Monthly Archive for April, 2009

Working with others is hard to do

Published
by
Sam
on April 29, 2009
in 930posts
. 0 Comments

Office/cubicle jobs include a certain level of stupidity. This is true whether you’re working for a large corporation or the federal government (the largest corporation of them all). I was inside a government building at work today when I noticed a poster on the wall. And by poster, I mean a piece of 8.5″x11″ paper. It was, well, less than genius. The subject was:

QUALITY

The creator of this poster decided to assign a phrase to each letter, apperently to help employees remember the importance of quality. They are (literally) the following.

Q – Quality built in
U – Use best practices
A – Always think quality
L – Long Lasting
I – Independently tested
T – Train for quality
Y – You!

I’m not even going to comment, except for this: if you’re going to do this kind of thing, you can’t use the original word again. I think the person that did this spend no more than 5 minutes on it. *sigh* Such is the working world.

Seriously?

Published
by
Joseph
on April 20, 2009
in 930posts
. 0 Comments

I’m buying a new car in a month and a half or so…hopefully.  A Honda Civic Si.

Since vanity plates are only $10 in VA, I’ve been looking into getting one.  My current plate says MWNERD.

Suddenly, I had a revelation, but god dammit, THE PLATE WAS ALREADY TAKEN.

I would shake this man’s hand.

over 9000

Adventures with cabling!

Published
by
Edwin
on April 17, 2009
in Fun Stuff and Tips and Tutorials
. 1 Comment

We have an IP KVM that needed to be configured through its console/serial interface in order to get it on the network. Unfortunately, the original cable was lost in the black hole that is the storage room, so we decided it would be easier to make one, rather than buy a new one. After figuring out the pin-out conversion between the Cisco console cable and the Avocent console cable, I made this:

I do good work.

I do good work.

I felt a little uncomfortable trying it on equipment “in production,” but much to my surprise, it worked.

I’m taking it home over the weekend to do it correctly.

Sector930 Is Now Global!

Published
by
Sam
on April 14, 2009
in 930posts
. 1 Comment

We recently set up an account with Google Analytics here at Sector930. (That’s right, readers. We’ve got an eye on you.) I was perusing the reports this fine evening, looking at traffic sources and bounce rates.

One of the more interesting features is a map that shows you where on Earth traffic is coming from. I noticed that we got a hit from Tunis, Tunisia. This person from Tunisia landed on our site by doing a search for “the more you know the more you dare.”

Now, we don’t have any posts even remotely related to this topic, if this is a topic. I have no idea how this person ended up on sector930.com. But I do have a few questions for this brave visitor:

  1. Can you please come back?
  2. Can you tell your friends about our blog?
  3. Are you a sane person?

I believe this is a giant step for this organization. We now have an international audience. But since we’re a hip, Web 2.0 blog, we should have planned for this. Damn.

I mean it, guy from Tunisia. Come back. Please?

Bypassing OpenDNS

Published
by
Edwin
on April 14, 2009
in Fun Stuff and Tips and Tutorials
. 0 Comments

Apparently a couple people stumbled across our humble little blog while searching for how to bypass OpenDNS’s content filtering. Originally I scoffed at the idea of using OpenDNS as a security, because I thought it was just blocking evil or malicious DNS queries. But after doing more research, it’s actually sets up a full web proxy! So much for an easy bypass. All that is left to do is change the DNS servers your computer uses to some other than OpenDNS. Although if you are in an environment which filters your web traffic, you probably will not be able to do this. But, if you can, just set it to one of these bad boys:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nameserver#Root_server_addresses

Or use another proxy of some kind. The Pirate Bay is suppose to start running a anonymous proxying service which would allow you to bypass OpenDNS, but setting it up would require you to run as an administrator on your computer, something you probably are not able to do.

Godspeed, circumventors. Godspeed.

