While sitting on a boring con call, I went ahead and re-did the shooting wheel into a PDF. This is a nice big sheet version of this so that you can take it to the range with you. This is a great tool to improve handgun shooting accuracy.
Today I went to the range with my older daughter. We had a good time, but as I was trying to teach her how to improve her accuracy, I kept remembering a chart I’d see years ago. It took me a long time to find this site: http://www.bullseyepistol.com/training.htm that had the chart. I’m including it here to expose it some more.
So, I was just at a customer site today. They have an interesting storage problem. Part of it was that we needed to map a whole bunch of hosts IP addresses to their VLAN id’s so that we can determine how much storage was in each VLAN. This will help architect our backup solution. Well, there was no such simple mapping to be used, so we started with an excel spread sheet that had all of the hosts names and each of their drive letters (capacity and free space). Another excel spreadsheet had the hostname to IP mapping. Yet a third spreadsheet had the subnet mask to VLAN tag mapping. Problem was that none of these represented the data in a consistent manner. The storage spreadsheet had the short name of the hosts. The hostname+IP spreadsheet had the fully qualified domain name and the IP addresses in a full decimaled notation (i.e. 010.010.005.013 as opposed to 10.10.5.13). The VLAN spreadsheet had the domains listed in the standard x.x.x.x/x notation. Well manipulating almost all of these turned out to be mostly doable via excel. But, the conversion of 010.010.005.013 to something sensible turned out to be not so easy. Excel’s string functions are, ahhh…, rudimentary. So, rather than waste a whole bunch of time writing an excel equation that had a whole bunch of “=left(A2,search(”.”,A2,(search(”.”,A2)))” nonsense, I turned to my trusty command line on the mac and turned to sed. I copied the column with the IP’s to a text file called aa (one IP/line). It looked something like this:
slick:~$ cat aa
010.003.001.208
010.004.001.040
010.007.096.016
010.004.001.226
192.168.012.032
192.168.013.021
010.002.001.160
010.010.004.164
010.010.004.165
010.010.004.049
010.010.004.051
010.010.004.052
010.002.001.034
010.010.003.039
192.168.013.200
10.2.19.92
10.2.19.91
010.010.003.052
010.010.003.053
I then wrote this shell one liner:
slick:~$ while read i; do echo $i | sed ’s/^0*\([0-9]*\.\)0*\([0-9]*\.\)0*\([0-9]*\.\)0*\([0-9]*$\)/\1\2\3\4/’; done <aa
and it output this:
slick:~$ while read i; do echo $i | sed ’s/^0*\([0-9]*\.\)0*\([0-9]*\.\)0*\([0-9]*\.\)0*\([0-9]*$\)/\1\2\3\4/’; done <aa
10.3.1.208
10.4.1.40
10.7.96.16
10.4.1.226
192.168.12.32
192.168.13.21
10.2.1.160
10.10.4.164
10.10.4.165
10.10.4.49
10.10.4.51
10.10.4.52
10.2.1.34
10.10.3.39
192.168.13.200
10.2.19.92
10.2.19.91
10.10.3.52
10.10.3.53
So, the question is, can any of you (the four people that read my blog) do better on the RE in the sed statement?
Also, Microsoft, please add regular expressions to the function list! If not Steve Jobs, Numbers?
OK - now this is an idea that I’ve had in my head for a while and it looks like someone has done it. This service lets you set up “partners” with friends that have big setups to do off-site backups. In essence you set up an off-site encrypted backup at a friends data control facility … I mean home computer setup. The only downside I see is that this is a windows only tool right now.
Anyone out there want to test it out with me?
Zoogmo - Your Online Backup Community: Unlimited. Free. Secure. Automatic:
NetNewsWire has proven itself to be a True Time Saver ™. If nothing else you should attempt to use this and give it a fair shake for a week or two. I won’t go back.
In my never ending search for total nerdery, I came across a quick howto on google adsense. My blog is now adsensified, so if you are so inclined, the few of those of you that come by here, click away on the adds. I’ve tried to make them as unobtrusive as possible.
Yes! I hate(d) the keyboard volume control because it’s such a pain to get it just right. Check this out: Macworld | Mac OS X Hints | Use fine-grain volume control in 10.5
The only problem is that I get cramps doing this on my MBP. I have to use FN-OPT-SFT-F[4|5] to get there. Still cool though.
Hot on the heels of Mac announcing that there’s going to be a an SSD option to their Mac Air, comes the news that EMC is going to offer SSD’s on the Symmetrix: StorageMojo » EMC’s new flash drives. Can’t wait to see what a fully loaded all SSD Symm runs for. My guess is the GNP of Guatemala. However, it should smoke just about anything out there. Finally a good use for all those fancy 4 and 8Gb Fibre HBA’s everyone’s been buying.
Yes! Finally a place to find the newest and bestest quicklook plugins: http://www.qlplugins.com/
My personal favorites so far:
Folder Viewer (now you can see what’s in a folder, not just an icon for the folder)
Zip Viewer (peek into your zip, rar, tar, etc. files without opening them)
The only thing I wish I had was one that let you look at more and older M$ formats. Particularly PowerPoint. Why is it that PPT files are roughly 50/50 on being able to be previewed with quicklook? That’s the format that I use it the most for.
Ever since I loaded up leopard on my mac, I’ve run into a strange issue. Whenever I log in to my account, which was transfered from my original powerbook over to the mac pro via tiger and then upgraded to leopard, I see a long period of disk activity that slows my box down to a crawl for the first 5-10 minutes after logging in. I’ve tried using top to see what’s going on, but all I can find is that a “find” command is being issued by someone. Well, while sitting on a plane ride to Minneapolis today, I stumbled across a shell script I had downloaded a while back. It is a solaris script to run Dtrace and report back on all of the disk activity. I thought for sure that this would help me figure out what’s going on. Well, when I fired it up, it first complained that I wasn’t root. A quick “su -” later and I ran it again. That got me a “: probe description io:genunix::start does not match any probes”. Doh! Being the nerd boy I proceeded to see if there’s a list of the probes that are supported to see if I could modify this script. At a minimum this was going to take me through the rest of the flight.
I was wrong.
Apple developer tools provide you with a cool GUI dtrace under the aptly named /Developer/Applications/Instruments.app!
So, I fired this guy up and figured that it would take another hour or so to figure this thing out. Nope, the very first thing it does is provide you with a wizard where you can select some predefined trace packages. One of them is called “File Activity”. Select that and then make sure to change your selection to “All Processes”
Hit the record button and Voila! All the disk IO activity measurements you’d ever want. Now it’s just a matter of tracing back the culprit and I should have this nailed down quickly. More on this as it develops.