Rusty's Blog

No, nothing here about heroic deeds I have done. If you think something I’ve done falls in the heroic realm of activities, you are welcome to note them, but I certainly am not looking for accolades.

No, this article is more recognition of some absolutely wonderful people who may not know that I’ve seen them do some pretty incredible things, and that I want to make sure that I’m not the only person who’s aware of it.

First up is my daughter. I may not know her as well as some others do, but I know that she recognized that she was in a very rough situation in high school, and took matters into her own hands. In her final semester of high school she had moved out of her mom’s house, had moved to a different city, and was riding an intra-city buss to get to and from school. She transfered in the middle of the semester to a school in the city she had moved to, and graduated that semester. She then turned around and married her boyfriend in the next year, started A+ certification (the school she was going to closed in the middle of the session.) and has worked at a grocery store supporting herself and her husband who is going to school to get his Bachelors degree. I have little doubt that once he is working in the field of his degree, that she will return to school. She may be a year or two behind many of her peers but she will have experiences that will give her an incredible edge in many of the subjects she will study. I would not be a bit surprised to learn that within 10 years she has an MBA and is working in management either for the chain of grocery stores she is working for now, or possibly within the technology sector.

Yes I am biased in my assessment of my daughter. She is after all my daughter. But I think what she’s done is incredible. You don’t have to agree.

I have known Anton Petersen on and off for 15 years now. Many people know him already in the Anton is Awesome fan club, and I’ve never seen a guest liaison or guest department head for a convention who does a better job of making guests feel welcome and involved in the convention they are attending. On more than one occasion he has stepped into a budding disaster and turned it into an acceptable if not positive experience for the guests attending, which is even more incredible when you consider that some of those situations have involved conventions he arrived ‘at the door’ to attend, and had no involvement with the guests department of that convention before arrival. I’m going to admit that there are times when I am concerned that he is taking on too much. Perhaps the most concerning aspect of him being involved in GPS is that I don’t expect his involvement in other conventions, will be reduced. I think it will grow significantly. We need more people like Anton. Not because he can’t do what he does, but simply because what he does should be done by more people.

Jennifer Manna is a force to be reckoned with. Outgoing, aggressive, uncompromising and both a geek and a gamer, she is someone you want on or at your side, and never as an opponent. Jen is a Feminist in the best form of the word. She fundamentally believes the principles that men and women need to recognize that our strengths are not in our appearance, but in what we ad people do, and how we treat those around us. People talk about treating everyone equally. Jen embodies that. If you are doing something stupid in her presence, she will let you know about it, or she won’t accept being in your presence.

There are many others who I would love to write up a full review on. Kat Pepmiller, Erin Lorenz, Tia Jean Starbuck, Amada Marquez, Damarra Atkins, Rin Schwartz, Peter Gamache and several other people I consider friends. Each has done things that I hope I never have to do, gone through experiences that I never will, and much more.

No one lives an easy life. We each go through some parts of our lives if not coasting, at least being aware that the experience has come at great personal expense. All of us know that times are tough. And we know that different parts of our lives are going to go through better and worse experiences, and that many of us will go through both a high point in our lives and a low point at the same time. While I note that I think of them as heroes, each is going through rough experiences at this time. From long periods of being away from her husband for my daughter, to being under employed, or experiencing medical problems, or issues with other people behaving badly in their lives. None of us are immune. All of my heroes however are some of the very best people to know, to work with, to support when I can, and to be supported by through my experience.

To my friends and heroes, thank you. May all your dreams be blessed, and the best results for all be the results of your efforts. Thank you.

Ok. I’m not sure if this was a scam or not, but I’m pretty sure that it is. In any case this was the interaction over the past couple of days. Some names have been changed, but the content is pretty much clear. My mental processes are in italics between posts.

I’m also advising that if you are not interested, or you find it boring, that’s OK.

(more…)

Parents are an odd bunch. My dad uses a computer to send and receive e-mail, plan trips and read up on the news. One of my friends dad’s uses the computer regularly, but his method of use is to open up Windows just so he can launch a command line interpreter. Considering I’m 45, we’re talking about people who are often considered grandparents, or even great grandparents.

