The radar shows a few scattered thunderstorms southwest of here but they don't look like they are going to amount to anything here. Problems are still ahead since the head waters of all the local rivers and streams had heavy rain last night and the result is a lot of extra water flowing our way. Overnight, all the local fire and rescue companies had their hands full with loads of people driving on roads swiftly covered by heavy rains. I know that there are some people who need to be out at three in the morning, but I still can't figure how anyone thinks that their SUV can ford a roadway covered with several feet of water. Hello? It ain't the commercial, kiddies! Read the fine print - you know, professional drivers, closed course, with a fleet of tow trucks and crews around to pull their sorry butts out if something goes wrong! No, they are fall too busy talking on their cell phones and in far too much of a hurry to get wherever they are going. And then, the volunteer fire and rescue personnel have to put their lives on the line for your stupidity. Last night, there were dozens of water rescue calls with fire cops blocking flooded roads to keep those who didn't belong there away.
Let's hope tonight is much quieter.
June 2006 Archives
Shifting gears from writing an major upgrade to my high school alumni web site (not putting it aside, just a minor detour) to cranking up a major set of meteorological data into a set of MySQL tables, supporting one of my professor's research work. It is a far cry from working on billing programs for the phone company and much more rewarding. Maybe not financially, but it feels so good to do something that might actually make a difference in something other that a company's bottom line, a company could give a rat's about me or any of its employees. So, I am off to code up a quick and easy way to get the hourly temperatures for 2002 for Chatham Municipal Airport in Massachusetts along with about 7000 other weather stations for the past five years.
...come again another day. We've had enough already! The storm reports at the local NWS office are piling up with rock and mud slides, flash flooding, and other storm related damage. Yesterday, we had a half dozen storm-related calls for the fire company. The good thing is that the drainage berm we cut into the north side of the ground around the house has been 99% successful - only a minor surge last night caused a bit of water downstairs, easily swept up with the PowerVac and a few towels. I am getting tired of soggy ground, bring back the drought (not!).
Simon and Garfunkel were right. People are in far too much of a hurry these days, usually driving their cars with their knees, going faster than the speed limit, wih a cell phone in one hand and a latte in the other. The effect of this behavior? The three accidents I was at today are examples. No, I don't know if the drivers were preoccupied, but I saw far too many people speeding today during our current monsoon-llike weather. Hello? Slow the hell down. The roads are slippery (two of the accidents today were flips) and there is a lot of flooding (don't be stupid - assume it is too deep to drive through). Remember, if you are distracted while driving, you might hit a poor fire cop like me trying to warn you that the road is closed ahead. You'd think that if someone saw me, dressed in lime green from head to toe, waving a flag while standing in front of an emergency vehicle with an illuminated arrow and every red light flashing on it, they'd pay attention. Stand a day in my boots - you'd be surprized...
A computer in my possession can only remain a virgin so long. I am determined, though, to keep it as pure as possible (how many times have I said that...). I now have my old laptop permanently placed on the counter in my office, tethered to power, network, cameras, and printer, to act as my office hub. It still has life left in it, eventhough no longer at my side wherever I wander. In fact, I am going to drive another audio stream off of it, focusing on just the Chester County frequencies, using my Radio Shack Pro-2052.
First things installed were Firefox, Arachnophilia, and WS-FTP, my basic tools of the trade. Today, I am installing the other goodies in my toolbox, ArcGIS 9.1 and Fireworks. I am having a problem with ArcGIS at the moment. I got the full product and all my data installed, considerably faster than the last time I did it courtesy of the Duo Core and a gig of memory. Now, after filling out the registration information, I am getting unable to connect to the registration server. The good thing is that I can just go back a step and keep trying. The bad thing is that I have to click a dozen check boxes to get my extensions registered. In the meanwhile, I will go off and collect my ArcGIS add-ons so they will be ready to go.
Still freaking raining here - maybe I should be building an ark versus building Arc(GIS)...
Even with all the subtle (and not so subtle) hints dropped yesterday, I did not have a clue that what I was getting for my birthday was a brand new laptop! Talk about being tickled pink, I am just so happy because not only does it have a Duo Core processor, a gig of memory, and is fast as lightning, but I don't have to worry about the cord falling out and losing everything. My old laptop, while still functional, has a totally dead battery. So it is relgated to a new stationary role in the home network while I sit in the living room, untethered, writing this entry.
Now, back to work away from the keyboard!
