I Drivel » thoughts

My Stay Puft Marshmallow Man Moment

justin — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 02:11:58 +0000

A couple years ago I was sitting at a poker table for my final interview for a sys admin position with . It had been a long day of mentally exhausting questions, and the interview was coming to a close. The person I was interviewing with sat for a moment and pondered his next question for me.

“You’ve got a building across the street with a bunch of data on a server. The building is on fire. You’ve got a connection between the two buildings. What’s the fastest way to get the data over to you before the building burns down?”

“I’d use dd over netcat”
What the fuck did I just say?

The interviewer gave me a strange look and asked me to elaborate.

I knew right away what I said was not the best answer. In fact, I knew anything I would have said at that very moment would have been wrong. As soon as I heard the question, “I couldn’t help it. It just popped in there.” There was more information needed to answer the question correctly. I spent the next few minutes awkwardly elaborating on the idea and eventually shifted into a completely different answer as I talked out the problem more.

Part of being a sys admin sometimes means having to make important decisions during major disasters. These issues will come up at anytime, and they don’t care if you are running on 2 hours of sleep. The worst thing to do in these situations is to act on the first thing that pops into your mind. Seemingly harmless commands can turn into disasters quickly. Stop and think for a few moments, gather additional information and formulate a few possible actions to take. The few moments spent thinking before taking any action could be the difference between a smooth outage and an outage where a 100 foot tall marshmallow man comes marching out of the Temple of Gozer.

Camera of near future prediction

justin — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:18:32 +0000

Edit: The title of this is great engrish… ok read on…

I predict cameras in the near future will begin shipping with wireless , 3G antennas or both. The cameras will be tied into social networking sites so that you can take photos of events and upload them as they happen. There will be a settings page in your camera to enter your Facebook, Myspace or Flickr account info. An option would be available to auto upload all photos taken or to prompt the user after each photo is taken for upload, and finally an option to just bypass that and worry about the uploading only when you are in review mode. The camera will auto resize (user setting on adjusting size) the photos and upload in the background so you can live blog events without thought. I know some cameras today already have built in wireless and can upload directly to a computer or an FTP, but the cameras that have those features are attached to SLRs, usually coming as an add-on . They are mainly for professionals wanting to instantly review photos during photo shoots, not for frat boys wanting to live blog a kegger.

Sony attempted this with their DSC-G3 model but failed miserably in it’s implementation. From reading reviews, the act of connecting to a WiFi access point is cumbersome and they were too eager by including a browser in the camera which IMO is a bit overkill and just needs a simple menu interface to select the social networking services you wish to use. All photo uploading must go through Sony’s portal page and photos have to be chosen one at a time, no seamless uploads, too much thinking involved.

My ideal camera would be a mash up of how the iPhone handles WiFi access points, a 3G provider that is not AT&T (bonus points if it’s free to use, but highly unlikely), and the ability for the manufacturer to add social networking services through easily installable firmware upgrades. The camera should also make all of it’s connections over a secure protocol so users won’t have to worry about their login information being compromised over an unsecured access point.

A couple of downsides to this may be that some people really don’t want to have photos available to the public before they can really look at them to make sure they don’t look like an idiot and that they are even appropriate enough to be made public. It wouldn’t really draw as big of a crowd if it just has WiFi. You are then limited in where you get to use the cameras main draw of being able to instantly publish photos to the world. A couple other short comings I could see with this camera would be the battery life not lasting too long. Users don’t give a shit that WiFi and 3G suck up more battery life, they just want their battery life to be the same as if those components weren’t there to begin with. The iPhone has people complaining about battery life all the time, comparing it to their old phones. If you are listening to music on it all day long, while checking facebook, the battery is not going to last more than a few hours. People aren’t using iPhones the same way as they did with their snake playing Nokia phones of early decade. The way people use their “phones” has dramatically changed over the last couple of years and battery technology has not been keeping pace.

I hope Canon or Nikon will integrate these features into a camera soon, and hopefully their implementation won’t suck.

iPhone 3.2 Wishes (Updated)

justin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:05:53 +0000

Before I had an iPhone, I had just your average flip phone, didn’t care if it had a web browser on it or if it did anything else besides just have a decent battery life. This summer I finally took the plunge and bought my first Apple product ever, the iPhone 3GS. I had been waiting for some time for them to come out with a version with more storage before I even considered getting one and 32GB was just good enough for me (64Gb would have really been the sweet spot). So far I’ve been pretty happy with the phone , not counting all the AT&T issues.