If you look at the popular press, these people are supposed to be almost incapable of adapting to modern technology. Ever been to a department store with a signature capture register and seen the ballpoint ink signature on the screen? Supposedly it is these people doing that. (Personally I think it’s as much people my own age, and perhaps younger.) It’s a running gag in the computer press that these people don’t need a lot of computer capability. Just a way to send and receive e-mail to their kids, and peerhaps a web browser to surf the web, and hey since you can send and receive e-mail across a web interface, we can just use a web browser. Right?

If you’ve read enough of my blogs, you’ve probably encountered my mom before. We didn’t always get along. That happens though. That said, I think she did a pretty good job of raising some pretty bright kids. If I say so myself.

You will see many posts today about women who are exceptionally capable computer programmers. ThinkGeek is calling them ‘self saving princesses’ in honor of the number of them who are gamers as well.

My mom bought the first computer I used at home. A Timex Sinclair zx81. Membrane keyboard, basic interpreter, 16k memory module, tape interface to save and restore. And she had been working with it before I ever saw it. This was pretty much a computer that you had to program to use. It didn’t come with, or have a word processor. Spreadsheets were not generally available yet. And so on. And she was working on it, teaching herself computer programing in basic.

When my sister and I had flown the coop, and my brother was the only one home, my mom decided to start going to school again. She had taken some college courses long before, but had not completed her degree. So she started off doing that. Since she had been a reporter at one point in time, and had learned office skills on typewriters long before, she bought an AT&T wheel writer word processor/typewriter to write papers and such on. and along the way, she ran it out of memory. Several times.

After she completed her bachelors degree, she started a masters degree program at the University of Minnesota. And she shortly realized that a typewriter was not going to be sufficient to her needs for school. She was going to have to write in certain styles that were not conducive to being tracked well on a typewriter, and so on.

So she went out, spoke with a computer salesman, explained her needs, and took home a laptop computer. I won’t go into which brand, it really doesn’t matter. The laptop ran dos. She returned it the next day, went to the school bookstore and brought home a Macintosh SE.

And she used that computer. Got a memory upgrade for it and installed that herself. Upgraded the hard drive. I think it came with a 20 meg SCSI drive. She added an HP DeskJet printer to print with, and used that combination for the better part of a decade.

She never quite completed her masters degree. She had to take a semester off here and there. for which I feel pretty much responsible. And they changed the requirements as she was just about to finish. Along the way she progressed from the Mac SE, to an LC, and finally to one of the Teal iMacs. I may have been hardware support for her from time to time, but she did almost all of her own software support. I think she took her computer to the campus bookstore two or three times in total to have viruses cleaned off, and for the first OS upgrade she did.

She had online accounts with Compuserve, local ISPs and the university. Though I don’t believe she ever maintained a web page.

My mom was a remarkable woman in many ways. I miss her encouragement and criticism, the times she would help, and the times she would not. I don’t know how many times I’ve read editorials and blogs, watched tech shows, listened to podcasts or radio shows, and been left wondering “Who are these parents tho know so little of technology?” Those experiences are strange to me.

For me, a woman who can use a computer, who can program, or play video games, is not unusual or strange. I don’t think of her as a ‘self saving princess.’ If she is a ‘geek’ it is because she sees herself that way, not because I do. I see her as a reminder that there are always remarkable people doing remarkable things, some of them even aware that what they are doing is remarkable. But all of them doing the best they can. And all worthy of more attention than they get.

To you my mom, may all your dialup sessions have clean lines, and your memory remain incorruptible.

The only effective solution to ignorance is curiosity.

Is the education system in the US broken? That’s an interesting question, with a lot of different opinions. Some think that there is too much religion in education, some think that there is not enough. Some point at declining SAT scores, or the fact that some schools test poorly on one variety of test or another, where others do not. Some point at other statistics, the results of the ‘no child left behind’ or the reading comprehension levels of college basketball players.

I think they are all missing the critical factors. The education system in the US is designed (or at least in my opinion should be designed) as an enabling platform.

