Author: Daniel

Sysadmin turned bearpuncher. Whereabouts unknown.

April 7, 2016

That script ain’t right

So I have a code offering today, which I’m calling DangItBobby.ps1. It lets you remotely disable the NIC of a computer given only the username that is logged in. In essence, when in the middle of a ransomware infection, and you see that the owner of all the files is changing to Bobby, you run the script and provide credentials of a local admin account. Then you tell it you’re looking for Bobby, it’ll check AD to make sure that’s a valid account, then check with WMI to see if there’s an explorer.exe process running under Bobby’s context on each computer, which you can narrow down with the first few characters of what the workstation might be. If they’re logged into multiple workstations it’ll let you choose which one to work with. Then it’ll give you a list of NICs and a little information about each one, and let you choose which one to disable.

I hope I don’t need to tell you to be careful running this.… (More) “That script ain’t right”

Nerd Stuff Work

April 5, 2016

The more you know, the less you say.

Pleased to report that Windows 10 hasn’t reduced the Surface Pro 3 to smoldering rubble. In fact, it’s quite a happy upgrade so far. The Verizon USB card seems much happier in 10 than it did in 8.1, and the applications all came over flawlessly so far, quite a feat considering it went all the way from NT6 to NT10. (That’s nerd sarcasm, by the way.)

I was mildly amused by being notified that I’d earned some money from Amazon Affiliates. That would be from my I Miss Grantland project, which runs ad-free and has a page where you can buy books on Amazon from writers featured on the site. The site has been up for about 3 months and has managed something like 104,000 hits. Out of those, about 132 hits were to said book page, representing about 7,000 clickable links. 88 clicks were made (a ~1.3% clickthrough rate) and 7 items were ordered, representing Amazon cutting me a check for almost four dollars. It’s seriously a good thing that the whole thing is automatic and able to run on my shared hosting account, so my only expense is the domain renewal.

It’s not hard to understand why so many sites are fucking littered with ads. All that said, I still run an ad-blocker. Not because I feel people shouldn’t get paid for creating content, but because the current system is a mess and more than a little insecure. E.g., malvertising. It’s one of the great unsolved puzzles of the Web. For a long time, Flash was the enabler of the worst offenders. Now it might be JavaScript. A simple, if regressive, solution would be to standardize on text-based ads, with the use of a 1px transparent image for basic tracking for per-impression based ads. Image-based ads … (More) “The more you know, the less you say.”

Life Nerd Stuff Work

April 5, 2016

BTYBTL6?

Well, I feel quite a bit better today. I don’t know if I was fighting some kind of illness yesterday or just didn’t get enough sleep, or perhaps the anticholinergic wore me out, but I spent most of yesterday in an exhausted fog. Felt rather useless at work to say the least. I’d have started to really worry about myself if I had to miss today, not because I might be sick, but because that would mean I’d missed every other Tuesday for the last 8 weeks, and that’s suspicious.

After some discussion on my fears, however unlikely it may be, that we would buy a house and then I would not be retained at work, I think we’re going to hold off on the whole process until the probationary period is over around Thanksgiving. It also lets us keep saving up money which is wise, if we can do it for a year it’s probably going to put us in a position to pay off the credit card debt, maybe pay off Diana’s car, and put us in better shape overall.

There was also some discussion on future plans involving spending money, and how I was a little put out that while I’m bringing in a lot of money, I’ve been really good in not spending it because the house was coming quickly. However, there were still projects coming up that didn’t involve me getting to buy those things that I want. I’m oversimplifying but to Diana’s credit, she heard me out and understood. So she wants me to get the list together of the stuff I’ve had in mind to upgrade.

I’ve been wanting to get back to other forms of media creation, in particular either a podcast, a radio show, or a screencast. My concern is the … (More) “BTYBTL6?”

Gaming

April 4, 2016

FIFA 15: Get Good or Blame The Camera

So after lamenting the sometimes-broken play of FIFA 13, I decided to pick up 15 for $20 on Origin. EA Sports titles that are on annual cycles can have surprisingly high variance year-to-year, even when they obviously share some (or a lot of) code. I played it most of the weekend and it’s mostly good with a few head-scratching changes in there as well.

Places where 15 is better than 13

The ball behaves more like a ball would, and less like a magnet. The ball physics and illustration of spin are significantly improved. In 13, the odds of getting a successful tackle in were extremely slim. The ball would stick to the foot of the opposition like it was on a string, but you would usually not have the same good fortune, even if you are covering the ball. Now the occasional reckless touch will put the ball a little too far in front, leaving you or your team a chance at poking it away cleanly or, failing that, sliding in and actually having a chance at catching the ball before the player.

