Regarding Greek life on campus

This was a spoofed e-mail/hoax, but it was very funny. I first saw it when it was MASSMAILed to all of the students early this weekend, but later received my own copy when it was MASSMAILed to everyone.

Dear Students,

Many of you may be aware of an event known as Rush. It is my objective to warn you of the potential downsides of Greek organizations. I advise you to not succumb to the aggressive recruitment tactics used by these organizations. It has been my concern over the years, that the Greek culture of alcoholism and lack of respect for the community degrades campus life.
These organizations present themselves as prestigious, yet are discriminatory, serve to perpetuate social inequality, especially with respect to the opposite gender, and promote a lack of diversity. Many students have expressed concerns with regards to safety on campus, particularly due to Greek culture and behavior. It is my hope that a student's experience on campus strengthens one's individuality, but the Greek system emphasizes the group above all, without cause or reason. This is detrimental to the purpose of universities.

I hope that you will consider wisely.

GDI Chancellor Richard Herman

[Service]: Service unavailable

Post to the CITES Status Page:

[Name of Service] is currently unavailable due to [primary reason].

[Description of impact of outage - how customers are affected or what the
symptoms would be on their end.]

[Specific steps being taken to fix the problem, or "CITES staff are working to
resolve the problem"]. ["We expect the service to be available again by xx:xx
am/pm", or similar time estimate].

Somebody is obviously doing it wrong.

On avoiding work...

I don't think that I have ever worked with someone that works so hard to avoid work.

Everyone that I know in the technical community knows what a pain in the neck Dubya's grand idea about moving DST has been. Pretty much every piece of software out there that deals with dates (most, some in ways you would never imagine), needs to be updated (usually via some sort of patch) to accommodate the changes in calculation.

Fast forward to Monday morning (yesterday), the day after "spring forward." I come into the office to find a machine that had software that we forgot about.

For grins, here's the error from the software. It's almost a WTF in itself...

Timezone mismatch: The agentTZRegion value (US/Central) does not match the current environment TZ setting(US/Central).

No problem, I'll go locate a patch. This leads me to the first problem. To even get to the document that tells you how to get the patch, you need a login to their support system.

I do not have said login.

I decide to ask my boss if we have a support contract for the software, and he sets up a game of telephone (a rant for another day) with the guy that has access to the support site--filtering information through himself between me and the other guy. After telling the guy, let's call him Steeeeve, that we needed a DST patch for this software, he sends a doc detailing how to make sure the TZ is set properly. The information in this doc was also spit out with the error and had already been tried.

Steve does what any "good" technical guy does when faced with a problem. He opens a support request regarding the issue (even though it is clearly a DST issue based on version and patchlevel of software that we already gave him). Fine, let's shoot it up to the vendor, and ask their opinion (I hope our contract doesn't charge per incident).

The next day (today), the vendor comes back asking for the timezone file, which I gladly provide. At the same time, the tech asks us to go through a troubleshooting procedure to verify that the timezone file needs to be updated. I go through it and come to the same conclusion that I had yesterday. We need a patch, and I don't know which one it is, and I don't have access to the docs that are linked in order to find the patch I need (they are different based on operating system, architecture, and software version). I tell Steeeeve that I don't have access, but give him the techdoc that has information, and ask him to grab the appropriate patch (and remind him of our os, etc. in case he forgot).

His response was priceless:

So I don’t have to read the whole doc can you tell me what patch number you need?

I had to blink a few times. Didn't I just tell him that I couldn't get to the doc. I remind him of such.

Gotcha. I’m attaching a saved copy. Please note this is not the note [the vendor] wants you to look at.

This new doc doesn't have any patch numbers in it, and references other docs that do. I kindly respond as such.

I didn’t read it, just passed it on. I just updated the SR telling them we know we need to patch and could they provide a patch number.

So after 40 minutes of back and forth this morning, our friend Steve punts back to the vendor because he's to (lazy? illiterate?) to read the doc and download the patch. I wonder how long this will go on. I'm guessing that I still will not have the appropriate patch by the end of today. At least I figured out a temporary workaround so that this does not affect anything that I am trying to do today.

This school really needs to learn digital document management skillz

I'm really getting tired of mass mails that include PDF scans of documents that are mostly textual and would translate to just a text mail just fine. Okay, so maybe this copy has some university letterhead, or the signature of some official, but it's not significant to the message. Just sent it text. Try to make information more usable, not less.

