Israel Lopez

Curse you LDAP! and a Hungry Sysadmin Later ...

Sun, 13 May 2012 16:35:15 -0700

So I am working on adding additional class of users to my Active Directory network, and I found out through frustration that the traditional methods of external applications can be affected by how Microsoft Active Directory works with LDAP. Let me explain.

Most LDAP authentication methods for remote applications allow for the MemberOf attibute of users to signify which groups they are in. This would mirror what you see on the users “Members Of” tab in Active Directory Users & Computers (ADUAC).

However, it does not. If you have a “Default Group” assigned, it is not in the LDAP MembersOf attribute. Thus messing with LDAP queries that Confluence and Crowd makes to check which users are part of which groups.

I made the change recently, and did not realize this situation. I used Sysinternals AD Explorer to find the differences between what I saw, and what the “Application” data looked like. On a guess I found the issue.

I’ve blown through lunch trying to solve this problem, and now it is time for dinner. My brain is gone!

"Un-pivot" Data in Excel... Yay!

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 09:25:33 -0700

"Un-pivot" Data in Excel... Yay!

MemoryForMyMac.com Launched!

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 19:45:21 -0700

MemoryForMyMac.com Launched!

Pulling My Hair out - FedEx / UPS Integration Codes

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 16:42:24 -0800

FedEx

Fedex service and packaging codes.

Page 39 of the TCR has packaging type codes:

Available for all:
01 – Customer Packaging
02 – FedEx Pak
03 – FedEx Box
04 – FedEx Tube
06 – FedEx Envelope
FedEx International Only
(including U.S. export):
15 – FedEx 10KG Box
25 – FedEx 25KG Box

And our service types are:

The service type provided by the shipper.
Valid values:
U.S. Domestic Services:
01 – FedEx Priority Overnight
03 – FedEx 2Day
05 – FedEx Standard Overnight
06 – FedEx First Overnight
20 – FedEx Express Saver
*70 – FedEx 1Day Freight
*80 – FedEx 2Day Freight
83 – FedEx 3Day Freight
90 – FedEx Home Delivery
92 – FedEx Ground
FedEx International Services (including U.S. export):
01 – International Priority
03 – International Economy
06 – International First
57 – FedEx Europe First (See the FedEx Service
Guide for served countries.)
*70 – International Priority Freight
*86 – International Economy Freight

http://blog.arkesystems.com/post/2010/06/16/Integration-with-Fedex-Ship-Manager.aspx

UPS

This is what you need to know to do automated imports, and carrier maps from other systems into UPS.

http://www.ups.com/worldshiphelp/WS15/ENU/AppHelp/CONNECT/Automatic_Batch_Processing_Minimum_Required_Fields.htm

http://www.ups.com/worldshiphelp/WS15/ENU/AppHelp/Codes/Package_Type_Codes.htm

Good Quality Software and Motorcycles?

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 17:27:47 -0800

I found a paragraph in a book recently that made me pause and think about what makes good software. The book in question is the Art and Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, it is a classic book and I recommend people who think of themselves as an analytic thinker read it.

The book’s subtitle “An Inquiry Into Values” gives you the four word insight into what it is going to be about. Its a story of a journey, through the past, present, and future of Values. Almost a construction in the scientific and romantic sense of what it means to have Quality.

This paragraph near the last fifth of the book struck me rather strongly, and I’m going to contrast it with software in my own words.

… If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn’t enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what’s good. That is what carries you forward. This sense isn’t just something you’re born with, although you are born with it. It’s also something you can develop. It’s not just about “intuition,” not just unexplainable “skill” or “talent.” It’s the direct result of contact with basic reality, Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal.

- Robert Pirsig

My turn.

If you want to build software without getting stuck just knowing how to write Java, PHP, Python or SQL is not enough. You have to have an idea for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what is good. That is what is going to make a piece of software stand out. That is what is going to rally a team together to “do the right thing” in regards to documentation, user experience, user interfaces, business logic, everything else that cannot be defined simply. This is not something you are born with, although you are born knowing what it looks like. It is also something you can develop. It is not about intuition or innate talent. It only comes from a direct experience with basic reality, or Quality.

How can you see this in action? Lets take the story of saving lives with five seconds.

