Filler

I’ve been working with Grok from xAI. It seems to be better than most of the others I’ve tried. It has done a good job of helping me debug complex systems.

I wouldn’t trust it to provide instructions to pour piss out of a boot.

I was working with it for the configuration of the Amanda backup system. I’m integrating it with my Ceph cluster. While it did an “ok” job of configuring Ceph, for Amanda it was entirely wrong.

Even though it asked, and I provided version numbers, it gave instructions for a configuration method that hasn’t been used in years.

I still don’t have a working Amanda configuration, but I have ideas on how to get there.

Because I’m not a great writer, I use every tool at my disposal to write better. I asked Grok to analyze my article about Charlie.

It insisted that Charlie was still alive and that I was writing some “wish-fulfillment” fictional scenario. I told it to prove that Charlie had been murdered. It did its thing and told me that Charlie had indeed been killed on the 10th.

In the very next prompt, it again insisted that it was a “fictional fact” and that it was merely “alleged” that Charlie had been killed.

One of the things to know about AIs is that the more they need to analyze, the longer it takes and the more “expensive” it becomes. This means that they have a memory or token limit.

This leads to article truncation when it is asked to retrieve web pages.

It told me my article ended abruptly and that it was willing to help write the ending. When it was instructed to print my original article, it showed me the truncated version. When I told it to fetch the complete article, that it had to be a complete <div>, it said it had fetched the article, then proceeded to write its version of the end of the article.

When asked to provide Obama’s statement on the death of Charlie, it showed me three or for articles that only short quoted Obama, leaving out all the context.

AI is an amazing tool. It is still at the verify then verify again stage.

Story Time

I was working with a client on a Magento site. This client was a “digital agency.” They specialized in throwing up WordPress sites for $1500 or so.

They could do this by outsourcing most of the work to an Indian firm.

The CEO was up to give us a talk on using Indian outsourcing. He was very proud of himself for figuring out that these Indian tech firms will claim they can do any technical thing, even if they have no idea what they are doing. You only know if they are any good at the task after you’ve invested in the firm.

He had solved this by going to India and personally investigating a dozen different Indian tech firms before deciding on the one that actually knew how to do WordPress sites.

He had great success using them.

He had asked this same firm, “Do you do Magento?” They had answered in the affirmative. I was the unhappy recipient of their “product”.

My question to that CEO: “Did you ask them if they can do a tech thing? “Yes.” “Do Indian tech firms always say ‘yes’ to that question?” “Yes.” “Did you violate your own rule about trusting Indian tech firms?” “Yes.”

My point is that you can find an AI that does a fantastic job on a task. They might produce great results every day for a month. That doesn’t mean you can trust the next answer it gives. It is just as likely to make it up or lie to you as give you a good, correct answer.

My office chair has been failing for about a year now. The gas tube gave up the fight. The left armrest had cracked. And the entire thing had become one uncomfortable mess.

As somebody who sits in front of his computer for many hours per week, this was unacceptable. Worse, it was painful to sit for more than about an hour. After an hour, the discomfort was making it difficult to program or get other work done.

I bought a new chair. I’ve spent the last couple of hours sitting in it. There are different issues, but mostly it is me getting used to the new chair. It is nice to have my eyes at the correct level for my screens.

Auburn Duck Race

This is an event that Ally has been attending for a few years. She dresses in period garb, does a cooking demo, and sells her cookbooks. Normally I drive her out to the event, drop her and her gear off, head home, and then go and pick her up after the event.

We were both uncomfortable with her being in a crowd after what happened to Charlie, so I went along and stayed. SIG P365, two spare magazines, truck gun briefcase.

Nothing happened; we had fun, plenty of people, some book sales. I got to see one of my clients in person and met his family.

Shit Talk from Leftist

I had mentioned to Ally that the amount of Trump and right bashing on the Reddits had gone down. I spoke too soon. It is still full of hate and evil.

She’s right! Donnie started this!

J6 was the most violent thing in living memory. That’s the problem; MAGA lives in a completely different reality from what is actually going on. They don’t have the mental capacity to apply critical thinking skills, they just ride on hatred and lies.

I think I’m going to have a “speak out” day once a week.

The project list keeps growing.

