It’s a spinet style, which is perfect for our living room. And it helps displace the tv which all too often can become the focal point of a home, family, and marriage – not that we don’t still have a tv (we have a couple), but it’s no longer the focus when entering the house

You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.

It’s got me wondering – if you had to give The Two Things about your job/field, what would they be?

And – if you had to describe your whole job in a tweet (<= 140 characters), could you do it?

This Saturday from 1300-1500 I’ll be taking ground school. Woot!

I’ve known a lot of pilots in my life, and have always wanted to join the ranks

Along the lines of freshnews, I have launched an rss aggregator/launch service at datente.com.

There are several categories of feeds (imperfectly broken-up, but it’s what makes sense to me) that display in quasi random order. And on the front page is a smattering selected randomly from the master list.

I would love suggestions of feeds to add, and maybe even new categories, too.

On the 31st of December of last year (boy that sounds weird to say “last year” and it only be 4 weeks ago), I traded-in my 2004 Ford Escape which had served me well for 4.5 years (including racking-up nearly 90k miles in the time I had it (and for almost a year it was driven less than 10k miles … which I think means I used to drive a lot)) for a new vehicle.

my cute wife, and our new car

We had been looking at replacing one of our cars for a while, and with the end of the year incentives in place, it was a good time for us to do it.

So we are now the proud owners of a 2012 Ford Fusion in “steel blue”. It’s not quite fully loaded, but it’s more than adequate for our needs.

But since they’re not (more accurately, it’s merely the next roll point on their calendar like 2000 was for us), we have a host of things to look forward to this year and beyond: a presidential election, graduations, births, new friends, and more I cannot think of right now.

So, to all 5 of my readers, welcome to 2012!

---------
rwxrwxrwx
uuugggooo

Where “u”, “g”, and “o” indicate “user”, “group”, and “other” while “rwx” indicates whether the item can be read, written, or executed.

Also of note are file ownerships in the form of

user:group

So a file might be owned by warren:warren with read/write privileges only for the owner: rw-rw----.

That’s pretty handy.

How many of you know there are hidden permissions that do not show up in a normal use of ls -l?

I didn’t until last week – and I’ve been using Linux for more than a decade

Turns out that – at least with ext2, etx3, and ext4 filesystems – there are a variety of other attributes that can be assigned to a file. One of them is the immutable flag^*.

(Using a related command to ls, lsattr, a person can view the extended attribute flags of a file.)

In specific, the immutable flag disallows even the owner from deleting his/her own file! There was the source of a very ornery issue I ran into while doing an upgrade last week of a customer’s management environment. The upgrade installer ran into an issue wherein it interrupted its own process. But when it did, it left the filesystem in an inconsistent state – specifically with regards to an SSL certificate file and the machine identifier file (agent.srv and mid, if you’re curious) having the immutable flag set. When attempting to pick back up with the upgrade, the installer failed more [apparently] asymptomatically (and esoterically) than I had ever seen before.

After several exchanges with senior product support, a working fix of running chattr -i /path/to/file was provided. Neither myself, nor any of the senior admins at my customer had ever heard of chattr. So off to the man pages. Turns out that chattr is quite the command – but it’s not well publicized (at least, I don’t think it is).

If you run into a file you own, but cannot delete, be sure to inspect the extended attributes with lsattr, and fix any mis-set flags with chattr.

^{*_{The entire list of alterable flags: “append only (a), compressed (c), no dump (d), extent format (e), immutable (i), data journalling (j), secure deletion (s), no tail-merging (t), undeletable (u), no atime updates (A), synchronous directory updates (D), synchronous updates (S), and top of directory hierarchy (T).” Non-modifiable, but visible with lsattr, flags: “huge file (h), compression error (E), indexed directory (I), compression raw access (X), and compressed dirty file (Z)”.}}

Being terminated over charging a movie to your room? Seems harsh (getting the $9.95 back from the employee would seem to be easier) – but breaking the rule is breaking the rule.

