Month: March 2005

I do not know if you guys have heard about Terry Schiavo or not. But I am sure you have. Go to cnn.com or nbc4.com to get updates. She is the women who has been brain dead for 11 years or so after an accident. They have removed her feeding tube. Congress is debating whether or not to put it back in.

My thought is, Congress should not get involved this is a personal family decision. My second thought is, this poor lady whether she is brain dead or not is going to be just laying there starving to death while her body shuts down. It could be 2 weeks before she passes away of dehydration. I believe that something should be done to ease her passing so she can go quicker.

I would like to hear your input. How do you feel about this?

Amazing..

Today, in Minnesota, 6 students, a security guard, and a teacher were gunned down by a teenager.

This guy killed his Grandparents before and killed himself during.

Whats not amazing is his rampage, the tragedy of the victims, the use of legal guns, the environment of the school.. whats amazing is how I kind of don’t care as much… and I’m mad at myself for it.

Since 9-11, I kind of look at this sort of thing and say, “Well, its only 10, look at the WTC (or the Russian school, or the Iraqi car bombs.. or heck, even Columbine). This is the worst school shooting since Harris and Klebold became household names, and unlike that day where I followed intensely, today I’m just, well, not that upset.

I should be.. I should be outraged.. I should be looking up the family members names.. trying to write songs.. watching CNN… but I’m not. I’m just sort of, “wow.. too bad.” And I’m ashamed of myself.

What has happened to me.. what has happened to the country that this is about the same as a right to die case or Michael jackson coming to court with a Doctor.. are we that desensitized?

I try not to be. Tonight, i will make myself pray for those horrrified families, those shattered lives.. and maybe I’ll throw one more at the Big Guy for myself and my country.. not because its is as bad as it is.. but that we’re used to it.

I have to say that any hopes I had that Episode III would be an improvement over the previous two Star Wars movies have just been completely dashed.

From CNN.com:

“It’s not like the old ‘Star Wars,’ ” Lucas told theater owners at the ShoWest convention. “This one’s a little bit more emotional. We like to describe it as ‘Titanic’ in space. It’s a tearjerker.”

So if you, like me, have been watching the DVDs of Firefly lately, and have been wondering what the actual translations of the Chinese curses used by the cast are, well, wonder no more.

If you actually like this kind of stuff, well, you’re probably right up there with the people who use Klingon to swear at their mommas. But hey, I’m going to learn a couple of these, so that I can use them instead of my more mundane curses! I mean, why settle for a simple “Crap!” when you can say “Da-shiong bao-jah-shr duh la-doo-tze!” (Explosive diarrhea of an elephant) instead?

(Hey! You! Chinese Language Purist about to rip me a new one because you can’t figure out what is said above! Why not read the site — linked above as “wonder no more” — before getting on my case? I’m just the messenger, and have absolutely zero interest in learning how to do anything in Chinese other than mutter unintelligible curses.)

I arrived a full hour early for the interview. I had forgotten that the small campus of this potential employer was only thirty minutes or so from downtown Salt Lake City. I sat in my car, listened to the Laugh USA channel on my XM Radio, fired up my laptop, did some geeky stuff with a Linux kernel (a diff in order to see if I could back-port a USB definition for my Tungsten C, but no luck), read some of my Linux Journal, and waited until there were 30 minutes before my interview.

I sauntered into the building.

The signs in back looked nothing like they’d looked the last time I was here. Oops, wrong suite, one more down!

I walked in, talked to the nice older receptionist by the name of Carol, she handed me an application, and I Sat down to fill it out. I noticed a thirty-something guy filling out an application at the counter. He appeared to be another candidate. He was smartly dressed in a gray business suit, sported a shaved head, was lean, and had that kind of rugged, chiseled, outdoors-y look to him.

