Hacker for Hire

You know, I didn’t think it was possible, but Gmail just got so much cooler. I know there are going to be write ups about this all over, but I can’t help it. IT’S JUST THAT FRICKEN AWESOME!!!

It started yesterday when I was able to save my Gtalk chats to my Gmail account and of course, search them. That was pretty cool. But now, now, now, now … I can not only search my chat history, but I can actually chat to all of my Gtalk contact from my Gmail account. And it’s not like that crappy popup the actual application and run it … there is an actual Javascript client in my Gmail side bar that shows everyone’s status that even highlights if I’m chatting with them!!! Top that off with the ability to pop that off into another chat window, rotation of emoticons, automatic archiving of chats, and little status indicators when you send an email to someone that is on/off-line, this is just too damn cool!!!

OK, I’m done now.

That’s right, you heard it here first … well, some of you will. Others will have received IMs and phone calls depending on their accessibility at the time. However you got the news though, it’s still the same.

Of course, what would a new house be without a house party? Well, yes, it still would be a house, but with less fun. I think I’m looking at sometime in the beginning of March for the “real” party, depending on the amount of time it takes to do the rewiring and fun stuff of that nature; however, before I get to that point, the current schedule must be addressed, this included the re-wiring project that is on everybody’s mind. Maybe not everybody’s mind, but at least the people who plan to touch something electrical at my house. So here’s the skinny on the schedule:

Right now, the big project is redoing the floors. I will be starting on them Friday night and hopefully we will be sanding by Saturday at noon with the hope of urethaning on Saturday night, Sunday morning time frame. I’ll be sending out the wiring invite shortly … get it?

UPDATE: It appears that there is going to be more effort involved in the floor to get it to sanding status so there will also be a floor staple pulling party. Anyone that would like to join, it starts at 6:00 PM Friday, February 10th, 2006 at my new place. Where is the new place you ask? Why, right here. And just in case you have an aversion to Google Maps, the address is:

6864 Sampson Ln.
Cincinnati, OH 45236

Bring a staple puller and I’ll see you there.

Everyday, my tolerance for the intellectually challenged (as it pertains to common sense) and social miscreants is generally pushed to its limits. I don’t think this is because I am becoming less tolerant, but because I’m encountering more people that could deal with a healthy dose of a brain. It’s not very often I get the chance to get even with these people, but when it’s there … it’s like a sale on (insert noun with plural) during a (insert bias relating to previously inserted noun) season and I’m the head (insert noun relating to previous noun insertion that signifies the alpha of said noun)*.

I pulled into Starbuck’s parking lot to get a parking spot at … you guessed it, Starbucks. Well, as I am patiently waiting, vehicle already poised for spot landing pattern Alpha 4, for my spot to open up, this little skank in her blue Audi (I hate those cars) backs up through the parking lot and into my spot that I am unable to just zoom into because I am waiting for the previous driver to clear my side of the lane that they have pulled out into. See Figure A.

Figure A

From here we can see that the red truck was leaving it’s spot and the blue Audi stopped it’s forward motion at the blue “X” and reversed into the now open spot even after I was already proceeding through my turn. I ended up parking in the spot with the gray “X” much to my dismay; however, I’m not generally that picky about how far my car is parked from the entrance to an establishment. A little exercise never hurt anyone and certainly wouldn’t hurt the obese people with handicap parking tags that reinforce their disability.

Getting angry over stupid stuff like this is never good, so I brushed it off with a simple “Jerk!” and went into Starbucks to get my order. After the stoned out, hippie, skanky, daddy’s girl and her friends get their crappy soy drinks, I waited for my order … that just happened to finish seconds after theirs. Now, if you notice where they parked, and where I parked, there is an easy line of pedestrian travel for me to get to my car. Noticing this, I left Starbucks and did what every other person in Rookwood Commons does … I walked down the middle of the road, in front of her and her poor ability to drive a stick shift. I sauntered my way back to my car, miraculously only annoying her (I even took the time to look left, right, and left again at the stop sign) and made sure she knew I was taking my time about it. As she attempted to “roar” by (she had to stop at the next stop sign only 20 feet from my car) I smiled and waived at her and said something about never driving like that again, which I’m sure she didn’t hear but made me feel better. Ahhh … nothing like the sweet taste of revenge to go with your coffee.