You can not force someone to learn. Well, there may be some debate on that, but essentially when you get to a certain level of education, the person receiving an education has to be engaged in the process. You literally can’t inject knowledge into their brain for latter use. Because there is the requirement that the student be engaged in the process many of the evaluations of how well various education systems work is flawed. And the results are being used in was that are very counter to the declared intent.

Let’s start with the latest example of bad leadership in education. “No Child Left Behind.” Schools are awarded funding based on the results of standardized testing of the student body. The better the students do, the more funding is awarded to the school. Now at some level this makes sens. Give schools who don’t perform well an incentive to do better. Right?

OK, here’s the flaw. Most of the schools that do not do well, have limited funds available to them, and while the incentive is there, they don’t have the means to implement the changes and provide the tools that would lead to the desired improvements. Compounding the issue is that the schools which do have better results, then go on to get even better results as a result of having more funds to work with, There are some who would suggest that this is a deliberate effort to keep the poor ever poorer. Unfortunately it is the educational initiative under which we are working at this time. So until that is changed, we’ll have to suffer the shortness of sight we are saddled with.

Some would suggest that the solution to our educational woes is private schools. Now while that does provide some potential advantages, unfortunately it is not a solution that supports a universal initiative. There will always be private schools. And for the most part they will cost less per student than public schools do. If you wish to send your children to private school, I certainly don’t think it’s a bad idea, but I also don’t think that it’s going to work for the vast majority of people. You know as well as I that many students will not qualify for scholarships who can’t attend because their families can’t afford the tuition, and so these students will be going to public school as long as they are required to go to school. And from a bringing education to the general population perspective having the ability to exclude a student because it would cost too much to support them, or for any other reason that a private business may choose not to accept a student as a customer means that there will always be a need for a public education system.

The starting point to any education is not targeting specific standards to meet at graduation. That is a laudable goal, but there will be many people who either so far exceed these targets as to make them meaningless, and others who will struggle to come close to the goal. It is an objective, but not a starting point.

The starting point is to encourage curiosity. That one characteristic is the foundation of every education plan. If you loose curiosity, there is no reason to learn something. Some might suggest that working on solving problems is a means to learning even without curiosity. But solving problems is dependent upon wanting that problem solved, and to learn from it means that you want to know what the solution to that problem is, and that is curiosity.

So how does one encourage curiosity? Encouraging curiosity is a three step process. Step 1 identify what the student can do, and likes to do. Step 2 identify what the student would like to be able to do. Step 3, show that what the student wants to do, beyond what they can do, can be done. Ok, someone will probably say ‘what about asking the student if they want to see how that is done?’ and the answer is that if you already know they want to do that, then simply demonstrating that it is possible will answer that question up front. Oh, they may not want the person demonstrating how it is done to show them, but that is where you as a teacher have to step in and be the person who provides the resources for the student to learn.

Now you have a curious student. At the moment they are curious about something that they want to get better at, which may, or may not be something that is immediately working towards the goal of the school or the community. But they are curious. Being curious, that curiosity will go a little beyond just the lesson for that task. Since you are teaching them how to do that better, you have the opportunity to ‘mention’ that you had the same problem when you first learned how to do this. But that along the way you learned a little bit about other people who do this, and, hey would you like to know more?

For pretty much every possible activity that you are involved in, there is a history of interactions between that specific activity, and other activities. If you don’t understand how that works, go pick up a copy of ‘The Pinball Effect’ or watch the various ‘Connections’ series. A larger scale version of this is to read a dictionary and follow the ‘See Also’ references. Wikipedia (while perhaps not the best of reference resources) also presents a great example of how things interact. Knowing how things interact you can show that there is a history that is written down for how to take a little bit of knowledge about this and turn it into a bit more ability. Or a lot more ability.

The fact that you can show that someone has shown how to turn knowledge into a means of showing other people how to do the same thing, means that they have the opportunity to turn the knowledge that they have into something someone else can use as well. And that starts them on the idea of sharing knowledge, teaching, and possibly writing.

At some point you run into the fact that not every concept is easy to translate into words. Occasionally numbers are the primary means of sharing information. That includes being able to count and translate products into money, and as a result you start working on some fairly basic math.

