A man flying in a hot air balloon suddenly realizes he’s lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts to get directions, “Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?”
The man below says: “Yes, you’re in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field.”
“You must work in Information Technology,” says the balloonist.
“I do” replies the man. “How did you know?”
“Well,” says the balloonist, “everything you have told me is technically correct, but It’s of no use to anyone.”
The man below replies, “You must work in management.”
“I do” replies the balloonist, “But how’d you know?”
“Well”, says the man, “you don’t know where you are, or where you’re going, you expect me to be able to help. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault.”
Management
Mexican Fisherman
An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied, “only a little while.”
The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?
The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.
The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”
The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”
“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
Arduino network support sounder
This project needs properly documenting, but in short it’s a Diecimila with a network module a 6V buzzer and tri-colour LED connected to PWM which provides an audible and visible alert upon the receipt of specific new emails.
I run Ubuntu and Evolution mail on a wireless laptop which has a filter configured to pipe all incoming mail to a bash script. The bash script then passes the email content over to PHP (where I’m most familiar) and parses it for support@ and other references. The PHP script upon triggering a ruleset visits the network connected Arduino using curl, sounds the buzzer for one second and phases the PWM LED through Red and Purple to provide a visual alert before reverting back to buzzer off and blue state. It’s pretty basic but it means I don’t need to be anywhere near the laptop to be able to jump on a support ticket.
Images Broken! Comment if you want them
CentOS 5.3 Smokeping 2.4.2 Install (quick)
Install the latest smokeping (without distributed polling) on a virgin Centos 5.3 minimal box… It’s probably the best (free) tool for monitoring network latency at a glance.
Examples: Pipe Ten Derby and Pipe Ten Sheffield.
Read More
CentOS 5.3 Zabbix 1.6.5 Install (quick)
A quick reference for a from-scratch Zabbix install on CentOS 5.3. We’ve used Zabbix for the past 3 or 4 years and just implementing 1.6.5 across multiple Xen nodes for funky distributed monitoring.
http.sh
I’ve faffed with this one and poorly hacked some jquery and facebook connect examples along with trusty ol’ PHP on the front-end, on the back-end is a nice c scheduler engine which seems to be performing extremely well during testing.
Just Feckin/Friggin/Fucking Google It
JFGIT.com was just a quick domain registration, modification of the google home page and a bit of mod_rewrite. It’s intended for the ‘education’ of people too lazy to use the wonderful search tool called Google.
How many MB are there in a GB? duh, http://jfgit.com/how+many+MB+in+a+GB/ or http://jfgit.com/clean/how+many+MB+in+a+GB/ if you prefer.
Where do petrol price sites get their data?
After an IRC conversation about GPS, we randomly got onto a discussion about finding the cheapest petrol prices and where those services get the data.
There were a few ideas: Read More
Ardunio Visible Distance Detector
I’ve had the Arduino Mini Pro for about 2 months now, but as I forgot to order/have some sort of USB FTDI converter I’ve not been able to play with it. As part of another planned project I intend to use the SRF02 ultrasonic sensor to detect and alert upon someone getting too close to the device, so this is just a bit of testing really. Read More
Ardunio Visible Distance Detector v1.0 snippet
/*
This code receives input from the SRF02 ultrasonic and maps the values to RGB outputs to a tri-colour LED.
*/ Read More