Speaking of slides, they’re viable again, and the physics are somewhat improved. I almost said “much improved”, but there’s some good and some bad. To the good, they behave largely as expected, and are very dependent on timing, as they are in real life. Also, players have a chance to jump over the slide, or keep their footing and get the advantage from the referee. To the bad, the slow-motion replays will show all the wonkiness this game engine generates with falling players. It’s not uncommon to see a player tumble over a sliding defender, and right before they land on their back, they gain altitude in mid-air, rotate another 180 degrees, and land on their … (More) “FIFA 15: Get Good or Blame The Camera”

SCP Wiki

April 1, 2016

A Modest Shitpost Proposal (Or, Shitposal)

I’m blown away by the vigor that the SCP community jumped on the Crack Fiction Contest with. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s allowing for low-level funny posts, or because of the super-short notice, less than a day to go from title to execution. Whatever the reason, there’s a lot of latent excitement there. I am thus wanting to seriously consider a spin-off wiki that does nothing but short-term events, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, these contests are incredibly disruptive when we do them on the main wiki. It positively fills up the newly created queue, drowning out unrelated mainlist entries and tales, drowning out requests for critique, and generally derails the site for the duration of the contest.

(Note, I am not advocating that there should never be contests on the main site, just that when they occur pretty much nothing else can.)

Second, some people just work better with a writing prompt, and there’s really no limit to how the prompts can work. It will result in an altogether different content then what’s on the main wiki, and logically they should probably be separated as people looking for one type of content aren’t necessarily interested in the other. This is a similar reasoning to the aborted attempt to run regular fuel contests on /r/scp which would become a writing prompt, ultimately axed because it would be too disruptive to do on the main site regularly (see the first point) and Reddit wasn’t a good place to host the content.

Third, it will give me a good way to get live Admin-level access to a working, active wikidot wiki to better build out PF, should the time come that we actually incorporate. I have put out there that I will not continue development of Project Foundation until … (More) “A Modest Shitpost Proposal (Or, Shitposal)”

DanielTharp.com Life Work

April 1, 2016

High-Speed Rustbucket

It’s a thoroughly nasty rain/mist/drizzle combo outside, a weather pattern more suited to Kentucky teenage depression in October than April in the desert. The music shuffle today has given an equally somber song to set the mood.

We’ve made it about 10 miles north and it’s turned to snow. I’m altogether not looking forward to what this has turned into when we get to Santa Fe County. In like a lion, out like a lamb? Not quite. The fog pattern is an unusual one, I’ve got what I estimate to be 15 miles of visibility except for Albuquerque which looks to be positively covered in fog, a cloud ending abruptly at the foothills of Sandia Peak and about a thousand feet tall. It looks for all the world like someone poured a giant bucket of dry ice on the city.

I’m mostly at peace going into today, I busted my ass yesterday and today is Read-Only Friday. I’m not looking to be a hero today, being a hero is not making anyone work this weekend. I can work in the lab, I can do documentation, I can follow up on quotes, I can do my weekly review, I can plan new security initiatives, there’s a lot of stuff to be done that doesn’t involve poking production systems.

I’m surprisingly awake today. I think it’s a combination of “yay friday”, realizing I had slept in and had to rush, and more upbeat music. I think I’ll start doing this a little more often, the embedding of songs as I’m listening to them. Last.fm only updates when I get home and run iTunes, which isn’t terribly often, and I like the look of them.

I’m considering a redesign of the blog, nothing major, but widening the main column a bit, … (More) “High-Speed Rustbucket”

Work

March 31, 2016

RIP Tickets

The goal today was to knock down my tickets by half. I thought I remembered having 13 to tackle, so seven done today was the goal. It turns out I only started with 11, but three more were added today. End result is the same, seven was the number to hit. I did not get seven.

I got ten. Of the remaining four, two are wrapping up testing before going to change management, one is waiting on customer confirmation, and one was on hold as the customer was out until tomorrow.

I will say, it makes the day fly by. This is the second day in a row I seriously considered staying late to finish up just one more thing, but it’s harder to justify when there’s no overtime pay. But I needed this, needed the pressure and the expectations. It feels good to remember there’s that extra gear of productivity available, that I can do solid work on short notice. It feels good to be fully engaged, to bring my mind to bear on a problem and tear the problem down. It makes me feel in rare form. Is it sustainable? I have no idea. It’s usually not needed for long periods of time. If I had to guess, it might just be sustainable. I don’t feel burned out, I feel invigorated. But that’s not really the point of a lot of sysadmin jobs. There doesn’t need to be 110% effort and focus around the clock, there are times when that mental recharge period is necessary.