• Mud the hallway so the wife can paint it after it’s been stripped to the drywall (and then some).
• Finish building the joiner’s chest. This has subprojects:
  • Finish planing the first end to thickness and avoid knots in the future.
  • Sharpen the plane irons for the new planes
  • Finish smoothing and jointing the boards on hand to create the top, front, back, and other side.
    • Repair the broken saw handle.
    • Take the handle off the saw panel.
    • Clean the saw panel.
    • Sharpen the saw.
    • Preserve the saw.
    • Reattach the handle.
    • Repeat for the crosscut saw.
  • Get the rest of the lumber needed
  • Finish the required sides and top.
  • Smooth and plane to thickness the bottom boards.
  • Rabbet the bottom boards (learn how to cut nice rabbets.
• Fill the joiner’s chest in an organized way.
• Build a new 6 board chest for Ally to use in reenacting.
• Build a couple of stools.
• Create a new nut and screw for the leg vise at the Fort.
• Install and configure a new Ceph node to replace an existing node.
• Upgrade the Ceph cluster.
• Build, populate, and configure a new Ceph server.
• Make the new “managed” switch do switching stuff.
• Move the current switch from the internal net to the DMZ
• Loose more weight
• Exercise more.

Boring, but it just keeps growing, and after my wife reads it, I expect her to add to it.

Got busy and forgot to write last night. Take some memes as an apology and checkout Giga Based Dad’s thread for more.

Yes, I took them all from him.

Today I was waiting for clients to get back to me. While I waited, I started installing OpenStack.

So far it has been going well. A few typos slowed things down. Errors are not always clear, but I am now at the point of installing neutron

This is the scary part. The terrifying part.

Neutron interfaces with Open Virtual Networking (OVN). This could be magical, or it could break everything.

OVN sits on top of Open vSwitch, providing configuration.

The gist is that you install OVS, then you add configuration options to the OVS database. This configuration instructs OVN how to talk to its databases.

Once OVN starts talking to its databases, it performs changes in the OVS database. Those changes affect how OVS routes packets.

The physical network is broken into subnets. This is a requirement for high-availability networking. As links go up and down, the network routes around the failures.

On the other hand, many of the tools I use prefer to be on a single network; subnets increase the complexity greatly. Because of this, I created overlay networks. One for block storage, one for compute nodes, and one for virtual machines.

Neutron could modify the OVN or OVS that brings my overlay networks down.

So I’m well into this terrifying process, and the power goes out. It was only out for a few minutes, but that was enough.

The network came back to life.

All but two servers came back to life. One needs a BIOS change to make it come up after a power failure.

One decided that the new drive must be a boot drive, so it tried to boot from that, failed, and just stopped.

All of that put me behind in research, so nothing interesting in the 2A front to report, even though there are big things happening.

The number of moving parts in a data center is almost overwhelming.

I fought networks today.

They won this battle.

I forgot to write.

See you all later today

There was a time when I would stand up at a whiteboard and sketch an entire campus network from memory, including every network subnet, router, and switch.

Today, not only can I no longer hold all of that in my head, my whiteboards no longer exist.

In the first office I rented, I installed floor-to-ceiling whiteboards on all walls. I could write or draw on any surface.

I can remember walking into Max’s office with an idea, asking for permission to erase his whiteboard, and then drawing out or describing the idea or project. Maybe 30 minutes of drawing and discussing.

What surprised me was asking to erase my chicken scratches months later and being told, “No,” because they were still using it.

Regardless, today I need to draw serious network maps.

I have multiple routers between multiple subnets. Managed and unmanaged switches. Gateways and VPNs. I have an entire virtual network layered over the top of all of that to make different services appear to be on the same subnet.

Not to mention the virtual private cloud(s) that I run, the internal, non-routing networks.

It is just to much for me to do in my head.

Oh, here’s one that’s currently messing with me. I have a VPC. It has multiple gateways allowing access residing on different chassis in different subnets. I can’t figure out how to make it work today. Even though it was working yesterday.

I’ll be messing with networks for the next week to get things stabalized.

Last week’s project was to make a shooting board.

I had all the stock prepared and had started assembling it when I realized that the screws were too long. They poked out into the part my plane slides down.

This is not good. The project is on hold until I receive more screws.

A Joiner’s Box

This is a simple box to hold my tools. It is about 38″ wide, 15″ deep, and 13″ tall. I think. The design calls for a simple till, an internal box for small parts. I think I will do the more period-correct and have two sliding trays the length of the box.

I brought in my first glued-up panel for my wife to fuss over and tell me nice things. Ego stroking for sure.

She came clean and told me that it was just a board to her, not really worthy of praise.

This led me to think about that simple panel.

To get to the point where I could make that panel, I needed to build my workbench. This was a big build; it is done.

I needed work holding for the bench. I installed a leg vise and drilled holes for hold-downs. I made a batten to hold boards in place as they are planed. This was more than a bit of work.

The first step of making a panel is to be able to cut it to size. My skills at handsawing have gotten good enough that this is no longer an issue for right-angle cuts. It is fast enough that I’m not interested in using a power tool.

Next, the stock needs to be planed smooth and flat. My smoothing plane made short work of the smoothing, and my jack plane got the boards flat. I was able to quickly check for twist and flatness with my winding sticks and a straight edge.

