Tims Blog

Man, this is hilarious.

So this whole last week I’ve been feeling like shit. It’s like I’m teetering on the edge of being sick or something. Anyways, since I’ve been feeling down, I really needed a good pick-me-up. I was writing code for this flows thing and wanted to find an example of parsing command line args, so I went to the splunk source code.

I jumped around in it and then weirdly came across this one command ‘ftw’. Now, I at first gave it a little chuckle and didn’t expect much because the splunk developers do this a lot in their code. But I stayed interested and did a ‘splunk help ftw’ on the command line. No help was available, so I just ran ‘splunk ftw’ and came back with the greatest output ever seen in an application; an ascii text picture of the orly owl.

Oh…my…god I thought. And then subsequently busted a gut laughing till I fell out of my chair.

I tip my hat to the devs over there. They are fantastic. The application is jawesome as it is, so to add this “feature” to the app just makes it 1 million times better. I love splunk.

Joe and I have practically no experience with the Postgres database, which means that we’re obviously the perfect candidates to take up a development project that uses it in a massive way

At work we like to make things and, well, we’re making something to replace our flat-file flow searching tools. Now, a little while back I was contracted on a project, to work on a system that was kinda similar to what I’m doing right now. That consulting job didn’t go so hot, but I assure all you fulltime consultants out there that I dutifully charged my client an outrageous price and subsequently accomplished nothing

But I digress.

In our escapades with vendors who like to peddle their wares, Joe and I have picked up many great ideas for accomplishing various tasks. This netflow thing is one of them. We’ve generously borrowed ideas from two vendors, and I have borrowed ideas from contract work. To this idea concoction we’ve added Joe and Tim specific ideas that will bring value to our current group at work, and benefit mr. employer in general.

Behind it all is Postgres in all it’s happy self. It’s a pretty cool database. I’ve only ever worked with MySQL, but after working more with Postgres, I find that I like it more than MySQL. Anyways, don’t get the idea that we’re doing ground-breaking work here. There’s a bajillion netflow->database apps out there. The problem as I’ve observed it though is that netflow is just too general of a technology that requires too specific of a site solution. You almost _have_ to build your own solution. So, we are.

I saw Cloverfield tonight…or…at 8:35 on Sat, because it’s 2:30 am on Sunday right now. I liked it a lot! Crystal was kinda like “meh” but oh well. I liked it anyway! You should see it if you haven’t already.

Nothing to say, just wanted to post some links to get em out of my browser

• wep cracking reloaded
• explanation for “argument list too long”
• linux enthusiasts and professionals (leap)

This weekend so far has been one filled with finally churning through and completing a lot of games, movies, and books that I’ve been putting off finishing. First, I watched my An Evening with Kevin Smith movie. It was really funny and for just being basic Q&A from various colleges, it was still very good. Next, I watched Knocked Up. My sister got me the movie for Xmas and it’s been sitting on my shelf ever since. I thought it was an awesome movie even though Will said it sucked.

I finished “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” too. I’ve never seriously considered interaction design, but Alan Cooper’s arguments for it, and the techniques he uses to accomplish it seem plausible. I’m interested to put the ideas expressed in the book to use.

I watched Aliens too, saw Dirty Work, and rented Hot Rod which I watched with Will. Overall this weekend has been more media-ish than any weekend in the last 6 years!

I’m starting a new book; Against the Gods. It’s about economics and money (I know, my other love in life ). Can’t wait to get started!

So I don’t know about all of you, but I really love economics…maybe I should have gone into that field instead of computers.

The recent weakness in the U.S. economy is leaving me both frustrated and fascinated. I remember back a couple months when we were at ~14k with the Dow. Now, we’re tiptoeing at ~12k. Woo! What a drop : )

Fed people have been saying that people have really cut back on spending, and this is, of course, making the economy weak. This goes back to an old saying that “you’ve got to spend money to make money”. It’s true!

• If people aren’t spending money, then businesses aren’t able to sell goods to pay for new things (like technology or new employees or what have you).
• This in turn causes businesses to have to stop hiring, or lay off if expenses become too great. (This of expenses like property taxes, energy costs, etc).
• Now, you can argue with me that business don’t pay taxes. This is true. However, the way that they go about not paying these taxes is by selling their goods; and if noone’s buying….well….you catch my drift?

