The Angst of Internet Oh-Nine

What do you do when you realize you spent hours wasted on Facebook and other social networks? You make the most of the experience by drawing a cartoon about it, of course!

I must say I am not that much into Twitter. While I did start out on Twitter I found the "conversations" there too messy. I don't see how people follow hundreds of people with Twitter. I only followed a handful and had to drop some people who tweeted too often. I still use the web browser instead of some fancy Twitter client so I don't see threaded messages. I prefer to see a variety of tweets, so if one person monopolizes my Twitter page, off he goes.

Plurk, on the other hand, keeps messages threaded so that you see both the original posts and replies to them. How logical! And no need to do @ and #, just address the person's name and it's automatically highlighted. I even use Plurk to update my FB and Twitter status now. You just have to watch your karma, a point system that probably doesn't mean anything, but fun to maintain. Don't plurk for a day or two and it drops fast, whereas climbing back up is measured in units of .01.

I also spent a lot of time on the reunion for my high school class, Newtown High School in Elmhurst, Queens, New York, Class of 1985. I had to sneak the school reference into the cartoon. Hopefully I'll snare a few more alumni.

DFSALT

Desalt? What do I know about the process of removing salt from water, as in making seawater potable? No, I don't. That's really D.F.S. alt, where D.F.S. stands for Distributed File System and alt is perhaps short for alternate.

It seems a long time ago my firm was thinking about using DFS technology to better handle our computer users' hunger for server space. The way I understand it, with DFS users don't actually map to the actual resource but instead is taken there through some link. Sort of like a shortcut to an actual document. We've been using NetApp filers/volumes/qtrees for a while and the limit, at the time, of the qtrees were 400 GB. Anything bigger than that and the daily backup would take too long to finish and you end up without daily backups, more like backup every other day or worse. DFS supposedly allows us to go around the limitation. Instead of mapping to \\filer2\volume2 and see qtree2, qtree3, etc. each limited to 400 GB, a DFS link would you to qtrees in other volumes, but to you everything just appears off, say, \\domain2.AD.CompanyXYZ.com\LOB2\subLOB2\folder2 , folder3, etc. You are still limited to the 400-GB ceiling, but if needed, each "folder" can have its own DFS link.

All well and good for the users, except for us admins who have to ensure there is sufficient space for the users to work with. Even with DFS, resources still run out of space from time to time. It does not take much for many users to download "stuff", legit business docs or baddies like movie and music files. As a big corporation with paperwork everywhere, it takes us time to expand, if that is ever an option. We use FileCensus (FC) to see what's in all those terabytes of data out there. Unfortunately, FC does not speak with DFS and only sees the real thing. For example, a DFS link to the user's home is \\domain3.AD.CompanyABC.com\LOB4\subLOB3\folder5\user7 and its actual path is \\server2\share4\user7 . FC only lists server2 and has no idea that the DFS link exists. Before going into FC, we would need to know what's behind the DFS link. One way is to map to the DFS link then look at its property sheet, DFS tab. Most of the time you would need to expand the column to see the full path. Lastly, since it's graphic you would need to either write it down somehow or have the info on-screen while you switch to FC to look up the info. An alternative is to launch the slowpoke MMC with DFS add-in, eyeball for the link and look at its property. Again, no easy way to highlight the path, say for mapping to it or to send the info to someone over instant messaging or email. I don't like repetitive tasks and more so when it's mouse-driven.

I learned that the command DFSUtil can do a lot of things, one of which, with the /DFSALT switch, to convert a lengthy DFS link to \\server\share format. Only if my firm's servers is up-to-date to support the switch! Alas, so close and yet so far.

I am no hardcore programmer but enjoy writing a batch file or KiX script every now and then. I need a way to dump out, for a given DFS name and DFS share, all the path behind the links contained therein. Then I would search the output for the lines defined for my target DFS link. The output of DFSUtil /view:\\dfsname\dfsshare is like

\\dfsname\dfsshare\blah\bleah\bleh

\\server1\share2

\\server2\share3DR

Ideally, anyway. There should be a production resource then a DR resource. I would love to whip up a KiX script that would capture just the lines related to my DFS link, but it would take more time, so for the time being this is what I came up with, just a batch file that calls DFSUtil and grep, with lots of comments and other lines of codes for error-checking. I assume that the lines following my string would be within the 5 lines that I tell grep to display.

Copy the following lines into a .BAT file, perhaps call it DFSalt1.bat. Use it like

DFSalt1 dfsshare$ \\addomain.bigfirm.com\dfsshare$\blah\bleah

@echo off

set domain1=addomain.bigfirm.com

DFSUtil /VIEW:\\%domain1%\%1 > c:\temp\DFSView.txt

if errorlevel 1 goto no_share

if not exist %2 goto no_path

REM grep options

REM F fixed string or literal string

REM i ignore cases

REM A print out appending lines, in this case 5 lines.