That gets us into reading, writing and arithmetic. Where you take that starting point is up to you. But you can tell when you are doing it wrong. When the students start acting like they are board, when they loose their sense of curiosity, you are doing it wrong. Now that can very well be that you don’t understand how what you are teaching can be exciting. How it can satisfy curiosity. How it can increase curiosity about other areas of study.

The education system we primarily have today is designed around the mass production model. Put all of the raw materials through the same collection of experiences, and you should end up with a consistent result. However if you have ever read the tags of things like leather jackets, or other natural materials products, you will note that they specifically state that the fact that the materials started out as raw materials means that they have individual characteristic that will result in differences between specific items in the product lines. And that applies to students as well. That doesn’t mean that students who don’t fit in the mold can’t be taught. Some of the finest craftsmanship in the arts, carpentry, and many other fields all ow their results to the fact that the craftsman or artist could see what the capabilities of a specific piece of raw material is, and can take that knowledge, and turn it into a thing of beauty or function that exceeds entirely what can be achieved in a mass mold.

We need teachers. We need teachers who can recognize when a specific teaching technique is not working, and can adapt to that situation and either move the student into a better learning environment for them, or if they will fit in with the rest, perhaps with a brief involvement with other teachers, apply that information as well. We need teachers who can work one on one with individuals, or as a team for some individual students.

Along the way, we need teachers to recognize when a student will be a good teacher and give them encouragement. For we will need new teachers in the years to come. People who can teach in the traditional styles. People who can teach by doing. By letting the student do.

And since the reality of learning is that we start one place, and try to get further than the last person who started down this path, we need to have teachers who can show students how to go beyond the current base of knowledge, and make what they learn available to others.

We will continue to have standardized testing. We will continue to have students do better than others at the same age, and students who do not do as well when older. But an education system that recognizes that the goal is not to find a way to make the most ‘successful’ of public schools richer, but to help the least successful of public school systems turn around that lack of success into a new and better approach to reaching those goals. The money that gets spent may show up in better teachers, or a better environment to learn in. It may be a significant change in the administration of the school, or perhaps paying for lunch or breakfast for students who may otherwise go hungry, which will affect the level of curiosity that students have.

OK, you may have noticed that I have not included a lot of things that seem specific to parents of students. Perhaps I’m not concerned with them, or think that there isn’t much we can do about them, so don’t even bring it up? That’s not it at all. First parents, foster parents, guardians, are all absolutely critical to the development of students. Parents are the first place where curiosity can be encouraged. They are the first teachers any student will have. And they need badly to know that they are important to turning the curiosity about the world around them into a window into becoming better at showing the world the wonders that they are a part of.

As with every skill, teaching at this level is not something that is a given ability. Some parents are better teachers than others. Kids don’t come with an instruction manual. And parents don’t always know how to read, if they did. But currious parents can find out more. Most communities have some sort of parenting and teaching system in place. It may be parents visiting at the playground or shopping mall. It may be informal classes at a community center, or even formal education at a school. But you can find out more.

Be curious. Share what you learn. You might find the experience enlightening.

So, 2 weeks ago I ordered a camera lens. Expected delivery in 1 to 3 weeks. Should be delivered to me sometime between this Friday and next Wednesday. Ordered through Amazon.

The way Amazon works, they don’t actually bill your credit card or account until they ship the product. So since I don’t know when the order is ready to ship,

I’ve been a subscriber to XM radio for about 5 years. Yeah, now they are XM/Serious (Anyone else read that and immediately think of that comedian ‘Yahoo Serious’?) In any case I generally like the service, and would recommend it for people, both who travel a lot, and for people who are interested in some of the covered genres of music and especially if those genres are not commonly available on local radio. An added advantage for some people is that most of the content on the satellite radio is also available across the Internet. Exceptions are generally reasonable, the result of license restrictions, but all in all they are a good service, and I generally recommend them for people traveling substantially.

On the other hand they can get expensive. I had 5 different radios, which came to something like $400 or $500 a year for a service I found I was listening to for about 40 min or so a day, 3 or 4 days a week. If I were driving cross country, or regularly found myself stuck in traffic, that might make sense, but I’m not.

