Abe Hassan

music meme

2008-07-13T10:01:07Z

Time for this to go around again! Here's opening line(s) from fifteen songs on my playlist. Person who guesses the most correct song titles and artists is allowed to be smug for a week. Google is cheating.

1. all day staring at the ceiling, making friends with shadows on my wall
2. baby life is like a ride on a freeway, dodging bullets while you're trying to find your way
3. once upon a time you dressed so fine, you threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
4. scanning the scene in the city tonight. we're looking for you to start up a fight
5. i will dedicate and sacrifice my everything for just a second's worth of how my story's ending
6. tom, get your plane right on time, i know your part'll go fine
7. i am thinking it's a sign that the freckles in our eyes are mirror images
8. freezin, rests his head on a pillow made of concrete, again
9. it was great when it all began, i was a regular frankie fan
10. words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup
11. you better work (covergirl), work it girl (give a twirl), do your thing on the runway
12. standing in line, marking time, waiting for the welfare dime
13. sometimes i feel like throwing my hands up in the air, i know i can count on you
14. i really can't stay ... i've got to go away ... this evening's has been so very nice
15. it's not easy having yourself a good time, greasing up those bets and bettors

what's my name - dj earworm

2008-07-11T09:15:02Z

This is a mashup of 22 songs by: Ace of Base, Mamas and the Papas, Brandy & Monica, Aaliyah, Britney Spears, Beyonce, Donna Summer, Maroon 5, Eminem, Alicia Keys, Destiny’s Child, Snoop Dogg, DMX, The Who, Madison Avenue, Eurythmics, Peter Gabriel, Irene Cara, Kanye West, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jason Mraz, Phil Collins.

Seriously.

cfengine

2008-07-10T08:43:58Z

We use cfengine as our configuration management system. (Yes yes, puppet is actually really nifty, but I still like cfengine too.) We're actually spending some time right now reviewing and cleaning up our configs, which have gotten nastier and nastier over the last few years, with an eye towards making them clearer to understand and more importantly, to do exactly what we want them to do.

Today I told tehdely that our goal should be to have this system run and produce no output unless something actually changes. He actually met that goal, and summarized it quite well:

01:29 <@mbaehr> cfagent now runs on these hosts with no output :) 01:29 <@mbaehr> that's pretty... pretty like a well-formed, fibrous shit which requires no wiping 01:29 <@mbaehr> you know, when you look at the TP and you're like... wait, did i just crap?

two more interview questions

2008-06-20T21:51:13Z

* Name ten Unix commands capable of sending mail.

* Name ten Unix commands capable of destroying your system.

shaving

2008-06-17T06:07:54Z

Hello Lazyweb,

I need to buy a new electric shaver. I really only use the trimmer functionality, because I go for a week and a half without shaving my beard and then I want to leave some stubble, so the trimmer works great for that. Lately I've been feeling that my years-old shaver is going to give up the ghost, and I'm terrified that it's going to do so while I'm mid-shave.

I want to find a new electric shaver. I want something that does the blah blah close shave blah blah in the off-chance I'd ever *need* it, but I primarily want a good trimmer that'll get me down from a week-old beard to five o'clock shadow. I'm okay with buying two separate appliances if that's the best way to serve my needs. I'm okay with spending a little extra money for quality/something that comes in highly recommended.

Recommendations? I can google for this stuff but I'd prefer recs of things that people will vouch for.

Thank you!

editors and web requests

2008-06-09T00:57:55Z

I unscreened comments on the previous post, and I'm really impressed by how many responses there were. :P

For the record, the ones I came up with:

* Unix editors: emacs, vi, vim, joe, sed, ed, pico, nano, cat, perl
* Web requests: lynx, wget, curl, lwp-request, GET, POST, HEAD, telnet, nc, perl

(Yes, I know "cat" is cheating, but on a system where I've only had vi, I have resorted to using cat and echo with >> instead of using vi.)

interviews

2008-06-06T08:17:18Z

Yesterday I did my first interviews for sysadmins - one for an entry-level position and one for a senior level position. I wasn't quite sure what approach to take so I asked for suggestions, and one person had a list of technical interview questions that she used as a guide/prompt for some things. One of the easiest questions on the list was "name ten Unix commands."

We're a bit amused at the question because, seriously. So we decided to change it around a bit:

* Name ten Unix editors.
* Name ten commands capable of performing web requests.

