As a side note, you may have to do what Razvan Potter explained on the JIRA ticket and manually override your dependency resolution tool to use Tika 1.1 instead of the version that comes with Jackrabbit as a dependency.

While not quite that bad, hilarity does often ensue when everyone realizes they are basically paralyzed when shut off from the Internet. I work on products that are hosted on the Internet in the “cloud” A.K.A. the already-worn-out buzzword for any services hosted over the Internet. In this context, I wondered what types of uptime my company was promising to its customers for the services I work on. The “holy grail” of availability, usually referred to as five nines, is availability 99.999% of the time. I have worked in my current position for almost exactly a year, and so I thought it would be funny to calculate the availability of my corporate network in that period. I’m making some pretty big assumptions, mainly that this was the only outage that occurred, which I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, and that it lasted for exactly 2 hours. It may have lasted less time, but effectively this was how long it lasted for me, because I went home more than 2 hours earlier than expected. I’m also assuming that there are 24 hours a day, and 365 days in a year, which isn’t exactly accurate either:

According to that Wikipedia chart, it looks like the folks in our IT department are close to four nines this past year. Hope we aren’t promising much more to our customers!

Notice how the audience applauds Tom Brokaw when he asks a relevant question, and didn’t boo or hiss at him when Quayle complains about having to answer it more than once. Not only that, but Brokaw points out Quayle’s exaggeration on how many times he’s responded to that criticism.

Compare that to how the crowd basically threw cabbages at John King for asking a question about Newt Gingrich’s stance on open relationships. Not only a relevant question based on Newt’s personal history, but one that points out Republican hypocrisy when it comes to being the “family values” party.

Seems like there’s a little less gravitas than in ‘88 all around.

I think it’s pretty much a slam dunk.

However, after looking at the different face code strings, I did see a method to the madness, and managed to create a crappy VBS file that makes it easy for me to go from the one in the editor screen to the one in the character file.

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strInput = InputBox("Enter Full Face Code from CTRL-E on Character Screen","Facecode Converter")
firstCode = GetFirstPart( strInput )
lastCode = GetSecondPart( strInput )
' Thanks to http://nerds-central.blogspot.com/2007/01/using-vbscript-to-paste-text-into.html
' Open notepad 
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run "notepad", 9

' Give Notepad time to load
WScript.Sleep 1000

WshShell.SendKeys "// Replace the bottom of your character text file with the following 2 lines: {ENTER}"
WshShell.SendKeys "face_key_1 = " & firstCode & " {ENTER}"
WshShell.SendKeys "face_key_2 = " & lastCode & " {ENTER}"

Function GetFirstPart( faceCode )
  ' Take the first part of the face code based on substrings
  first16 = Mid( faceCode, 3, 16 )
  first16AsDecimal = Hex_to_Dec( first16 )  
  GetFirstPart = MyHex( first16AsDecimal )
  WScript.Echo "First Code " & GetFirstPart   
End Function

Function GetSecondPart( faceCode )
  ' Take the first part of the face code based on substrings
  secondPart = Mid( faceCode, 19, 32 )
  GetSecondPart = Left( secondPart, 16 )
  WScript.Echo "Second Code " & GetSecondPart 
End Function

Function Hex_to_Dec(hex_value)
  Hex_to_Dec = CDbl("&h" & hex_value)
End Function

Function MyHex(ByVal Number)
' Thanks to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2004/08/30/222760.aspx for this
  Dim Sign
  Const HexChars = "0123456789ABCDEF"
  Sign = Sgn(Number)
  Number = Fix(Abs(CDbl(number)))
  If Number = 0 Then
    MyHex = "0"
    Exit Function
  End If
  While Number > 0
    MyHex = Mid(HexChars, 1 + (Number - 16 * Fix(Number / 16)), 1) & MyHex
    Number = Fix(Number/16)
  WEnd
  If Sign = -1 Then MyHex = "-" & MyHex
End Function

Ugly, as most VBScript is to me. Unfortunately, Mount and Blade only runs on Windows. I would love it if I could stop having to use my Windows machine to play on it, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for this awesome game.

Game over man. Game over.

I have been spending way too much time playing this game lately. More details to come.

I wasn’t too surprised by my results. I think for progressives, it has become a sad cycle of having to pick the least conservative of the two options available. We haven’t had a good progressive candidate since I’ve been able to vote.

Oh, and by the way, this site uses Flash. If by chance you’re one of those people who brag about disabling Flash in your browser, don’t bother.

Great discussion on 5by5 about the classic movie Goodfellas. Dan and John devote a good 3 hours to the subject.

If nothing else, this just validates that Coach is the hippest character in the Left 4 Dead franchise.

Whether Slashdot decides to do that is not the point of this post, but that they need to do something different. The content on Slashdot has not decreased in quality, but I think that the comments have. I present three specific articles that I think aptly demonstrates how terrible they really are now.

