01.24.12
I am a product of the 80s and early 90s. This includes movies of that great period. It has been a long time since I have seen some of them but I remember them all with at least a little bit of fondness. I recently stumbled across Good Bad Flicks, the sitename speaks for itself. Here are a list and links to a few of movies the site helped me rediscover. Note bene: not all of these are from my childhood, but I haven’t seen them in a long time.
WARNING: Each review, while also filled with trivia and info, includes a full plot recap filled with spoilers.
Re-Animator
While I didn’t discover this film until early college, it has become a early Halloween staple and led me to all things Lovecraft, something for which I am indebted.
Suburban Commando
I loved all thing Hulk Hogan growing up. I remember watching this movie, too bad it didn’t stand the test of time. The Rock is a much better cross-over than Hulk ever was.
Super Mario Bros
I remember thinking this movie was both awesome and incredibly cheesy, turns out this one has a storied production.
Hackers
I took my 12th brithday party to see Hackers and I loved it. I’ve rewatched it at least 10 times, and while the hacking and computer bits don’t stand up, I still love the gestalt.
Screamers
I remember picking this one off the shelf at our local Blockbuster, before there was netflix and recommendation engines. It was before I discovered Philip K Dick. Another movie that introduced me to a great author.
Critters
Another birthday party staple, I have seen all 4 of these multiple times. We used to stay up all night and watch movies and then pass out the second the sun broke the horizon. Fun times which included gory furball filled horror.
Chopping Mall
I didn’t discover this film until just last year, but it is a also a product of the 80s.
Other More Recent Movies:
Deep Blue Sea
The Happening
Robot Jox : “The Iliad with Communists and Robots”
11.16.11
There are some great sysadmin resources spread across the internet, but it can be difficult to find them in the morass.
Here are some I have recently stumbled across.
Useless Use of * – a presentation originally given at SCALE 2007 by Jan Schaumann
Teaching System Administration in the Cloud, ;login, The USENIX Magazine, October 2010 also by Jan Schaumann
Other good miscellaneous resources by Jan Schaumann
More for new users but always a good refresher: Getting Started with SSH by Kimmo Suominen
Proxy through SSH by Kimmo Suominen
Tom Limoncelli’s youtube videos about Time Management for Sysadmins
11.08.11
I have recently been doing an increasing number of phone interviews. I want to make sure we bring in the best candidates while saving my colleagues time by screening out candidates who can’t make the grade.
Click through to see a review I did of a webcast from O’Reilly.com. This review was originally posted at SNAPGH | System and Network Administrators of Pittsburgh. Here it is posted in its entirety.
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09.13.11
Due to some alignment of heavenly bodies, I have found myself enjoying the culinary delights of a few various purveyors of the hamburger. A singular invention, it is served at five star restaurants, practically every diner in the US, and at backyard barbecues. I wanted to collect my thoughts on the three restaurants that I found myself eating at in the not so distant past. I do this so in the future when I can’t remember whose burger was better, I have a record.
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08.30.11
What is a BTU?
BTU which stands for British Thermal Unit is just another example of the British trying to confuse everyone. While the metric system has gained a stronghold in science and engineering, it seems like heating and cooling are stalwarts against the tide of the metric system.
The British thermal unit (symbol BTU or Btu) is a traditional unit of energy equal to about 1,055 joules. It is approximately the amount of energy needed to heat 1 pound (0.454 kg) of water (i.e. exactly one tenth of a UK gallon, or around 0.1198 US gallons) from 39 to 40 ° F (3.8 to 4.4° C).[wikipedia]
Latent vs Sensible & Dry vs Wet Bulb Temperature
The Engineering Toolbox has the specifics including formulas, but the basics are:
Latent load = Wet bulb
Sensible load = Dry bulb
Links for more info from The Engineering Toolbox:
Cooling Loads – Latent and Sensible Heat
Dry Bulb, Wet Bulb and Dew Point Temperature
Cooling and Heating Equations
08.08.11
As part of the System and Network Administrators of Pittsburgh I got a free boot to review from O’Reilly’s Usergroup program. If you don’t know who Tom Limoncelli is, don’t be too embarrassed. I didn’t know who he a couple months ago. Google him and you’ll find out he is pretty active in the Sysadmin community.