I glanced down at my small, but steadily advancing, pot-belly. No tie. Some business-casual slacks, long-sleeved red shirt, and black leather jacket. Damn, I am such a geek. I keep thinking I need to hop back onto my exercise regimen and get back the glimpse of six-pack that I’d almost had a year ago, but it keeps being pushed back for things that are more fun.

“It takes all kinds”, I thought to myself. In this kind of tech company, the contents of one’s brain was much more important than the fat content of one’s abdoment. I looked around at the people moving in and out of the entrance, and in typical “technology company” fashion, there were all manners of dress: ties, dresses, business suits, jeans with sweatshirts and sneakers. You name it. Good, I really wasn’t too far out of the norm. However, I ran out to my car and fetched a tie so that I was slightly more presentable. You never know.

I finished filling out the application. I really wish more companies would move to electronic methods for this stuff. My hand always cramps up because I write by hand so rarely. Give me a typewriter, and everybody will have a much easier time reading the darn stuff. Not to mention, it would be much easier for me to write it.

A few minutes later, I watched the interviewer, Rick, come up and introduce himself to the other candidate. “I’m Rick Soandso. Right this way.” He escorted Chiseled-Feature-Man down a short hallway and disappeared into what seemed to be a small conference room. I intentionally sat with my back to the short hallway, so that I would not see who was going in and out. I’ve found that things go most smoothly if I introduce myself for the first time having not actually seen someone, rather than having watched them float back and forth while staring at them repeatedly.

The first interviewer reappeared about forty minutes later, ten minutes after my scheduled appointment time, and introduced himself to me. He explained he was running a little late, and thanked me for my patience as he explained he had a bit more to do before seeing me.

A few minutes later, the other candidate emerged from the short hallway. He futzed with some business cards on the receptionist’s desk. When Rick showed up again and made a formal introduction with me, he asked Rick for a business card. Rick asked Chiseled-Feature-Man to hang around for a few minutes, and he’d provide him one.

Chiseled-Feature-Man (CFM) looked nervous. He was extremely self-possessed going in, and yet came out looking very anxious. Not a good sign.

Rick and I made small talk for a few minutes, after a somewhat less-than-graceful half-joke on my part about competition for job positions. He explained the company’s organization, what the role was of the position I was applying for, and some of the technology in use while caveating, “I am a manager, not a technical person, so I may not know what you are talking about”.

Eventually, the next interviewer was summoned. Brett, his name was. We chit-chatted about some of the same topics covered with Rick, then he began asking some historical questions about my background, mixed with a few technical questions. We chatted about Linux and technology for about 30 minutes, before summoning the final interviewer.

“Nate’s interview may be more interesting,” Brett informed me. “He has the legendary laptop.”

Now, I’d heard about this laptop. Rick had mentioned it to me, as how they evaluate the basic technical capabilities of candidates. I was a little nervous.

Nate entered, carrying the notorious machine. We spoke for about 5 minutes, covering much of the same ground again regarding my background and interests. I learned a little bit about him too.

“So this is the legendary laptop,” I segued, “why don’t we dive in?”

“OK,” he responded, shutting the unit down. “It has a problem with X. You don’t know the root password. See if you can fix it.”

I powered the machine up. After the usual BIOS screens, I saw the grub prompt (grub is a boot-loader regularly used on GNU/Linux systems), pressed “a” to append to the kernel execution command, added “single” to the kernel arguments so that it booted to single-user mode, and booted.

It went straight to X11, flashing an NVIDIA logo at me repeatedly. “Well, I thought you were going to single user,” Nate began, “but this is the problem. I think the last guy really messed it up.”

Since it was obviously stuck in an infinite loop (darn Redhat, and their policy of setting X to “restart” via init in runlevel 5, rather than “once” like it is on Gentoo), I powered the machine off, made a joke about hoping we were running a journaled filesystem, and then powered it back up again.

“Let me give you a little help, because this isn’t the problem you’re trying to solve. Add ‘init=/bin/bash’ to the end of the kernel invocation argument.”

