Senator tells AIG to go kill themselves
Fellow Shacker and an awesome photography concept
Beyond awesome time waster…your keyboard can be a Daft Punk music machine!
Apple are idiots. Same thing happened to LatestChatty
Aaaand finally, John Stewart serves up a case of woop ass on Jim Cramer: here
7:45…7:50…7:55…8:05am. The previous times are scheduled stops for the High Speed Trolley that takes me to work in the morning, and all times that it did not arrive. I looked at my phone; 8:10am. I had been standing on the cold platform for 25 minutes now to no avail. At this point, I’m contemplating just driving in and saving myself the needless hassle of standing there like an idiot waiting for a trolley that may never come.
Of course, the logical mind is thinking that it has to come. There may be a broken down trolley that they have to move off the track, but eventually, in order to not block the trolleys coming from Norristown and to allow people to actually get somewhere, it would come. It finally did, shortly after 8:10. “Don’t worry about the fares, just come on in”, said the driver, both trying to save time and perhaps make up for the lateness, “first stop will be Bryn Mawr, so if you need to get off before then, there is another trolley coming in about a minute or two.” In essence, he was about to skip about 8 stops in an effort to make up time…awesome! Not that it would really help, since it would only save about 5 minutes total, but still, it made for a quicker ride. Quicker indeed, dude put the pedal to the metal, I don’t think I’ve ever traveled as fast in a trolley as this dude made it go. In fact, he overshot the Bryn Mawr platform due to his speed, and I’m pretty sure he almost jumped the track at one point. I want this dude to be my driver everyday.
“Next stop…40th street” was the last thing I heard before the subway stopped….in between 46th street and 40th street. Figures…only my luck would have it that my trolley is fucked, and my subway is fucked. A few minutes later, they announced “the train will be moving shortly”…right. Eventually we get moving, and make it all the way to 34th street, where we stopped again for another 10 minutes. They finally told us that the train in front of us was having mechanical problems, and we’d be moving again shortly.
SEPTA…epic…fail.
And now for some people much worse than me: Most unfortunate names ever, according to the BBC
And…wtf? Zombie…pinup…calendar?
First of all, I bet most of you are wondering what the hell IISADMPWD even is. Well, basically it’s a tool built into Windows 2000+ and IIS that allows password changes over the web. You go to a webpage, type in your username, current password, and new password, and it updates your information using ASP. This works on local workstations, domain accounts, you name it. It’s quite awesome.
I wish I had known about this tool two years ago, when I was asked if there was any way for VPN users to change their domain passwords (which they used to authenticate to the VPN) remotely, without having to be on the domain.
Setting it up is pretty easy, but it’s not really documented very well anywhere. A bunch of websites reference it as a tool to use for this purpose, but most just leave it at that; Microsoft tells you how it works, but not how to get it running initially. Well…here is how to get it running…after the jump:
“Hey, Hey…where’d you get that green shirt?” yelled a tall, crazed Septa rider as he admired the green Phillies “luck o’the Irish” shirt that I wore to the parade today, “I couldn’t find one of those anywhere.”
I turned to him and grumbled a response, something along the lines of “luck, I guess”.
In reality, it’s simply a mass produced shirt that I bought at the stadium one day, but who am I to diminish the Phillies Spirit in the guy.
I hate Septa. Riders of the lowest common denominator, the left half of the intelligence bell curve occupied the El I had ridden just a few minutes earlier, and it seemed that the 100 trolley would not be any better.
The Phillies parade was today, so people were traveling on Septa en masse, similarly to how the Japanese ride their subways at rush hour. For the first time ever, there was not even a place to breathe, no matter if you were sitting or standing. Surprisingly, the ride into work was quite normal, eerily normal actually, I guess it was a bit too early in the morning for even the most die hard of fans. The parade was not starting for another five hours, leaving plenty of time for the crowds to gather in every orifice of the city.
We left for an early lunch to catch the parade. In reality, we simply skipped the lunch part and made our way along Walnut Street to where it intersected with Broad Street: The parade route. “Hi, remember that today is a regular work day, and no concessions of time off will be made to those wanting to attend the parade”, said an email earlier in the day. Pfft….yea, ok, get right on that chief. We managed to get a pretty decent spot to stand, only about ten feet or so from Broad, about six or seven lines of people back; not bad for having left an hour before the parade was to start.
Coming from work, we were dressed business casual; no Phillies attire whatsoever, and Hasan had his Halloween costume with him….or…on him: The Wendy’s girl wig. We were heathens, getting perplexed looks. No Phillies gear at the parade…we must be mad! Are we not citizens of Philadelphia, are we not patriotic to the Phillies? At some points, I thought we were going to be clubbed like a baby seal.
