yaleman.org

Paul Blackburn - Julio Cortázar from Cronopios and Famas “The Instruction Manual”

(A Spanish Text)

Preamble to the Instructions on How to Wind a Watch

Think of this: When they present you with a watch they are gifting you with a tiny flowering hell, a wreath of roses, a dungeon of air. They aren’t simply wishing the watch on you, and many more, and we hope it will last you, it’s a good brand, Swiss, seventeen rubies; they aren’t just giving you this minute stonecutter which will bind you by the wrist and walk along with you. They are giving you—they don’t know it, it’s terrible that they don’t know it—they are gifting you with a new, fragile, and precarious piece of yourself, something that’s yours but not a part of your body, that you have to strap to your body like your belt, like a tiny, furious bit of something hanging onto your wrist. They gift you with the job of having to wind it every day, an obligation to wind it, so that it goes on being a watch; they gift you with the obsession of looking into jewelry-shop windows to check the exact time, check the radio announcer, check the telephone service. They give you the gift of fear, some­one will steal it from you, it’ll fall on the street and get broken. They give you the gift of your trademark and the assurance that it’s a trademark better than the others, they gift you with the impulse to compare your watch with other watches. They aren’t giving you a watch, you are the gift, they’re giving you yourself for the watch’s birthday.

I had a friend trying to download the IOS 7.1.2 image for his iPhone 4 (which he’d just about bricked installing IOS8 on) and was having a weird issue.

It looks like if the server sends the content-type “application/octet-stream” it’ll try to download it with the extension .zip instead of the original extension. This is because of MIME sniffing, which only reads the first 200 bytes of the file to try and guess - rather than just trusting the server and not being a tool about it.

Getting an error like this one?

Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.

1. Open the registry editor as a local-administrator level account.
2. Look for the folder {CDCBCFCA-3CDC-436f-A4E2-0E02075250C2} which is under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Wow6432Node<wbr>AppID
3. There should be an entry matching the following:
   • Name: RunAs
   • Type: String
   • Value: Interactive User
4. Rename this entry to _RunAs so it doesn’t apply any more. This will likely require you to add permissions to the folder giving you full control.

Voila, it should be working - remember to revert your permissions changes, they’re inconsequential.

You got: The Fool

Don’t take this card the wrong way. The Fool is associated with deep thoughts. You think about everything and form opinions based on all of your gathered evidence. You’ve been around the block, and have occasionally played the fool.

Seems entirely true to me.

The Fool

(Un)fortunately my friend Jess reported it to websense and they reclassified it, but hey, I was sexy for a while…

Couldn’t get into a 2008 SQL server today, whoops!

No one had the credentials so I had to get myself access. I found an article covering adding yourself via single user mode, but thought I’d add some more details for my own information and to cover missing info on that page.

1. Shut down any services related to SQL and anything that connects to it. The ones I shut down on the server side were:

   [Read More]

So, Wireshark in Mavericks doesn’t work terribly well. If you install XQuartz and the Wireshark application then try to run it, it’ll just sit silently mocking you in the Dock.

There’s a few steps. First you want to add it to the Applications menu on XQuartz. Run XQuartz and then right click on the icon, select Applications, then Customize

Add a new item, and fill it out as below. This will allow you to run it from the XQuartz menu in future.

So I’m installing a new NIC-CSK-210G in my Cascade Shark 2100. It’d start up fine but the new card wouldn’t detect. The NIC-CSK-4TX-X installed detected fine, but the other one didn’t.

When going to the “Interfaces” screen on the WebUI, I’d get a weird error:

If you waited a few seconds or clicked the “Retry Now” button, it’d log you out and kick you back to the login screen. Ugh.

When time looks like this on your F5 box:

And time in the real world looks like this:

Things aren’t going to go so well for your users.

What you want to do is check that your device has [When time looks like this on your F5 box:

And time in the real world looks like this:

Things aren’t going to go so well for your users.

What you want to do is check that your device has](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol) configured (System -> Configuration -> Device -> NTP) and that your handy firewall isn’t blocking the traffic (udp/123 folks!).

If that’s all good, and you can see traffic is flowing (you’ve got your firewall syslog flowing into Splunk,  yeah?) The next trick is to check if NTP is even running.

I was once on a US military ship, having breakfast in the wardroom (officers lounge) when the Operations Officer (OPS) walks in. This guy was the definition of NOT a morning person; he’s still half asleep, bleary eyed… basically a zombie with a bagel. He sits down across from me to eat his bagel and is just barely conscious. My back is to the outboard side of the ship, and the morning sun is blazing in one of the portholes putting a big bright-ass circle of light right on his barely conscious face. He’s squinting and chewing and basically just remembering how to be alive for today. It’s painful to watch.

[Read More]