God I love how this stuff works.

The energy costs thing is also equally cool. Lots of people seem to think that the price of oil is going up because of shortages or demands or what have you. While all this certainly could have an effect on the price of oil, people forget that the U.S. imports nearly half of it’s oil from abroad. Now, when you pair that with the current weakness of the dollar, you get some pretty big numbers.

So there’s a couple ways to fix this whole bad economy problem but most of them are of the “who came first the chicken or the egg” variety.

The cost of energy (oil, coal, etc) needs to go down so business and average Joe’s can keep their heads above water. Energy prices won’t significantly dip though until the dollar is once again strong. And the dollar isn’t going to be strong again until the economy picks up. So people need to spend money to pick the economy up. But people don’t want to spend money because the economy is weak, and they may not have the money to spend because they can’t get a job. And businesses won’t hire people until their costs (energy, material goods, etc) go down. Which brings us back to (one of the many) square ones.

Awesome!

Joe and I have some interesting conversations every now and then. Recently we had one about software piracy. I believe that all the software that will ever be written is already available on your computer. If you consider software just a bunch of 1′s and 0′s, then you’ll agree that I’m right. The boxed software that you buy in the store is just a way of organizing the 1′s and 0′s that already exist on your hard drive. So yes, I have my own copy of Arcsight ESM. And I already have Windows 54 million installed, and Ubuntu Zesty Zebra. The problem is that the software engineers who organize the code around into legible working stuff haven’t gotten around to the future versions of software I mentioned above.

In any case, that makes us all pirates. Sweet.

• likewise open
• how do you store a tree in a database table, part 2
• softwarestartupdaily.com
• low pro
• isomaster
• keep informed
• books that influenced my software development career
• monster list of freelancing job sites
• comparing two simplexml documents
• scraping links with php
• magpie rss
• clonezilla
• micropolis
• imacros
• plphp
• tsearch2 introduction

If I could just click to upgrade WordPress. I always forget what I changed in a template. It’d also be useful if the Ubuntu folk could incorporate the creation of samba users into the shared folders dialog. You can create shared samba folders, but no users are ever created to access those folders…so you can’t access them. Has this changed in the recent releases?

• frets on fire fan forum
• tools for frets onfire song creators
• keyboards on fire
• frets on fire faq
• inside a ddr stage
• endless pageless
• create a samba user on ubuntu
• ddruk
• convert wma to mp3
• ultimate geo coder

So CES is over for me and I’m sitting in McCarran airport right now trying to kill 2 hours. Jim and I did a lot of cool stuff. It’s too bad that CES was kinda split between two convention centers. We only visited the Las Vegas Convention Center. I saw a lot of cool crap and took pictures all over the place.

We stayed at the MGM Grand in a big ass suite which was hella cool. It was kinda a “no expense spared” trip since Jim writes it off as a business expense. I ate a 52 dollar steak at Emeril’s Delmonico Steakhouse . My god it was so good. We also saw Blueman Group. I’ve seen them in the past, but seeing it again just made it better. They dropped off the bowl of cereal and flashlights with me!

I also got to see Sean again! I haven’t seen him in god knows how long. We went to a British pub (haha, old school. Britain ftw). We caught up on life and whatnot. It was a great time. I wish I could stay here longer, but no luck . I’ve taken the rest of the week off work though, so time to sleep and lounge.

Leaving work.

• the ultimate guide to not choking under pressure
• calendar date select
• bundle-fu
• senderbase
• rapleaf
• spock api
• domaitools spinner sdk
• maltego
• cisco netflow database setup stuff

Gloves and my Leopard CD are among them. Where’d I put them?

• tracing php applications with xdebug
• how to debug javascript in ie6
• monoprice
• underground
• visualization: how to present security data to get your point across
• pcapy
• a quick and dirty guide to kernel hardening with grsecurity
• sharing linux printers across subnets
• creating snapshot backups of your desktop with timevault
• getting error values from the middle of a pipe chain in bash
• making a php rest client to call rest resources
• a php web services client
• wireit
• memory storage on postgresql
• logmein
• prototip
• how to setup a remote calendar using webdav with mozilla sunbird