The ride home was oh so very different from the ride in. That mass of people was also traveling back, much to my discontent. The 100 trolley was packed nuts to butts, with the crazy guy among us. He was loud…everyone was loud, some cheering the Phillies, others telling this particular rider to shut the fuck up.
Finally…Gulph Mills; head pounding, deaf in the ears, glad to be off.
As I threw out my October Transpass, and searched for my mustang keys…
“I would rather have stayed at work”.
We have the Patriot Act….but that’s NOTHING compared to this: YRO@Slashdot
The UK is being the Nanny state hardcore.
Your next link brought to you by Police Brutality/Stupidity: KTVU News Story
I’m not sure how many of you have heard of del.icio.us, but it’s fantastic.
I have been using it to collect all my bookmarks for a while now, and have replaced Firefox’s Bookmarks with it completely using the del.icio.us plug in toolbar.
Anyway, here is a link to my del.icio.us so you can get a better grasp of the crazy sites I visit and how I categorize them. My Del.ico.us
I have also added a link in the sidebar to it.
The other day, I was tasked with writing a small maintenance script for work. The purpose of the script was to read a list of servers from a text file, go out to each of them, and perform certain operations on folders.
In order to do that, WMI had to be utilized, since that is the only way to perform actions on remote machines from a local workstation (or in this case, a task manager server).
In WMI, just like in most programming languages and frameworks, there are certain special characters that need to be escaped. For example, a simple quote character such as “, needs to be escaped because the compiler will interpret it as something else, such as the beginning or end of a text string. So, in PHP, for example, to assign this is my string to a variable, I would do:
$variable = "this is my string";
Notice how the string is enclosed in quotes. However, if I wanted to say something like And he said, “blah blah”, and then left, I would have to do it like this:
$variable2 = "And he said, \"blah blah\", and then left"; (Yes, in PHP, I could use single quotes to get around that limitation, but that’s not the point)
As you can see…the string had quotes in it, and they had to be preceded by a backslash so that they would not be interpreted as the end of the string. If I did not use them, and instead did:
$variable3 = "And he said, "blah blah", and then left";
the code would error out, because the first quote before blah would mean that I am done assigning my string to $variable3.
Ok…now that all the boring stuff is out of the way, back to VBScript and WMI. Let’s say that I wanted to delete a folder remotely and needed to write a script to do that, and let’s say that folder was C:\Documents and Settings\Luke, because for some reason, I wanted to break my remote machine by deleting my local profile. In WMI, and in almost everything else, a backslash “\”, is a special character, and must be escaped. In this case, any operation I would perform would need my ProfilePath variable to be C:\\Documents and Settings\\Luke.
So my code so far is:
Dim ProfilePath, server
ProfilePath = "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Luke"
server = myRemoteMachine.myDomain
Set serverWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & server & "\root\cimv2")
Set folder = serverWMIService.ExecQuery ("Select * From Win32_Directory Where Name = '" & ProfilePath & "'")
So far, I’ve basically asked WMI to go and grab me that folder, and it did, because I had the path properly escaped.
To delete stuff using WMI in the modern flavors of Windows, you can’t just say
folder.Delete
, as you could in Windows 2000, NT and the like. No…instead you have to get a big array, and enumerate every single file and folder inside every single folder. Basically, you have to prepare an entire directory tree, and work from the inside out.
This requires me to query WMI for the subfolders of that folder and the subfolders of that folder and so on.
We can do this pretty easily with another query like this: (note, I already have the objWMIService prepared and all that elsewhere in the script
Set colSubfolders = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
("Associators of {Win32_Directory.Name='" & ProfilePath & "'} " _
& "Where AssocClass = Win32_Subdirectory " _
& "ResultRole = PartComponent")
I ran that code (with all the other stuff I needed it to do), and it failed. Trying to find what failed took a few minutes since VBScript error reporting isn’t exactly perfect. End result was…it was failing on that query to get the subfolders. Through trial and error, I found that if I stripped the extra backslashes from ProfilePath…ie make it C:\Documents and Settings\Luke instead of C:\\Documents and Settings\\Luke, it would work.
Now wait a minute, wasn’t WMI just bitching at me at the beginning of my script that I had to escape the backslash because it was a special character?
All things considered, I have no idea why it chooses to work one way for some queries, and completely differently for others.
End result is: profilePath = Replace(profilePath,"\\","\") …and suck you very much VB
Part 1: http://www.misreply.org/2008/drunken-fury-part-1-the-ordination/
Part 2: http://www.misreply.org/2008/drunken-fury-the-penn-years-part-2/
Unsure whether I should laugh or wince in pain, I got up from my fetal position on Bill’s bed. I looked up and Firn was still holding that damned chair above my head. “Dude…really…”, I barely made out in between fits of laughter, “chill”. Twice now had that chair been dropped on my head. The first was a sucker punch of sorts; I really wasn’t expecting him to actually do it. Bill egged him on a second time, as my egg shaped head met the cloth of the backrest yet again. Once for each case, Firn, good job.