And for that matter, why email your 1.1 meg PDF in the first place? We have websites, we have wikis, we have RSS feeds, we have discussion boards, etc. Post it somewhere and send a pointer (or don't send the pointer. Assume anyone who cares is already reading the news source you post it to, and the rest of us never cared in the first place.)

Email is not a direct translation to campus paper mail. You need to use the technology better. This would have been acceptable 10 years ago, but not anymore.

A foot is as long as the King's foot

At the university, the only thing we love more than inane bureaucratic paperwork is making up acronyms for inane bureaucratic paperwork (IBP). While filling out my 2007-2008 Report of Non-University Activities (RNUA) I noticed this question: "Do you or does any member of your family(2) have a managerial role or a significant(3) financial relationship with a company that does business with the University or with a company in a field of your research?"

Footnote (2) just defines family as spouse or children, which doesn't seem complete enough to avoid the nepotism the form is designed to identify.

Footnote (3) says, "Federal research regulations define "significant" as financial interests exceeding $10,000 or representing more than 5% ownership regardless of dollar value. The State Procurement Code prohibits the award of University contracts to companies in which University employees who earn more than 60% of the Governor's salary have either (a) ownership interests in excess of 7.5% or (b) entitlements to annual income in amounts in excess of the salary of the Governor. (The Governor's salary is $171,000 as of July 1, 2007.)

There are two things that make this significant. One, you need to make more than $102,600 for them to care in the first place and then only if you're important enough to own those interests (at least 7.5% which doesn't seem significant to me,) and only if at the end of the year you make more than the Governor, which is the important thing. You can't make more than the Governor (or make it without reporting it.)

These regulations are weird.

Cannot delete file

Huh?

Unclear on the concept: Wikis

We're running enterprise wiki software at work, and have converted quite a few public, class, and Intranet sites to the wiki. Confluence lets us give each wiki a 'space' with its own namespace and configs and tools.

The data structure class is using a wiki space. Part of mp1 used some library to make fractal like bitmaps, and they encouraged the class to upload those pictures to the wiki (but not to explain how they made them,) as a way to show off what they did and make pretty artwork.

Right before the assignment was due, people started posting on their newsgroup that they'd overwritten other people's submissions, and could the original poster please re-upload them. I guess a lot of people named them out.bmp

Then they were worried about editing the picture meta-data after the upload changed the timestamp (for grading purposes.)

Sounds like these students don't understand the WikiWikiWay (logging, versioning, collision/revision control.) Chaos is part of the fun. I thought students today were supposed to be web saavy?

From a system side, I guess those bmps were pretty large because the bandwidth usage by the wiki server jumped up quite a bit and users on the newsgroups were complaining that the page that had all the images in it was slow to load (hundreds of >500k graphics.) Apparently the wiki software sends a no-cache instruction to the browser, so each load pulled everything down again.

I just chuckle when they post to the newsgroup that they uploaded over Joe User's graphic and could he please upload it to the wiki again.

Wednesday's adventure

Wednesday was a fairly boring day. My coworker was out of the office and there weren't a lot of walk-ins. It was beautiful outside, but I wasn't able to get out of the office at all. I was thinking about taking a walk, when a lady and a young man walked up to my door...around 3:00. I said, "May I help you?", to which there was no response. The two were talking quietly to each other, so I just sat and watched for a minute. When they had a break in their conversation, I asked again. The lady took a few steps into my office and said that she was looking for [a professor in my department]. I started to tell her where his office was when she interrupted me and told me that she'd been there already and that he wasn't in his office. I started to tell him where his secretary's office is located, but she interrupted again, saying "I've already talked to [his secretary's name]." I asked if she was looking for his students' office, as it is near my office, hoping that she had just wandered into the wrong room. She told me that she'd been into his students' office and that they had all suddenly got up and said that they had somewhere to be.

She began talking about some of his research, specifically dealing with DoD/military research having to do with airplanes. She told me that this was really dangerous, that anyone could come in here and steal it, that it was scary, that the enemy wouldn't steal the physical product...they'd steal the knowledge. I suddenly realized that I had no clue where the young man who had come in with her had gone and that the door from the back half of my office, located about three steps behind my desk, was wide open and began worrying that he had gone in there to get behind me or to try to get to the research servers sitting in the back. I was still sitting at my desk, so I quietly pulled my pocket knife out, opened it, and kept it concealed under my desk. As I was thinking about all of this, she began to switch topics. She ranted about the current state of politics, the war in Iraq, the lack of weapons of mass destruction and the lies that go along with that, the idea that we academics were researching how to replace people with computers, and how engineering was a lowly pursuit and that arts, music, and theology were much more noble and worthwhile. She seemed to have a distinct end to each rant and it seemed like she was stalling, so with my already heightened sense of security, I pointed out that she was in the computer support office, that the person she was looking for was not in my office, and that she needed to leave. She continued talking, so I calmly asked her to leave again. When she continued, I asked her to leave a third time, including that I would call the police if she didn't leave immediately.

