Never been one to let the carrier drop

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/04/21/win32ole.html

I know. It’s been around forever.. the elephant lurking in the corner. Two technologies that I’ve used extensively on their own, but somehow never mixed.

Until today. 😉

I only publish the link because I’m sure a lot of my three readers are perlsters, and perhaps have never thought about how powerful a tool perl can be in win32 land. I first noticed some of it’s capabilities when writing a perl script to do symlink management for my girlfrancée. It’s capable of automating filesystem manipulation in ways that aren’t even easy – or obvious – in MFC or .NET. Yes, the digital duct tape language knows no bounderies. (Thanks, in part, to the good people over at ActiveState)

So, me and Kayti have decided on 6-06-10 as the date that we will be married. Mark your calandars 😉

here is a palm-based smartphone. Well, sort of. Apparently the OS is ‘all-new’. I cringe a little bit, but then I remember that nothing could be worse than windows CE and that I really like my current PalmOS Treo, so one would hope that they put some of the same stability into WebOS. Not that I’m saying my Treo never crashes, but I think I average about one crash a week, and they’re nearly always when I’m starting up the ssh client – and I have to admit, a ssh client is a pretty hairy thing to be running on a cell phone.

I’m currently trying to economize my life in general.. I actually had to debate with myself for several days before buying the Strong Bad video game

I have a number of criticisms of the current economic system, as many of you know. I pretty much hate money, and think everyone should have access to unlimited resources. Haven’t figured out how to implement that one yet.. 😉

Anyway, one of my criticisms of the stock market is of margin accounts. I have a margin account – I don’t remember what feature I needed that the regular account didn’t offer, but there was something having nothing to do with what I’d normally think of as margin that I couldn’t do unless I switched to a margin account. I’ve purchased on margin a few times, and I’ve had to answer a margin call once. I was able to.. but I’m not criticizing it because of me.

Instead, I’m criticizing it because of the people who can’t make their margin call. Not, as you might think, because I feel sorry for them – although I do – but because I feel sorry for the whole system. It’s *got* to be dynamically unstable.

Here’s the problem. If you can’t answer a margin call, your broker sells off your assets to pay back your margin debt. Now, if this were a isolated system and you were the only user of it, this would work fine. However, you’re *not* the only user – and selling off your assets lowers the price of those assets for everyone else. Maybe only fractions of a penny for each individual margin call – but multiply that by 10,000 or 100,000, and you’re starting to talk about some pretty serious wampum. Now, one side effect of lowering the price of those assets is that it makes other people’s margin ceiling *lower*, because your margin purchasing power is based on the value of the assets you hold. So, it can result in other people getting margin calls – which some of them will be unable to pay – and the result is kind of a domino effect which only starts to be really apparent in a prolonged bear market.

Who would design such a thing? I nominate Bloody Stupid Johnson, from Discworld. It has his flavor to it.

I should mention that I’m not in fact a financial guru, and there might be some really well designed effect that counteracts what I’ve just described. Feel free to comment.

So, I’m here today to tell you about a little adventure that I went on, and perhaps save you some headache if you happen to be trying to go on a similar adventure.

The beginning of our story: recent events caused me to reacquaint myself with Cisco’s layer 5 switches, also known as the Cisco CSS series. These were originally a product called Arrowpoint, made I think by a company of the same name, and when I first started playing with them around my Epoch Internet days, they were horribly expensive.

They’re not any more. You can find them on e-bay for $150-$300. They’re kind of nice, really – they’re capable of being regular layer 2 switches, layer 3 switches, or ‘content aware’ switches – so they can do NAT-style load balancing at wire speeds – as well as doing URL-aware traffic directing – which presumably means speeds approaching a gigabit since most of them have gigabit fiber ports, or at least spots for a fiber transceiver.

But, never mind the sales pitch – I presume if you’re reading this and you found it from Google, it’s because you have one of these things and you’d like to initially configure it, which requires a console cable. NOT, mind you, the standard Cisco blue console cable that we all carry around – nay, nor the 3Com nor Baytech console cables (which are also DB9-RJ45), nor any of the above with a null modem.. nor, amusingly enough, even the Official CSS-CONSOLE-KIT that one might order from any number of vendors and Cisco describes at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/contnetw/ps789/products_tech_note09186a00800a3f28.shtml

At the point at which I discovered this – including ordering a $54 CSS-CONSOLE-KIT off ebay and a $74 CSS-CONSOLE-KIT from CablesAndKits.com and finding that neither one worked correctly – I was starting to wonder if I had somehow acquired not one, nor two, but three CSS boxes that didn’t work. It seemed unlikely.

Finally, I got frustrated, and did what I should have done several iterations earlier.. I made two RJ45 pigtails – one I marked TX, RX, and ground on (since it was connecting to a PC port through a standard Cisco console adapter, it was a known quantity) and the other one.. first I determined which pin was ground – pretty easy, just set voltmeter on continuity and measure with CSS turned off between CSS frame and pins. Then, I turned on the CSS and measured voltage between ground and various pins – it didn’t take long to determine that there were just two pins that were floating – one of which had to be RX. There were also only a couple of pins which had approximately the right voltage to be transmitting data. I toggled the power on the CSS while connecting each of them to RX on the PC – and before long, I had found my transmit pin. From there, finding my receive pin was just a matter of trying all the possibilities until something made the box start responding when I hit keys.

To get the resulting pinout, please paypal $5 to sheer@sheer.us… just kidding.

Seriously, the pinout is as follows:

 Terminal side            CSS side

3                                   2

6                                  3

5                                   1

Hopefully this information will save you some time.