The first board I attempted to smooth and flatten took me hours, and I did a poor job. Today it went quickly, with low effort.

That is because I’ve spent far too many hours sharpening plane irons and chisels. My slow-speed grinder now puts a 26-27° bevel on an iron or chisel; the three stones then bring that to 25°, and the strop polishes the bevel to a mirror-like finish. It is to the point where I only need to use the fine, extra-fine, and strop to bring an edge back to razor sharpness.

You can hear and feel when the blade is sharp. If I would only put the time into sharpening the irons of all the planes every day before starting, my life would actually be better and easier.

Even with a sharp iron, you need to know how to adjust the plane. Before I started this journey, I didn’t know how to do that. My planes fought me constantly. Now they are a pleasure to use.

Besides knowing how to tune, sharpen, and adjust your planes, you need to know how to use them. It is to the point where the process of smoothing and flattening a piece of stock is easy. I start with the #4, make it smooth, and move to the #5 Jack plane for the flat. Using the Jack plane at an angle to present a shearing action also makes the boards flat from side to side.

It only takes 5 to 10 minutes to make a board smooth and flat.

The next part of stock prep is to square an edge. Again I start with the #4, knock down the high spots until I have a smooth edge from end to end, and then I switch to the #5 again.

Checking for squareness is easy but humbling. Except that more and more often the edge is square after the Jack plane.

I’ve been playing with the Jointer plane. It is a huge, heavy, and long plane. The iron is wide enough to cover 2+ inches of wood in a single pass.

For my first panel, I clamped the finished faces together with the squared edges aligned with each other. Less than 4 minutes in the vise with the Jack and Jointer, and the edges are jointed.

The glue-up went very smoothly. There was a very thin bead of glue that came out of the glueline, as wanted. The final product is pretty darn good for my first glue-up in many years.

After the glue had dried for a few hours, I took the clamps off and gave it the once-over. It is not flat enough to plane the finished surface, so I worked on the back surface.

I think that this will be the last panel that I glue up that is full thickness. From now on, I’ll either rough plane the back surface or feed it through the (cheating) bandsaw to take 3/16 off the back face to reduce the amount of chips I make.

So that very unimpressive 12×13 panel represents an entire series of new skills. I’m looking forward to doing still more.

A few years ago, Miggy told us the tale of getting fit. He changed his diet, he added exercise, he did more, he ate less, and he weighed less.

At the time he was going through this, I was feeling pretty fat. Being fat made it difficult to want to do many things. I was fighting depression.

As part of the process of getting fit, I went to a local Zumba studio to use their treadmill. I started walking. Then I started walking rapidly. After a few months, I was actually jogging.

Unfortunately, my knee started to give me trouble. My doctor gave me a choice: jog and get a knee replacement or find something else to do.

I settled on a recumbent exercise bike. It helped. Then the panic hit. Things got bad.

Just as my doctor told me to stop jogging, my weight had plateaued at 285.

At my last doctor’s visit, the office scale read 312. This included full gear minus my EDC pistol. So spare magazines… Never , I’m making excuses for that very high number.

My morning weigh-in for the same day was 303.

Monday morning, my weight was 295. My weight loss for the week was 4 pounds, but I’m averaging about a pound a week.

For exercise I still have the exercise bike, but spending 2 or 3 hours using handsaws and hand planes to make things seems to be exercise as well.

I’m in this for the long run. In 1976 I was pleased to celebrate the 200th birthday of my country. I intend to celebrate the 300th as well.

If you ask a woodworker if they have enough clamps, the answer is always “no.” You always need at least one more clamp.

I’ve become that woodworker. I don’t have enough clamps. So I make do.

My glue of choice is Titebond III. This has a working set time of 15 minutes, it is an extremely strong adhesive, it is water resistant, and it is “easy” to work with. It comes in sizes ranging from your standard Elmer’s glue bottle to 55-gallon drums.

My local hardware and lumber store only had it in the pint size. I’ll be ordering more online shortly.

What I learned today is that I have not been using enough glue in my past glue ups.

Yesterday I went through almost half that bottle with an 11×48 three-board lamination. And I didn’t use enough.

The first board didn’t get enough glue, but I think it will be fine for what it is. The problem I ran into was spreading the glue. I had quickly made a spreading stick, but it just wasn’t working. I switched to using my finger and got better results, but I almost ran out of time working the first board in the sun.

Even a thin layer of glue is more than you expect.

I also took a page from the machine shop and looked up the specifics on the glue. It requires 100 to 150 PSI to properly work.

For those keeping track, that means we need to be providing over 65,000 lbs of pressure for proper use. A good clamp will provide 2000 lbs of pressure. This means that I should have been using 30 clamps on that one glue up.

I hate mathing.

Have a fantastic day; music tomorrow and SCOTUS on Wednesday.