I did so. Within a few moments, it reported a kernel panic and crashed.

“I think I need to find another laptop,” Nate informed me, then bustled out. He returned a few minutes later with another box, booted it up, typed in a single command, and then powered it off again. “Try again,” he asked.

I booted to single-user mode, changed the root password, added a nonprivileged account, gave it sudo privileges, went to init 3, and logged in as the unprivileged user. I like to have a log of the commands I run as root, and “sudo” provides this. I use it all the time on the laptop I’m using to write this blog entry.

I went through several things. I tried a “find / -atime 1 >~/find.log” to see all the files changed in the last day. I chatted with Nate for a few minutes while the hard drive churned. I opened another virtual terminal to check the status of the log, and it had found nothing. I realized later that I’d provided the wrong flags to “find” to actually have it find which files had changed in the last day. Oops.

Anyway, I tried starting X and redirected stderr and stdout to log files. “startx 2>error.log 1>out.log”

It hung. I hard-rebooted the system since I couldn’t get to a virtual terminal.

“This is an evil little problem,” Nate informed me. “Nobody in the last two years has been able to fix it in an interview.”

The machine rebooted. I again went to single-user mode, set the default runlevel to 3 instead of 5 (console mode, rather than X), and checked my logs.

“Could not find default font: fixed” the error log from X reported to me.

“Huh,” I thought, “I wonder if this uses a font server?” I don’t use a font server on Gentoo, preferring to specify the fonts in the X server configuration file since I get a small speed boost from that. On my aging 366MHz Pentium 3 laptop, every speed boost I can get, I use.

I checked /etc/rc5.d. Sure enough, the X Font Server wasn’t set to run. I checked if it was running (ps -ef | grep xfs), and it wasn’t. I changed the name of the symlink from “K10xfs” to “S10xfs”. I fired it up with “./S10xfs start”. I changed the link in /etc/rc3.d as well, just to cover my bases in case I tried to start X from init runlevel 3.

I typed “startx”.

It worked.

I said, “Looks like it’s working!”

Nate added, “Well, you’re not quite done.”

I removed the unprivileged user account I’d created, along with his password and group allocation. I cleaned up the sudoers file so he wasn’t in there anymore. I rebooted, made sure X came up, and ran “chkconfig –list xfs”, corrected it so it ran in runlevels 3, 4, and 5 with “chkconfig –level 345 xfs on”, and then Nate said, “NOW you’re done.

“I think, actually, one other person has managed to fix it in the last two years. And it used to be harder; there was a change to the font server that eventually Redhat fixed.”

I smiled. I realized with satisfaction that I’d won a round of the interviews. And I thought Nate was a pretty cool guy and had enjoyed his interesting, but somewhat tricky, problem. I think I’ll like working with him.

This is a company I’d love to work for. They have a solid reputation in the Linux community, and are working on some seriously cool cutting-edge stuff. They’re a startup, so there’s some inherent risk involved, but if they can meet my modest salary requirement, I’m certain that we can get along.

I called the recruiter on the way home, and left him a voicemail to inform him that the interviews went well. I think I was slightly overconfident, assuring him that I think I’d like to work there, and I’m certain my interviewers would like to work with me. Darn. I should keep that tendency toward overconfidence in check.

Regardless, I feel like I scored a home run. What a great feeling after my disaster of an interview a few days ago. Very cool stuff.

It’s not glamorous, but it’d be a good job with a company with a solid rep. That sounds like a lot of fun to me.

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: Alcoholics Anonymous is when you get to drink under someone else’s name.

Anybody else getting fed up with the mail-in rebate hassle?

Case in point: this past weekend we bought a new computer and accessories for the household. Part of the reason for buying was the low advertised price. Of course, the low advertised price is always the amount after you subtract the various instant and mail-in rebates.

