Little Cat Feet

Mark Twain has been incorrectly credited with the quote: "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." I never really appreciated this assertion until I spent a July weekend tooling around the City by the Bay. My previous trips had been in the spring and winter. Cool air, fog, and wind aside I took a great exploratory walk from the Mission to Golden Gate park to visit the de Young Museum.

While the museum was quite stimulating and comes with my personal recommendation, the surprisingly interesting part of the excursion was walking from the Mission to Golden Gate park. I got lost en route and had the chance to walk through two neighborhoods I may not have seen on foot otherwise. Luckily, I sincerely believe that a great way to see a city is to get lost in the middle of the day when it is not raining. The glaring exception would be Los Angeles. The City of Angels is a terrible pedestrian experience.

Heisenberg

Today, during a typical geeky e-mail exchange, Ranting Nerd and I switched places for moment on the quantum level. He posed to question to Zetetical and me that normally I would pose to the former two. I later answered with a response that the Nerd may have actually given me in the past.

The Problem: Applying anti-spam rules for personal (user@) and administrative (root@, webmaster@, postmaster@, etc.) e-mail that arrive in the same mailbox is a logical nightmare.

The Answer: Maintain separate mailboxes for personal e-mail versus administrative e-mail.

Why this works: There's a whole lotta spam!

Why this *really* works: On a bad spam day an individual mailbox can get flooded to the point that the piled up e-mail has a DoS effect. I.e. the spam pushes a mailbox past a disk space quota. Directing all the RFC necessitated recipients to your personal mailbox invites this to happen sooner than later. It would be teh suck if personal e-mail bounced or was hidden beneth a slew of "spoofed header" bounces to postmaster@mydomain.

Ticks & Leeches

One of my tasks as a System/LAN/Windows Administrator is putting together performance graphs of various systems I administer. Among these systems is an e-mail content scanner that performs content and virus scanning of incoming e-mail before it reaches the back-end storage server. Like most applications, this e-mail content scanner works fairly well once it is properly configured and the annoyances are beaten out of it. To properly beat the annoyances out of an e-mail gateway, it helps to have current and historical information about its performance in an easy to read web interface-- and 9 out of 10 IT managers love it. To this end, I use MRTG.

My method, while involved, is rather straight forward: Install a configurable SNMP provider on the host(Windows); create custom MIB/OIDs that use the NT Performance Counters provided by the application; populate an MRTG configuration file with these custom OIDs as targets. As long as the performance counters I want to query exist, this works like a charm.

Let me tell you why I am mad: Between major version releases the good folks from whom I purchase e-mail content scanning software decided to replace a counter I considered integral to monitoring the performance of the software: "messages queued for processing." They chose to include a counter of the time difference between the receipt of a message and its processing. While the latter is quite useful, it is no replacement for the former. Who would not want to know how many messages are piled up on the server awaiting an available processing thread? My only conclusion to the rationale for this is they, the software manufacturer, want to sell a plugin (pronounced: custom dll) for the SNMP agent/provider of their choosing.

The workaround: I will write a quick and dirty script to count the files the queues on the content scanning server; make this an extension in my configurable SNMP provider with its own MIB/OID that calls this script; and configure an MRTG target with this OID. Subsequently, I shall prepare myself a sandwich.

Pretension

Excerpt from my contribution to an e-mail exchange last week:

....I liked Dvorak for about a minute,
but he tends to either push me forward towards Copland or backwards to
Tchaikovsky.

Dvorak and Copland killed my interest in the works of John Williams.
Seems like every movie score Williams did gets its principal theme from
Symphony No. 9 (Dvorak) or Rodeo (Copland).

In retrospect I have come to realize that I have neither the qualification nor the severe lack of common decency to make such a base accusation about the music of John Williams. Williams is a great contemporary composer, musician, teacher, and innovator. The most important to note here is his work as an innovator: bringing the distinctive sound of American music to the silver screen the way Williams has, is no trivial task.

Sure, the Main Title to Cowboys may evoke thoughts of Aaron Copland's Rodeo; his Olympic Fanfare, Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man. Maybe Jaws (Main Theme) bears a striking resemblance to the opening of Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 9, "From the New World." The works have their own merit not only apart from, but also along side the classics they resemble, for Williams innovation, adaptation, and application of the American sound to American cinema is special and deserves praise.

6U

Today, while watching Atlanta Braves baseball on TBS, I saw an unassisted triple play. This was the thirteenth unassisted triple play in the history of Major League Baseball. A very special moment to witness even on television. Unfortunately, it was the starting third baseman for the Bravos who put a ball in play that led to three outs, thus ending the inning.

Kudos to the short-stop for the Colorado National League baseball club for a heads up play. A dumbfounded look to the manager of the Atlanta National League baseball club for putting on the "hit and run" with men on first and second, no outs, and a 3-2 count to a former National League Most Valuable Player who does not strike out much.

All I wanted was a printer....

Main Entry: cur·mud·geon
Pronunciation: (")k&r-'m&-j&n
Function: noun
Etymology: origin unknown
1 archaic : MISER
2 : a crusty, ill-tempered, and usually old man
- cur·mud·geon·li·ness /-lE-n&s/ noun
- cur·mud·geon·ly /-lE/ adjective

Commencement

Main Entry: darky
Variant(s): or dark·ie /'där-kE/
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural darkies
usually offensive : a black person