Unixpeople

I signed up for Netflix streaming mode and one of the first movies I watched was called “Suicide Room”. It was a decent flick – I’d give it 7/10. It was about a kid who spends a bunch of time hanging out in a virtual reality chat room. After watching that movie, however, every time I logged into Netflix, the suggestions were all movies with LBGT content. I think the first time I logged in after “Suicide Room” it suggested, “Longhorns”, “Private Romeo”, and “Blue is the Warmest Color”.

It took a few months to get it dialed in.

The TADDM Model can be a pain in the ass. Customers don’t normally ask me to add site information or admin information to Objects in TADDM. The last time it happened was over 2 years ago, however, my current customer asked me to add it from a spreadsheet that they provided to me (never mind that the spreadsheet contained host information that was more than 6 months old (since prior to Hurricane Sandy).

Ok, so I looked back to try to find the code form the previous time I added site info programmatically and I couldn’t locate it. Oh well, its not rocket science.

I wrote a shell script which used awk to pull the fields out of the provided spreadsheet (in CSV format) and then wrote a java program to create a SiteInfo object and add it to the computer system which was fetched by name from TADDM using an api call.

Here is the important part of the shell script:

h=`echo $line |awk -F, ‘{print $3}’`
site=`echo $line |awk -F, ‘{print $1}’`
rackpos=`echo $line |awk -F, ‘{print $4}’`
busDesc=`echo $line |awk -F, ‘{print $5}’`
busOwn=`echo $line |awk -F, ‘{print $7, “,”, $8}’`

And the call to the java program:

java SetAdminInfo localhost administrator collation “$h” “$site” “$rackpos” “$busDesc” “$busOwn”

Now, the tricky bit. If you were going to set something in TADDM that shows up in the details panel as “site”, you might search through the model and eventually settle on the SiteInfo class (which is what I did). You’d be wrong.

I went to all the work of adding the stuff to the computer system object by attaching a populated instance of SiteInfo only to find that it didn’t show up in the UI. I went through all the standard troubleshooting assuming it was a problem with TADDM (restarted the UI, etc.) but to no avail.

Turns out the proper object to populate is AdminInfo. Here is the salient parts of the java program:

 /* create new AdminInfo */
Class aClass=com.collation.platform.model.topology.admin.AdminInfo.class;
AdminInfo admininfo=(AdminInfo)ModelObjectFactory.newInstance(aClass);
admininfo.setObjGuid(comp.getGuid());
admininfo.setSite(sitename);
admininfo.setName(comp.getName());
admininfo.setDescription(busdesc);
api.update(admininfo,null);
aClass=com.collation.platform.model.topology.admin.SiteInfo.class;
SiteInfo siteinfo=(SiteInfo)ModelObjectFactory.newInstance(aClass);
siteinfo.setName(sitename);
siteinfo.setRackPosition(rackpos);
comp.setSiteInfo(siteinfo);
api.update(comp,null);

As you can see from the code, I needed to set BOTH AdminInfo and SiteInfo because AdminInfo doesn’t have a place to set rack location….

Success! Except, I now notice that SiteInfo doesn’t show up on the details panel…. I opened RFE 33221 on that.

At the request of a friend of mine from my home town, I joined facebook. Initially, I thought it was pretty nice and within a few months, I managed to connect with various people that I’d lost touch with over the years including:

• Someone from my kindergarten class
• A girl-friend from high school
• A girl I had a crush on in high school (and who is now a detective constable)
• Several of the people that I still associate with whenever I visit my home town
• Various and Sundry people who I would consider acquaintances (at most)

Its that last category that has me in trouble now. Although I’m using facebook as an example, I’ve had the problem with other social networking sites (specifically linkedIn).

Here is the problem. I get “friend/network requests” from people who:

• I can’t actually remember at all. I mean, their name sounds vaguely familiar, but the picture (if there is one) doesn’t actually ring a bell.
• I don’t really like – the worst of these are people that I once worked with who I really think are assholes and who couldn’t do their job if their life depended on it
• Are really interesting (in a car-wreck kind of way), but to whom I probably shouldn’t associate

The quandary is what do you do with these requests?

For the first category, I normally just break down and add them as friends. We have a quick conversation about the weather or “what have you been up to for the last 2 decades” and then they fade back into the woodwork never to be heard from again – no harm done.

The second category is different. I generally just sit on the request for a while and eventually delete it. I believe that if someone hires these folks because of my recommendation, (I think that “friending” someone on linkedIn in some way “recommends” them) and they are still idiots, then my reputation is tarnished.

The third category is the one that has me in trouble now. Recently, the marriage of one of my friends broke down due to an extra-marital affair. I received a “friend” request from the “other woman”. For about a week, I sat on the request, weighing the desire for more information on the situation against the possible negative side-effects. I knew that should my friend’s wife find that I was communicating with this woman, she would feel this was in some way advocating this affair – which I do not.  Eventually, however, the desire to get the other worman’s story won out over the more pragmatic side of me, and I accepted the friend request. Over a span of about one week, we had a conversation of 6 messages none of which increased my understanding of the situation at all.

Today, I received a chastising message from a friend who had looked at my profile and found that I was “friends” with this woman – it seems that this fact was spreading like wild-fire (and causing just about the same amount of destruction).

I care deeply for my friend and his wife and I like to think I would not do anything to hurt either of them, however, it appears thats exactly what I’ve done. I deleted the “other woman” from my friend list shortly after.

In summary, I think the right thing to do is to drive right on by that car accident on the freeway – don’t look over and don’t slow down. I wish thats what I had done.