The review was originally published on SNAPGH | System and Network Administrators of Pittsburgh’s site. But here it is in its entirety.
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08.01.11
A friend of mine was getting his A/C units service at this data center and the service tech was nice and handed us date books, thanking us for the business. While I never use a date book, there was something very useful inside: a page containing heating and cooling constants and formulae.
07.25.11
This is a very boiled down version of The Practice of System and Network Administration.
“People often ask me how they can improve their sysadmin team. It takes only a brief discussion to find fundamental gaps that, when filled, will improve the teams’s productivity and the quality of the service being provided. Such a gap doesn’t just create many problems, it creates many categories of problems. “
07.19.11
One of the easiest easy ways to show your chops as a Sysadmin is to mess around at home. I have known a couple Sysadmins who always asked about an interviewee’s home setup. I have read a couple of articles about how the new programmer’s resume is GitHub or their commits to open source projects. This is the Sysadmin version. The following are a couple of current projects of different sizes that one can do at home and give you something to talk about during your interview. They are all relatively easy, my intention is not to give you something hard to accomplish but to get your hands dirty.
FreeNAS is an open source storage platform that provides numerous ways to turn your old desktop into a Network Attached Storage appliance. It has both a web and commandline interface which provide access to various tightly integrated software services: iSCSI, FTP, SSH, torrent, TFTP, NFS, CIFS, rsync and many more. It will allow you to do a number of cool and nifty things. I use the TFTP server coupled with DD-WRT to build a home pxe multi-distro build environment. You can setup a fileserver to share music, movies, or documents across home computers.
DD-WRT is an open source commercial wireless router firmware replacement. You can take your old Linksys or Belkin and flash it with DD-WRT. There are numerous articles all over the web about how dd-wrt will turn your $60 router into a $600 super-router. When you first flash the firmware, it is still just a regular old router. It takes work to utilize all the features. As aforementioned you can couple it with FreeNAS to create a home pxe environment. You can also create multiple wireless and/or wired networks. At one point I had 5 separate networks on my dd-wrt enabled linksys router. Take a look at the dd-wrt features page for more ideas. The more creative the better.
Build a desktop
You would be surprised how many computer programmers could not open up their desktop and upgrade a component. Edsger Dijkstra, of Dijkstra’s algorithm, is a computer science teacher who believe a true computer scientist should never touch a computer. Ask friends for old desktops, visit newegg, or just get a bare bones PC. Tinker, tinker, tinker. Servers and desktops might look completely different but they all have the same innards. It will turn out to be so much more than just CPU, memory, PCI-E cards, etc. Only specific memory works with each motherboard that also requires a specific type of CPU. When Intel upgraded from the Xeon 5500 series CPU to the Xeon 5600 series CPU they completely changed the memory bus configuration and type. You will quickly learn as a sysadmin that you should never throw anything out. Just because you don’t need it today does not mean you won’t need it in 5 years. I have heard of sysadmins digging out their old dial-up modems in 2010 to just mess around.
Install a Linux Distro
There are a myriad of available linux distributions. Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, are centOS are just a few. Pick one out and install it on an old piece of hardware. If you can’t find hardware, install virtualbox on your current PC and build a guest. Build it, update it, break it, a lot is learnt when trying to fix an issue. After you have installed an Operating System, install interesting packages. LAMP is a common acronym for a Linux, Apache, mySQL, PHP server. You can use it to create a webpage, or install wordpress or another blogging platform. Once you have mastered the easy installs, you can try Gentoo or even LFS (Linux From Scratch).
Other non-project ways to boost your Sysadmin cred:
06.21.11
Awhile back I listed the contents of a Data Center Go Bag that I helped put together: Data Center Support Go Bag. It was immensely helpful for us as my company branched out from a single data center to more sites.
SAGE (System Administrators Guild) also has a list: SAGE Toolbox
What I have found is that all I really need is:
- a sharp knife
- a pen
- a screwdriver with both phillips and flat heads