She continued talking, so I picked up the phone and called 9-911. While I started describing the situation to the dispatcher, the lady walked over to the desk adjacent to mine, between me and the secretary who works in my office, and started emptying her purse, stating that she wasn't a threat and listing everything in her purse. When the dispatcher asked me her age, I responded with "I'm not sure." I was asked to guess, so I moved the phone a little and said, "Ma'am, how old are you?", to which I received no response. I told the dispatcher that I thought she might be in her 30s or 40s, to which the lady responded, "I'm 57." She didn't look 57, but I passed that information along to the dispatcher, finished up that conversation, and was told that the police officers were on their way.

After hanging up, the lady began to talk about how she had dealt with the police in the past, also listing other authority figures. I wasn't paying much attention to what she was saying and eventually asked her to step out in the hall to wait in response to her saying, "Let's just wait for the police to get here." She asked which hallway, to which I responded "Any hallway out there is fine with me." She stepped just oustide my door and asked if that was fine. I told her that it was fine with me, just glad that she wasn't standing in front of me or ranting any longer. I finally heard her say something to the guy in the hallway, so I eased up a little bit, knowing that I wasn't about to be attacked from behind. A few minutes passed and she walked back in the room. She said, "Let's go talk to the Chancellor." "Feel free to go," I said. "No, not the Chancellor...who's one step below the Chancellor? The President! Let's go talk to him. Do you think his house is open now?" "If you want to go find out, you're more than welcome," I said. She finally retorted something about how I hadn't asked her to leave before. I pointed out that I had asked her to leave several times before threatening to call the police.

Something seemed to click, so she walked over to repack her purse, continuing to rant about politics, Iraq, WMD, men being in power and causing problems by having their "penises serviced" (references to Bill Clinton and how the war in Iraq is really all his fault were included...a theory I hadn't heard before), and how the world would be at peace if women were in charge. Finally, she walked out of the room while ranting about how we "academics" were destroying the world and how we were all bound to our computers. I had to hold myself back when she quipped that "Computers tell you when to check your e-mail," as I really wanted to retort "No, I tell my computer how often to check my e-mail and it does it automatically," or reply to "Computers tell you when to go home" with "No, I look at the clock on the wall." I knew that saying anything would make probably escalate the situation, so I just tried not to laugh.

About two minutes after she walked out, the police officer walked into my room. I told him that he had just missed her, but he responded with "No, we ran into her in the hallway." About this time, the other officer walks past my doorway with her in handcuffs. As I was giving the officer my information and a description of what happened, we could hear the lady yelling about the blood thinners that she was taking, the fact that she'd be bruised "tomorrow", and telling the officer that he'd be fired. The officer talking to me retorted "You'd be surprised how often we're fired." I just laughed. We were both trying to not crack up, as the lady outside continued to talk.

After the officer took my information and description of the story, he went outside to talk to the woman. After a few minutes, he came back into my office with the professor that the lady was looking for. The professor told him that she goes to his church and had the officer talk to the woman's husband on the phone. She was apparently off of her meds for whatever mental disorder she has. As the professor kept talking, it came out that this lady has been going to his house for the past few days, bugging his wife, trying to get ahold of him. His wife has apparently stopped answering the door, but this professor talked to this lady yesterday at his home, where she bragged to him about more or less destroying a wedding/reception at Allerton Park this past weekend. She told him that she got her message out and that all the people there were cheering for her...which he found to be, obviously, hard to believe. Regardless, the husband didn't really know what to do, the professor didn't want to do anything, in spite of the fact that the lady was obviously harassing him and his family, so the officers were left with a decision to either let her go or try to have her involuntarily committed. It sounded like they were going to choose the latter.

I think the professor is being very naive, as he's sure that she'll never do anything. I think that the woman's husband is doing her a disservice, as the woman obviously needs psychiatric help and he's simply trying to avoid that path so that she isn't viewed in the negative way that society tends to treat those with mental disorders...though I'm not sure that letting her destroy weddings, stalk people, or go ranting around campus buildings is really preventing her from being viewed that way.