How does one feel like the national average speed limit, 55 MPH? Basically because I couldn't find a standard quantity for 1,735,668,000, the number of seconds that mid-afternoon today will roughly approximate the time I have spent crawling, walking, running, playing, working, relaxing on this Earth. Yep, I reached another annual milestone of existence today. I share this day with many others born on this day like rock star Nils Lofgren (same date, same year, same hospital!), Jean-Paul Sartre, Prince William of Wales, Jane Russell, Bernie Kopell, Ron Ely, and Berke Breathed (Opus comic strip).
It is also the day that Cyrus McCormick patented his reaping machine, a boon to agriculture, the day that three Civil Rights workers disappeared in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a sad day for those fighting for equality, and the day that one of the murderers of those three people was finally brought to justice and found guilty for that horrific crime. SpaceShipOne made the first commercial flight into space and, yes, it is the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year. So, as the tones go off on my fire pager (yet another automatic alarm at the new Cheeseburger in Paradise in Exton), I am going to enjoy my day, remembering the past nearly 29 million minutes and looking forward to the next.
As I was going through my spam folder today, I noticed an upswing in the number of 4-1-9 scams it contained. I am sorry, but who the hellis so stupid that they think someone is going to pick their email address out of the blue to receive a pot of gold? Even the
United States Secret Service has a section related to the scams. Sad to say that there are some very vulnerable folks out there that believe the sender is honest and lose money to them. I guess that PT Barnum was right...
Another reason that the American worker should be perturbed that American companies are sending their jobs to cheap foreign markets is pointed out in this OP-ED piece in the New York Times:
Current chief executive compensation creates what economists term a perverse incentive. An American chief executive, who is paid an average of $11.3 million annually, gets rewarded enough in one year to exceed the lifetime standard of living of 99.99 percent of the world's population. Even if he's booted from his job because of poor performance, he's set for life.People like Ivan should think about that when they send thousands of American workers into unemployment lines while they decide on the color of their new Bentley.
Literally - stuffing envelopes to send out invitations to Andy's Swearing In as our next State Senator. In fact, everyone is invited - just see the web site for further details about it and the Victory Party, too.
With all my recent work and tinkering, I need to get back to increasing my knowledge in Geography (and also get to some unfinished business). While I am at it, I'm opening a Geography category here, something I thought I had done some time ago.
First map to get done today is one for directions to the bus pickup area at the Exton Square Mall for everyone going to Harrisburg a week from Monday to see Andy Dinniman sworn in as our new State Senator. To work!
I am so annoyed with telemarketers. We used to have a TeleZapper until it got zapped by water. Amazing little device - wish I would have invented it - how it works is really quite simple. When the phone rings, you pick up the receiver and the TeleZapper emits three little tones. If the caller is an automated dialer (used for both live and pre-recorded messages), it will immediately disconnect. Why, you ask? It is really quite simple, especially for an old phone company person like me (again, I should have invented it). Those three little tones are the same tones you hear when you call a number that has been changed or disconnected. The automated dialer thinks that your line is no longer in service and removes you from their dialing series. Since a number of telemarketing companies share dialing systems, you could be removed from multiple lists. The first month we had the TeleZapper in place, our calls went down from 10 a day to maybe 1 or 2 a week.
Now, I make it a point to pick up the phone and take great pleasure in being downright nasty. I'll listen to their come-on and let them prattle on (waste the company's money) and then either just hang up or hold the number 7 down on the phone (really nasty sounding on a headset). If the call is obviously from an offshore call center - you know, the ones where, when you ask where they are, they say Minnesota - I give them a short quiz in whatever state's geography. Evil.
Now that I have one of the AOL/AIM free phone numbers, this is another wonderful tool to fight back. Those forms you fill out on the web and that come in the mail where they demand your phone number, stick that one there instead. Since the AOL/AIM system has caller ID, you can just delete those messages that you don't recognize the caller. Devilish.
I decided last night to upgrade my AIM to the new Triton beta. I had done it once before, but it was far too bulky in the resources area and I uninstalled it almost immediately. AOL seems to have gotten their code working better and it takes little more room than the classic AIM version. We'll see how it acts over the next few days.
While I was there, I noticed mention of their new service, AIM Phoneline. Since the word free was so prevalent in the hype, I decided to look further. Signing up, you get a real, local phone number which allows for incoming calls, answerable via the new AIM Triton client and voicemail. Yes, it really is free. Nice feature is that it even has caller ID and you listen to the voicemail via either AIM or AIM Mail (yes, another 2GB free email account).