This morning it took me 45 minutes to sort out the receipts, fill out the rebate forms, cut out the UPC codes from the original packaging, make copies of the receipts, forms and UPC codes, circle the purchase prices on the receipts, stuff the right forms, receipts and UPC codes in envelopes and then write mailing addresses on the front of each of the envelopes.

I do all this with a smile, knowing that I’m not going to end up a statistical casualty of laziness. Retailers work closely with manufacturers in analyzing the percentage of those lazy customers who never end up sending in rebate forms. Without any knowledge of the actual amount, I’m going to hazard a guess that the non-redeemers are at 20%.

Well, I may be stuffing rebate envelopes, waiting 8-10 weeks to receive the rebate check and clicking on the rebate website everyday to make sure those rebate yahoos in the sprawling rebate hubs of Miami and Mesa, AZ aren’t sitting around by their 14,697 different PO Boxes and intentionally tossing my precious $15 rebate request into the +2 Bag of Seeyoulaterville, but I sure as hell won’t be the loser down the street who loafed my way into the 20% category.

If it’s even 20%.

Somebody get me statistics on this.

As most regular readers have been able to tell, I’ve been running Google AdSense on the right-hand column of barnson.org for the last couple of weeks. It brings in about $1.38 a day, which is enough that, when they cut me a check after earning my first $100.00, it’ll cover the costs of running the site. Almost 🙂

My question for you as a reader is, all things aside, are the ads too invasive? They’re kind of big and kind of blocky. Do you think they work, or should I get rid of them?

I’ve been supporting the site out of my pocket for the last three years, and that’s probably not going to change soon. One generous member pays me $10.00/month to host his web site here. And really, the only thing he gets here that he couldn’t get for free elsewhere is lots of space, no bandwidth limitation (effectively… I’m limited to 40GB a month total for all my sites and have rarely approached it), and responsive tech support 🙂

But I keep wondering if folks reading the site regularly think it’s too much. I value your opinion; let me know!

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: Nice guys finish last, but we get to sleep in. — Evan Davis

So we are all people of the times. My question is, the wedding still a thing that is for the girl and the guy just rides along?

Back in the day, all the groom had to do was show up. He really didn’t even have to pay. That was left to the “Father of the Bride”.

With recent finacial situations though it seems to be a family affair when it comes to the paying and planning. We have all heard of the mother in-law intrusion on her trying to make it her wedding, but what about the groom. My husband agreed nonchalantly on the plans saying yeah he liked the theme. Then I had to assign him duties. Things that I knew I wouldn’t have time to do, beacause if I did I would have done them myself.

So gentleman, I know that you are great at the proposals but did you stop after that. Did you say the wedding was all her. Or did you join in the fun?

EDIT by matthew: Formatted.

Hey guys… this is not a shot by shot description as the last one was, but is a preliminary description here, hours before it airs on the OC tonight and tomorrow with ROBOTS.

REVENGE OF THE SITH, the second trailer.. spoilers may be below – If I find a more detailed description, I will post a part 2, but for now.. enjoy the scoop!

The trailer begins with the following exchange:

Palpatine: “The Dark Side of the Force is the pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.”

Anakin: “Is it possible to learn this power?”

Palpatine: “Not from a Jedi.”

We are then introduced to the political maneuvering of Palpatine, Obi-Wan and Mace Windu. All of them actually want to use Anakin as a pawn in their game (Palpatine makes Anakin his “personal representative on the Jedi Council” while Obi-Wan wants him to “report on all the Chancellor’s dealings”). The first minute or so is surprisingly heavy on dialogue and consists mostly of shots of various characters speaking to each other (intercut with short glimpses of evil droids, space battles etc.). We even see how Mace Windu and three other Jedi attempt to arrest Palpatine (he grabs the lightsaber and confronts them). When Mace Windu tells Anakin “You are on this council but we do not grant you the rank of Master”, Anakin loses it and joins the Dark Side (Sidious: “Every single Jedi is now an enemy of the Republic”). At least that’s how the trailer makes it look.