“Why are we in here, my room is like six times the size.”
“Yea good point…I really have no idea, I just wanted to bust Bill’s balls about Diablo.”
“The kid failed Calc because of that game, and you are going to continue to torture him about it?”…I paused a bit and realized the comedy of my own statement, “Yea…good point.”
This seemed to be the trend that year. While it was in no way a regular occurrence, the few nights of debauchery that we had were well worth the year at Penn by themselves. This particular time, the second of our aptly named “Drunken Fury” get-togethers, happened to end with a chair on my head, and a session of Quake (You can truly tell a geek when some semblence of geekdom can shine through even after consuming enough booze to drown a small country).
A few weeks before that, Ryan’s girlfriend (actually,she was already his fiancee at the time…now an ex) had come up from Florida to visit us to celebrate our birthdays. Older than me by two weeks, her birthday being on the first of February and mine on the 16th, she decided to visit in between those two dates to bear witness to the genesis of Drunken Fury.
Preparations had been going on for the last week or so for this event. It was a typical faux Philadelphia winter; temperature varying from the uncanny 70 degree days in January to the negative 5 degree temperatures that week…but no snow. There’s just something not right about a NorthEast winter without snow…
“But dad, I want to build a fortress!”, I screamed as I looked at the four feet of snow outside.
“Yea…well, first you have to get the damned door open.”
After a few minutes of pushing, I stepped outside and breathed in the cool crisp air. I’d add “clean” to that list, but we’re in Philly, not Montana, and your chances of finding clean air are about as likely as getting the opportunity to bang Megan Fox tonight (unless you are banging Megan Fox tonight…in which case, I hate you). At age 11, wrapped up in three layers of clothing, a heavy waterproof jacket, hat, gloves, and boots, there is really nothing better than diving into a four foot mound of soft fresh snow. I don’t think anything else during the Blizzard of ‘94 was more fun than that day in Fishtown.
That is the feeling that was missing that day. A cold February morning, no snow on the ground, just the knowledge that the days are going to be short and boring…but at least we had a dorm fridge full of Heineken, a bottle of Grey Goose, a fifth of Captain Morgan, and the loveliest liquor of them all: Bombay Sapphire.
“You going to help me with this shit?”, asked Ryan as I lazily looked up from whatever book it was that I happened to be reading.
“What are you talking about?”
“My TV…moving it in here.”
“Oh yea…give me a sec.”
Of the four of us at VP-313, Ryan tended to be the most impulsive of us all. In 2001, having a high definition TV was symbolic of godliness, so of course he had to have one. It arrived on a Saturday morning, and I felt bad for the Best Buy guys that had to carry the 150 pound juggernaut up three flights of stairs, as our dorm had no elevators. Helping carry it during move-out day, and subsequently moving it to my room at Doyne’s a few years later, I now know the torture those brave men faced. It’s not that it was really all that heavy, but it was unbalanced. What did you expect…it was a CRT, with heavy glass in the front, and oddly shaped plastic all around. A CRT…unheard of these days, but it was high def, goddamit (Not that the original XBox, Dreamcast, Gamecube, or the PS2 that we collectively owned would take advantage of it).
I felt bad for Bill…I really did. His girlfriend was over that night, so he wasn’t even able to fully enjoy the get together. Additionally, her random button mashing in Soul Calibur was coasting her to easy victories against Bill. I never really understood the term “whipped” until I saw the extent to which their relationship took it.
“Ok, who wants beer and who wants liquor?”, I asked as I grabbed a Heineken.
“Nothing for me”, replied Bill as Ryan grabbed the Bombay and poured it into a Styrofoam cup, filling it.
Everyone looked at Bill, anxious for his followup, “She’s not letting me drink yet.”
After fifteen minutes, Bill walked back into the room, followed by his girlfriend. Sharpie marker in hand, she laid out her terms. “He gets to have one drink, but I’m going to write shit all over his face.” As funny as we found it that she drew a few down arrows and boldly wrote “small penis” on his forehead, I wasn’t sure whether I was laughing at the sight of this or the sadness of the state of affairs. How could he let her do that…a man has to have some limits.
I took out the Italian Rum Cake my mom bought me and placed it on the chair. Within minutes, the sheer amount of rum in that cake had begun to seep through the box, staining the chair. “Well… I guess I’m not sitting on that one.”