Any takers? :) Looking elsewhere on the Internets is cheating, looking at your Terminal is cheating, spending more than five minutes thinking about each of these is no fair. Comments here are screened, and a gold star to whoever gets closest. :)

itunes random

2008-05-22T08:18:35Z

I discovered quite a while back that "random" on iTunes isn't quite random. More specifically to my problem, if I picked a particular song to start with, I'd go through exactly the same playlist; it's a random list, but it's the same random list!

So now I do something a little different. I'll pick the song I want, type in enough of the name of the song into the search bar to narrow it down. Then I'll just delete a few characters of what I typed in, a different amount and from a different part of the search string, each time. Like, if I was in the mood for "Fairytale of New York", I'd start there and then my playlist that day is anything where the title/artist/album has "fa" in the name. Then when I get tired of that, I'll re-seed the list, and so on. :)

mashups

2008-05-18T00:47:49Z

I've stumbled across some excellent mashups on YouTube. My favorite so far is called "Toxic Love Shack":

Some other honorable mentions:

* Sweet Dreams are Made of Seven Nation Army
* Take Me Out For A Milkshake
* Bootylicious + Smells Like Teen Spirit
* Scrub Close To Me

via anildash

2008-05-14T13:02:59Z

Please, Cross Your Arms In The Server Room

i'll keep you my dirty little secret

2008-03-10T02:51:28Z

Heard this song on the radio this afternoon and it got stuck in my head.

Never seen the video before today! It's totally right up the alley of anyone who likes postsecret though. :)

chips and salsa

2008-03-05T06:06:52Z

View Poll: #1149122

i sit near a lot of people

2008-02-28T05:42:03Z

Abe's MOTD from http://lisa.vox.com/

pillowfight

2008-02-14T07:47:59Z

The Great San Francisco Pillow Fight.

Tomorrow at 6pm, Market and Embarcadero.

warranties

2008-01-25T07:07:13Z

So we had to buy a new dryer the other day, since the one we have has given up the ghost. The dryer comes with a one-year warranty. My mom joked that she'd love to have a one-year warranty, as long as she can pick the start date. I know I (and several people) always joke that things break the day after the warranty is up, so this made for an interesting question.

If you could pick any one-year period to be covered by a warranty, how would you decide which one-year period to pick? Assume you don't actually have data on "this computer tends to have a lifetime of 2 years, etc", just the same information available to you currently. For added excitement, assume you're buying a vital appliance of some sort, so you can't just say "I'll wait six months to repair my dryer" or whatever.

60s music monday

2007-12-10T18:10:07Z

o/~ Gooooooooood, gooooooooooooooooooood, goooooooooood, good vibrations o/~

britney spears

2007-12-09T00:44:48Z

BritneySpears.ac, upon first glance, looks like a typical fan site.

But upon closer inspection, you find a whole section of the site called Britney's Guide to Semiconductor Physics.

.... *what*

iphone pilots, via tehdely

2007-11-20T08:25:04Z

Ask the pilot

On one of the frequent-flier blogs, an airline pilot writes that only moments after informing his passengers of a weather-related ground hold affecting their flight to Memphis, Tenn., he and his captain received a call from one of the flight attendants. Seems an iPhone-wielding customer in the back had a challenge. "Some guy with an iPhone says the weather is good," the flight attendant says, "and wants to know what the real reason is for the delay. Is something wrong with the plane?"

I like that, "real reason." The implication, as always, is that the carrier is lying or otherwise withholding some critical information. There must be some dangerous malfunction they're not telling us about. After all, "the weather is good," so obviously there's no reason we can't depart immediately.

Reportedly, the captain responded with a public address announcement that was sharp enough to elicit audible laughter from the cabin.

"If the passenger with the iPhone would be kind enough," he began, "to use it to check the weather at our alternate airport, then calculate our revised fuel burn due to being rerouted, then call our dispatcher to arrange our amended release, then make a call to the nearest traffic control center to arrange a new slot time (among all the other aircraft carrying passengers with iPhones), we'll then be more than happy to depart. Please ring your call button to advise the flight attendant and your fellow passengers when you deem it ready and responsible for this multimillion-dollar aircraft and its 84 passengers to safely leave."

another nother confession

2007-11-14T07:34:33Z

Photo Booth started acting weird recently. Like, it seems my iSight's lens got horked, so any pictures I took were all fishbowly and broken. This started around when I got a new cleaning thingy for my screen, so I figured I just horked it and sighed a bit and moved on. (It's not like I really use it all that often. So, no big loss.)

