Commentary about those things I find interesting.
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Watched a number of episodes of Justice League Unlimited today. Buildings, roads, and machines get pulverized by the violent actions. Someone rebuilds all the destroyed stuff because in the next episode, everything is pristine to get pulverized again. So much rebuilding must suck for insurance premiums. However, it does ensure lots of construction employment, material sales, structural engineering services, and designers.
… And you thought they were just weekend morning cartoons!
A site called The Hero Factory lets you make your own comic character. This is the one it gave me. There are other similar sites:
A book on time management in talking about long-term goal planning suggests we define the legacy we wish to leave. Coming from academia, I typically think of a legacy as a name on a building, an applicant with an alum for a parent, or a scholarship. However, the artifacts left behind by previous cultures are also a legacy.
Our digital footprints both could be part of this legacy or easily lost. I lean toward all this data we spew about the Internet will be lost eventually. I have seen floppy disks and hard drives die, taking with them the only copy of critical data. I have seen companies report their hard drives stolen from their machines in co-location as why customers lost their data. I have seen companies close web sites because they ran out of money. Let’s not forget natural disasters like earthquakes and floods.
So we keep backups.
Who will preserve these backups once we are gone? Are you able to read the data from computers 40 years ago? Maybe we’ll be better about being able to read the data from past when we reach 40 years into the future?
Not likely.
Do you talk about computers, software, or web sites as manifesting human-like behaviors? Personally, I have.
At work, we manage several machines who collectively provide the GeorgiaVIEW service. When a machine is completely unresponsive, then we refer to it as having died. When a machine stops a performance issue, we refer to it as happy. I call my car cranky when it fails to run well.
Besides, electronics and vehicles, are there other examples?
I really have to stop listening to the same song played over and over. It may affect my thinking….
We had another node crash due to the Sun JVM issue. Our start script failed to make a file in /var so the node did not become fully operational as expected. While waiting for those with permission to delete some stuff to free up space, I went looking for what I could delete myself. Naturally /var/tmp seemed a likely place. I found 1,171 files named Axis#####axis. (Replace the #s with well… numbers.) They used up only 42MB. Most were small. Looking across all our machines there are thousands of these dating back to February of this year.
I love the Unix file command. It will tell you what kind of files are there. So I used file | sort -k 2 to sort by the type. Almost all of the files were either plain text or JPEG or GIFs. One file, called a “c program file” turned out to be a JavaScript (based on the C syntax). I downloaded a JPEG file locally, renamed it to have the .jpg extension, and opened it in an image viewer. It opened correctly. Seems its a graphic of a table.
It would seem our Blackboard Vista 3 has been collecting these files for months. They do not take up very much space. There are not nearly enough files to represent a download of content by all users. Our /var would fill up hourly in that case.
Axis is an Apache SOAP project. Vista’s exposed APIs use Axis, I believe. So, the running hypothesis is several of our campuses are using a product which is contacting the APIs to upload content. Its spread out enough that all four clusters are affected. Its something that started about February.
Suspect #1 Respondus – Chosen because we know it hits the APIs to upload content. Discounted because the content is lecture materials. Respondus works with assessments (aka quizzes, tests, exams).
Suspect #2 Impatica – Chosen because the JavaScript file references PPT. Impatica compacts PowerPoint (aka PPT) files and allows them to play without needing a PPT player. Their support pages teach users how to use the Campus Edition 4 user interface to upload content into a course. O-kay….
Suspects #n Softchalk, Diploma, Microsoft .Learn, etc. – I haven’t really investigated any of these. They are just names to me at the moment.
UPDATE: So… There is a bug in Axis which dumps these files into the file system. The files can be deleted as long as they are not current.
So many to cover let me number them.
).Lately, we have been coordinating through AIM chat rooms. Trillian was working fine for a while but in the past couple weeks has demonstrated issues with these chat rooms. It doesn’t send or receive invites for the rooms. I have an account with Meebo, so when Trillian didn’t work and Meebo did, I knew it was me. So, Pidgin (formerly Gaim) is installed to see if it works and rule out a firewall or something similar. Too much work…Or… Maybe the stress of work is getting to me? I’m taking it out on my software? Wow… what psychobabble!
UPDATE (3007-AUG-13: Naturally, PuTTY is at the top of my ssh.com replacement list. I’ve used it before. However, over the weekend I used PenguiNet. It did pretty well. I’ll probably be playing with a bunch of different software over the few months.
Also, a reader pointed out that if I really want to get back to the feel of the Ultra 5, I ought to go Linux. Its an excellent point. I’ve been thinking since 1996 it would be good to go play with it, but I never seem to actually do. One day… One day…
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