Of course, there is a premium component ($9.95/month) which gives you unlimited outgoing calls to the US and Canada and 30 other countries. I find it interesting that China is included, but Japan is not in the oversees freebies. I really have no need for this part of the plan, but I am sure it would be good for the road-warrior or for those who spend a lot of time in Starbucks and other wireless-enabled caffeine emporiums. It is not a true landline phone replacement, though, since it does not have E911 service. I think I might even use it for web site feedback and questions for those who would rather speak than type... or blog comments, since I still have not found a truly effective way to eliminate the spammers. Funny, they'll probably just call the number... sad statement on society today.
Just got these quick snaps from Joel at Station 47 (thanks!) from the fire at Dane Decor in Downingtown this past Saturday morning.
I have been using Furl since it opened up and quite satisfied with the way it works. I have also used del.icio.us as a resource to see what's hot around the net, even had an account though I hadn't used it for storing much of anything. Yesterday, I decided to export my Furl links and import them into my del.icio.us using their import facility. It went very smoothly except for what I think is a major problem: it marked all of the 1750+ links as not shared, hidden from the public view. In a system like this, one that is used by the gazillion or so folks on the web, you would think that there would be a make 'em all public click. Well, there isn't. So, I am off to look at the API to see if there is a way to undo this with a little perl magic.
Don't forget - today is 06-06-06, the apocalypse date. Beware of evil spirits!
In an effort to move to the next layout design, something I usually do every 6 months or so, I decided for the moment to emulate the look and feel of my blog. The basic MovableType blog layout is a simple one and, since I converted back to MT, I think that I'll tinker with MT-driven layouts. Since the stylesheet is a general one and the layout is basic two-column menu on the right, I decided to transform the whole site. Since I use a combination of SSI and a homegrown perl CMS, the transformation took about 10 minutes, including a new this section contains block at the top of each page.
It may not be the fanciest or the most original, but it will keep things running while I add more content and do some creative work.
Yesterday was a lost day for me, courtesy of a major fire early yesterday morning in neighboring Downingtown. In my past year and a half with the fire company, the two major fires I responded on were in Downingtown. This one which went to five alarms was by far the larger. I participated both in the protection of the water supply companies who were stretching lines in from the north of the fire, as well as pumping water from a large pond, and in crowd control south of the fire building. As a fire cop, I am usually blocks if not miles away from the scene, keeping traffic away. Last night, I was literally on the fire line, keeping onlookers out of the way of our firefighters. It never ceases to amaze me how stupid some people are, literally walking into harms' way. We also had several incidents of people attempting to drive over multiple charged water lines, going through the barracades and cones we had set up. The local police took the appropriate action towards those folks. Sixteen companies assisted Downingtown in the effort, along with a Fire Police Task Force from all the surrounding areas. I finally got back to the station around 7:30 am and then came home and collapsed for the rest of the day.
On a fun note, tonight is the first of the Summer Concert Series in Albert C. Miller Park (link to Google Maps). Appearing tonight are the US Navy Commodores, the Navy Band's Jazz Ensemble. The concert begins are 6:30 pm and the weather looks like it will be cooperating this evening. So, bring a blanket, a picnic supper, and enjoy the music. We'll be providing traffic and parking control throughout the series. You can download the full concert schedule (a pdf file) from the township web site. Historical trivia note - the park is named after a former fire chief of our company.
A network fault caused VMware to chock the proverbial chicken since I am running FC5 from a network drive. In fact, even after getting the connection reestablished, it still would not go down in an orderly fashion. I had only been using the session to ssh over to another server to do some work so I was hoping that I only lost the VMware log in the process.
So after rebooting my laptop (for an unrelated reason), I fired up VMware again. Everything appeared normal so I then turned the power on for FC5 and, other than taking a few extra minutes to check disk integrity, it came up like a champ! I had installed xmms this morning and it is still in place and works just fine. I am assuming (got to RTFM) that they do disk buffering and they must write out frequently and a lot, something I am thankful for in a situation like this one.
Score a big one for VMware!