Their biggest fault is one that is also a failing of commercial radio stations. Play lists. They have gotten better over the past year, but they are still far from perfect. I know two Taylor Swift songs. “Love Story” and “Tear Drops on my Guitar” I’m pretty sure that she has performed other music. But those two songs are pretty much the ones that I know are getting play time on XM. At least in the ‘The Blend’ channel. To be fair, they are not playing a ‘top 100′ list. They really do provide a good selection of multiple artists, and in general are a music provider I like a lot. But I decided I wanted to listen to an even more diverse collection of music.

About 2 weeks ago I pulled the radio in my car. Pandora has an application for my cell phone, and I can use some of the same wiring that I set up for my xm tuner to provide a hook up for my cell phone, so I don’t think I’m loosing anything critical at this time. I haven’t listened to XM in my apartment for over 3 months, and while walking or riding a bike, in over a year.

I received a notice from XM a while back that my credit card on record with them had expired, and perhaps I would like to call in and have the information updated. I decided that was my indication that it was time to close up the XM stuff. I may decide to re-subscribe at some point in the future. As I say I happen to like the service in general, but I’m not really satisfied right now, and the expense is a bit more than I would prefer.

This morning I checked my balance on my checking account, and saw that about what I was expecting to go out for my camera lens was gone. I was about to log out of that system when it occurred to me that I should see where the money went. I very much wanted and expected to see Amazon listed. After all, I’m pretty close to half way through the delivery window, and just about to the beginning of the projected delivery window. I was a bit surprised, and disappointed to see that the actual charge was for my XM subscription. Yeah, a bit upset. Amount the reasons for that is that I had hopes that the lens would show up in time for this weekend. And the funds available now are not going to cover that purchase. Now if they wait till Friday to ship, the funds will be there. But if they try shipping today or tomorrow, I’m likely to see my order canceled. and at best I can expect another 2 to 4 weeks before the order gets fulfilled. At least I don’t think I’m the only person waiting on the lens.

So I called up XM when they opened this morning, and canceled my service. I’m not as happy with that decision as I might be. But since they went ahead and charged an expired card for what is obviously a substantially amount, I’m not going to get too upset about canceling. Unfortunately the refund won’t be immediate. It’s going to be ‘A week to 10 days’ before I see my funds restored. Hey just in time for a convention, but not when I would prefer.

Ok, there is the possibility that Amazon could ship today. That they will bill me and my bank will cover the difference for 2 days, and charge me an added $35 for the privilege of doing that for me. In that case, the lens might show up Friday, and I will be able to use it over the weekend. I’m just not really holding my breath.

So, frustrated, and irritated. And wouldn’t be surprised if I become more frustrated, and further irritated later on today. We’ll see.

There are many people who suggest you should not put yourself down. That some people out there will use just about anything you say that might reflect poorly on yourself against you. And at some level they are right.

That doesn’t mean that they are always right.

None of us are perfect at the things we do. Oh, we may work toward perfection, but that doesn’t change the fact that perfection is not really in what we do. We stumble. We trip. and occasionally we fall. These are all normal parts of becoming better at what we wish to do.

Failing to recognize that we are not perfect in all that we do is one of the worst things you can do. Because the people who are most out to ‘get’ you are going to use those faults against you to attack your ego.

I have no trouble acknowledging that I am far from perfect in the things that I do. I make mistakes, I drop the ball, and occasionally I’ll do something that is really stupid. Part of that is learning what is important.

If you put on a pair of running shoes, and don’t tie them, you run the risk of catching a shoelace on something while you are running. However most of us learned to tie our shoes long before we took up running. Not because it would be a piece of useful kit when we did take up running, but because we observed that if we didn’t tie our shoes we either started dragging around mud from the world around us into the house, and our mothers were not really happy about that, or more often because we learned that it was not at all difficult to and up standing on the laces from one shoe while we were trying to take a step with that foot. That tends to lead to our not really well co-ordinated selves falling. Occasionally that’s a bit embarrassing, and it also tends to hurt a bit. If it ‘Hurts when I do this” and you don’t want to suffer that pain, it’s a pretty good incentive to stop doing things that way.

Depending on whom you talk to, there is a bit of an art to admitting to faults. Thes ‘self deprecating’ declarations are intended to be things that show that you are human, we all make mistakes after all, but are not something that is going to drive people away.

