Powershell is a ton of fun, particularly if you're a network or server administrator. I wrote this script to scan subnets and get information from the nodes it finds, using DNS and WMI information. Obviously, if the node it scans is not a Windows machine, it's not going to return WMI information, but you'll still get a DNS name if available. The only way the scan will miss the node entirely is if it doesn't respond to an ICMP ping.

I work in a unique environment where I have to manage servers in three different sites scattered about the metroplex, each site having multiple subnets, all of which are completely mixed up within two different domains with no trust relationship. It's a mess, but it's a challenging environment to work in and has taught me a lot.

So to that end, I've put as much customization into the script as I can think of.

Enjoy.

Why don't they take the acknowledgement number out of the TCP header and just use the sequence number for acknowledgement purposes, thus eliminating 32 bits of redundancy from every TCP packet in the world? You heard it here first...

At this particular moment, blogging is a very boring activity for me. No one really cares about anything that I have to blog about, and therefore, I don't do it. I have some pretty neat IT stuff to post as my career in technology progresses, such as how awesome MS Powershell is and all the neat things I can do with it, but I don't feel like blogging about it right now. Sorry.

My GTX 260 died. And get this: It was actually not overclocked at all when it died. And it was in a very well-ventilated case. And the only thing going on at the time was my girlfriend was playing solitaire on it.

That's right, solitaire brought my GTX 260 to its knees.

Actually it was probably the PSU just got old and it was only 630 watts so I probably outgrew it. So I've replaced it. And I went to Fry's to find a cheap card to get by on while I RMA this one. And is it just me, or has the box art on video cards always sucked. Even in 2010, they have the exact same cheesy, generic graphics on them.

Just wanted to throw that out there.

Remember when it used to be a significant achievement to overclock your 486 processor from 66MHz to 75MHz? My boss handed me a brand new Gigabyte EP45-UD3P motherboard the other day, which I've been experimenting with. I quickly realized that overclocking has come a really long way since I started doing it back in junior high. The BIOS settings in this thing are insane, requiring you to have a degree in electrical engineering (or spend a few hours on the web researching) to even begin to have a clue as to what most of them do. Sure, I knew all about CPU multipliers and front side bus speeds, but what the hell is PLL voltage? Termination voltage? GTL Reference voltage? Load Line Calibration? Clock skew? Wha... does "ps" stand for picoseconds? Well, maybe I'll just change the clock to the right time...

But no, I can't stand just not knowing what shit does. So I had to look it up. And I found a wonderful article here that explains it all pretty well.

My current rig:
GA-EP45-UD3P v1.6 BIOS FE
C2D E8500 @ 4GHz (422x9.5) 1.25v (1.2375 after vDrop and vDroop)
4GB OCZ DDR2-800 4-4-4-15 @ 844MHz, 2.08v
EVGA GTX 260 @ 666MHz, 1404MHz, 1107MHz
640GB Western Digital
Windows 7 64-bit

It plays the fuck out of Minesweeper.

This is my production environment.

So I was out to lunch with the guys from work yesterday, and as we were joking around (and eating ridiculously large American restaurant portions,) the topics of genetically-modified crops and the world's food supply in general came up. Being the problem-solvers that we are, a debate arose on whether "world hunger" is solvable. One guy dismissively said, Another guy responded with the statistic So as I sat listening to the two sides, I thought to myself what sort of stance I took on the issue. The way I see it, it's not a black and white, yes-or-no issue.

1. First of all, who is "we" in the phrase "we could feed the world?" I don't believe that there is any sort of distribution network and/or manpower infrastructure, real or imagined, that could even reach every hungry mouth in the world. Let alone while bringing fresh food with them. That would take some crazy world government that hasn't even been read about in the darkest of Orwellian sci-fi novels. There are starving people right here in the US that we can't even help. And in much of the rest of the world, oppressive regimes keep people too poor to feed themselves and make things impossible for any outside aid organizations to help. And that's just where there are luxuries like roads and fresh water. Let's face it: there are a lot of people living in places where human beings should not be living.

2. If you think Sally Struthers and her "feed the children" campaigns are really about feeding the hungry... well, they're not. They're about spreading the Gospel of Jesus to those poor Godless Africans.

