The Most Awesome Funeral (for cheap!)

According to the world wide web of internets, the average funeral in the U.S. costs between $6,000 and $11,000. Thats a lot of money. And pretty lame really. Thats not going to get you a sweet marble building or statue or phallus or anything.

But you know what costs a lot less, and is a lot more awesome? A sky burial. But you can't be lame and just leave your body anywhere. So, if you were to ship a 150lbs body to Thimphu, Bhutan (probably the closest place to Tibet UPS delivers to) it'd cost you a little over $1,500. So then I assume you could hire a Sherpa for a grand or two. And presto, for between $2,500 and $3,500 you get to be buried in one of the most awesome places in the world in one of the most awesome ways.

Firebox and new IPs

Trixie trixie bastards. So we gots some static ip's that are chillin behind our Firebox. The firebox itself has a dedicated ip.

0800 - Everything is working.
0830 - 1030 - Movin servers to new lo-cal.
1030 - 1100 - Reassign machine ips and tweak firebox.
1100 - 1930 - Not a god damn thing works.

So here is what we knew during this time:
- All machines could go out to the internets
- All servers were serving up their wares
- Internal pinging worked, outgoing pings worked
- 1 ip, behind the firebox on a drop, could be reached from external internets
- NONE of the simple firebox -> forward to machine from external sources worked
- All newly assigned ips worked, you could connect a server directly to the outside and bam
- Firebox logs showed incoming requests, denied, can't find destination
- All destinations were clearly mapped. No trickery. Come in on external ip xyz and forward to internal abc
- a trace route would die on the failing ips would die after the isp hop

So why? ARP CACHING!!!! Dirty, dirty, dirty girl. So what happened was this: We got assigned new ips. One went to the firebox and the rest behind it. The firebox was aggressive and broadcast saying "yo, here I be." The rest, chilling behind the firebox, did not. So, our isp was not able to properly route these requests.
The fix? Set every machine or ip on the open to the world to let it broadcast, then toss it back behind the firebox like a fat chick. ARP cache fixed.

This is why I'm not a network guy. This crap is lame. NullPointerExceptions are much easier. Or so I hear, since I've never had one.

Comcast offers 50 Mbps...for an hour and a half a month.

Let me preface this by saying I hate comcast. They don't show up for apointments, don't respond to emails, and just all around suck. Problem is they don't have any competition where I live (oh please FiOS...please!!).

So Comcast has been running ads on tv around here lately offering service with up to 50 Mbps for $99 a month. But this made me think of a few years back when people accused Comcast of throttling their speeds, which Comcast denied and eventually conceded "yeah maybe but but... 9/11... AMERICA... Terrorists!". Anyway, that'll never pan out because Comcast spends more on lobbyist than you or I do, but I digress.

So what meaningful came from the throttling incident? Well, as of Oct 1 2008 Comcast limits your monthly incoming traffic to 250 GB per second. But whats get me is this, you can pay extra to get 50 Mb per second, but only get 250 Gb a month. 1 Gb = 1024 Mb, so, if you were to sit on some traffic that heavy, you'd run up your limit in 85.33 minutes. Stupid Comcast.

cl.exe results in mspdb80.dll was not found error

cl is the Visual C++ Compiler that comes with Visual Studio. So today I needed to compile me some C code. Ok, lets do this. Path not found. Easy enough, add C:\Dev\Tools\VisualStudio\VC\bin to my path. "mspdb80.dll was not found" error. Bullocks.

Most of the internet chatter was about running vcvars32(which calls vsvars32) or vcvarsall which SHOULD HAVE set the environment variables, but did not. Maybe it was a bad install or maybe maybe maybe. Too much work. Don't need another rabbit hole.

So all you need to do is set another path var to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VSA\8.0\VsaEnv (or wherever your mspdb80.dll is located). In like Flynn.

So you wanna use cl? To sum it up set two new path vars
C:\{visual-studio}\VC\bin
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VSA\8.0\VsaEnv

Vignette, Ahh Poor Vignette

Man. I really don't like configuring and implementing COTS software. Its usually sold to someone who thinks it'll solve problems A, B and C when in fact they're only real problem is X. And they spent half a million. Or more. A lot more.

Well, I had the privilege of vomiting for 6 months working with Vignette products (although, I'll admit it was work). Now, Vignette products aren't terrible. At one time they could have been called cutting edge. Too bad that time was circa 1993. And the coding concepts are good. The code isn't. God no. The code is the definition of spaghetti code. See, Vignette bought up a lot of little chunks of code and then tried to play God. The kind of God that made the Platypus. And they did.

So, what made me have these flashbacks? Two things. First, my co-worked pointed out to me a few weeks back that someone had actually purchased Vignette. Oh boy. If you own stock in OpenText...hmm. If their intention is to 'cherry-pick' through Vignettes code they might as well have purchased a JDK 1.0 for dummies book and gone through the code in the accompanying cd. Then they should have gone looking for code in a dumpster behind a Taco Bell. But eh, at least they didn't buy AOL.

But thats not what rubs me. What really did it is again today I got another spam mail from Vignettes Education Services. From which I've already tried to unsubscribe. Months ago. See, I got a similar email a while back which prompted me to hit the handy unsubscribe link at the bottom. That tried to send an email to unsubscribe_me@marketing.vignette.com, which of course is an invalid email address. So I sent an email to their general support saying essentially 'wtf mate'. The lady said she unsubscribed me. Which I believed. Until today. And yes, the unsubscribe link in the email is still set to unsubscribe_me@marketing.vignette.com.

Screw experts-exchange

If you post on experts-exchange you're a dick, plain and simple. Even the crappiest of programmers can attest to the fact that they've used the internets a million and one times to help them code. Anytime you're trying to do anything you search and read blogs and forums and and all that. If there is any example of how free information benefits real business it'd be computer programming.

So why does experts-exchange show up all the time on my searches? Well, I have a theory and it involves a fat nerd living in his moms basement, too much mountain dew and manga and not enough social interaction with those of the opposite sex. God that site pisses me off.

JAXB xjb & too many nodes

As I went into a while ago, you can use xjb to customize JAXB bindings. Today I learned of a tragic shortcoming. So say you have this snippet

<jaxb:bindings xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
 xmlns:jaxb="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jaxb"
 version="1.0">
 <jaxb:bindings schemaLocation="train.xsd" node="//xsd:element[@name='car']">
  <jaxb:property name="cars" />
 </jaxb:bindings>
</jaxb:bindings>

In that example there was a complexType with the name train, which contained an element with the name car which corresponded to the complexType car. All is right in the world. But what if there was another element somewhere, probably in some other complexType that contained a car? Well, that'd be kosher unless you were trying to customize the bindings with the above snippet. Instead you'll end up seeing

[ERROR] Error while parsing schema(s).Location [ file:/C:/Dev/Workspace_Netbeans /my-project/src/main/resources/train.xjb{5,80}].com.sun.istack.SAXParseException2: XPath evaluation of "//xsd:element[@name='widget']" results in too many (2) target nodes

There was an enhancement request put in years ago for XPath to be able to match multiple nodes, but like Bill O'Reilly releasing a softcore romance novel I wouldn't hold my breathe. Oh wait.