*For anyone without an imagination you could use something like: carnivorous ducks, mean-spirited flesh-eating, inducer of thigh pain. Bonus points to anyone that comes up with the best choice of words.

As seen on digg.com and other various places around the Internet, the Superbowl XL commercials will be made available online from ifilm.com. Personally, I think this is great because now I don’t have to watch a crappy football game to get to what are generally considered the most creative commercial ads of the year.

I was going to write something about how it takes effort to be creative and how many of the commercials on now are just awful, but I don’t really care that much.

UPDATE: When using the WordPress “standard” editor, always make sure you close the quotation marks inside of tags.

My boss is absolutely nuts about anything that Cisco dreams up. Sometimes it’s really annoying having him blow a Cisco-ey load all over the office every time he looks at a stupid PowerPoint they send out. The most recent one is Cisco Incident Control System. It’s basically a really pretty interface Cisco stole from TrendMicro and slapped their label on. The concept is that when:

• An IPS pickups an malicious worm/virus/trojan
• TrendMicro sends an emergency alert out
• An administrator specifies a action

The system will automatically distribute IPS signatures to your IPS enabled routers, distribute access control list to your non-IPS devices to block ports, and sics something called Damage Control Server on any system that is reporting like it has something malicious. This of course takes action for X number of hours, minutes, seconds that the user delegates. I’ll admit, it’s pretty cool technology, even though it’s a glorified Perl script. I also find it kind of freaky that if we had another RPC worm come out, that it would just magically send out an access list that would block all Microsoft RPC traffic on the network … essentially crippling many services on an Active Directory domain.

It just annoys the crap out of me when I’m supposed to test and verify that this “amazing” system works without the IPS devices to actually trigger it. Because I share this frustration with my boss, to him it sounds like this endeavor is a waste of my time. Newsflash! It is a waste of my time! How in the hell am I supposed to give you a valid evaluation of a system that I cannot thoroughly test the capabilities of? I mean, I guess I could just make it up and say the thing works (which it does by the way, if you know how to convince the system that it is under attack.) At least I got to school the goober in Halo (15 to 6, 15 to 7, and 15 to 5).

Sometimes it’s the little things that count. Today, I added a nifty plugin to WordPress that allows you to preview your comment as you are typing it. Why you ask? Why not? Actually, it’s really handy if you are inserting actual html in to the comment like links and images (as you are allowed to do). So now when you type in a comment, it display exactly what it will look like when it’s posed to the site. Props to Iacovos and Jeff for a spiffy plugin.

However, I can’t just leave it to just do simple html … I need to add crushing value to anything I touch . I’ve taken the chance to hack the source on their JavaScript that does the replacement of text so now when you type in the preview, not only do you get what you would see in html, but the emoticons for smile, sad, cool, evil, and twisted magically appear when you type them in. I’ll be adding the other 17 when I have time to edit all of them in and figure out a better way of doing the variable manipulations because it’s somewhat static at the moment. Let me know if you like the preview or not .

Recently, userfriendly.org has hit the spam topic (here,here, and here) and today it has come to hit me as well. My boss came to me and asked me to setup our Exchange server to use this RBL system and possible screw up our entire email functionality for 24 hours. Of course, I’m not going to do it because I don’t care that much that he’s getting all sorts of spam on his handheld and PC (same email box, no crap you are getting them on both you turd bugler!) and I really don’t feel like breaking a server I just got to functional yesterday.

User participation time … what would your response be to “I’m getting a lot of spam on my handheld and PC” … of course, feel free to assume that you don’t care if you work for this company or not (like me ).

Good Documentation. There are many times in my life when I find myself attempting to solve a problem that could easily be remedied by proper documentation, something many people seem to glaze over during their product development life-cycle. These past week that I’ve been working on Sharepoint, I would have pillaged a moderately sized continent for something that resembled good documentation. Eventually, I found what I needed by searching through the Google Blog Search and someone had the proper revisions for Sharepoint database schemas so I could actually complete the restoration process.

In this endeavor, I have learned two key things.
1.) Never trust the documentation. The person writing it probably hated writing it just as much as you hate sifting through their inane and incoherent ramblings.
2.) CLI utilities will generally save your ass with their many undocumented features that the GUI’s don’t even have APIs to access.

To that guy out there who’s blog I can’t find anymore because I lost those virtual machine changes, thank you for stepping up where the big dawgs bailed out.