3. Robert Malthus. If you hadn't read about him by the time you left high school, go and ask for your money back. (Wait, what?) Yes, I am as cynical as they come, but in the immortal words of the late Bill Hicks: We are a virus with shoes. When fed and watered, we will propagate and multiply and fling ourselves farther and farther afield, stressing the limits of the available food supply until it all predictably collapses back in on itself. That's the immutable nature of all animals.

4. I was discussing this with my girlfriend last night, when she brought up the additional good point that people don't want to just be fed. They want to cook and hunt and farm and be self-sustaining. It's part of our self-actualization as human beings. We need to feel that control over our own environment and our own lives.

In fact, simply feeding hungry people may actually be exacerbating the problem, because we're feeding people that are living in places where, frankly, maybe people shouldn't be living if they can't feed themselves there. Maybe that sounds shitty of me to say that, especially as someone who literally pisses and bathes in fresh water (not at the same time) while other people around the world die of thirst. I know it's not those people's fault for having been born there. No one asks to be born into the situation that they're born into. No one asks to be born at all.

But that's the world we live in. Right now as you read this, human beings wasted away and died from a lack of food or water. People that no one who has food or water to spare could have or would have ever even known about, much less reached.

My dinner last night. My culinarily-inclined girlfriend prepared scalloped potatoes, short ribs, and fresh, buttery asparagus. I'd tell you exactly how good this was, but this is a family-oriented website.

Is an awesome game. It's really not like DoWI at all, and many people won't even call it an RTS. There's no base-building. In the single-player campaign, your men are just dropped off from a space-pod to complete their mission and that's it. There are control points around the map that can be captured that can beam down reinforcements to replace guys that have been killed. In multiplayer, you are given one building, an HQ, and you make every unit and every upgrade from that one building.

So it's really less about resource management and building structures, and more about the tactical movement and placement and skillset and loudout of your squads (a bit like the tabletop game, I suspect, I've never played it.) And the game has a little bit of World of Warcraft/Diablo on it, in the sense that sometimes the bad guys drop random pieces of "loot" on the battlefield, and when the mission is over you can go and equip this loot on your squad commanders. Like better guns, armor, etc. It's got a very WoW-ish feel to it. (Like "Heavy Bolter of Purgation, 11.5 damage per second" etc.) And each squad commander has 4 different stats to increase, and they gain XP and level, so right there the game has a ton of replay value, because you have to decide if you want your dudes to use their XP points in specializing in guns or melee weapons or HP, etc.

The game makes very heavy use of cover. You can go inside of buildings, and every little wall and tree will block enemy bullets from hitting you. And the physics is done in real-time, so when a grenade comes and blows away that wall you were using for cover, it looks awesome.

In the campaign, you fight Orks and Eldar and Tyranids. There are side missions and choices that you have to make, and in each mission you have to make a choice of which strategic asset on the map you want to secure... there are tons of choices to make, thus tons of replay value.

Oh yeah, and aside from the normal multiplayer, there's a co-op mode for you and an online friend to go through the singleplayer campaign together.

Just broke 1MB/s steady download speed from Steam. Just thought I'd brag. :)

I finally finished Farcry 2. It wasn't great, but it was at least not so terrible that I couldn't bring myself to finish it. Played through it on "Hardcore," no cheating. It was a bit too easy. But the next difficulty setting up was ridiculous. The graphics were pretty, but the voice acting was terrible, and it had a weird volume/directional problem where you couldn't really tell where the voice was coming from much of the time. Like a plot character would be right in front of your face talking to you, but sound distant... but sometimes you'd be fighting guys in the jungle and someone would say something 50 yards away but sound like he was right next to you. But overall the AI was pretty cool. Bad guys seemed to make semi-intelligent use of cover, sometimes, and one cool thing they would do is rescue their buddies if you shot one of them and they were lying on the ground writhing, one of their buddies might come out from behind his cover, pick up his wounded friend and try to drag him back to cover. Which would of course give you the opportunity to mow them both down. The ability to start fires and watch them spread was pretty cool. And there was always a generous amount of exploding barrels and propane tanks around, which was nice. The gun-jamming thing and the gun-exploding thing was an interesting gimmick, but way too overused. Guns that you pick up off of dead bad guys are "used" and they look all dirty and rusty. They're more prone to jamming and/or exploding. The guns that you pay for and get from the store are new, they look better, and are supposed to be reliable. But they still jam all the fucking time. To the point where it gets extremely annoying because your shit jams on you every single firefight it seems. The guns (especially the ones that blow stuff up) are actually pretty fun. Except when your M79 grenade launcher spits out a dud and the grenade just sort of rolls out of the barrel and lands at your feet. And explodes. And you die. And I didn't realize until the very last mission of the game that the new and hopefully more reliable guns that you got at the "store" actually degrade and make themselves "used" automatically if you keep them long enough.

