is only facts to him and some of those facts he does not believe. I am mainly intrigued by the historical information surrounding the events of the Gospels, Acts, and the Epistles. Durant has talked about the role and perception of several church leaders like Peter, James, and John, Paul's upbringing, and the persecutions. It is also good to learn about the growth of the churches and their locations in the Roman empire. The cultures and types of people in these areas required special attention in the epistles in targeting their sin or need for spiritual growth.
Durant also pointed out the difference in the way the Gospel of John was written compared to the other Gospels. I find Americans and myself are often most inspired and connected to the Gospel of John and I never really understood why until Durant pointed out that it was written in more of a Greek fashion and we all grew up with the Greek way of teaching and a "Greek" value system. The Gospel of John targets us and has more meaning and utility with its form and descriptions that "hit-home" to the way we think. I have also enjoyed the descriptions of how the Roman emperors and the Herodian dynasty tried to appease and integrate the Jews with no success because they did not understand the Jewish culture. It is plain to us Christians in studying the Old Testament how God had separated them and instructed them to be different and not integrate with other cultures. The Romans, not understanding this, tried to force this integration on them and then wondered why they would resist so much. I was able to see why Herod acted the way he did in the scriptures, why there were money changers in the temple, and the jurisdiction given to the Sanhedrin by Rome in governing their affairs. I better understand the environment in which Jesus grew up and developed his ministry. I had expected to see how different the culture was back then from now but I have found the opposite. We are much the same as we were then and that makes the Bible so much more applicable. One cannot argue that we are different and that parts or the meaning of the Bible do not apply. The Bible addresses things that are inherently human that do not change with technology, culture, or location and also the unchangeable nature of God. It is relevant for all generations. Reading this book accentuates that concept. I recommend it to those interested in learning more about the environment in which Christ lived. |
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