I was talking to stilldavid tonight and I told him how my arms bend backwards a little, and I offered him photographic proof. I told him he'd have to discount the effects of the distortion, and he made a fishbowl comment. So on a lark, I go into Photo Booth's settings, and hit the "Normal" filter. And it works fine now.

This is why they call me a computer engineer, folks.

first pass through the code

2007-11-09T04:22:49Z

hachi berated me for writing the following:

$ret .= "<td>$_</td>" for `seq -w 1 13`;

I didn't want to mess around with printf on my first pass through writing this! I wanted to figure out what I wanted to do, so I write train-of-thought code on the first pass and then fix on the second pass. And this is what I produced. I'm a little ashamed. (Really, I'm more embarassed that I'm not as fluent with 'printf' as I'd like to be; it's not something I naturally think to use.)

another confession

2007-11-06T09:56:14Z

Earlier today, one of those "comment with your address" posts popped up on my friends page. As I brought my mailing address to the forefront of my thoughts, my immediate reaction was "204.9.177....oh wait".

(It makes sense! No, really! I've had IP addresses on my mind all last week; I haven't had to think of my mailing address at all. ... At least I caught myself before commenting.)

confession

2007-11-02T07:01:56Z

I'm writing a script to debug something. I wanted the script to sleep for a little while. Usually one could do this by writing:

sleep 60;

Or whatever. Instead, I wrote:

sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep;

Because I wanted the process to sleep for a long time, see. I didn't even realize what I was doing till I was about three quarters of the way into that. At least I eventually reproduced/verified/resolved the bug I was looking for.

code practices

2007-10-29T07:52:19Z

Probably one of the most valuable lectures I've had so far this semester dealt with refactoring code. It wasn't anything groundbreaking, but part of it was a straight-up checklist of "if you see these things happening, you might want to clean up your code". And some of it was obvious (eg, declare a function instead of duplicating code) and some of it was stuff I haven't consciously thought about (eg, use subclassing instead of if/else or switch statements).

So lately I've been on a refactoring kick -- I kind of enjoy the challenge. (It's almost like perl golf, which I'm also coming to enjoy) One of the things I'm starting to hate more and more are constructs like:

my @uids;
if (some conditional) {
  @uids = LJ::get_uids_somehow();
} else {
  @uids = LJ::uids_some_other_way();
}
return @uids;

Or, another one that drives me nuts, and I know I inherited this from brad:

if (some condition) {
   ... lots of code ...
} else {
   return $some_value;
}

Both of which drive me nuts. (Switching to a tangent completely.) It's weird. I like cleaning up code! I like testing! I like fixing bugs! I like writing documentation! And I don't like caffeine. Clearly I'm not cut out to be a software engineer. :P

parents' jobs

2007-10-21T02:00:55Z

My parents are both doctors. (My mother doesn't practice, and hasn't practiced since any of us were born, but she still knows what she's talking about. *g*) I'm having a hard time articulating this, but it meant that we as kids never really had to go to the doctor all that often, because we kind of grew up with "well, mom or dad can tell us what's wrong". And then my dad can call in a 'scrip to the pharmacy, and we'd be on our way back to normal.

The one story I always think of was when my brother had appendicitis. He was laying in bed, in a lot of pain, and my mother was doing a quick "let's figure out what's wrong" check on him. She explained that if you push against the left foot (while the person's laying down), they'll yelp in pain if it's appendicitis. Which to her was the "oh crap we gotta go to the ER" signal. But more generally, I just love picking up that sort of knowledge from them.

So that's the sort of "culture" I grew up in at home, where illness was approached very clinically, where they generally knew how/why we were feeling ill and how to fix it right away. For me, it's not at all surprising to hear my parents talk about drug interactions or things like that. But I wonder what it's like for (say) the kids of a carpenter, or the kids of a chef, or things like that. Anyone got stories? :)

an address

2007-10-17T23:21:27Z

My roommate was surprised that I recognized this address, but I don't think it's that big of a surprise. He is two years younger than me, though, so it might just be the generation gap.

Do you recognize this address? If you don't, just say "no i don't" so it's not just votes from people who know/have a guess. :)

View Poll: #1073193