Category: obscure pursuits

I got this working and thought it worth putting down here for my own memory, and perhaps to help someone else.

It’s possible to mount Windows (a/k/a CIFS or samba) shares on the command line. You need to create a .nsmbrc file (not unlike a .netrc file), and populate it like the one below. This is handy if you want to copy files to a file server that gets backed up regularly, but doesn’t require you to be logged in to or have it mounted.

To hash the passwords, use smbutil:

bash-2.05a$ smbutil crypt password
$$178465324253e0c07

Then replace the uppercased bits with stuff that really exists, and replace the password hashes with the ones you made.

bash-2.05a$ more .nsmbrc
[default]
workgroup=WORKGROUP
username=USERNAME
[HOST:USERNAME:SHARE]
password=$$password
[HOST:USERNAME:SHARE2]
password=$$password
[HOST2:USERNAME:SHARE]
password=$$password

And then just mount your filesystems as needed: no need to use su, even.

bash-2.05a$ df -k
Filesystem              1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s9             78143056 12793924 65093128    16%    /
devfs                          95       95        0   100%    /dev
fdesc                           1        1        0   100%    /dev
                       512      512        0   100%    /.vol
automount -fstab [404]          0        0        0   100%    /Network/Servers
automount -static [404]         0        0        0   100%    /automount

Now you don’t see /Volumes/www . . . . .

bash-2.05a$ mount_smbfs //pdb2@mars/www /Volumes/www/
kextload: extension /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext is already loaded
Filesystem              1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s9             78143056 12793924 65093128    16%    /
devfs                          95       95        0   100%    /dev
fdesc                           1        1        0   100%    /dev
                       512      512        0   100%    /.vol
automount -fstab [404]          0        0        0   100%    /Network/Servers
automount -static [404]         0        0        0   100%    /automount
//PDB2@MARS/WWW          26627736  1736436 24891300     6%    /Volumes/www

Now you do . . .

Brad Choate: 802.11n and Gigabit ethernet

This could be dangerous to the pocketbook (does every home need Gigabit ethernet? maybe not, but at $160 now, how cheap will it be in a year’s time?). And then we add 320 Mbps wireless (802.11n): you’ll be able to cook food on your wireless access point.

NCSA – The Future Frontier: Computing on NCSA Mosaic’s 10th Anniversary

On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will host five of the nation’s leading technologists to explore the future of computing and networking. This panel discussion will celebrate the 10th anniversary of NCSA’s release of Mosaic, the world’s first freely available graphical Web browser. Mosaic spurred a revolution in communications, business, education, and entertainment that has had a trillion-dollar impact on the global economy.

I remember seeing Mosaic when I was doing desktop support, and getting my first exposure to the internet, TCP/IP and UNIX. Mosaic was so new but it was obvious and easy to use. A true disruptive technology . . . . as noted here, the industry segment it birthed will be worth 6.8 trillion dollars by 2004.
Continue reading “Mosaic is 10”

Business 2.0 – Web Article – Management by Blog?

“It’s only a matter of time before we have a blogging system that’s able to measure the intellectual climate of employees, that can get at the sorts of questions that managers need to know the answers to. What do people think of the new parking garage? What are smart people talking about? What’s on their minds? It’s a great, nonintrusive way of seeing what is happening in your organization.”

[ . . . . . ] Many employees might feel that such a system is akin to management eavesdropping on water-cooler discussions.

Such systems are not for every company, and they’re far from widespread. And such success depends entirely on an individual firm’s culture. If the company personality is too buttoned-up or secretive, a blog initiative will either fail to take off (there’s nothing lonelier than a blog that doesn’t get updated) or deteriorate into something unhealthy. The internal blogs that succeed will be safe, clean, well-lit virtual places in which diverse opinions are welcome and ideas — not people — are judged. Companies should always explore new ways of getting messages out and new tactics for fostering idea-exchange among the staff, but right now the blogging action is almost exclusively for external readers.

I think there’s merit in this idea but it depends on what employees are allowed/encouraged to record for public consumption.

Even if a constellation of weblogs were created but limited by ACLs (access control lists) to internal users only, it would be a good knowledge sharing tool for cultures that don’t already have one.

Thanks to Wade for this one.

