Year: 2007

Miscellaneous Sysadmin

I’m usu­ally the chief sysad­min in the fam­ily for the things like the print­er and the Win­dows boxes. In the interests of mak­ing it easi­er for myself in the future and hope­fully oth­ers, here are a couple of things I fixed this week.

For some reas­on the print­er, an old but still very pro­duct­ive HP Col­or Laser­jet 4550 that cost a hor­rendous amount when we first bought it back in 1998 or there­abouts, star­ted hav­ing con­nip­tions when we wanted to print out files. Mostly it blew up on Open­Of­fice or Microsoft Word doc­u­ments. The error was 49.4C04 Ser­vice Error. Pok­ing around on the web revealed a bunch of com­pletely use­less information:

Turn the com­puter off, wait a minute, turn it back on, this only ever hap­pens once and reboot­ing the print­er solves the problem
Wrong! The next thing I prin­ted caused one line of wing­dings to be prin­ted per page for many pages des­pite press­ing the can­cel but­ton; turn­ing the power off res­ul­ted only in paper jams and the same error message.
Caused by a defect­ive net­work card; replace
Not in this case; it’s a par­al­lel (LPT1) con­nec­tion dir­ectly into the net­worked PC
Caused by third-party memory; take it out
Again, not in this case since I nev­er bothered installing more memory

What did work was rein­stalling the drivers. Not the PCL 6 drivers that Win­dows tried to tell me to take, the PCL 5 drivers. Those PCL 5 drivers actu­ally work on our sys­tem, unlike the PCL 6 drivers.

The oth­er prob­lem that I found the solu­tion to was the size of the Norton Pro­tec­ted Recycle Bin. I installed this some years ago, have nev­er used it, and found that it kept grow­ing. And grow­ing. And would­n’t let itself be cleaned up, no mat­ter how often I told it to purge itself. So I unin­stalled and then tried to delete the recycler/nprotect dir­ect­ory files. No dice. The Norton web­site sug­ges­tion did­n’t work either (sounds weird, but it’s true); what did work was the sug­ges­tion I found online: rmdir /s \\?\C:\RECYCLER\NPROTECT. I sus­pect the Norton recycle bin will not be rein­stalled on my system.

Evacuating the A‑380

Tim poin­ted me at the video of the test run for evac­u­at­ing the A‑380 — it’s worth a look. I noticed, how­ever, that it was­n’t exactly a very real­ist­ic test. If you read the page rather than just leap­ing to the video, you’ll see the dis­cus­sion of an earli­er MD-11 test where a woman over the age of 45 tripped and fell; bear that in mind when you watch the A‑380 evac­u­ation video.

What struck me about the video was that the evac­u­ation was not only car­ried out in ideal con­di­tions, but the par­ti­cipants were also all ideal. All between the ages of roughly 20 and 45, all wear­ing com­fort­able trousers, none of them over­weight, none of them car­ry­ing or cajol­ing chil­dren or babies, none of them in wheel­chairs or con­nec­ted to oxy­gen sup­plies, none of them in high heels or flimsy dresses (or good suits, come to that). All were fit and able to jump on the slide without hes­it­a­tion. In a plane car­ry­ing over 850 people, what pro­por­tion will be in some way encumbered, and how big a dif­fer­ence does that make to the evacuation?

In a lot of ways the video reminded me of the films that are always being shot around Van­couver. One I saw being shot at Van­couver air­port had lots of extras tow­ing bags around pre­tend­ing to go some­where and looked unreal­ist­ic for the same reas­ons — no-one was over­weight, or eld­erly, or had babies or chil­dren, unlike every air­port I’ve been to recently.

Mother’s Day

Mother­’s Day, in its best mani­fest­a­tion, is a day to cel­eb­rate fam­ily and togeth­er­ness and chil­dren, as well as moth­ers. On this day though, it’s also good to spare a thought for those who would like to be moth­ers but can­’t be, for whatever reas­on, and for those who’ve lost their moth­ers, in whatever way. These cel­eb­rat­ory days aren’t unal­loyed joy for everyone.

Sun and OpenID

I’ve been heads-down on a pro­ject which was just announced (though not yet up and run­ning, so I’m still work­ing hard with the rest of the team on final details) about Sun put­ting up an Open­ID IdP (iden­tity pro­vider). The idea is that this IdP will veri­fy that the per­son using an Open­ID of the form http://openid.sun.com/username is a Sun employ­ee. Everything else is self-asser­ted, so people can use pseud­onyms and non-Sun email addresses, but they will be a Sun employ­ee. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see what hap­pens and how we can use it, once it’s live. That info will be pos­ted to developers.sun.com/identity as soon as the IdP is up and running.

I’ll be post­ing some tech­nic­al details of what I’ve been doing, and some tips and tricks to help someone else take the OpenSSO code and cus­tom­ize it; oth­ers on the team will be blog­ging about their pieces. 

It’s been a fun pro­ject and it will be even more fun see­ing what people do with it. We’re using the tag sun­open­id, or you can fol­low along on Plan­et Iden­tity.