Steve was upset that the Mac took too long to boot to boot up when you first turned it on so he tried motivating Larry Kenyon by telling him well you know how many millions of people are going to buy this machine - it’s going to be millions of people and let’s imagine that you can make it boot five seconds faster well that’s five seconds times a million every day that’s fifty lifetimes, if you can shave five seconds off that you’re saving fifty lives. And so it was a nice way of thinking about it, and we did get it to go faster.

- PBS, Triumph of Nerds, Andy Hertzfeld
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html

Now this story has been revised on many other sites; that it may have been 10 seconds, and had much more technical discussion. However that is irrelevant. What is relevant was the outcome.

The fact, and purpose of trying to “shave off” time in order to “save lives” makes you think about the values held by Mr. Jobs. Where did he have this inner drive? He probably saw it in various aspects of his life growing up in Silicon Valley, the way his house was designed a certain way to be cheap yet comfortable, the experiences he had as an adopted child. Many experiences. So. Then imagine taking those values and cajoling, prodding, encouraging engineers to make a vision of Quality a reality. Then see that vision in the hands of everyday people. Those people now had a “reality of Quality,” something they can point to finger at and say “now this is what I call a computer.”

Good Sysadmins Don't Like Magic

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:32:00 -0800

My twist on @AlexTatiyants blog post on Magic Programming. I know I’m replacing Dev with Sysadmin, but I hope this is flattering.

Overall this is a personal view that I struggle to convey with my other technical colleagues, and sometimes they discount my views because I am “Overteching it.”

Good Sysadmins don’t like magic. They want to understand exactly what’s happening under the hood. They want to know how the machine got from point A to point b. Most importantly, they want to be in control of their system (instead of the other way around).

Good Sysadmins also know that magic comes at a cost. That cost is paid when things are don’t work exactly as you expected. Suddenly, you have to dig through a maze of your (distribution’s) abstractions to understand what went wrong.

…

Any modern system can be considered magical. Hell, you install the operating system and most likely you can get the computer to do something.

The thing is for certain situations the trade off between transparency and magic makes sense. Sure you could compile your own versions of gcc and sshd, but why would you want to?

I am of the position, that if you did not configure your critical services yourself, and know what the application is doing on your system you do not know your system. If you do not know your system, it is a liability.

And. Liabilities bite.

Just one more point. Steve Jobs is a visionary in technology, but he was a tyrant. He knew how stuff was supposed to work together. So, as the creator do you think he’d enjoy a Magic show?

Windows 7 Cant Click and Drag

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:25:58 -0800

Cant click and drag files in Windows Explorer? Make sure you have a explorer window selected and hit [ESC] on your keyboard.

I did this to myself while dragging files for attachment in a Mozilla Thunderbird email window. Maddening.

I guess the click-and-drag handler got lost somewhere. [ESC] fixes it.

BMW E90 328i Brake Disc / Pad Info

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 22:06:38 -0800

http://bmwfans.info/parts/catalog/E90/Sedan/USA/328i-N52N/LHD/N/2007/september/browse/

For newer BMW E90s … especially my 2008 328i the front rotor size is 312x24mm and the pads should be sized for such; the rear rotor size is 300x20mm.

http://bmwfans.info/parts/catalog/34116774875/

Stock front rotors have a minimum thickness of 22.8mm, and the rear have a minimum of 18.4mm.

I left GoDaddy

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 18:18:30 -0800

My personal domain has moved, two business accounts next. ;)

http://gizmodo.com/5870779/december-29th-is-leave-godaddy-day

I wish this was available for terminal windows or context input...

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 10:56:27 -0800

I wish this was available for terminal windows or context input forms. Sometimes I forget to move the mouse and I inadvertently type commands to another window that has focus.

rm -rf /home/test

Oh, damn that was the wrong server.

ilopez.com may go down for awhile

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 16:11:50 -0800

Reason? I’m migrating my domain registration away from godaddy to something that reddit approves. Right now, this is about what I can do to “vote with my wallet” to oppose SOPA. Curious about what SOPA is? Google it, you will find more articulate and concise blogs/research/news-articles about the topic that I could ever string together.

Server why you no fix yourself?

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:27:40 -0800

Server why you no fix yourself?

How did that corvette lose control during a slalom? Jeez. Hope...

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 20:53:51 -0800

How did that corvette lose control during a slalom? Jeez. Hope the guy is okay.

