Filler

Yesterday was supposed to be a simple task: wield the eight hangers I made yesterday. They are simple hangers, 6×2 by 1/8, angled at the top with 2 3/8 inch holes to mount to the rafters.

The task for yesterday: dig the I-Beam out of the snow, put it on sawhorses, do a quick prep on the top surface, and then wield the eight hangers at 16 inches on center.

At the start of the day, it was 1° outside and in the machine shop. It got up to almost 20°. My office started at a toasty 50° and was up to nearly 60° by 1000.

Today it will be in the upper 20s, with snow. I’m going to try and make room for the beam in the shop and get this wielded up. If I can get this done, then I’m 90% of the way to completing the hut for the winter.

The following tasks are to install the window with my son’s help, get the rest of the hut insulated. Thats only a few wall bays and the ceiling.

The big issue is that I need to fix the wick on the KW-24 heater.

Wish me luck and I hope you are having a comfortable day.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the snowblower died. I need to replace the carb. This happened just before the skys dumped 8-12 inches of the white evil on us.

Feast time. We spent the entire day preparing, and then people showed up. Then more people showed up.

I hope you are having a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend.

My brother-in-law is an addict. Drugs and alcohol. There is nothing he wouldn’t sell to get booze or drugs. For a while his scam was to con his sister into believing he was starving; she would order him a pizza. He would then sell slices at $2 a slice.

She bought the pizza for $25 delivered. He ate one of the pieces, sold the other 7 and got something from it.

He sold canned goods. He sold his mattress. He sold everything he was given, then begged for more. Always preying on his mother’s and sister’s sympathy. For his mom, it was cleanliness. He would con her into paying for laundry and clothes. For his sister, it was food. With his daughters, it was something else.

Of course you can sell your EBT card. My BIL sold his, many times.

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.