I've heard stories from people about having to deal with some crazy person coming into their office at work, but I've never been on the receiving end. All told, this situation took about an hour from start to finish. The adrenaline dump that I got from the sudden feeling that I was in trouble when I didn't know where the guy was didn't wear off until after I was already home...I was fairly jittery for a while. Definitely not what I was expecting to have happen on an idle Wednesday afternoon...and to think that it all could have been avoided by going for that walk. :)

This webpage is not the login server you're looking for

A service I manage, talked about here in an abstract form to protect its identity and my users' stupidity, has two components - the server itself, which has its own clients, authentication system, yadda, yadda and the website that serves the end-user documentation. The website for the service (with the documentation) redirects into a larger CMS/wiki site, with its own authentication system.

Apparently, users are going to the website, clicking login, and are confused when it doesn't provide access to the service. They're not reading a word of the documentation -- they're just seeing a login button in the top right corner and clicking on it.

That prompted us to put a banner at the top of the page:

Attention New Users!

This site is the documentation for the service. It is not the actual service. The login link in the upper right corner won't log you into the service.

To use the service, follow the instructions linked from this page.

We considered s/New Users!/Dumbass/, but figured that wasn't very polite.

Football tickets

For the past few years, the DIA has offered free tickets to an early season game to Faculty and Staff members in order to get attendance up and since they weren't likely to sell those tickets anyway. This year, they decided to allow people to buy reduced price sideline tickets...regular price $45, available for $20.

From the hard copy flyer:

"The DIA has also made it easy to purchase the tickets at the special $20 price. Click on this link http://ev6.evenue.net/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/ExecMacro/evenue/ev68/se/Display
PromoList.d2w/report?linkID=illinois&RSRC=&RDAT=&caller=PR"

HARD COPY! CLICK A LINK!!! Not only that, but they couldn't set up a redirect somewhere like http://dia.uiuc.edu/StaffFootballOffer/ to take us to that site? Think, people. *sigh*

Come, listen to this talk!

Paraphrased from an email I got this morning... "Hey, come see this talk by this person. It's a 3pm on this date in this place. See the graphic for more information, and let me know if you have problems viewing the graphic."

The attached graphic was a 5MB jpeg that was emailed to more than everyone in CS (well, all the departmental staff/faculty and grad students were on the list, as well as other departments research groups.)

Let's just assume this was 500 people. 5MB * 1.30 (for the binary-to-text mark up) yields a 6.5MB email, sent out to 500 people means 3.2GB was lost to store this message. And knowing how people around here leave all of that in their inboxes, which change all the time, I'm going to be backing that up again and again and again...

Lame. The content should have been culled from the graphic and copied into the email, or the graphic should have been put on the web somewhere and a URL included in the message.

"Use the right tool for the job." That's a simple extension of Occam's that applies to almost everything. It's sad some people haven't picked up on that yet.

Throttled survey

Campus/Chancellor sent out a MASSMAIL this morning regarding a survey about campus pedestrian safety. The survey is hosted by the WebTools office, which runs the UIUC website; I'm pretty confident in their abilities to run things. Their Survey tool is pretty neat, and allows anyone on campus to whip up a web based survey without having to know anything about web forms. This used to be something I had to do for our business office; now, we just send them to WebTools.

So it surprised me when the images in the survey didn't load. Because a few of the questions involve looking at images and answering questions, they're a critical part of the survey. When I looked at the properties of the broken image and visited it directly, I got this error:

Forbidden

Available bandwidth quota for this filesystem has been exceeded.
(/jcmedina/shared/ScanningTour)

Please, try again later.

So it's not a survey bug, but a NetFiles configuration tweak that is purposely throttled. I suppose that works fine for normal traffic, but breaks when you MASSMAIL a link to it out to 60k people who check their email first thing in the morning. Oops.

[ Edit 9:09am: They fixed it. I guess someone else noticed. ]

Who needs security...

This is another in the "Worst. <insert here>. Ever." series. When designing the login system for our new web application at work, I had the following conversation regarding hashing of passwords over the past few days.

Warning: This has technical jargon in it. I would suggesst something like wikipedia to help decipher it.

Boss: I need to change the MD5 password hashes that you wrote the other day back to the shorter version that I had.

Me: Umm. Why?

Boss: The MD5 hashes are too long to display in the password field.

Me: <blink><blink>Why are you sending the hashes back to the UI?

Boss: I need to know if there is a password set.

Me: <blink><blink>Why are you sending the hashes back to the UI? Can you not set a hidden input that is a boolean?