Japan 2005 Pictures

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:42:14 -0800

Japan 2005 Pictures

Why I like structured and programmatic music.

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:24:06 -0800

At some point in recent history someone thought Baby Einstein was a good idea. A torrent of bright colorful video and classical sounds to soothe babies into a trance? I have doubts whether this actually works.

I think it is just a way for parents to let the tv babysit their kids under the cover of ‘they are learning.’

But the idea has some kind of basis. Isnt music, inherently linked to intelligence some how? The ability to read music notes for example is could be considered as a mathematical skill. For example, Beethoven was deaf. He did not need to hear the notes, he knew the measure the notes and pitches to create a composition to stand the test of time.

So I wonder. What about modern day music? composed through what could be considered simply elevated or abstracted math, implemented as software? Music is hardly analog anymore, laden with frequency generators, fast fourier transforms, memory management and stream processing. Could the musicians of today be software engineers at heart?

Consider EDM, Electronic Dance Music, genre of music. It is a world of composers and musicians generating addictive tracks only needing a laptop and maybe a microphone for sampling. Listen to this remixed track: http://soundcloud.com/inrvisn/tiesto-work-hard-play-hard. It is a track remixed by an artist named Inrvisn, with music from an international superstar Tiesto.

To the unappreciative ear it sounds like noise. To me Jazz was the same way, after taking a Jazz Appreciation class I have learned to like it. To other generations Rock and Roll was noise too. Soon the blips and bloops, sawtooth notes, the looped fade ins and fade outs, deep bass notes for me reverberate an inner cavity of energy that makes me nod and bop to the beat.

Interestingly for me, I notice other effects as well. I begin to focus more, new ideas pop out of nowhere, and I make inferences from unlike ideas very quickly. Its like the music serves as entropy for this complex mass of brain matter. Maybe the ideas were already there, but the music shakes them out.

Also for me, this is where it comes full circle.

Music made through software and human input inspires me to create software that when executed sounds like the program execution pipeline. I’d like to think I can hear a current program stack as a musical note signature, when a method starts and ends a note plays. I’d like to think I can imagine what it would be like to hear an exception, how it is being handled, and the data that is transmitted across an Ethernet driver. Maybe all modulated by some modern encoding like 4-PSK or something more ‘musical’ like notes translated into a MIDI controller to play binary PCM waveforms.

Yeah, I’m a nerd. ;)

I came pretty close to this as a network engineer for a datacenter once. I hand compiled a linux 2.4 kernel to include a realtime packet capture patch, and connected that in to a mirrored up link port for a router that was plugged into an OC-1. With that I used a tool to capture packets, look for an MPEG header, reassembled it on the fly, and decoded it with ffmpeg. I could hear the network.

We also used this server as a troubleshooting point to ensure the networking layer was doing what it was supposed to be doing. Neat huh?

New Favorite Toy - Perfgraph 3.0

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:11:05 -0800

New Favorite Toy - Perfgraph 3.0:

Windows 8 Task Manager - SO COOL!

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 07:48:51 -0700

Windows 8 Task Manager - SO COOL!

PHP and C# ftw…

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 19:37:00 -0700

PHP and C# ftw…

Playing with C#

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 20:48:57 -0700

Console.WriteLine(“Using DataSets”);

FbDataAdapter da = new FbDataAdapter(); // Create a new DataAdapter

da.SelectCommand = new FbCommand(@”select * from company”, c); // Assign a Select Command to the DataAdapter

DataSet ds = new DataSet(); // Create a DataSet to Collect the Output

da.Fill(ds); // Use the DataAdapter to Fill the DataSet

DataRow dr = ds.Tables[0].Rows[0]; // Create and Fill a DataRow

Console.WriteLine(“Data Row Value” + dr[“name”].ToString()); // Pull out the field “NAME” from the table “COMPANY” and print it

Tough Mudder 2012 Southern California Route Elevation Start:...

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 14:23:00 -0700

Tough Mudder 2012 Southern California Route Elevation

Start: 1483 ft

End: 1462 ft

Max: 1834 ft

Min: 1355 ft

Total Gain/Loss: 2558 ft / -2579 ft

Average Slope 7.3% / -6.8

Max Slope: 44.5 % / -53.0%

https://s3.amazonaws.com/ilopezcom/ToughMudder.kmz

http://toughmudder.com/events/socal-2012/