If you ever managed to get Barry Bishop talking about himself, he likely failed to mention the not-so-insignificant fact that he was a member of the first American team to summit Mount Everest. That’s just how Barry was. Besides having a quick sense of humor and a passion for science and exploration, he was also exceedingly modest. And unstoppable.

There will be a documentary on the first US team to summit Everest on April 27 featuring Brent Bishop, son of the above-mentioned Barry, and my former co-worker at an Internet startup. He had also summitted Everest, but wasn’t likely to brag about it either.

You can read more about him here
Continue reading “on top of the world”

Now that tax season is over and we’re at our full complement of adults, I have started hitting the trail on my bike in earnest. Today, I did 33 miles, from my nearest Burke Gilman trail access point to somewhere in Woodinville, about 16 miles out. A great ride, though it has become obvious I need to get fitted for my bike so I don’t feel quite so uncomfortable as time goes by. I need to be able to stay in the saddle 6-8 hours to complete the Seattle to Portland Classic.

I’ll see about that tomorrow.

Performance Computing – Features – The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

Nowhere is this word/image culture tension better represented than in the contrast between UNIX and NT. When the much-vaunted UNIX-killer arrived a few years ago, backed by the full faith and credit of the Redmond juggernaut, I approached it with an open mind. But NT left me cold. There was something deeply unsatisfying about it. I had that ineffable feeling (apologies to Gertrude Stein) there was no there there. Granted, I already knew the major themes of system and network administration from my UNIX days, and I will admit that registry hacking did vex me for a few days, but after my short scramble up the learning curve I looked back at UNIX with the feeling I’d been demoted from a backhoe to a leaf-blower. NT just didn’t offer room to move. The one-size-fits-all, point-and-click, we’ve-already-anticipated-all-your-needs world of NT had me yearning for those obscure command-line flags and man -k. I wanted to craft my own solutions from my own toolbox, not have my ideas slammed into the visually homogenous, prepackaged, Soviet world of Microsoft Foundation Classes.

Lots of great images and ideas here, some of which I have felt but never articulated. The “short learning curve” is a great summary of my brief-but-still-too-long experience with Windows 2000. It was boring: you couldn’t do anything.

Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price of freedom is always dear, but there’s no substitute. Personally, I’d rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon like NT. I’m hoping that as IT folks become more seasoned and less impressed by superficial convenience at the expense of real freedom, they will yearn for the kind of freedom and responsibility UNIX allows. When they do, UNIX will be there to fill the need.

There’s approximately zero chance of this happening in my workplace, but then, I look at it as self-imposed exile. I’m not willing to force someone to expand their horizons, enlarge their mind. They have to want it for themselves.

The New Yorker: Fact

“The military is not like a corporation that can be streamlined. It is the most inefficient machine known to man. It’s the redundancy that saves lives.”

meta-douglasp

<gulp> Doug Purdy just added me to his blogroll: thanks for the compliment. Now to try and act like something other than comic relief . . . .

He just brought home his daughters for the first time: I’ve been remembering moments like that myself, from 6 years ago. There’s a telescoping effect there, where it seems like yesterday and at the same time you recall all the time in between.

As I heard said and have repeated myself, being a parent changes everything.

[IP] a pirce very worth reading till the end SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL byJo

[ . . . ] By these terrible means, they will create a world where war conducted by any country but the United States will seem simply too risky and the Great American Peace will begin. Unregulated Global Corporatism will be the only permissible ideology, every human will have access to McDonald’s and the Home Shopping Network, all “news” will come through some variant of AOLTimeWarnerCNN, the Internet will be run by Microsoft, and so it will remain for a long time. Peace. On Prozac. If I were in charge, this is neither the flavor of peace I would prefer nor the way I would achieve it. But if I’d been in charge back in 1983, there might still be a Soviet Union and we might all still be waiting for the world to end in fifteen nuclear minutes.

What’s scarier than this theory is the notion that we might actually be following it.

I read this a month or so ago and was reminded of it again today when an otherwise reasonable friend opined that he thought G W Bush’s intellect is under-rated. While I’ll concede that he must has some level of smarts to get where he is, he’s not the one to be concerned about. The guy who ran the search for the VP candidate and found no better choice than himself is the one to watch.