My own opinion is that you can pretty much admit to any mistake you have made, so long as you don’t mind someone trying to use that against you. I wasn’t a perfect father. I can go into detail about why I feel that, and I have discussed some of my failings, but that doesn’t change the fact that my kids turned out OK for the most part. Perfect? No, but we covered that already.

Most of us are familiar with the interview question of ‘What is your greatest weakness?’ It actually is not a trick question. It serves several purposes. First up are the people who suggest that they have no weaknesses. Right. Along the same lines are those people who can’t really answer the question. I mean it’s not like this question has never come up before. Right? Then you have the real ‘shot themselves in the foot’ responses. ‘I tend to oversleep.’ ‘I have trouble managing my finances’ and so on. Ok, remember, you’re applying for a job where they are pretty much not going to be looking to hire someone who doesn’t show up on time, or who they have to be concerned with where they deal with money.

From there it gets more interesting. Hints are don’t say anything significantly negative about your last job, and be prepared with something you consider a fault, but which is not going to be an issue for this job. If you think it’s a weakness that you don’t have a car, but it isn’t going to be an issue, because you live across the street from the job.

My own current favorite is that I hate not knowing what my job is, or what’s expected of me. It means I will make an extra effort to learn what the job is, and be up to speed a lot faster. And pretty much every hiring manager can identify with the feeling. Additionally they can give you a good idea up front, what the availability of the training you will need.

As to ‘people are looking for ways to cut you down, don’t give them away’ suggestions. if someone wants to use a negative comment I make about myself against me, they can try. In almost all cases I’ve said something negative about myself, I can honestly say that the fact that I’ve already publicly admitted it means I can laugh about the situation. I’ve already recognized that fault. I’m not ashamed of it, and it’s not going to hurt my ego or sense of self by you ‘using’ that statement against me.

The way things end up working out, I’ll probably laugh and say, You know, You’re right I’m not good at that.

And it may be a starting point in figuring out how to do things better going forwards.

There are essentially three different types of UPS devices. In order of ‘cost’ they are unmonitored, Serial port monitored, and Ethernet monitored. That’s usually an indicator of the cost as well, So there are a few people out there who are using either serial port or unmonitored UPSs. If you are paying for it out of pocket, and don’t have a lot of cash coming in, that’s probably OK, but in the long term you very definitely want to go to an Ethernet monitored platform as by and large they also give you significantly more information about the health of the UPS than the others.

But for now we are probably interested in knowing whether we have power or are running off the battery.

Even with a serial port monitored device, you may not be able to safely use a platform like UPSd to monitor the UPS. If you can, then go for it. However there are a lot of people running servers where the only serial port on the server is being used as a console for remote access, or to log errors to, or something. If that’s the case, then UPSd may not be able to monitor even a serial port based system. What to do?

Well, since I presume you are not into spending money, o you probably would have gone with the more expensive solution to begin with, I’m going to presume you haven’t exactly splurged on the switches in your network either. So what happens when you don’t plug an unmanaged switch or hub into mains power, and the local power drops?

The simple answer is that you can’t ping anything but localhost. You may not be able to ping the Ethernet interface of your server, but that depends on the network stack, and some will spoof the up interface for you.

The problem with Ping is not that it takes too long to get a response, or that it may give you unreliable results. The problem is that it requires the use of the network stack, which perhaps you are not using, or which you may be using in a different way from the standard IPv4 stack.

So, what to do? A very simple way to see if your switch is up and attached is to check to see if you have a link up state on the interface. Presuming you are doing standard syslog, there is a way to monitor for loss of network link, just by monitoring syslog.

If you unplug your network cable from your computer, you should see a message in the syslog from the Kernel that reads: “tg3: eth0: Link is down” I’ll leave out the tg3 and eth0 information, as they may not be correct for your setup. So what can we do with that?

Well, if you ‘tail -F /var/log/syslog | grep ‘Link is down” >> monitor_ups.txt’ you will capture all the link down messages. But we might just want to know if the link has come up along the way, so let’s change that to ‘tail -F /var/log/syslog | grep “Link is” >> monitor_ups.txt’ and now we will get both ‘link down’ and ‘link up’ messages.