We ate cake…then they left. I honestly did not even notice if Bill washed his face or not before leaving.
November 4th is quickly approaching, and the final debate between Obama and McCain took place last night. Many people are still undecided, some refuse to vote, while others defend their candidate with an almost annoying enthusiasm. That being said, there are a few things that generally annoy me about people.
1. Single issue voters. OH COME ON NOW! While I completely agree with the right for everyone to cast a vote, sometimes I feel that there should be some kind of common sense exam before one may vote. Just recently, a long-time friend of mine told me “you know…I agree with Obama on pretty much everything. I would get a pretty decent tax cut, and I think he is definitely better at foreign policy…hell, better at dealing with people in general than McCain could ever be, hell the last eight years sucked, and McCain is more of the same!”. I almost felt the but coming, but I decided to pre-empt it “So, you’ve made your choice already, I see…Go-Bama?”. “Nah, McCain dude….I like my guns.” Seriously…are you shitting me? While I chose to highlight this particular example, I have heard many such variations, except replace Obama with McCain, McCain with Obama, guns with abortion, foreign policy with the economy, and every variation thereof. “So do you know [Candidate X]’s plan for [major national issue]?”. I asked…”Nah, but he is for [single controversial yet minor issue that won't affect the state of the nation or how it is perceived in the world], so…you know…”. Seriously, people, before you go out on November 4th, educate yourself on the issues. Don’t just watch Fox News/MSNBC, or read each party’s talking points. Give it some independent thought, some personal insight; read summaries of actual bills and proposals from the candidates instead of relying on the attacks the candidates make against each other, or their defenses.
2. Tying in somewhat with issue 1…lack of education regarding the actual policies of the candidates. As much as I would like to be able to be impressed by the inherent wisdom of my acquaintances, it is simply not the case; the majority (sadly) have not taken any initiative to become politically smart. They don’t see past the attacks, the talking points and the pundits “expert analysis” of the issues (of which the majority are party biased, depending on the station’s affiliation), and should not taint the Democratic process by blindly voting.
I don’t care who you vote for. I don’t care whether or not you will go straight Democrat, straight Republican, or vote for every possible independent candidate. Your vote is your vote, but please…make it an educated one. Don’t follow your friend’s advice, don’t vote for [Candidate X] because your parents want you to, and don’t vote for the entire package based on one tear in the wrapping paper.
But do make a difference.
Narrative:
* a message that tells the particulars of an act or occurrence or course of events
* the systematic recitation of an event or series of events
Blog
* a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer
Like personal Twitter accounts, many blogs exist on the internet solely to act as validation for the author. Really, Bob, I don’t care that you went to the store today and bought cereal, nor do I care that you enjoyed last night’s episode of [whatever]. Granted, some people use them as an outlet to vent or to organize their thoughts. It’s the 21st Century version of “my secret diary”, except for the whole secret part.
Other blogs, on the other hand, have some narrative substance. Some are a joy to read. These authors have a vivid imagination, exceptional writing skills, and the ability to convey their thoughts to print. Do these outlets for storytelling still technically count as blogs, or are they in a class of their own? I don’t know, nor am I an authority to make such a classification. I’m sure you have your own opinion.
“Let me tell you what I heard today about Apple/Microsoft/etc … “, comments Bob, pretending to be an expert in the technological field, “it’s going to change technology as we know it”. On another site, probably even hosted on the same server, Sally writes: “…and today the polls show…”.
This brings me to one of the biggest paradoxes on the internet: news blogs. Finally, some real-world applicable substance… Is it still technically a blog if it’s written by a respected journalist…is the “blogosphere” an actual news outlet? It’s tough to say, and it depends who you ask. You will get answers ranging from a simple “it’s a blog” to “the blogosphere is real, aliens are coming!”. Personally, I consider news blogs to be a separate category. It’s news…but at the same time it’s someone’s personal interpretation of an event. Is that really any different from someone’s personal interpretation as it would appear on the front page of the New York Times?
When it comes down to it, I wholeheartedly support anyone that takes time out of their day to write. It doesn’t matter if they write political commentary, what they did the day before, their problems with significant others, or if they publish a book. Writing is becoming a lost art. I see the aggregate writing levels decreasing, and it worries me. Throughout the day, I read a lot of technical documentation: Technical documentation written by co-workers, documentation for software, and various miscellaneous web sites. Honestly, some of these are painful to read. I, admittedly, am a grammar Nazi, and I pay attention to elements of grammar as I read documentation. It pains me to see college graduates write the way they do. I feel that if they have the opportunity to write more often, then they should; their writing will improve greatly.
So I say: Read…read all you can so that you can become a better writer by example. Write blog posts, write narratives, write books, write letters. Write…write all you can.