mcbeen.com

Last thursday, I had another Dell machine hard crash the disk drive. I’m not really sure why so many Dell machines crash this way. Anyways, I was not sure at the time that the problem was the disk drive. I could not boot windows, and I could not reinstall windows without disk errors. I have had similar problems on hp machines that were caused by wrong ram modules being installed.
So, after testing a few things out, and getting a disk failure message in the diag util, I called Dell up to ask advice. The tech was convinced it was a drive failure, and he convinced me too after about 15 minutes of corrolating symptoms. He went ahead and sent me a drive.
If I had known it was a drive failure, I would never have called them. I have been through too many refurb disks with these guys to screw around with that. I always put brand new disk drives in machines. It’s cheaper in the long run.
You can imagine my shock when I opened the Dell repair box to see a shiny new shrink wrapped sealed drive inside. I could not believe it. They sent me a new drive. I had already built the machine with a drive of the same model, so I did not use it, but put it on the shelf for next time.
May be these guys are finally waking up. Melissa was able to get a new TFT panel out of them last week without even a fight. I sure hope they are coming out of thier funk.

So. Where to start.

Just to show that I am an equal opportunity bitcher, I had an hp d530 ultra slim blow a motherboard last week. hp was nice enough to send me a used motherboard to replace it. Unfortuantely, they did not make sure it was usable before shipping it. The video connector was mostly broken off the board. They did not argue and sent me working used board. At least it works now. TAKE NOTES DELL!!!! [sigh]

Ok, so… the fun of my day today. Everyone is really keen on all these lovely cisco IP phone we have now. I have to say the whole thing has been quite mixed from my point of view. On a scale of 1 to 10, our success runs in the 3-4 range.
And now that I have discovered the most wonderful “feature” ever, I can tell everyone I know to run away from these pieces of shit screaming. As fast as you can. Are you ready? You sure?

Every cisco IP phone ever made is a network time bomb. Every fucking one. Want proof? Read this:

If the phone is not powered by an AC power adapter and the phone is connected to an Ethernet switch that does not provide POE support, the circuit inside the phone’s uplink port remains closed. In this state, any traffic sent by the switch to the phone may loop back to the switch and create a loop back storm that disables the entire VLAN.

This may mean nothing to most of you non network admins, but all you real admins right now are shuddering. Read that again to just make sure you fully understand the situation.

It took out one of my branches last night. A cleaning lady knocked a powersupply loose. Took everything out: Security, atm, teller machines, phones, everything. And it can happen to anyone. Any company that has IP phones, and a mix of POE and non POE ports on thier system (everyone), are in danger. Just imagine little Suzie moving some stuff around in her cube, and accidentally plugging her computer and phone into the opposite ports. POOF the main vlan for the comapny is now DEAD! By design no less. Here is another quote for you:

Devices that are capable of receiving POE, such as Cisco IP Phones, close the loop back circuit on their uplink Ethernet port when they are powered down to enable the POE discovery pulse message to be looped back to the switch.

Again, you might want to read that twice. Cisco ip phones use the biggest mistake in networking to power themselves up. It is completely unnessesary as well. 802.3af uses resistance and capacitance on the line to determine the same thing. And it is backward compatible to NOT take your network down. how quaint.

Cisco is quick to trumpet the fact that cisco hard ware is “immune” to this problem. They claim that their hardware has loopback recovery features to prevent the vlan from crashing down. Just one problem. It shuts down real live working servers. cisco has shut down their own fucking Call Manager software (phone switch) on our network three times due to “errors”. The problem has been remedied by moving the server to an HP switch that does not suck.

Full doc on this “feature” can be found here

Another site I forgot about until Alex brought up the subject of high speed cameras. These guys took cheap disposable cameras and rigged together optical triggers to get some pretty amazing photos. Here is an example of one:

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Pretty crazy considering this picture was taken by a bolt knocking a piece of cardboard free.

I found a rather fun site today. It is a online etymology dictionary. So if you are anything like me, and sometimes wonder why certain words are used certain ways… This is THE place. Ever wonder why exposed film is called footage? Now you know.

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This area of Spanish Creek cuts through a large vertical section of granite. As you can tell the water is pretty rough. That is David standing out on the rocks.

I always thought it was a rather moving picture. The dreary muted colors of the overcast day contrast strongly against the bright jacket he is wearing, one one source of color in the photo. One person standing alone looking into the rapids that can symbolize so much in our lives that feels impassable.

Anyways. I like the photo.

I have had this video clip for some time now. It was given to me by a local electrician. Supposedly it is real. Supposedly it came from a site in the Central Valley of California. Real or not it’s pretty neat.

Judging by the way these guys back away, I think it is real.

Jenn and I now have WP 1.2 installed. Lots of good new features for us to play with. Plus, we couldn’t just let Joe have all the fun. The Coppermine stuff is really starting to work well now. It’s pretty much what I have been wanting. One of the reasons I stopped posting photos to my website was I was sick of maintaining the html library by hand. WHAT A PAIN! Now it’s cake… And my blog is directly linked to it.
Sorry about the new theme Jenn. I couldn’t resist. Let me know what default theme you would like and I can set it for you.

I’ve gone ahead and updated my blog to 1.2 of wordpress, and linked to a new online photo manger, Coppermine, running on my server. I’ve got about four other blogs running on my server right now, and I plan to integrate all of them into coppermine. A small sample of what this means can be seen off to the left. Random photos from the gallery are shown. There are tons of different things that can be done here. the least of which is something like this:

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This image is being served directly from the Coppermine system. I’m hoping that I can find a way to add in a post to blog button to the gallery so this can be a two way posting system. I may just have to write my own fuction. Based upon what I have learned about both systems, this should not be hard.

[thumb:5:l] Thompson Valley Foggy Morning
Took this picture a couple days ago. The fog has started to apear around here for the first time this year. Soon the leaves will be changing and I’ll have some great pictures to go with this one.

BTW, Wow Wee, the makers of the Robosapien sent me a new remote! goodie! Nice to have our little buddy mobile again!