Then the more “visual” half starts with some very neat scenes like a low angle shot of Anakin marching in front of a Clone trooper army. We see Wookiees on some kind of war machine, the duel in the volcano field, gigantic 10-wheel military transports and actual destruction of the Senate chamber. Everything is very dramatic, several deaths are implied, Padme is seen crying loudly and music from the Emperor duel (ROTJ) is heard.

Overall, the first half of the trailer is surprisingly specific, making no sense whatsoever to people who don’t know Star Wars well. The second half is very dark and dramatic, but with lots of action. Bad guys (apart from Sidious) only appear for a fraction of a second and have no lines. The final seconds consist of Obi-Wan shouting “You were the chosen one!”, fighting Anakin while both dangle from some ropes/wires. After the closing titles, there is a bonus shot of Vader and Sidious standing side by side, accompanied by Vader’s breathing.

This is a preliminary version with effects and sound not quite finalized. One part of the trailer is actually without music (either for dramatic effect or John Williams’ new score will be inserted here?). The length is little under 2:30.

When further questioned about the “evil droid”, our source confirmed that there wasn’t a clear shot of General Grievous but there was one of the bodyguards:

There is some evil-looking humanoid droid with a cape around his head and torso, flanked by two classic battledroids (from Episode I). He seems to hold a lance in his hand. Later, Obi-Wan is seen swordfighting with a humanoid droid but he’s only seen from back and moving quickly. (I’m 90% certain it IS Grievous, but it’s extremely short and quick shot.) Anyway, both of these shots are VERY brief (about half second).

One of the shots depicts Obi-Wan being surrounded by dozens of droids. Some of them look different and wear capes, maybe one of them is Grievous. But it’s very wide shot, the characters are small.

So I went down to the coffee shop inside the building where I’m doing some short-term contract work, sat down with my laptop, and waited for a phone call.

And waited.

My nervousness grew. This was going to be an important job interview. They were ten minutes late, and my bladder was growing full.

And waited.

Finally, at about fifteen minutes after the hour, the phone rang.

“Hello, this is Matthew.” (my customary phone greeting)

“Uh, hello, is Matthew there?”

“This is Matthew. Is this Earl and Verl?”

“Hello, Matthew. This is Earl. I’m here with Verl and Bob.”

“Hello, Matthew,” said voice 1.

“Hello, Matthew,” said voice 2.

(Names have been changed, of course.)

I could tell right away this interview would be interesting. One of the interviewers spoke English clearly, with only a moderate Indian accent, but the other two were very difficult to understand. To make it even more fun, there was a very high, whining noise in the background, and a constant rush of air as if someone were working on a server while on the phone.

“Hi Earl, Hi Verl, Hi Bob. Nice to meet you!” I responded.

There was a long, pregnant pause. I heard the faint shuffling of papers.

“Matthew, are you there?” came the voice of Earl tenatively over the phone.

“Yes, I’m here,” I replied, my nervousness mounting.

“Ah, Matthew, thank you for taking our call today. Let’s start with telling us a little about yourself.”

Wow, that was abrupt. Usually, in an interview, I’m used to exchanging a few pleasantries beforehand, getting to know them a little bit, and that kind of thing. “Well,” I thought to myself, “perhaps they are short on time.”

Now, I’d been prepped a little bit by my recruiter, Louis. She’d informed me that these guys had found candidates who had a wide variety of UNIX experience, but had always fallen flat trying to find someone with sufficient Linux administration experience. I figured they’d be tough, but I was ready.

“Well, as you know, my name is Matthew Barnson,” I began as I launched into my thirty-second, canned ‘get to know me’ introduction which I use for interviews. “I’m a career UNIX and Linux admin with experience in diverse industries. Not only am I a systems administrator, but I’m also a professional musician, having recently released…”

“Matthew? Matthew? I cannot hear you. Can you speak up?”

