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Archive for February, 2008

Trip report: Tempe, AZ

February 20th, 2008 Comments off

I’m stuck in an all day conference call of a sick person telling us what we already know, so I might as well get around to posting about the trip I just got back from. All around it was a great trip. I enjoyed Tempe but the workshop itself was more management than technical so that was a bummer but I made some good contacts and had plenty of side conversations. Some points though:

  • Flights: I don’t mind flying, but being stuck three people in when you want to go to the bathroom and you have incredible heartburn for 5+ hours is not fun. However while flying out we were chasing the sun as it was setting which was amazing. I had the window on the south facing side so I got to see some incredible gradients and such. And if anyone ever has to pick up baggage in the Phoenix airport, I feel for you.
  • Mr. Pibb: There’s a Coca-Cola bottling facility in Tempe so most of the place offer Coke products, including Mr. Pibb!! Something I’m not used to seeing since I’m in the northeast, but it’s amazing.
  • Weather: The first day out, the weather was phenomenal, it was like a perfect Spring day. Thursday and Friday however there was some rain or just the feeling of pending rain but not too bad. However, we were sitting outside at a Happy Hour talking about CAS Thursday night, and got hailed on thrice.
  • The Big Bang: Thursday night I went out looking for a bar. Being only three blocks away from ASU this was not a difficult task, but which bar to go to first. We walked into a basement bar called “The Big Bang” which advertises itself as a dueling piano bar. Holy Cow! If you are a fan of live music and find yourself in Tempe go to The Big Bang. We had an amazing time. The “I’m only going out for 1 drink” night turned into a night in which we had t o leave at 2:00 because Tempe closes down at 2:00.

So it was a good trip. I was completely exhausted Saturday night when I got back to Albany, but with my love of live music I went straight to Mahoney’s to see Replica. Just a couple more days of not working on projects then I fly down to Orlando for another conference.

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Hooray A/C

February 13th, 2008 Comments off

That’s right A/C. I walked into my hotel room tonight, and the priorities were 1.) turn on A/C 2.) Scan for wireless networks. I guess more to follow but I’ve been traveling for 12-13 hours so I’m going to go relax.

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I have no name!

February 10th, 2008 Comments off

I had this weird problem at work back in December that I thought I’d share. I had noticed that when I started new gnome-terminals, my prompts read:

I have no name!@urbs-19979

Now that’s weird, but I ignored it since the machine was working and I was in a series of meetings. However, when I started trying to ssh into other systems I was getting told

You don’t exist, go away!

At this point I verbally told my laptop “You don’t tell me no” which caused some weird looks but people moved on just fine. Since the problem was now getting in my way I had to look into it. After a while I had realized that by adding a username to my ssh commands (through -l user or user@host) I could use ssh again. This caused me to think something was wrong with /etc/passwd, and I was right. My user couldn’t read /etc/passwd, fixed the permissions and all was well. I forget what I did to muck up /etc/passwd, but I’m sure if I had been using vipw like you’re supposed to I wouldn’t have had this problem…..but then again I would have missed out on the great gems that programmers leave in their programs.

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