How to Thwart the High Priests In IT

Okay, so right off the bat I immediately empathize with the title of this post. Anyone who has had the misfortune of working at big companies and dealing with an out-of-control IT bureaucracy probably will feel the same way. As someone who writes software for a living, I am always demanding more of the hardware and software I use to meet my deadlines and ship software. However, any situation involving IT turns into a quagmire. For example, at one time, it was the policy to start encrypting your hard drive on any laptop after some sales executive lost their laptop on vacation. Fine, I enabled encryption on my Ubuntu laptop I was using. Suddenly though, it was apparent that “encryption” meant installing this very specific software suite on a Windows machine. “Linux Encryption is impossible. Because it is Open Source you see.” WOW.

Anyway, here’s a few of the comments on this article:

Fine. When the CORPORATE network blows up, it isn’t “mine”, and I won’t give a shit. How does THAT sound?

“My Network” doesn’t imply “ownership” as much as it does “complete responsibility”, which is why TWITS like you don’t get it. “My Network” is something that I take a great deal of pride in. It is MY responsibility, and therefore it is MY network. It is like the sales guys getting all upset when another sales rep “steals my client”. It isn’t your client, it is the company. That isn’t YOUR desk, it is the company’s. It isn’t your office, it is the Company’s.

You get the point now?

Sounds like the article was written by a tool with no understanding of how enterprise IT works, and no grasp of what bringing alien, unknown systems into contact with critical infrastructure can lead to.

Oh yes, we know you’re important. You don’t have to yell at us.

Testing the MongoDB Global Write Lock Improvements

For some background, MongoDB is a very popular NoSQL solution for persistent storage. This role has typically been filled by a RDBMS until recently. This is largely due to some unique use cases that have arisen from the different type of processing that social networking and other new technologies demand. Well wait one second, I thought that was fairly well known in the tech community?

Congratulations. You matter enough to bother reinventing this wheel again. If you continue to matter for a meaningful amount of time you’ll end up locking individual documents, or whatever you call them. Oracle called that ‘row’ locking. 15 years ago.

For when you’re too cheap to spring for a BerkeleyDB license, some amateur playing a decade of catchup gives you everything you’d ever need, as long as you don’t need support, performance, stability or data integrity.

Um, okay. Well they’re probably right, I mean this NoSQL business is silly then if it’s just rehashing old technology. I guess you could just stick with Oracle, I’m sure they won’t take part in any of this NoSQL Hype. Oops, spoke too soon.

Michael Dell Dismisses Tablet Threat To the PC Market

Okay, the obvious point is that Michael Dell sells PCs, and tablets are a perceived threat on the PC market. Of course, Michael Dell isn’t always right on his predictions anyway.

Trying to do much REAL WORK(tm) on a tablet is an exercise in frustration. By the time you add a keyboard and mouse so that you can be even marginally productive you might as well get the tablet so that you can work even where/when there isn’t a wireless network.

The tablet’s niche is on the couch or the train or the bus

Do I even need to make a comment about this? I think adding a keyboard means you don’t really understand what a tablet is supposed to do, and if you have a hard time doing any work on a tablet, you’re probably using the wrong tablet.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with me on my feelings about these comments, and of course there are some comments that weren’t as out of touch with reality. If anything, I hope it shows how comments don’t necessarily add anything useful to site content.

I had forgotten to how to uninstall Oracle. The temerity!

After all, at my last job and for the past few years, installing and working with Oracle DB servers had become old hat to me. Whether we had to do some testing on a dump from production or we just needed a new development database, I had learned how to do it myself. Now, a year later, I was back to being an Oracle noob, fumbling around looking for documentation. Scouring Oracle blog posts for useless information and broken links to supposedly useful information. It finally came back to me deep inside some byzantine directory like “/u01/app/oracle/11/dbms/oui” that I found what I needed to know. Perhaps some last bit of forbidden knowledge had been shaken loose by all of my searching, but eventually I was able to properly remove the last remnants of Oracle 11g.

At first I felt a little ashamed: perfectly good knowledge of mine which had gone to waste from lack of use. However, thinking about it some more, it made me feel pretty good. It was equivalent to forgetting how to wiggle the TV antenna to get a broadcast station to come in without the static. The tools I’m using now are far less convoluted and are usually pretty easy to work with. Anyone that I work with is perfectly capable of setting up anything we use. This made me think about what that role is like in a general case. It can be enticing to be “that wizard” who can get something working that no one else can. Sure, you don’t want to ask them any questions about what they had to do in order for it to work, it must be magic! Sadly, I’m no longer that person when it comes to Oracle database setups on random GNU/Linux or Solaris systems.