Being terminated over buying gum? Ok, so I WOULD terminate somebody over that … but I hate the stuff

But it’s repulsive, revolting, and wrong
chewing and chewing all day long
The way that a cow does*

There are a host of ways listed in the article – that I find truly shocking – to cheat on expense reports: blank receipts? buying gifts and then selling them on eBay? double-billing? Wow. The sheer effort taken by some people to cheat is astonishing!

Where I work now has a corporate credit card issued to every traveling employee. The only time we submit non-AmEx charges is if a place doesn’t accept AmEx: it’s just way easier to use the corporate card than it is to try to give all the supporting documentation of a personal card. Plus, there’s the benefit that it’s not my personal limit that is being affected if a customer delays in paying a bill.

Everyone that works where I do now also follows the expense guidelines we have – don’t exceed the IRS per diem rate for your region (on average). If you want to eat someplace nice for dinner – that’s fine. Just eat someplace less expensive the next day. Sticking within the rules isn’t that hard … so why would you want to try to evade them and end up with employment history issues like termination on your record?

OS Prov is most typically done using PXE (or the similar bootp process). SA provides a PXE server that gives a boot menu to network-booted systems. That menu contains a variety of choices: linux, windows, winpe, etc.

In most environments, one particular OS will be dominant, and typically one particular version of that OS – whether it be RHEL 5 x64 or Windows 2008 R2, it’s usually just one that makes up the lion’s^* share of systems on the network.

If you know that you will be provisioning, say, Windows 2008 R2 90% of the time, it would be nice to not have to always have to pick it manually from the PXE boot menu.

Here’s what you need to do to make that happen (presuming you want to use Build Plans):

Edit the following file:

/opt/opsware/boot/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default

For example, if you have this at the beginning of the file:

"prompt 1
default local
timeout 100
display pxelinux.msg
implicit 0"

Change it to this for the OGFS version of winpe64:

"prompt 1
default winpe64-ogfs
timeout 100
display winpe64-ogfs.msg
implicit 0"

You can use the above process – modified, of course – for any of the available boot images.

^{*_{And if you’re provisioning Mac OS X 10.7, “Lion” makes up all the share}}

It’s truly that good.

This week I was working in Fort Lauderdale. It’s been over 4 years since I was last in the area, and I’ve always wanted to visit Miami – at least once.

As I am wont to do, I checked-out OpenTable to see what interesting food places were available. One of them was 1401 Argentinean Bistro. It’s a fusion restaurant selling Argentinian food with Italian influences (the owner/chef’s dual heritages).

I went with a coworker and the customer contact with whom we were working. We all ordered the skirt steak, and LOVED it!

Our waiter was the chef, Fabio Pizelman: he enjoys tending tables 2-3 nights a week to get a better feel for what his customers like, don’t like, want, etc. We arrived late enough Tuesday that we were [effectively] the only customers. So I do realize that our service was perhaps slightly more attentive than it may be when the place is packed, but it was still a phenomenal place to eat.

Due to circumstances beyond our control, we ended up leaving work late, and had to move our reservation a couple times – but that worked to our advantage in that we had the place to ourselves.

The outdoor seating was excellent on the balmy fall evening, and we decided by the end of the rolls that we had to go back.

While waiting on our entrees to arrive, I rebooked us for Wednesday – when we planned to sample the non-steak portions of Chef Fabio’s menu.

Due to some more unforeseen (and unavoidable delays), we had to no-show Wednesday – but Thursday was our night.

Alas! Senor Pizelman must think we’re flakes! Last night we didn’t get to leave the office until it was almost today

And with my return home imminent, it also means that I won’t have a chance to eat at the Bistro again for some time – a true shame. Chef Fabio’s food, service, and personality couldn’t be better.

And so, with this, I must wait to return to 1401 Bistro until my next trip to south Florida.

I wish Mssr Pizelman all success until (and after) then.