Category Archives: /dev/random

08/8/06

Help me help you.

So here’s the deal: I don’t charge a single cent for tcpreplay regardless if you’re using it for educational or commercial use. You can even embed tcpreplay in your product and sell it, I don’t care.

I don’t charge for the docs, man pages, or FAQ even though I spend quite a bit of time trying to keep the docs up to date, accurate and useful. I’m also more then happy to provide free technical support to anyone who emails the tcpreplay-users mailing list. Having people use the list means that the questions and answers are archived for future use and it gives other people a chance to help you out. If you only email me, then only I can help you and nobody else can benifit from the answer.

I suppose there are two ways you can look at this, “something for nothing” or “you get what you pay for”; either way, it seems like a pretty good deal to me. On the other side of the coin, in the last 5 years I’ve been working on tcpreplay, I’ve gotten little fame, a few “thank you” and a DVD. Obviously, I’m not doing this for the money.

So here’s the rub, don’t get offended when I balk at giving you free, 1-on-1 support directly over email. Contrary to popular belief in the open source community, developers are not your slaves. We don’t have to give you support. We help out users because we like to and because it helps make our project better. While I’m sure some developers are more then happy to go to great lengths to help you with your problems (even when they are clearly between the chair and keyboard), you’ll have to excuse me if I’m too busy to do so. And you’ll have to excuse me if I do a poor job of explaining it for the hundredth time to someone who was too lazy to read the support page without sounding like an a**hole.

So please, please use the tcpreplay-users mailing list.

07/6/06

Headhunters!

Got a phone call from a headhunter yesterday. I’m not sure if this is really a rant or just funny watching the headhunter squirm, I’ll let you decide. Conversation went sorta like this:

Me: Hello?
HH: Hi, is this Aaron?
Me: Yes, who is this?
HH: Hi Aaron, this is ****** and I'm with Atlantis Partners.  I got your name from
someone who told me you're in charge of hiring for the engineering department. 
Is that true?
Me: Who exactly gave you my name?
HH: Who?
Me: Yes, who gave you my name as the hiring manager?
HH: Oh, I called the main number and the receptionist gave me your name.
Me: We don't have a receptionist.
HH: <silience>
Me: So where did you really get my name?
HH: Oh, I got it on the internet, I saw that your company had just recieved $10M 
in funding and I figured that ment you're probably hiring, is that true?
Me: Yes, we are hiring, but I don't work with people who lie to me.
HH: Excuse me?
Me: I said I don't work with people who lie to me.
HH: I didn't lie to you.
Me: You said you got my name from our receptionist, which we don't have. 
If that's not lying, please tell me what it is.
HH: Hello?
Me: Yes?
HH: I think we got off on the wrong start, how about we start over?
Me: No.
HH: Did I call at a bad time?
Me: No, your timing was perfect, I just don't work with people who lie to me.
HH: How about I call you tomorrow?
Me: I'd rather you didn't.
HH: I'll call you tomorrow.
Me: Ok

What I find amusing of course is that she lied for no reason whatsoever. Did she really think I was going to punish her for using Google? Anyways, still haven’t heard back from her, but the day is still young. The sad thing of course is that if she doesn’t call me back she that would be another lie… not the best way to start a business relationship!

[Update: Nope, she never called back.]

06/24/06

Boring…

So I’ve watched a few world cup games… mostly because nothing else was on TV at the time. One thing though I don’t really get is, why do people like soccer (or football for everyone outside of the US). I’ll admit that the players have to be in really good shape to be running around like that for 90 minutes, but the game has a number of fatal flaws IMHO:

  1. It’s painfully slow. Field is so big it takes forever to get from one side to another.
  2. American football, basketball (which I also don’t care for) and even icehockey have the concept of someone able to break away and having a solid chance of scoring. With so much playing field and so many players, breakaways just don’t seem to happen.
  3. Tie scores suck. The whole point of playing a competitive game is to see who is better. Ending a game with a tie score is pointless.
  4. Few scoring chances. I just finished watching Germany vs. Sweeden. They said that the German goalie stopped 6 balls that had a chance to score. That’s 6 scoring chances in 90 minutes. No wonder why there’s so little scoring.
  5. No instant replay. Nothing worse then your team loosing the game because of a bad call by the ref.
  6. Penalties don’t seem to be a big deal. In soccer, if you get a red card, you’re kicked out for the rest of the game and your team can’t replace you. But with so much playing field and players on each side running around, it doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal. The tide doesn’t turn and the other team doesn’t seem to get that big of an advantage. Even when down two players, you don’t see rampant scoring by the other side.
06/19/06

Suck

Well looks like things have gone from bad to worse. Server has hung in an apparent I/O wait condition @ load of 25+. Existing ssh sessions have hung and can’t login. Ping still works. The word “hosed” comes to mind. Hopefully when I hit the reset button in the morning things will magically work.

06/9/06

Site news

Well let’s see…

  • I upgraded WordPress to 2.0.3.
  • Enabled mod_deflate to apache so that pages should load faster.
  • Added some pics from my latest track day at Thunderhill Raceway.
  • I’ve significantly improved the docs for tcpreplay

Anyways, right now, my main goal is to learn ruby and rails so that I can use it for work and some side projects I have in mind.

06/5/06

Great quote

I have a poorly maintained hobby of keeping track of great quotes. Just recently I read another great quote which I found very timely considering what is going on in the world and the US of late:

As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an
evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil
that they set out to destroy.
                     - Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of Nations

05/27/06

Why the NSA spying on Americans isn’t helping

I don’t usually think of Computerworld as a particularlly great place to read Op-Ed pieces, but this article by Ira Winkler, an ex-NSA analyst explains why not only is the NSA warrentless spying on American’s phone records is illegal (duh) but counter-productive as well if your goal is to stop terrorisim.

While I agree with almost everything Ira had to say, I don’t think comparing the NSA actions to Stalin and Hitler is useful. The quickest way to send a discussion to hell is start comparing people to Nazi’s or people like Stalin- not only an emotionally charged issue, but most Americans think what happened in places like Germany and Russia could never happen here.

But of course we now know that the U.S. Government has a history of spying and persecuting people (remember what happed to Martin Luther King Jr. and during McCarthyism in the 1950’s). And I can guarantee you that at some point in time in your life, your perspective will not be in line with the political powers that be. So maybe you should worry after all.

05/22/06

Adaptec/Supermicro sucks

I’ve been fighting a drive apparently going bad for a little over two weeks now. One of four drives in a RAID 0+1 array apparently has some blocks going bad and neither the drive nor controller seem to be able to remap the blocks.

To make matters worse, the Adaptec controller won’t even tell me which drive has the problem. So after getting absolutely nowhere with Supermicro (whom is providing support due to the nature of their OEM contract) I’m having to replace all four drives in the array. Suck.

05/1/06

Chinese ticket spam

So lately it seems that a certain Chinese company has started going around and spamming Trac sites by creating tickets promoting who knows what (honestly, I have no idea, it’s all in Chinese). Once was annoying, twice pissed me off, so I added this to my httpd.conf:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www\.google\.cn/search?.*q=NEW\+TICKET.*
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.consumptionjunction.com/downloadsnew/cj_52447.jpg [R]

I wouldn’t recommend visiting that URL if you’re easily offended. Seriously, don’t go there.

04/22/06

Confidentiality in email redux

So maybe it’s just me, but it seems that these “confidentiality notices” in emails are on the rise.

Anyways, I’ve decided to do a little experiment. Many of these notices contain verbage to “notify the sender” if you receive the email… what will happen when I start replying? Hillarity? Confusion? Bogus legal threats? A bore? Only one way to find out…