I got my review at work a few days ago, and it went pretty well in my opinion. My boss sat me down and asked me how I thought I was doing. I’d been dealing with some… “reservations”… at work recently so I thought I’d lay it all down on the line. I told him I thought my numbers were lacking, and that I spend too long on events that could be passed quickly, just because they perk my curiosity and I over-investigate them. I told him I was bored out of my skull and I latch onto any opportunity to practice the things I’ve learned and really apply myself. And that I need to get into an engineer position badly. He came back with “Good. That’s pretty much exactly what I put. Glad we’re on the same page”. Apparently upper management only sees numbers, so I have to spend a few months pushing trash. But Joe has assured me he’s speaking loudly for me to get into CCNA training to get an engineer spot. I wish it was coming sooner, but this is good news.
Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.
So Comcast has been doing this really sneaky thing to try and cut back on traffic in general. Bittorrent constitutes a significant percentage of overall traffic on the net, so Comcast is all like “hey, we can mess with that lolâ€. They got this program that seeks out Comcast customers with active bittorrent streams and basically severs them (it forges RST packets and injects them intot the stream towards each end). So if you’re a Comcast customer and your torrents have been dying, that’s why. They didn’t announce it, and it’s a pretty crappy thing try and pull in the first place. There are lots of legit bittorrent uses. What’s more, they forge very messy RST packets and basically break RFC protocol on how one is supposed to use TCP/IP… not the sort of thing an ISP should be doing. If I went around doing the same thing, dropping peoples’ connections to other people randomly while they’re in the middle of doing stuff, I’d probably get in trouble for it. It’s a really *bad* thing to get caught doing.
Anyways… It’s been bugging my roommate for a while now and I tried to see what I could do about it since I more or less control our network. I spent a decent chunk of the day reading up on this issue, TCP/IP in general, and scanning through tcpdump output (basically a record of the raw packets passing through the firewall). It’s funny how I get on kicks like this, going into it knowing *not so much*, and I come out as if I re-learned something I knew all along. And I get excited about it on top of that. Very much like having an epiphany. I feel like I took in so much in the few slow hours I had at work that it’ll take me a couple days to fully digest. I suppose that’s how I know I’m in the right field?
Sorry for so much Nerdy(tm). It pays the bills and keeps me occupied. I can’t complain.
Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.
So I put some finishing touches on my photo album script yesterday. I had a couple epiphanies after spewing forth some boring nerd-babble at her (that she’s so good at putting up with). She gave me some suggestions on fit and finish that my eyes didn’t catch too. Taking this script from its original form and making it do what I wanted it to do was a great learning experience. I thought I’d post it up for the few of you that might find it interesting or useful. Feel free to use/change etc.
The script
The original
A glance at both will show I’ve added quite a bit. My script auto-generates thumbnails and stores them in a common directory instead of downloading each pic and scaling them to a suitable thumbnail size. In a directory with more than 10 pics or so it brought my pathetic upstream to a halt. I also made it represent directories with icons (instead of “not at all”) to make browsing easier. I had to split up the image subtypes to make animated GIF thumbnails behave nicely. The script is still a kludge and could probably use some refinement, but I thought I’d post it up since a few people have commented that it makes a nice slick image page.
Check out this picture directory starring my old CRX to see how it looks (I reccommend not browsing around the directories much, as many directories have images from random places on the internet that contain nasty words and such). It’s nothing flashy but does its job very well for a simple script written by a noob.
Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.
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