Any idiot can drive fast in a straight line

Friday, August 18, 2000

my.umich.edu (no link since the site isn't up) is a new portal being developed for the staff and students of The University of Michigan. The static gateway that is currently in use has proved to be all but worthless, mostly because searching of lower pages in the hierarchy is chaotic. A preview shows just how ugly the new site is going to be. Also, one of the press releases talked about how headlines will be pulled directly from The Michigan Daily website. As the Systems Administrator, I can say that I just installed the new web server and it is not ready! The main online developer has yet to configure the web server, mostly because we just installed the hardware late last week. The site is being fully redesigned, and we are all quite excited. Hopefully we can help with the headlines on my.umich.edu, in a couple months .

Ananova - Dog 'shoots' woman

More Final Meal Requests: Six pieces of french toast with syrup, jelly, butter, six barbecued spare ribs, six pieces of well burned bacon, four scrambled eggs, five well cooked sausage patties, french fries with catsup, three slices of cheese, two pieces of yellow cake with chocolate fudge icing, and four cartons of milk

How horrible! In this list of Final Meal Requests: Shrimp and salad. Shrimp not available. Served cheeseburger, french fries and cola. I would be just a little bit pissed when my dignified order was replaced with crap you could get at McDonalds.

Thursday, August 17, 2000

Gameplay: 10 Graphics: 10 Sound: 10 Value: 10 Chrono Cross.

Even more of a reason to buy a Playstation 2:Super Bust-A-Move.

I worked 17.5 hours yesterday. Took a half an hour break for dinner between jobs, and that was about it for rest. In Ann Arbor, most of the client machines could not connect to anything but the file server. Knowing that the file server uses Appletalk as the protocol and TCP/IP is used for everything else, we narrowed down the list of possible problems. Checking out the error logs on our servers showed stuff like this over and over and over: Aug 16 18:54:45 beer.pub.umich.edu dhcpd: DHCPDISCOVER from 00:50:e4:30:6f:24 via eth1 Aug 16 18:54:45 beer.pub.umich.edu dhcpd: DHCPOFFER on 141.211.148.76 to 00:50:e4:30:6f:24 via eth1 Aug 16 18:54:45 beer.pub.umich.edu dhcpd: DHCPREQUEST for 10.0.1.5 from 00:50:e4:30:6f:24 via eth1 Aug 16 18:54:45 beer.pub.umich.edu dhcpd: DHCPNAK on 10.0.1.5 to 00:50:e4:30:6f:24 via eth1 In basic terms, this is what was happening: a system comes online and tries to DISCOVER the DHCP server, the server OFFERs a good IP from it's pool, the client REQUESTed a bad IP, and the server does Not AcKnowledge that request. Then the cycle repeats. This made no sense to all three of us working on the problem. We tried restarting our DHCP server, we tried using a different server, etc etc. FINALLY, Sat realized that someone had an Apple AirPort they wanted to hook up. Searching the Apple Tech Info Library, we found out that the AirPort acts as a DHCP server! It was accepting all of the requests, and just giving out bad information! Took that off the network, and everything returned to normal. And it only took 8 hours to figure that out.

In the midst of a vast wilderness, far off, standing all alone, is a high mountain. You are sitting on open ground on top of the mountain, looking off into the distance in all directions. There are no boundaries. As you sit, you fill the world. Relaxing and releasing body and mind, You abide in the Buddha-realm.

Wednesday, August 16, 2000

Fun Toy Banned Because Of Three Stupid Dead Kids.

First there was the working artificial eye, and now there is the moving artificial eye.

Tuesday, August 15, 2000

I used to joke about how my main non-free ISP was AOL (simply because a family member has paid for it, and I get an account), yet my main operating system has become some flavor of UNIX. I thought I would never see this day, but there is now an AOL client for Linux. I cannot try it out, simply because I only have a winmodem that doesn't work in Linux, but we shall see when I get that cable modem...

Sunday, August 13, 2000

They call it PMS because Mad Cow Disease was already taken.