Boss: Well, really I'm not sending the hash. I'm just sending asterisks the length of the hash.

Me: <blink>So you want to change the hashing algorithm to something less secure so that you can have fewer asterisks? Can you not just send a specific number of asterisks?

Boss: *sigh* I guess. But I've already written the UI.

It's easy to not think about security, I suppose.

No EOF

I usually use here files when putting long strings in perl programs, and I usually use the string EOF to indicate the end of the here file. Today, I forgot to put the EOF in the document, and perl crapped out with the error:

Can't find string terminator "EOF" anywhere before EOF at ./csv-web.pl line 36.

This is not an example of obtuse error messages, or bad code - since I knew what I did wrong and how to fix it. The wording just struck me funny.

Worst. Interface. Ever.

Problem number 1
Trying to register a new account in firefox, I would fill out the form, click submit, and it would bounce back to the login page. No error. Nothing. Try again, same problem. Ok, this must be one of the few sites out there that requires IE. It doesn't even have the courtesy to warn me using a javascript or server side browser detection. I brush the dust off of IE, and try to create the account. Now I get an error at the top of the form page that tells me the username is already in use. If you're going to use AJAX, either make it work everywhere or don't use it--it's really not that hard.

Fine. Account created. Now I want to go back to my beloved firefox--maybe it was just the creation form that was broke. I close IE, pop open firefox, put in my shiny new username and password and hit login.

Warning

You have already logged in to the secure site with another browser. Please try again in a few minutes.[1065]

Thanks for the warning. What a lame security attempt. If I try again from the same computer, you should recognize that.

20 minutes later I can login. It's not even useful, either.

Actually

I'm pretty sure when the word "actually" is used as a verbal tick (as in "uh", or "um",) it's a sign that the speaker has no clue what they're talking about. Perhaps they use that word to sound like they're knowledgable in the subject, or to kill time for their brain to come up with some other bullshit to spout out next.

Clues like this make conversations easier. For example, if the word "paradigm" is ever used, you're free to let your mind wander until the speaker stops talking... Nothing important ever follows the word paradigm. If you're still reading this, you fail.

No right turns through a parking lot

In the "of course that just happened" category...

I decided to take a different route to work today, and drove up Kirby to 1st to Springfield. (CU is a grid, so there are like 20 different routes I can take to work, none of them really better or worse than any other.) Headed north at the red light at 1st and Springfield, there was a concrete truck, another car, and me. The car in front of me decided not to wait, and instead cut through the Mexi-mart's parking lot to take a right on Springfield. As he did, I chuckled. The light's not that long, and that's such a small parking lot it's obvious to everyone what you're doing.

I glanced back in the rear view mirror and noticed a university motorcycle cop right behind me. He saw it too. I did what any responsible citizen would do, and pulled up, giving him the option of going after the wiley lawbreaker. He did.

Then the light turned green.

So, I followed the legal way ... only to see the stunned cut-through-the-parking-lot-er freak out at the cherries behind him .... and turn south on second street.

Abusing the nearby parking lot to make a right turn at a red light might be forgiveable with a warning. But, turning the wrong way down a one way street when you're pulled over? That's priceless.

Fun with symlinks

For those unix fans in the audience...

lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     other          1 Aug 13  2004 class -> ./

I did a 'cd class' eight times, and I STILL didn't find the data I was looking for.

Is that really the biggest concern?

As I was driving to work this morning, flipping through stations, I came across the ABC news on Paxton's radio station. The lady on the news was talking about Hurricane Katrina and all the damage. The station that got me thinking was "Power is out for a million customers. Without power, of course, there are no ATMs working, so there is no quick access to cash." Is quick access to cash really the most important reason to have power? WTF?

Activate this networking jack

I get annoyed when people tell me they want to use a certain computer on a certain networking jack. I say okay, and lookup the machine to find out what network it's in. Then, I pull open a big spreadsheet and trace the ethernet jack back to a switch and switchport. Then I ssh into the switch and check which network that switchport is on.

And find it was set properly to begin with, and would have worked all along. They didn't have to bother me at all, or have me go through the steps above.

In other words, if you tried it, and it didn't work, come to me to fix it. But, you don't waste your mechanic's time giving him a call in the morning and telling him you want to drive your car to work. You get in the car, put in the key, and if it doesn't turn over, THEN call him. Why should IT be different? Or, better yet, why shouldn't IT just work? I've devised a scheme to get around so many jack/vlan changes, but it's going to take a few months to implement it.

Why do so many people look for a handout instead of thinking things through themselves?