EDIT:

Please refer to a followup post: http://www.sector930.com/blog/2009/05/13/opendns-a-followup/

Fun Times with Religion

Published
by
Sam
on April 12, 2009
in 930posts
. 1 Comment

Easter, that less glorified of important Christian holidays, is finally upon us. If you have a religous, Catholic mother like I do, you might be spending part of it in church. And, if you’re lucky enough, you might go to the Easter Vigil mass, the 3 hour extravaganza of readings, pyrotechnics, and fiery baptisms.

My brother and I were watching the priest baptize some heathens when we came up with a brilliant idea: baptism by dunk tank. Sit the baptizee up on the chair, and let the priest hurl some baseballs at the target. They could even go all out with a full fledged carnival setting. I can hear it now:

“Step right up, folks! Don’t miss the priest baptize the unholy! Don’t forget, Father, you only get 10 balls. Come and find out, folks: will they be saved or damned to eternal hellfire?!”

Then a few booths down, the priest could dish out communion skee ball style. Instead of wafers, make some unleavened bread balls and roll ‘em up the lane. The recipients stand underneath the center hole, mouths open, and wait for Jesus to come through. Skee ball is a pretty hard game, though, so only a few people will be lucky enough to see immortal life.

Some other ideas:

  • Baptism by squirt guns
  • Confession via Gypsy palm readers
  • Confirmation, Nickelodeon slime style

Leave your own ideas in the comments. The Catholic Church is leaving MILLIONS on the table, and they don’t even know it.

We had another sort-of related idea while at church. Some places, like Colorado or Arizona are very dry, so people use humidifiers in their homes. Well, there’s nothing better to come out of a humidifier than holy water vapor. Get a gallon of water blessed by a priest, turn on the machine, and enjoy the Holy Spirit filling your lungs.

I hope a fundamentalist does a Google search on Easter and gets this post. Happy Easter everyone!

A pearl of gooey awesomeness

Published
by
Joel
on April 8, 2009
in 930posts and Fun Stuff
. 0 Comments

For those of you who don’t know, part of my job involves coding and designing the GUI for several systems currently used by the Navy. I work with older systems because of hardware constraints (remember HP-10.20 anyone?)  which tends towards more headaches than there needs to be. After an ardent discussion with some of my coworkers, I was perusing the web trying to prove a point about interface design and discovered this  pearl of awesomeness on Webdesigner Depot. Yep, it’s a chronology of OS interfaces from 1981-2009. It includes everything from Xerox’s PARC (the very first GUI and a contender for the most obscure exam question I had in school) to the latest and greatest Mac/Windows/Gnome/KDE interfaces. It’s interesting to note how little has changed over the years as well as the seemingly constant use of blue and green in the default color schemes. The basic window design introduced with Xerox 8010 is almost identical to that used today. Similarly, the taskbar has remained the same since Windows ‘95 outside of placement and the Mac dock variation. If you’d like to check out more GUI history and design, be sure to look at the links they’ve included in their acknowledgements, especially Nathan Toasty’s in-depth GUI timeline and considerable collection of screenshots. Oh and in case you’re wondering, I both won and lost my argument. I won because I was mostly right and lost because “…that’s how it’s been done for years.” Go figure.

Of Universe creation and Processing

Published
by
Joel
on April 8, 2009
in Fun Stuff
. 1 Comment

I was reading io9 the other day and ran across this article about Jared Tarbell’s use of orbits to create art. He has two different variations on the creation algorithm. Variation A uses a myriad of root nodes, each of which follows a vertical path and is orbited by several other nodes. The resulting creations tend to resemble horrid wallpaper from the 60s and 70s. Variation B is more interesting to look at. Its creations are akin to the way a real universe works (using a central node about which all other nodes orbit) and each picture is the summation of 400 years worth of orbits. They’re fun little applets to play with and he includes the source code as well (which I may add is fairly easy to follow). The only thing I wish he’d add is a way to change the number of orbital years in order to simulate varying ages in universes. It’d be interesting to do an analysis on the development of these universes as a chaotic dynamical system.