To clarify, this pinout is for a adapter cable that will adapt a cisco blue console cable to a 11000 series CSS (but NOT a ArrowPoint branded CSS, I don’t think). I used phone tap splices to make mine, but you could also probably figure out how to correctly stick the li’l colored wires into a RJ-45 on each end to get this result. Then I used a RJ45 female-female to connect mine to a Cisco Blue console cable).

11500 CSSes use the standard cisco blue cable.

(p.s. Thanks to Kayti for correcting the most obvious of my spelling and grammar errors, and also holding a voltmeter probe on one of the RJ45 ends while I was reverse-engineering my handmade cable to write this note)

(p.p.s. Thanks to Allie for tangling his claws in the cable while I was trying to reverse engineer it by myself, reminding me that reverse engineering is best done as a social activity.. especially when you are reverse engineering your own work)

Just a reminder for you linux admins – chmod is not the end of file permissions in ext2/ext3. You also need to lsattr/chattr to cover all your file permission bases. Thanks to DoctorWho for the tip.

according to this, I am weighing down the world’s financial markets. Singlehandedly.

I’ve debated long and hard about whether to make this a public post, but I’ve decided that it should be, for reasons that I will later discuss.

As some of you may have noticed, there has been a 3.5 month hole in this blog. The reason for that is that I’ve been away from the internet, because I entered a drug treatment program in San Pedro to address my nitrous oxide addiction. The program went well, and I’ve now been clean for almost four months. (For the very few of you who don’t know, the web counter on www.sheer.us at the top is how long I’ve been clean).

It was a interesting experience, to say the least. I’m not sure what to write about it, other than it happened. I did manage to survive without the internet (not even a cell phone, except for ten-minute segments a few times a week) for several months. I’m glad that I did it, and I don’t ever want to do it again.

It was a 12-step based program, and as many of you know, I have a number of criticisms of 12-step. They remain valid – in fact, most of what was useful about the time is that it gave me a long period of time to focus on my thinking and my addiction and learn to recognize addictive thinking and stop it (with exercises from Smart Recovery. It was also good to have a support system of people to talk to about the problems surrounding addiction, as well as about spiritual principles.

That said, I’m back and I will be posting regularly again. (Actually I’ve been back for some time). I probably will – despite previous comments to the contrary – make another post about religion – although this one won’t be attacking any particular religion or set of beleifs, but merely explaining what the problem is, for me.

I had to debate with myself for a while before deciding to post this publicly, because there’s always the concern that some employer will see it and decide to fire me, or not to hire me, based on knowing that I am a nitrous oxide addict. (After all, the internet never forgets anything). I decided not to worry about that for several reasons:

1) Addiction is a disease, not a moral failing. As such, the only employers refusing to hire me would probably be people I wouldn’t want to work for anyway.

2) I can’t imagine any employer actually reading my entire blog, or stumbling across this out of the 2000+ entries based on a simple web search. Of course, I might be wrong. It did just occur to me that I’ve used the ‘e’ word a lot, so googling for sheer pullen employer would turn this up – and now by using those keywords all togeather I’ve increased the chances. <sigh> I think just about anything I do is going to make that situation worse, though, so I think I’ll leave it there. It’s a pity there’s not a keyword or html code you can put in a single document to indicate that that document, and only that document, shouldn’t be indexed. If I were really bored, I’d figure out how to exclude *just* this entry with robots.txt. I’m not that bored.. or that paranoid.

3) I think that acting as if being a addict is something horrible that I have to hide both feeds the addiction and helps support the social stigma that might lead to addicts being unable to find jobs. As a addict, I was still a hard and (except for a few times when I was on binges) dependable worker, I never stole anything from anybody, and I never had any run-ins with the law. I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that all addicts are subhuman creatures who deserve nothing but contempt.

The side effect of all this is that I am going to talk about recovery-related topics in this journal. I will tag them as such, and you all can avoid them, but there may be some people out there who are interested in what mental gyrations I go through trying to stay away from nitrous, and anyway, it’s probably good for me to write about them.

So, now that we’ve been through that little digression, my new years resolution list

1) I will make 1 wshr broadcast a month in 2009

2) I will record one new, original song every 3 months n 2009

3) I will not use nitrous oxide in 2009. (So far, I’ve never managed to keep this one, but I think this is the year)

4) I will be able to run 2 miles at 4.7 miles an hour at a 4% grade by the end of 2009. (In other words, I will not be completely out of shape. I’m not going to try to be one of those super-healthy fitness fanatics)

5) I will try to remain open, honest, and willing

Anyway, happy new year, everybody!

For those of you who might be running into the same problem I was with using CentOS’s PAE kernel to support more than 4G of RAM – where the system would crash during the boot process – the solution is to upgrade the firmware for the RAID controller. You can find firmware for the PERC (Dell’s rebranded Adaptec RAID controller) on Dell’s web site – it requires two floppy disks and is a self-extracting archive that will write itself to the floppies. Those of you like me who haven’t been keeping floppy drives in your computers will be happy to know that a external USB floppy drive works just fine for writing the firmware.

Me and Tory were part of a experimental live electronica band called Mischief Committee. I won’t hype our single album here, since it’s already linked elsewhere in this blog.. he came down from Seattle to spend the weekend with me, and we did a jam session.. that audio is the first time me and Tory have played together in more than two years, and I think we were suprisingly tight – we are making up pretty much everything as we go along, improvisational-style.. I’m not sure what genre of electronic music what we did would fall under, although I think some of it would definately be trance and other bits might be d-n-b and other bits glitch..