OK, we’re capturing the link state messages. Anything else we can do? Well, the only thing I can think of that’s worse to deal with than a server that didn’t shut down properly, is one that shut down un-necessarily. The UPS will most likely bridge brief outages, Not all of them of course, but usually that’s because the battery needed to be replaced anyway, or you vastly overloaded the UPS. In either case you really don’t want to be running in that situation. If you are, go get a better UPS, or at least new batteries.

A reasonable expectation or design is to set up UPS loading to give you about 15 min of power off the UPS. You should plan for the possibility that an outage may last more than 15 min, but if possible don’t have the computer providing a load for all of that 15 min. If the network connection is gone for more than 5 min, then it’s reasonable to assume that it will be off longer. Many servers take several minutes to do a clean shutdown, as they close local files, and clear any write caches. So the process should monitor for link is down messages, and once one is received, start a 300 second countdown. At the end of 300 seconds we check again to see if the most recent message is ‘link is up’ and if it isn’t we initiate a system halt.

But what if we had an up event in between? Shouldn’t you reset you’re timer? Actually in that case I’m even more interested in shutting things down. If power has been going up and down, then the UPS is in an unknown charge state. It may have initiated a discharge timer to discharge the batteries so that they can take a full charge. The batteries may actually only be available for 4 min, or less. I don’t know. And resetting the timer isn’t going to help matters any. Now is a good time to shut down.

If the latest link state is ‘up’ then the shutdown process should exit gracefully.

If you have installed upsd, then you can very likely find a library call you can use to initiate the shutdowns. Otherwise you can have a root level cron job execute every minute, checking to see if you have set a shutdown flag, and if you have, then it shuts the system down for you.

I’ll leave the rest to you. Nothing described above is particularly difficult. It’s not as nice as using upsd as an overall package, with a managed ups, or even a single managed ups in the environment, and a bunch of more capable dumb UPSs and upsd shares with other systems the state of the managed UPS. But that’s the nature of saving money. Sometimes you have to make the best of a bad situation.

It has been a day of activity, yet calm. A day of thoughtfulness, reminders of good, and reminders that there is a deep level of carring amoung my friends.

I postedto my facebook page about 8:30 this morning that I had found Nicholas had died overnight. The post has garnered 18 responses, counting my own thanks to friends for their condolances. And that is mostly where those should be posted.

I also sent off an e-mail to family, and have received responses there as well.

Nicholas wasn’t always what people would call a family dog. The breed tends to be a one person dog. That said, he was always good with other dogs. There are larger, faster, smarter and pretty much every characteristic you can name about a dog in other breeds, but Nick was all of that to me, and then some. From the moment he currled up on my lap at the adoption agency, to the cries he emited in his dying days, he always looked to me for support, and was always working to be supportive of me. A very territorial breed, he knew when there was a stranger about, and alerted on door bell rings, even if they were only on TV. He wanted me to know that he was on guard.

There is wide debate over whether dogs or cats are better pets. Some look to the alooftness of a cat as a good sign, and the dependence of a dog as bad. I don’t thinkit is quite that simple. A cat selects or accepts a den where it will live. If a better offer comes along, it will almost always take it up. A dog does more than accept a place to stay. The going rage in pet selection and posession these days is to say that you are ‘adopting’ the animal. There are obligations that come with that. You agree to provide a place to live, food, companionship, and discipline. And as far as that goes, it works pretty much the same for dogs and cats. A cat will tell you when it is hungry, or needs to go out, or come in. But beyond that and the coming up to greet and mark you, a cat does not seem to generally recognize the humans in their lives as being significant to their existance. They don’t ‘adopt’ humans, so much as they become familiar with which humans about them do what.