It’s also useful to note that the applets he supplies are coded using Processing. Processing was also used in the chess AI Thinking Machine which I wrote about earlier. I’ve started to see more and more applets and data visualizations done with Processing and am thinking of toying around with it as soon as I finish my Math Post-Baccalaureate. I’m sure the Sector would get a huge kick out of me posting the travesties that I’ll be developing. Anyone know if we can embed Java applets in wordpress?

APAA (A Post About…)

Published
by
Edwin
on April 8, 2009
in Fun Stuff and The more you know...
. 6 Comments

I’ve always been a fan of acronyms. And as I work in as an IT weenie for the government, half the words I hear are acronyms or abbreviations of some kind.

FUN FACT: In 1943,  Bell Laboratories coined the term acronym as the name for a word (such as SONAR) created from the first letters of each word in a series of words (such as SOund Navigation And Ranging).

By some definitions, acronyms have to be pronounced as words themselves, such as N.A.T.O. or S.C.U.B.A, whereas P.C.M.C.I.A. would be just be considered initialisms. But no one cares anymore, and they are all just referred to as acronyms. Except for me. I’m going to start correcting people.

There are many different breeds of abbreviations, some of which I will show you now:

Standard

  • LASER: Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation
  • PEBKAC: Problem Encountered Between Keyboard And Chair
  • POTS: Plain Old Telephone Service
  • JBOD: Just a Bunch of Disks
  • BGP: Border Gateway Protocol, also (Be Gettin’ Paid)
  • PHB: Pointy Haired Boss
  • TACACS: Terminal Access Control Access Control Server
  • YTMND: You’re the man now, dog

The Department of Defense and it’s branches seem to relish in the unpronouncibility of it’s acronyms:

  • CDRUSSTRATCOM: CommanDeR, United States Strategic Command
  • JFCOM: Joint Forces COMmand

Multilayers, or Nested Acronyms

  • NetBEUI: NetBIOS End User Interface
  • DITSCAP: DoD Information Technology Security Certification and Accreditation Process

Recursive Acronyms

  • WINE: WINE Is Not Emulation
  • GNU: GNU’s Not Unix!
  • VISA: Visa International Service Associations

Backronym, or Contrived acronyms,

Abbreviations where the words were chosen to fit the awesome abbreviation some senator came up with and had his interns stay up all night coming up with the words to fit it. The best example I can think of is this:

  • USA PATRIOT Act: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001

Most of this information was tastelessly ripped from Wikipedia.

POST YOUR FAVORITE IN THE COMMENTS. QUIZ ME. I DARE YOU.

nbc_the_more_you_know1

Welcome to the new sector930.com

Published
by
Sam
on April 4, 2009
in 930posts and Projects
. 2 Comments

Well, we decided to make the move. Edwin’s host checking thingy was telling us that our hold hosting service, Bluehost, kept going down during the day. My RootBSD server, on the other hand, had excellent uptime. So after the email equivalent of a huddle, we agreed: adios Bluehost.

I had written a good post in anticipation of our easy transition and great success. Alas, that was not to be. I jumped the gun with changing the DNS, and Joe couldn’t export the old blog. So we all learned some lessons from the experience.

  1. Backup your shit before you do ANYTHING.
  2. Tell everyone involved what you’re doing BEFORE you do it.

These are lessons that we should have learned at our jobs, but you know how nerds are. We think we’re invincible. (PLUS people at my job haven’t learned this lesson, so they keep making the same mistakes over, and over, and over.)

But after all that, I’m ready to officially declare the new sector930.com a success.

So congratulations, all 2 of our readers. We broke our blog just for you, and probably made it harder for us in the meantime. But rest assured, we are working around the clock to deliver top notch information, insight, and advice on whatever it is we write about on this blog.

On a more technical note: redirects are fun and easy with Apache. Here is an example.

<IfModule alias_module>
    Redirect permanent /index.html http://www.sector930.com/blog
</IfModule>

So if you ever wanted to know, there it is.

Have a great day.

XOXO