While it was nice to have people rely on you for something, it’s not necessarily a good thing if it is just because you know something no one else really cares about. If setting up Oracle database systems was my only talent, I would be in a pretty bad spot at my current job. Suppose at your family you have “Uncle Frank” who is a wizard and knowing where the tinfoil goes on the rabbit ears to make your 4 channels come in without static. Now, when you get cable and no longer need the rabbit ears, Uncle Frank might seem to be a little grouchier than normal. Fortunately for me, that’s not the case, as I’m happy to leave that part of my experience in the past alongside other embarrassing knowledge that once seemed important.

• Last Modified: October 28, 2009
• Article: TS1258

Symptoms

You may see multiple, dark vertical bands or dark bumps starting along the bottom of the MacBook Pro (15-inch, Early 2008) or MacBook Pro (17-inch, Early 2008) with the high resolution LED backlit display, as shown below.

Resolution

To help prevent this from occurring, download and install Mac OS X v10.5.3 or later from Apple Downloads.

If the issue persists when running Mac OS X v10.5.3 or later, a quick reset of the display panel will reset the LED backlights.

The quickest way to reset the display is to use the following key combination:

• Press Control - Shift - Eject.
• After the display goes to sleep, wake it by pressing any key on the keyboard.

That must have been some kind of doll.
She was.

It’s weird to think that Fellowship of the Ring came out 10 years ago this month. I can vividly remember how excited I was to see the movie, and how I wasn’t disappointed in the slightest when I saw it on opening day. This teaser trailer has got me just as excited, possibly even more so because I know what kind of quality to expect in December, 2012.

It’s truly a shame that these guys no longer produce videos. Check out their individual sites here: Duane Brando

• Netscape Navigator Gold 3 - The browser my school system had installed.
• Netscape Communicator - Just an upgraded version with more features.
• Mozilla - Netscape Communicator without the “N”.
• Opera - The first browser I found with good tab navigation.
• Mozilla Firefox - I switched when several sites I visited stopped working.
• Safari - When Firefox 4 came out and broke every add-on I used with Macs.

It’s been an interesting ride. The story that came out last week about Chrome overtaking Firefox in browser market share got me thinking about it. I can’t say I’m surprised, it was hard navigating to any of Google sites in the last few years without being inundated with “Try Google Chrome” on each page. I’ve never tried using Chrome as my primary browser. The only places I always install it are on Linux machines or Windows Servers. Chrome works pretty well on Linux machines, considering that the computers I usually put Linux on are older laptops. Windows Servers had IE so locked down by default I couldn’t navigate anywhere, and I didn’t care enough to figure out exactly what policies I needed to change in order to fix that. I’d just copy a Chrome Installer.exe over onto the server and be done with it.

The thing that surprises me about this list is that Safari is the first browser I’ve ever used that’s the default for an operating system.

• Recording individual keys pressed by the user
• Recording the contents of SMS messages
• Recording requests made to websites, even when using HTTPS

I recommend you watch Eckhart’s video. If you feel the way I do about privacy, you should start to have a sinking feeling about 9 minutes in.

All of this seems bad. More developments have been reported that seem to indicate that Eckhart’s findings portray Carrier IQ’s software inaccurately. I’m sure that this story is far from over, but I think the most shocking part to me is unrelated to the veracity of Eckhart’s findings. In response to Eckhart sharing his information, Carrier IQ sent him a cease-and-desist notice based on copyright infringement related to hosting the company’s manuals on his website. Eckhart argued that he wanted the manuals in order to verify his research. He obtained them from the Carrier IQ website, and hosted them only as a precaution should they become unavailable from Carrier IQ. According to Wired.com, Carrier IQ had in fact removed the manuals around the same time they sent the letter to Eckhart. Another Wired.com article goes on to show how the EFF stepped in, and not long after that, Carrier IQ apologized for the letter.

Carrier IQ’s response is more damning than anything Eckhart could have demonstrated. The “root” of the problem isn’t necessarily what mechanisms the application is capable of, but what data it actually records. It’s possible that Carrier IQ only records a small subset of what it is capable of logging. If they had been more transparent about it, this whole story goes from “brouhaha” to not even newsworthy. However, instead of disclosure, Carrier IQ’s initial reaction was to push the big red lawyer button. This means that the only notion I think anyone can take away is that Carrier IQ has something to hide. After threatening didn’t work, Carrier IQ defended themselves based on a premise that the carriers determine what information was collected and stored. Why should full disclosure be a last resort if someone inaccurately portrays your work? If Carrier IQ’s claims are true, why not come out with that first and not after you fail in silencing your critics?

I would hope that most companies choose not to react the way Carrier IQ did to criticism. They should be up front in defending their products or at least acknowledging privacy issues when they arise. By threatening legal action against Eckhart as a first response, Carrier IQ set themselves up as a bully who can’t own up to the facts, no matter how damaging they actually are.