A dog on the other hand adopts it’s human almost as much as it is adopted, and sometimes far more. Some dogs are somewhat indiscriminate of whom they befriend, but once you are friends with a dog, that dog will remain your friend for a long time. If it adopts you, then no matter what, he or she will treat you with respect, caring, and do just about everything in his power to help when the help is needed. Dogs have long labored along their humans. Look at the dogsled races that hppen today, Burmies Mountain dogs pull carts that may weigh several times their own weight. Dogs amoung the America Indians are reputed to have hauled significant loads on hunting trips, and as their tribes migrated with the seasons. They work for our military, our police, and for people with disabilities and conditions that the dogs can alert about. They do not do these things because they are dependent upon us, though that dependence may exist, they do these things because they are as concerned with us as we are with them. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, some wolves and some humans recognized that they were better off together than on their own. That has carried through to today, and some of us are better people for having a dog around, and when our dogs are not around it is often the memory of them which makes us better people as well.

I can not see a long view of my life without there being another dog in it. However I will admit that it is not the first priority of what I think I need in my life going forward. For the moment I will take advantage of the freedom of not having to be home within so many hours to be able to visit with people, go places, and experience more of life. However that is only for now. What the future holds, only the future knows.

Today has included some very much appreciated peaceful contemplation. Some activities involving friends, and pieces of the normal daily life that shows that the passing of a dear friend is not the end of reality. I have many wonderful friends who have expresse their condolances, and many more who will as they become aware of me loosing Nick. If you would like to read more of my experience with both of my dogs, put the word nicholas in the search window at the top of my blog page, and you will see more.

For the next few days, my favorite picture of Nicholas will be on my profile at Facebook. It will be in a photo album there for as long as FB will let it be. As noted earlier, FB, or e-mail are my prefered places for condolances.

Thank you for reading.

-Rusty – kc0vcu – www.facebook.com/rusty0101

Yesterday (Monday the first of March) my primary home network router died. I suppose I have that to look forward to with my other gateway device, but I’m hoping for some time before that happens. There was nothing really spectacular about the device, and a few things not so hot about it. It was aimed at gammers, with 4 100mbps ports on the lan side, switched, and a 100 mbps wan uplink. No wifi, fairly basic collection of rules you could assemble, but sufficient for my needs for the most part.

On the other hand I have a few things I want to set up and get going that I couldn’t very well do with that router. It wasn’t set up to handle multiple WAN ip addresses, pointing to different devices in the lan, or different ports on similar devices.

So the device I started out with as my new firewall is a PowerSpec V.50. Not that you can get them any more, though all of the hardware is out there, so you could roll your own. It has a single 10/100 Ethernet adapter, 4 usb 2.0 ports, and more. It came with Windows XP, but, yeah, that’s not on there any more. Not that I don’t trust the platform when configured correctly, just that I don’t know the platform well enough to do that configuration, and I’m not really interested in learning it, thank you.

I did a bit of checking around, and ultimately settled on pfSense as the firewall platform I wanted to use. It’s based on FreeBSD and runs very well on hardware with specs that the V.50 outclasses in just about every area. So I’m hoping that it works well from a hardware perspective.

The only concern I have at the moment is entering my firewall rules. I’ve mentioned in another post that I’ve set up a page that automatically blocks traffic from certain hosts if they enter content in certain fields. The last time I checked, I had a list of about 400 or so addresses in the list. At the moment my list is just under 2,000 entries long. In that list there are some 30 networks of 24 bits meaning a 254 host network each, and two 14 bit, or 260,000 + addresses each are being blocked, so 2,000 entries isn’t really a good indication of the full extent of what is being blocked. That has been being done at my web server. Unfortunately that means that the traffic has had to traverse my firewall, gotten onto my lan (albeit with a fixed destination) and continues on till it gets to my web server. Due to the nature of TCP/IP it is very unlikely to do any actual damage to anything in that process, But it is traffic that doesn’t need to be there. A prime rule in network security is to stop potential threats as early as possible. At the very least it means that my web server doesn’t have to figure out what to do with the traffic, and can handle legitimate traffic all that much faster.

The combination of the address blocking list, and the fact that I changed the authentication model of my blog about the same time, means that in the past 3 months not one blog comment has been properly marked as spam by the software available for my blog. Granted I’ve only had a few comments in that time, but it works out to the sam.

And tonight I ran into my first evidence that the platform I have now is going in the right direction. Comments on many blogs that i’ve posted to have sent e-mail notices that there was a comment. Mine hadn’t been however. Now it does.

So, steps back, steps forward, and all hopefully steps in the right direction.