Mostly Harmless

On the one hand, I’ve got functional A/C in the car again, which is cool. (Oh look, a pun!)

On the other hand, my stress test score is 90.

Some time ago I coined the term “wandwidth,” which is the bastardization of “wan bandwidth.”

(A lot of people would just use the word “bandwidth,” naturally.)

Anywho, today I coined “osnostic,” which is a contraction of “OS agnostic.”

I’m going make a teeny logical leap and coin “browsernostic” as well.

The big news of the day was the first use, as far as I know, of the “air smiley.”

The invention of the “air smiley” followed a brief discussion of air quotes… the gist was: do you make your air quotes with straight lines or curved lines? i.e. “air inch marks” or “air curly quotes.”

(It was argued that “air curly quotes” was more correct.)

Seemingly out of nowhere the air smiley was born: with the index and middle fingers of one hand, form the “eyes” (vertically, like a sideways “peace” sign), with the other hand draw the curve of the mouth in the appropriate location.

I can’t think of any real uses for the air smiley, since a smiley should only be necessary if the person can’t see or hear you… in fact, you’ll probably get smacked for being a doofus if you use it in public.

To begin… this: “/” is a “slash.” Also known as a “forward slash.”

This: “\” is a “back slash.” Also known as “not the forward slash, the one that ‘leans’ to the left, the one on the same key as the vertical bar ‘|’, not the one on the same key as the question mark ‘?’.”

Got it? Good. Let’s remember that when we “map drives.” Do not call me saying that “it doesn’t work” when “it works perfectly fucking well if you know what the hell a ‘back slash’ is.”

Ahem.

To continue… what the fuck is up with these guys? First off, they sell Unix backup software for $2,500 and then they charge extra for the number of tape slots you have in your tape changer. By “extra” I mean thousands of dollars.

That’s all standard practice in Unix Server Land though: “(Q) What does your product cost? (A) How many processors do you have?”

So anyway, you deal with the pain of purchasing the software, then you have to deal with the pain of actually using the software. Howsabout we hire some elementary school kids to design the interface next time? It can’t turn out any worse.

After a (long) while you learn to stumble through the interface, but the “cup of grass,” the “pizza resistance,” is the backup scheduler.

Let’s say, for instance, that you want to rotate between two sets of backup tapes. There is no “every other week” option, there is only “week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4, and ‘last week’.”

You may foolishly think that setting one schedule to week 1, 3 & last, and the other to week 2 & 4 would result in an alternating schedule between two sets of tapes.

To that I say: fat chance.

Sometimes week 4 and “last” are the same week. Sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they overlap.

That last bit should throw you. Sometimes they overlap.

You were probably thinking that a week was a stretch of time lasting 7 days — and you’d be right — but you also probably just assumed that it started on a Sunday, or a Saturday, or a Monday even.

How terribly, terribly wrong you are. It’s sad really, you were doing fine up until that point.

You see, apparently, the “week” starts on “1″ and goes to “7″, then the next week goes from “8″ to “14″, then “15″ to “21″, etc. That last week is just 29-30 and 31, if necessary.

If you’re looking at, oh I don’t know… a calendar, you will find that the backup schedule is doing all sorts of weird shit, vis-a-vis the traditional concept of “a week.”

E.G. if you have two backup sets, A & B, and you have two schedules per set, one for a full backup on Monday and one for incrementals the rest of the week, you will get: a full backup (B) on Monday, incrementals (B) til (the next date that is an even multiple of 7), incrementals (A) on the other tape set til Monday when you get a full backup (A) on that set, incrementals (A) til (next multiple of 7)… (repeat)

You change tape sets on the 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th of the month — no matter what day of the week it is. So here’s the day of the week schedule for the rest of the year:

June — Saturday
July — Monday
August — Thursday
September — Sunday
October — Tuesday
November — Friday
December — Sunday

So, yeah, that’s amusing.

They have to know of the existence of the appropriate day-of-the-week algorithm because there’s a calendar right in the fucking application! On that calendar you see the schedule that requires tape changes on a different day of the week every month.

As far as I can recall, most code editors have a feature that will let you “copy” one chunk of code (say, from the calendar part) and “paste” it somewhere else (say, the backup scheduler part).

I bet, if they tried, they could make the scheduler do backups on the same day of the week every month.

They’ve got the code already, I’m sure. We just need to license it for $100 x (number of slots in tape loader) x (number of drives in tape loader).

Lamers.

Time to write a script that schedules every run date individually…

I haven’t yet mentioned my spiffy new PowerBook; it’s mine in the sense that it belongs to my employer but I get to use it 24/7/365.

Hewn from an ingot of pure titanium, the PowerBook G4 is, I must say, “a freakin work of art.”

Perched atop its mighty shoulders is a screen a yard wide.

The heart of the beast, pumping the life-blood of 1’s and 0’s, is the 2nd fastest G4 CPU available (damn!).

The brain of the beast is the G4… which is also the heart of the beast… ahhhh nuts, my metaphor has forsaken me.

Anywho, it’s real nice, and oh so very toasty in my lap. And I can almost ignore the stuck pixel (damn! damn! damn! damn!).

I suspect I’ll go wireless when the Airport speed bump arrives (say July 17th at Macworld?). I’ve already proven that I can fake the WAP with the built-in networking guts of OS X; just stick a card in the desktop Mac and the laptop and do some happy fun ip aliasing. Bada bing.

You’d think that a spendy joint like Midas would have the necessary equipment to recharge the A/C on a 1995 Audi.

You’d be wrong.

At least they avoided my wrath, and subsequent boycott, by not charging me a single penny.

Too bad (for them) that the A/C was the only reason I had to go there: Exhaust? Stainless steel. Brakes? Don’t think so!

(Side note, my brakes are lasting a relatively long time considering the heft of the car, how fast I drive, and how hard I brake — scratch that… decelerating from 65 to 40 for a 20mph off-ramp probably isn’t that hard on the brakes.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, gotta make an appointment with the competent Audi dealer, or some other Audi mechanic in the tri-county area.