General

General

A Very Long Engagement (Un Long Dimanche De Fiançailles)

By on Sunday, February 17, 2008

When I first saw the trailer of A Very Long Engagement so long ago, I thought I have a pretty good idea what the story is about. I finally got to watch it last night and I found out that it wasn’t exactly as I expected. Set in France just after World War I, the story is about a girl, Mathilde, looking for her fiance, Manech, who went missing and presumed dead after the horrific Battle of the Somme. Yet she did not believe he is gone. When you love someone, when do you give up hope and admit that he is lost to you? In this case, you don’t. She went on a determined search for him and gradually put together pieces of the mystery. Despite all the difficulties she encountered and all the discouraging answers she got, she persevered. In the end, she finds out that… Well, I guess that’s for you to also find out.

Rating: 4/5

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General

Adventures and Misadventures

By on Wednesday, February 13, 2008

I don’t know what it is about today :P but I found myself thinking back. Yes, for most of us life is good even with its ups and downs but sometimes it does get monotonic. And so once in a while we would go out and do something adventurous. Something, anything to stop that feeling of being trapped in the daily grind. These adventures are welcome respite. A reminder that there is more to life, a lot more.

Of course, if you have adventures, you inevitably would have misadventures. Though definitely not as much as some of my friends, I have my fair share including:

  1. Crashing onto a center island on a drive. It was due to miscommunication with my co-driver. She was saying left, then right, then center. Luckily we both had seat belts on and the damage was limited to a blown-out tire and a slightly dented rim.
  2. Going hypothermic on a climb. We were hiking up and it rained slowing us down and causing a drop on the temperature. Then night fell and the temperature dropped some more. We had to pitch a tent in the middle of the trail. I was shaking uncontrollably. Good thing my buddy helped me dry out and kept me warm.
  3. SUV I was co-driving running out of control on a drive. We found ourselves heading straight at the concrete center dividers. Fortunately, my driver recovered and got it back on its direction, Unfortunately, she also slowed down and the pig truck behind crashed in and totaled the rear window.
  4. Running low on air on a dive. It was my first time on that site and the current was stronger than what I was used to. Good thing the divemaster was around and gave me his octopus.
  5. Crashing while karting. I was going at high speed and took a hairpin turn. I plowed into the crash barriers. I injured my hands and my knee. More here.
  6. Getting food poisoned after eating spoiled fish. This actually happened twice. More here and here.

Will I let these misadventures stop me? Hell no! They’re nothing compared to others’. And as the last one illustrates, we run risks in even the ordinary and mundane things we do. So might as well try to make it extraordinary and fun, right?

Skydiving anyone?

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General

LDAP Authentication For Squid

By on Friday, February 8, 2008

One of the things you want to do as you integrate your systems would be to have them authenticate from a common user base. That user base is usually an LDAP source, in my case Microsoft Active Directory (don’t say anything!!!). One of the systems you would want to use the common user base is your web proxy, Squid in my case. Here is how to integrate the two. It’s quite simple actually though, as usual, LDAP gave me a bit of a hard time.

First you need to configure Squid to use LDAP. Just add the following in your squid.conf:

auth_param basic program /usr/lib/squid/squid_ldap_auth -P -R -b “dc=your,dc=domain” -D “cn=user,cn=Users,dc=your,dc=domain” -w “password” -f “(&(objectClass=person)(sAMAccountName=%s))” yourldapserver

If you’re encountering problems add the -d parameter at the end and do a tail -f on /var/log/squid/cache.log Now that Squid can authenticate using LDAP, just add your ACLs in squid.conf:

acl youracl1 proxy_auth “/path/to/userlist”
http_access allow youracl1

That’s it!

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General

Rage

By on Wednesday, February 6, 2008

There are some people who really infuriate you. Like this one who makes you almost want to bash her face in. She talks like she knows it all and she won’t hear of anything you say. In fact, she’s insultingly dismissive when you try to talk to her.

But I did get to talk to her and it was surreal. She knows that a RAID server is about striping (all except RAID 1) and mirroring (RAID 1) but how could she think that RAID has something to do with her PC’s disk being mirrored to the RAID server? I tried to interrupt her and tell her that she was misinformed. Tried to tell her how it actually works. But she won’t have any of it. She even told me I wasn’t talking like an IT person. WTF?

And then she goes on about RAID being generally slower than non-RAID disks and that she shouldn’t be using it because it will slow her work down. To set the record straight, RAID 0 is faster. The other RAID levels are indeed slower but that because it’s the price you pay for data integrity. And no, your work is not slowed down because of using a RAID drive for backing-up. Not even if you wait for your backing-up to finish before going back to work. Sorry, you can’t use that as an excuse.

And finally she goes “Now you’re surprised at my IT knowledge.” I was incredulous. Yes, I’m surprised alright. Surprised at how someone could possibly get it oh so wrong. I mean really, how could you? Talk about the difference between knowing and understanding. As if that’s not bad enough, she goes on “I don’t even have a master’s degree.” Where the heck did that come from?!?

I felt like I was talking to a crazed spinster. Oh wait a minute! I was!

And I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way. If someone told you in front of other managers: “I’m willing to work with you on this, the question is do you?” Wouldn’t you feel the same? You would, right?

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General

Cloverfield

By on Sunday, February 3, 2008

Cloverfield is Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project. Essentially Godzilla’s attack on New York from the perspective of a group of friends or more accurately from the perspective of their old-model home video camera that severely lacks a shake-reduction/motion-stabilizer feature. Could have been an interesting story but the first-person perspective approach was dizzying and I don’t mean in a good way. Half of the time my eyes were closed trying to recover my sense. I should have listened to Eeya’s recommendation not to watch it. So maybe listen to mine: Don’t watch it if you are motion sickness prone!

Rating: 1/5

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