11h.net

I am currently preparing for a data migration from my current laptop to either the same laptop with a re-freshed Windows XP install or a new laptop with a fresh Windows XP install.  The IT guy helping me with a failed forced update patch had the same reaction to my system as Derek did to Chip’s system and suggested that I migrate.

The only real thing I care about on my laptop is my iTunes (yeah go ahead, make fun of me) library.

In the process of the preparation for a new system I have been re-organizing my iTunes library to make it smaller so that the migration would not take so long.  I discovered that I have a number of duplicate songs and a lot of the songs that did not have proper metadata.  I assume that when I ripped the CDs (on my file server), my Perl script did not add the ID3 tags correctly which would explain why I added the songs again from another source (with proper tags).  Bugger.

Now, here I am, re-organizing my iTunes and watching the second show of IT Crowd season two.  I ended up listening to a song from my music that was un-tagged and realized that it was Delia Derbyshire from the BBC’s Radiophic Workshop.  She was most famous for her work in creating the Dr. Who theme song.

There was a youtube video that I saw of her doing reel to reel loops and mixing in the form of monome.  Only 40 some years earlier than when monome came out.

If there is someone that I would have liked to meet, it would have been Delia.  She’s awesome.

While trying to create a graph with trendline to predict what a thermistor reading for a Prius’s radiator/engine temperature would be at certain temperatures I started battling MSFT’s Excel.

I created a chart with the known data collected about the voltage at the thermistor for  a list of temperatures.  I wanted a trendline to show the calculation so that I could use it to calculate the resistance of the thermistor at those temperatures.  However, after creating a chart and looking at the trendline formula’s calculation of known data, something was completely screwed up.

After some Google searches there was a link to Microsoft’s Help and Support website that indicated that “the trendline formula should only be used when your chart is an XY Scatter chart.” Great.  Well, at least I didn’t waste too much time on it and it was an easy fix.  However, why didn’t MSFT’s Excel team not grey out the trendline option for non-scatter charts?!

Last week I was disparately looking for something good to listen to on the radio while I was driving around Atlanta, GA.  The radio stations in Atlanta seemed to have taken a horrible step in the wrong direction in the last 10 years… But I digress.

While pressing the radio’s seek button like frogger to avoid the massive number of rap stations I heard the end of some 70s sounding song with “It’s the word, it’s the word, it’s the word…”  Damn, why does that sound so familiar?

Right!  It was a sample in track two of “the word” from the Swordfish soundtrack by Paul Oakenfold.

Again, my music friend pointed that the chorus was from the movie sound track to Grease [the original].  It was from Frankie Valli - grease.  It was the last six seconds or so…

Paul Oakenfold - the word == Frankie Valli - grease

I’m working on a project where I need my DHCP server to send an IP address from a specific DHCP range if the hostname is a certain value otherwise it needs to send a normal IP address range.

I’m using Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Server V3.0.3 (ISC-DHCP).

To give a specific address range, we first need to detect if the DHCP client is sending the option 12 host-name and if so assign it to a class.

class “FooBar” { match if (option host-name = “foobar”); }

Once the client has a class associated to it we need to give it an address from a pool that doesn’t deny it.

subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {

Other DHCP settings here but make sure that the range is not specified; it overrides the pool settings.

pool {
allow members of “FooBar”;
range 192.168.0.90 192.168.0.99;
}

Otherwise we want the systems that don’t specify a hostname to get an address from the normal IP address pool

pool {
range 192.168.0.254 192.168.0.100;
}

Add more pools if needed

} # ending the subnet declaration

Pretty simple, hu?

UPDATE:

Thanks to a post I read by Bill Stephens of the PepsiCo Business Solutions Group, you can match a hostname using substr.  If your DHCP clients are named foobar-xyz you can use substr to match for foobar:

class “FooBar” {

match if ( substring(option host-name,0,6) = “foobar”);

}

(This would match the first 6 characters of the option 12 host-name)

I received the following error today when trying to open a samba share on a FreeBSD system from a clean Windows Server 2003 install:

“no network provider accepted the given path.”

“PC LOAD LETTER, what the fsck does that mean?!” I thought to myself. After some digging, I found that the default LAN Manager authentication level is set to NTLM response only and not LM & NTLM response.

Fix for the issue:

Administrative tools -> Local Security Policy -> Local Policy -> Security Options

Change: Network security: LAN Manager authentication level

From: Send NTLM response only

To: Send LM & NTLM responses