As I’ve come to realize with Apple products, they always seem to leave out the most obvious of features to people and dictate to the user what their experience and usage of their products should be. A couple quick examples off the top of my head, you cannot turn off the monitor on the iMac, iTunes doesn’t support the ability to monitor your mp3 folder for changes in the library (iTunes 9.0 did a weak attempt of supporting this by adding a folder you can drag things into).

Apple does seem to be listening…. a bit, to their users with the iPhone as everyone is so vocal about them and it’s one of the most widely used phones out there. I remember in the past if I had any issue with my flip phones there would almost certainly never be any firmware release to fix the issue and the product would be abandoned all together by the company within a year. Calling support about the issues was pointless, they would just try sending you a replacement phone or just file a bug report that never got corrected unless there were enough people using the phone to complain about the same issue (there never was). I just accepted that as the norm if you were not using the most popular phone out on the market at the time. Then I got an iPhone and all of a sudden I started caring about my phone working perfectly. All those little nuisances suddenly needed to be fixed dammit, I paid a lot for this phone! A few things still remain that I’d love to see get fixed/added as an option in 3.2…

Timestamps on all text messages sent and received. Currently you only get a time stamp on a message if it’s the first message that’s been sent after 15(or some other time) minutes of inactivity. The data is definitely there, but they are choosing not to display it for whatever reason. Makes them look sleeker? F that, just give users an option to turn them on and off. Friends text me all the time saying “I’m on my way” and I always used to use that to judge how long its been since I’ve heard from them.
A global option to turn off auto-rotate. A couple of apps have this built in currently, mainly e-book readers. I, like many other people, use their iPhone in bed, or laying on the couch and end up turning on our sides only to have the current item we are reading rotate along with us. I then end up trying to play a game with the phone on how I can move it slow enough not to trigger a rotation and still be able to read what I wanted to while laying on my side.
Video and Podcast titles are cut off that are too long. If you download any podcast or video with a title more than 11 characters long, it is truncated on the listing. Guess what? Every single video and podcast I’ve come across has a title longer than that. The first few words in every video and podcast title appear to rarely have any information relevant to the episode you are wanting to watch. I can never find particular episodes of videos or podcasts because of this, unless I happen to know the date of the item. Please just give us some sort of way to scroll horizontal in the title box to see the rest of the title.
An accurate signal strength indicator. I’m not sure if this falls in AT&T’s lap or not, but my phone seems to have either 2 states, full bars or no bars, and there are countless times when I have full bars that I can’t make a phone call, send a text or get any data service, but the indicator does not change.
Ok this one is a stretch but…. The weather icon always says 73 and sunny and I’m constantly fooled into thinking that’s the actual weather outside. It seems like the iPhone supports dynamically changing the app icons as it can add a progress meter during an install and an unread message counter for apps with inboxes/notifications. It would be nice if the weather icon could dynamically change instead of mocking me all the time.
Edit 12/09/2009: Would like to see the ability to snooze Calendar events that go off, and also have them accumulate with a count on the calendar icon for unread events that have gone off.
Ability to select “Emergency” contacts on your phone to call if phone is locked. I lock my iPhone and in the event of an emergency or if I lose my iPhone and some good samaritan happens to stumble upon on it, I’d like the ability to choose a few emergency contacts that can be displayed without having to unlock the phone that can be contacted in an emergency or to return my phone.

subway ads

admin — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 14:47:00 +0000

I think the reason they have ads on subways is it gives you something to stare at when there are crazy people talking to themselves on the train car or homeless people asking for change.

Gum Sucks

admin — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 01:27:00 +0000

Why is it, that I’m left with a taste worst off than the one I started with, after I chew a piece of gum? After the mint flavor wears off, I’m left dehydrated with a crappy taste in my mouth. Am I the only one this happens to?

New houses/buildings numbers

admin — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:58:00 +0000

When you put up a new house or building in the middle of a street, how do you determine what the address is?