In any case, I feel like I’m earning my pay. Part of the reason I was selected for this job was the generalist background; since the position needs to know Linux, Windows, and networking, and also be able to communicate and collaborate with … (More) “RIP Tickets”

Gaming Life

March 31, 2016

mrognin

It took about 20 minutes before I realized I was on the train. Having a hard time waking up, not to mention a delightful sore throat and post-nasal drip. I’m inclined to blame the cold snap that’s going on right now, though. At least nobody’s at the office to infect.

My goal today is to close half my tickets, so 7. I think I’ll be able to manage that, I like the odds. More meetings today that are tangentially related to work; I would much prefer to get the notes later on how it went. Hopefully they’ll be understanding of that.

I’ve been playing a fair amount of FIFA 13, I mentioned a few days ago. Despite their best intentions, and some talented programmers, the “be the goalkeeper” mode in Career mode is terribly boring. Reducing the chess battle to a circle you should stand in, using one analog stick to abstract away all your movement? Both boring and frustrating. I was defending in a crowded 6-yard box, an attacker gets the ball around the penalty mark and gets turned toward me. Due to the way people are positioned I can tell if he shoots it’s gonna be to my bottom-right corner, but I need to hold my spot until he winds up because there’s another attacker to my left. He winds up. In real life, the motion would be a quick wide step to my right and fall forward onto the shot. What happens in the game is I run to the right, I’m in the path of the shot, and then I dive to the right, to get out of the way of the shot. Rage.

And if the one analog stick is too much control, you can hold down LB instead and the guy automatically positions … (More) “mrognin”

Work

March 30, 2016

Tempo can catch these hands.

As it turns out, I was well within my rights to be apprehensive about today. It wasn’t just because it was crazy busy, it was more the urgency of the matters at hand to fix, with regularly interspersed meetings that could honestly be done some other time when my hair isn’t on fire.

Oh, Meraki can catch these hands too. I’ve got a new access point deployed at the opposite end of the state, configured identically to other working networks. People can associate with it, and get to the internet. I can see it from the cloud dashboard and even run packet captures on it. But the AP won’t sync with Meraki’s fucking cloud to get config changes. There’s nothing in the way here! A client on the Meraki can get to the same IP that the AP says it cannot. There’s a part of me that would really like to bring the Cisco rep in, bring the Meraki AP in, and set the AP on fire in front of the guy. Then go Ubiquiti for wireless.

Pain in the ass.

I think what really bothers me about it is that this wasn’t on my horizon of “things that could absolutely wrong,” as Meraki APs have pretty much always been plug-and-play devices, or very nearly. What I was worried about today going in, was a stream of tickets related to a LOB application called Tempo. Out of 13 tickets in my queue right now, 11 are related to LOB applications. Why are they in my fucking queue, you might ask? Because they aren’t working, and they’re accessed via Terminal Server. QED. End-user can’t print? Server problem. Application installed locally to the workstation and acting up? Server…problem..? No. Coming to a consensus on who gets what problem this decades-old pile of … (More) “Tempo can catch these hands.”

Life Work

March 30, 2016

Mother Nature is on some bullshit today.

There’s no good reason for it to be snowing this late into March. Not in New Mexico. It is rather tranquil, watching a bunch of snow-covered roofs zip by to the strings of See You On The Other Side.

This morning I’m trying WriteMonkey, which they affectionately call ‘Zenware.’ There’s plenty to play with from a customization standpoint. But somehow these distraction-free workspaces seem to always use way more RAM than they have any reason to. It’s using 100MB of RAM just for gray text on a black background, a word count, and the clock. It has a little button that randomly picks the color scheme. It’s kind of fun, until you get yellow on hot pink and your eyeballs fall out.

I’m a little pensive this morning. I’m concerned about how shorthanded things will be today. I wonder if I gave someone good advice yesterday, I was certainly trying to. My mind is generally sort of scattered, and that’s usually a good indication that I need to do a weekly review outside of my normal schedule of Fridays at 2:30. Come to think of it, it was a half-day on Friday so I missed it last week. I won’t want to feel this scattered all the way to Friday, so it’s something to be done rather early today.

I need to do better with GTD in general, I’ve fallen out of that capturing habit. It’s not for a lack of ability or resources, just lack of effort. It needs a little refocusing every now and then. Once you stop habitually capturing everything, it stops being effective as a tool to enable a clear mind, a mind like water.

The theme lately in writing has been accountability, and there’s not a significant difference between holding myself accountable at work versus … (More) “Mother Nature is on some bullshit today.”