Crap. I had heard from a previous caller that the microphone on my phone wasn’t loud enough. Guess it’s time to replace the phone.

I spoke up.

“Yes, sorry, is this better?” I asked in a much louder voice.

“No” chimed a chorus of three voices from the other side. “Can’t hear you.” “Too quiet.” “Something wrong.”

“I hear a high-pitched whining noise in the background,” I replied, “that’s quite loud on your end. Is there some way to quiet it?”

“Let us call you back in five minutes from a conference room,” replied Earl, “then we won’t have the background noise anymore.”

“OK, talk to you then,” I replied, and hung up.

Now, for those who aren’t familiar with interviewing, this is not an auspicious beginning to a job interview. Not auspicious at all. Phone problems prejudice it from the start. I was nervous, I was off-balance, and I had just biffed my introduction.

How do I do that again without it sounding canned? I didn’t know. I guess we’d just plunge into technical details.

Seven minutes later, the phone rang again. I’d relocated myself to a more comfortable chair in the lounge of the building, and planned on speaking loudly. Well, it turned out I wasn’t speaking loudly enough again, so I relocated to outside where I could shout into the telephone.

I still heard a very loud hissing coming from the other end of the line. I suspect that was our basic problem, but who am I to tell them “move again! Your building is too loud!”

We began simply enough. “Describe how you create a filesystem on Linux,” he started, with no further preamble.

I walked him through the steps: fdisk. mkfs. mount.

“What flags would you give to mkfs to make the ext3 filesystem?”

Stumper. I don’t remember those flags off the top of my head; I just run mkfs, it lists the options, and I use the ext3 option. And I didn’t have a Redhat box in front of me. “I really don’t know offhand, but I’m certain if I were in front of a redhat box right now, I’d see the option quickly.”

That turned out to be the theme of the rest of the interview.

“Describe, in detail, how to create a Flash Archive Image on Solaris.” “What is the name and path of the file which stores MAC addresses for use during a jumpstart on Solaris?” “What is the location of the configuration file you’d edit to change a bind zone on Redhat?” (I knew what to use, but didn’t know Redhat’s exact path) “Describe how to create a multiple disk filesystem on Linux kernel 2.4” “How would you repair a bad superblock on a mirrored drive for a Solaris system?” “How would you clone a Redhat box?” (knew this one, after I described the process, he incredulously asked, “you’ve tried this and it works?”… Obviously, it wasn’t the answer he wanted.

We went on in this vein. I was batting about .500, nailing the answers that I’d worked with regularly, but I sensed stress from the tenor of the conversation. We made frequent requests on both ends to repeat the questions or answers due to the loud noise in the background. The fact was, that I flat didn’t know the command line arguments for a few dozen separate utilities which they apparently used daily.

The interview was not going well.

I realized that I’d spent far too much time in Gentoo, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, and had not kept up with Red Hat and its derivatives, so I couldn’t answer some questions competently.

We finally got to the “what questions do you have for us?” part of the interview, and I asked a couple of lame questions about the business. I knew it was a formality at this point. I could have asked some more technical questions, but my goal was really to just get out of the interview fast. I haven’t choked during a tense situation so badly in years.

The worst part for me was, there were a few questions where I knew that I once knew the answer.

And I couldn’t remember them.

I don’t know if it’s old age, disuse, or something else, but that was the most troubling thing of all to me. Knowing that I once knew something, but could no longer remember the specifics. The panic from that was worse than all of the other nervousness put together.

Is that a normal thing that I shouldn’t worry about? Maybe I should just go into some sort of soft-ball profession where that kind of total recall isn’t expected anymore. Like sales. Or belly dancing. Or a circus sideshow.

So I’m hoarse from shouting into a telephone for an hour. And I’m tired from having to stand (actually, walk around outside, randomly) for an hour while explicating UNIX details.

And I don’t think I got the job.

Man, life is disappointing sometimes.