Unthinking Sexism

When I was at uni­ver­sity in Auck­land, one guy said to me that he had­n’t real­ized he was sex­ist until he met me. I’ve always found dis­crim­in­a­tion based on the bio­lo­gic­al cap­ab­il­ity of bear­ing chil­dren to make about as much sense as dis­crim­in­a­tion based on eye col­our. It seems much of the world does­n’t agree, pre­fer­ring pre­judging abil­it­ies to the hard work of fig­ur­ing out real, rather than pre­sumed, cap­ab­il­it­ies. A lot of dis­crim­in­a­tion is simply not think­ing, accept­ing the movie or tele­vi­sion view of the world and the roles that women and men (or for that mat­ter, people not of west­ern european extrac­tion) have in it.

There’s quite a lot of sex­ism in tech­no­logy. One woman I know hates start­ing a new job, since, as she says, it takes six months to con­vince the guys I know how to turn on the light. Shelagh Cal­la­han told me of an exper­i­ence she had doing booth duty at a con­fer­ence. She was start­ing to explain some­thing to this guy when he inter­rup­ted her, said she did­n’t know enough and he knew Dr Cal­la­han, the lead­ing expert on this top­ic, and he (Dr Cal­la­han) had a dif­fer­ent opin­ion. At which someone stand­ing next to him sug­ges­ted he look at Shelagh’s name badge. I’ve had my fair share of con­des­cend­ing males assume I would­n’t under­stand what they’re talk­ing about or be able to con­trib­ute any­thing of value to a tech­nic­al dis­cus­sion. One could argue that most women would­n’t under­stand a tech­nic­al dis­cus­sion, but that’s no excuse for the assumption. 

Of course, this prob­lem isn’t lim­ited to tech­no­logy. A female law­yer friend of mine takes some pains to dress dif­fer­ently to the way sec­ret­ar­ies dress, for example, so it’s clear she’s a law­yer and not a sec­ret­ary. She says it’s been inter­est­ing watch­ing the devel­op­ment of some men, who at uni­ver­sity assumed every­one was a pro­fes­sion­al and treated them all equally, but once out in the leg­al work­force star­ted treat­ing men and women dif­fer­ently, assum­ing women were sec­ret­ar­ies and men were law­yers. With the large num­ber of women gradu­at­ing from law school these days that should change. Wheth­er the prac­tice of push­ing women law­yers off into fam­ily court (“you’re so good at being under­stand­ing”) where they earn less than crim­in­al court law­yers changes soon is an inter­est­ing question.

There are lots of aspects to sex­ism, quite a few where people don’t under­stand why I find them irrit­at­ing, or even upset­ting. As an example, send­ing mail addressed to Mr and Mrs {hus­band’s name}. Hav­ing people assume mar­ried people share a sur­name is not unreas­on­able, but assum­ing we also share a first name is. To me it smacks of Vic­tori­an-era treat­ment of women, where they were an append­age of the hus­band, not beings with sep­ar­ate iden­tit­ies. I guess it seems petty to worry about these sorts of things when women in so many coun­tries have it so much worse, but on the oth­er hand sex­ism cre­ates an envir­on­ment that is not wel­com­ing. If you don’t feel your pres­ence is val­ued in a soci­ety, then you’re not going to be a full part of that society.

Sleeping Babies

We’ve had prob­lems with get­ting the baby (now 10 months) to sleep prop­erly dur­ing the day, and when she also star­ted wak­ing more often dur­ing the night I decided I had to fig­ure out an answer. Our first child slept read­ily, took sched­ule vari­ations in his stride, and so it was a big shock when our second child was com­pletely dif­fer­ent. We tried put­ting her on vari­ous routines, but could­n’t find one that worked until recently (yay! sleep!). Giv­en that lots of searches on my blog are about how to get babies to sleep, and the vast num­ber of books out there on the sub­ject, I fig­ure some oth­er people might be inter­ested in the sub­ject. The rest of you will undoubtedly have already tuned out by now.

I got heaps of books out of the lib­rary, but can only recom­mend two. Some of the books seemed to be writ­ten along the lines of “this worked for me, I don’t know why, maybe it will work for you too” and per­son­ally I prefer an approach that has a little more research to it. I’m not going to talk about the books I read and did­n’t like since oth­er people may find them use­ful; I’m just going to review the two books I liked best.

If your baby is young, you could try The Hap­pi­est Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Cry­ing and Help Your Baby Sleep Longer, which looked like it had some use­ful tips. I would­n’t both­er with it if your baby is more than about 6 months old though.

The book I liked a lot, and even bought, is Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, which con­tains a lot of inform­a­tion, includ­ing some research into how long chil­dren sleep at vari­ous ages, a strict routine (which really suits our baby but would­n’t have been neces­sary for our first child), and dis­cus­sions about what to do as the child gets older in terms of chan­ging the sleep and nap routine. A lot of people may find the advice to let the baby cry harsh — you do have to be able to recog­nise the vari­ous types of cry your baby makes so you can respond to fear or dis­com­fort while ignor­ing the baby when she’s annoyed. It worked very well for us (at least so far and we’ve been on the sched­ule for a week) and we not only have our happy baby back, I’m also catch­ing up on sleep. Get­ting up at 6:30 am every morn­ing is a bit of a change, but not being woken up at 11 pm, 2 am, and 5 am more than makes up for it.