...or 59.9 kilometers if you prefer metric. To what, you ask? It is the distance from here to the closest Sonic Drive-In restaurant. I hate TV commercials, in particular the ones that drive me crazy for something so simple as a drive-in with carhops. I can remember (showing my age...) a restaurant in Virginia called Tops Drive In, where my friends and I used to waste far too much time, enjoying a thick shake and exchanging comments about and glances at the adjoining cars and their occupants. It was one of the first things that you did when you (or one of your friends) first got their license and car. The drive-in was quite the social mecca. It is a shame that the only equivalent today is the mall food court or a McDonald's parking lot, sprinkled liberally with "No Loitering" signs. Drive-ins actually encouraged you to hang out as long as you didn't get too rowdy. Ah, summer evenings, hanging out...
So I guess I'll have to get in the car and drive a bit to relive this memory soon.
Tomorrow (Saturday June 3rd), at West Chester University, the West Goshen Lions Club is sponsoring the first Chester County Firefighters Muster and Challenge.
A Firefighters' Muster and Challenge is a skills competition among firefighters and first-responders based on the firefighting and rescue tasks performed in emergency situations. The first Firefighters' Muster was held on July 4, 1849 in Bath, Maine. Five teams, using hand drawn pumpers, competed to see which team could shoot a stream of water the longest distance. During the second half of the 19th century firefighters' musters grew. Modern musters are very different from those early events. Today they are more complex, with serious competition among fire companies and individuals. The goal is to perform the challenge task perfectly, according to strict rules, and in the fastest time.This is a great opportunity to see your local volunteer firefighters in action in friendly (like hell!) competition as well as view both modern and antique firefighting equipment. A portion of the proceeds of this event are going to the Chester County Hero Fund.
I spent the day yesterday doing routine server cleanup for all of our client virtual servers. In the process, I had one particular mission: get rid of any software written in php. Luckily, none of my work or our clients' work is done in php. I had already converted all of the blogs over from WP to MT, something I did with some regrets. The bottom line, though, is that in a production environment, security is job one. With this move, I am anticipating that the few leaks of the past few weeks (rhyme unintended) will now go away. I am keeping close watch over the system and the suspect IPs and, over the past 24 hours, the previous situations have not occured. Hopefully, this problem has been solved. I have far more important things to do than chasing bugs within the infrastructure.
Does this mean the end of any php-driven software on our servers? No, it just means that there will be a more thorough testing cycle prior to any being loaded, along with regular maintenance and scans of the bug boards to see if there are known problems. I have also written some of my own internal checks and balances to recognize and correct problems earlier. Thirty-plus years experience in the IT game does come in handy!
So, where was I? Oh, I have a fully functional Fedora Core 5 system running under VMware. My next step is to create a mirror-image environment of our production appliance so that I can fully test as well as backup our full setup. Can you tell I like Vmware? I also want to look at Xen, but since I don't have a real Linux box running yet, that will have to wait. The whole concept of virtualization software is so facinating. My personal encounters in the big iron mainframe world with IBM's VM and how we ran 15 different flavors of MVS under it on a collection of boxes... But that was another time and this is now and I can run two different OS's on one tiny laptop. My, how times have changed...
Well, I thought I was going to have some fun today with Linux, but I must put that on hold. Why you ask? I need to do some cleanup work on our servers. Previously, I have ranted about php versus perl and how I have a general dislike of the former and love of the latter. It seems as though one piece of software that I still use (infrequently) that is written in php (open source) is full of holes. Like swiss cheese. Like potentially open to attack.
So, my mission for the day is to completely remove any trace of php software from our servers. It may sound drastic, but it is much easier to re-add a few products than to rebuild an entire system from an intrusion. Err on the side of caution? You betcha!
Update: I thought I had already removed all of the php code. Just realized I missed Gallery. Gone and to be replaced with a perl-driven slideshow.
Thanks to VMware, I am having a blast and a half doing a full Linux installation on my laptop while still having a functional Windows system, something I still do need for daily work. Over the past week, I made the leap from just using a pre-configured base Fedora Core 5 appliance to actually installing FC5 using VMware Workstation. It was a bit lengthy since I laying down my virtual systems on a network-attached hard drive versus the overflowing one in my laptop. Expecially long was the initialization of the disk system. I wanted to make my FC5 virtual disk a large one (10 GB) and the initialization took several hours. Luckily, the running of the system does not lag courtesy of our local 100 MBit network.
I am quite pleased, using FC5 with a KDE desktop, but I want to explore a bit more into the other flavors of Linux, something which is quite easy to do with VMware workstation. I do not even have to burn CDs since you can do the installation directly from the ISO images. So, today I am off to DistroWatch to pick which one(s) to install next!