GREP -F -i -A 5 %2 c:\temp\DFSView.txt > c:\temp\DFSgrep.txt

ECHO.

ECHO.

TYPE C:\temp\DFSgrep.txt | more

goto the_end

:no_share

echo.

echo.

echo.\\%domain1%\%1 does not exist!

echo.

echo.

goto the_end

:no_path

echo.

echo.

echo.%2 does not exist!

echo.

echo.

:the_end

JHS Graduation Day

I wrote about my JHS 73 experience as an afterthought after I started looking for high school classmates. Interesting enough, I got a few feedbacks about the JHS 73 entry but nothing on the high school one. Here are some photos in case anyone know the teachers. This was 1982 so it's been almost 30 years, who know what happened to them after all that time.

I had Dr. Michael for some English class. I remember reading The Hobbits although I hardly knew what was going on. There was no DVD back then, but I might have read some Cliff Notes or Monarch Notes.

I cannot recall what class I had Ms. Cuffs but somehow I remember her name. In New York City, at one time there were these ads for teachers. It touts that people don't remember their managers' names etc. but teachers are remembered well. It is true.

I had Ms. Butler for English As A Second Language class. I had a great time when we had a school trip to Rye Playland.

Greetings from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn - NOT!

For years, I've been living in this area of Brooklyn that up to recently I believe to be called Bensonhurst. Perhaps when I first moved in my wife told me so and whenever I told people where I lived no one ever corrected me, so far. Recently I saw an article in AM New York about the neighborhood and it had a small blurb about Bensonhurst's border. Lo and behold, I realized that all these years I really lived in the neighboring area called Bath Beach. Even when I was staying with the in-laws over near Scarangella Parks, that was not Bensonhurst either.

In the map above, courtesy of Google Earth, I've outlined in Green the streets that form Bensonhurst's border. You may want to click on the picture to zoom in for a better view of the street names. Start from the southern point at the intersection of Stillwell Avenue and 86th Street, it goes north to Kings Highway, then east to MacDonald Avenue. From there, it goes up to 60th Street, then West-ish to New Utrecht Avenue then go back southeast to 86th Street, and finally along 86th Street back to the starting point of 86 and Stillwell.

It is neither bad nor good to live in Bensonhurst. I don't have any special attachments to it that would now shatter because I don't live there. Maybe some years, if I ever move again, I will look back with fond memories, like how I look back at my high school years in Elmhust, Queens. It is just surprising how things in life can go by undisturbed if no one looks at it. Wikipedia does state that it is a common mistake many people make in thinking Bensonhurst to include neighboring streets. I will have to ask my neighbors to find out how many know what area of Brooklyn they really live.

Rain. Shower. Drizzle.

I bought TypeDrawing last night from the App Store. Today, it rained pretty much all day, so what did I end up drawing? Something to do with umbrella and rain, of course!

The software is quite interesting. You type a sentence, choose a font, and a background, then as you draw with your finger on the iPhone/iTouch, the text is drawn out. In my case, the face was drawn from the phrase "Qaptain Qwerty" - if you don't know who that is, Google it. The umbrella of course is made from the word "umbrella". Lastly, the rain drops etc. came from the 3-word nonsensical sentence "rain shower drizzle", which almost accurately reflects the weather today. Well, at certain time of the day, we actually had downpour or torrent.

I've discovered that if you draw slowly, the types are small. Likewise, if you draw fast, the types are large. Not an easy thing to adjust to, but it is fun to play with. Perhaps because of the vector graphic nature of the program, there is no eraser tool, you just use the Undo button to work your way back, one line at a time.

iRealLife

Click on the picture to see a bigger version with the text more readable.

Ode To A Wild Flower - NOT!

I fancy myself a good photographer and usually have a camera with me most places I go. Take enough pictures and some fantastic photos ought to come about. Such as this photo of my son seven years ago at a bench near Plumb Beach in Brooklyn's Sheepshead area. I used a rather simple 2.2-megapixel Kodak digital camera, my first one ever. The result is quite good - you see the ocean in the back, there's sand, and the innocence of a child hold some wildflower.

Fast-forward to 2009 and I was equipped with a fancier camera. Still a Kodak, but now the camera has video capability, many modes, timer, 10x zoom, etc. Yet the photo came out not as good. Somehow I totally replaced the ocean on the left side with a washout white area. Probably too much sunlight. And the child, same one as before, is now one active 9-year-old who would not sit quietly to pose for the camera.