All posts by rbowen

So noisy

Due to my less-than-ideal housing situation at the moment, my servers are in my bedroom. At the moment, I have 3 servers running. Three others are turned off. The iMac is *still* out in the dining room.

Anyways, back to the point. This morning, I just couldn’t take the noise any more. I needed a break. I turned off all the servers for about a half hour. After a while, you can almost get used to the noise to where you don’t really hear it. But it’s always there, and it drowns out other things, like the birds and the hum of cars passing on the highway.

Ironically, while enjoying the silence, I had a desire to blog about it. Which would, of course, require that I turn the servers back on. Isn’t that absolutely pathetic? But, I resisted the urge to turn them back on until now. I kinda need to turn them on before I leave for work, since they run semi-critical services, like DNS for a dozen domains, IRC bots, and, of course, this web site.

*sigh*. I really really really want to get back into my house.

Hackers

I just watched Hackers, again. I’ve probably seen it a dozen times now. I think I’ve come to a realization. The reason that I don’t watch many movies is that they suck me in too much. I identify with the characters entirely too much, and it messes with my mind. Hackers, for example, is about who I probably would have been had I lived in the USA during the 80s. Kinda scary.

I often wonder about how much trouble I would have gotten into if Asbury had had Internet when I was in college. I managed to get into quite enough trouble without it. Plus all the things that we never got caught for. 😉 (Ahem. Is the bell tower *supposed* to be that color?)

The sequence in Hackers, when they are altering the records for Mr. Richard Gill, just seems a little bit too much like me.

In college, about all that we had was a dialup number to the college computer. Of course, nobody knew the phone number, right? And we would dial up to it from the dorm, and log on and poke around. Later in college I managed to obtain a SLIP connection and a login on the computers at UK. We would log in and poke around there, looking around FTP- and Gopher-space. But, alas, we were right on the cusp of the WWW days, since I graduated in 1992.

Anyways, all that to say, “Hackers” always makes me sad, and glad, that I wasn’t a part of that subculture at just the right time in history, because I tend to think that I would have been a little more Joey than ZeroCool.

Spray-on usability

John Gruber has a depressingly good article about Linux usability in which he highlights some of he fundamentally wrong assumptions about usability, and, in particular, why Linux is (can be) terrible in that department. The underlying assumption is that first you make software work, and then you “spray on” the ease of use.

In the article he refers to the “rock star” UI designers who are both good at user interface design, and, at the same time, are programmers and can make it happen. He says that these folks are very very thin on the ground. Of course, I immediately thought of Tim.

More online banking peeves

More online banking peeves.

Twice in two months they have misplaced a rather important payment. I got my “termination of service” notice from the electric company yesterday. The other one was even more serious than that, if you can imagine.

If I try to open multiple tabs, so that I can look at my current account status as well as my pending payments, one of the tabs logs me out.

Payments that are supposed to be made today don’t show up in the account status (register) view, because the payments haven’t been made yet, but they also don’t show up in the pending payments page, because that lists future payments only – ie, starting tomorrow. And, of course, yesterday’s payments don’t show up either place either, because they haven’t cleared yet. So, on the second day of the month, when I do most of my bill paying, there’s something like $1200 of pending payments that were supposed to be made yesterday or today that are simply missing. I know that it’s supposed to be there somewhere, but I can’t see it anywhere. This has led to one fairly serious overdrawl so far, and, although I’m aware of it now and am trying to be more careful, I expect that’s likely to happen again.

There isn’t a real “register” view, listing all checks, past payments, and scheduled payments, like you’d have in a real piece of banking software, so that you can see today’s balance, tomorrow’s projected balance, and the balance next week after the payments are made. So, really, the only convenience I’m getting from this is the ability to pay bills without writing checks and using stamps. I suppose that’s a significant advantage, but it would be much more accurate to call this online billpaying than to call it online banking. What’s strange is that the online banking (so called) is free, but the online billpay – the only bit that’s actually useful – is an additional fee.

I don’t really want to switch banks again so soon, and, from what I hear, everyone’s online banking software is pretty terrible, so perhaps it wouldn’t be worth it anyway. *sigh*

**Addendum**

Oh, yeah, forgot one. The online banking bit is a completely different company from the bank itself, so I can’t call the bank about problems. And the bank never really knows where my money is at any given time. When those payments went missing, I call the bank, and they tell me that there was never a payment. I call the online banking place, and they say that the payment was made. The payee never got it. And yet another company/department – the investigative unit, or something like that – has to go look into it. That’s another number that I have to call, and repeat the story yet again. I’m really looking forward to calling about my electric payment today. I suppose that if my electricity gets cut off, you’ll notice by the absense of this web site.

Malone’s

Last night a vendor took several of us out to dinner.

We started by going to Pacific Pearl, but, alas, it looks like it has closed. 🙁

So we went to Malone’s, where I had the Sirloin Oscar – a great steak with a cheese sauce and crab meat on top. Mmmm. I had a glass of Ravenswood Zinfandel, and a glass of Wolf Blass Cab. They pour *really* big glasses there.

I also had a glass of Sandeman’s 10 year tawny port, which was really really good. Highly recommended. Even better when someone else is paying for it.

#apache and my new Gerber

I spend an inordinate amount of time on IRC. In particular, I spend hours every day providing Apache tech support on #apache on irc.freenode.net. I’ve often wondered if there’s a way to bill for some of this time. 😉

Well, today in the mail I received a Gerber multi-tool, which I had put on my Amazon.com wish list. There was a short note saying thanks from all the folks I’d helped on #apache. The individual who sent it, who I won’t mention by name, as I did not ask his permission to do so, is a true gentleman. I certainly don’t expect anyone to compensate me for my contributions – it’s part of what I give to the Apache documentation project – but it is enormously gratifying to be appreciated. 🙂

On a related note, I ran some simple stats on the #apache log files, and apparently I say 3.4 times as much as the next most prolific person, and more than the next 5 people combined. And one of those 5 is a ‘bot, so hardly counts. Obviously I spend *too much* time on IRC.