And oh yeah, did I mention you're stuck with malaria the entire game? There's no way to cure it. You have random attacks and have to pop pills to keep it at bay. Note: These malaria attacks will always occur while bad guys are shooting at you. And then your gun will jam. (Seriously sometimes they jam every single magazine.) And then the plot advancement will be interrupted because you "run out of pills" and have to run a special mission to go get more.

That's one way to extend play-time.

The ending was semi-interesting. You end up killing all your friends after they betray you, and end up cooperating with the one guy that was the main bad guy all along. Together you concoct a plan to allow the African refugees escape. One of you has to go blow up a cliff with a stash of dynamite. Only there's no detcord, you have to haul a car battery up there yourself and detonate it right there, killing yourself. The other option is to take a briefcase full of diamonds to the border agents to secure the safe passage of the refugees, and then shoot yourself in the head, because you're about to die of malaria anyway. The main bad guy spouted a Nietzsche quote at the beginning of the game... you know, the "will to power" one. It was so hammy I cringed. But hey... suicide is the ultimate will to power, so I thought it was actually kind of cool.

My new desk at work. I'm TS'ed into a different server on each one of those screens except the big one. That metal box off to the very right is a Hyper-V server with 20GB of RAM and 2 quad-core processors, waiting to be racked. Also, I just formatted and installed an operating system on a machine 10 miles away. I'm loving it. Now if I can just get them to pay me more... ><

Finally, I have an official IT job now. Server technician... or something. I build servers and keep them running. Also, I just got a 24" widescreen monitor. The first DVI monitor I've ever had. It's pretty sweet.

Well I said I would do this, so here it is. This is some hardcore nerd crap that I'm about to write here. But I love this kind of stuff.

As we learned in class, a "bus" networking configuration is where we have several computers hooked up to and sharing a single line.



The terminators for 10BaseT bus networks are typically 50 ohms. An ohm is a measure of resistance. (Resistance is also known as impedance when applied to an alternating current.) 1 ohm is equal to the resistance in a circuit where an electromotive pressure of 1 volt will carry 1 amp of current. I other words, 1 volt per amp.

Any substance can conduct electricity if you apply enough voltage to it. Metal is just a particularly good one (and rubber a really bad one) because of its atomic structure.

In grade-school science classes, we're taught that electricity is the "flow of negatively charged electrons" and that it can only happen if there's a "circuit." Well, that's... kind of wrong. The crap printed in a lot of textbooks kids read to this day about electricity is flat-out wrong.

"Electricity" doesn't necessarily need a "circuit" to work. It just needs a potential difference (which means an opposite charge) between point A and point B, and if that exists, current will flow.

Electricity is not just electrons. The positively-charged particles and the negatively-charged particles are equally important and both have an equal amount of "charge." These particles are the electrons and protons supplied by the conductor itself. Sometimes current can even flow in both directions at once through the same conductor! And in certain cases, you can even have proton-flow, which drags the entire atom with it! Electricity is not a single particle traveling at or near light-speed all the way from one end of a wire to the other. A typical metal conductor, on the atomic level, is a bunch of large atoms floating in a sea of tiny movable electrons. When an electromotive force (voltage, or potential difference) exists across this wire, a current is created, and the electrons lurch forward, but they can't get very far without bumping into more electrons. They just transfer their momentum - their energy - to neighboring electrons. And so in a way, the "electric current" flows very very slowly, literally slower than pancake-syrup inside the wires. And in AC currents it doesn't move at all - it just sits in one place and vibrates. The energy however, flows very fast. Like almost light speed.

So let's go back to the bus network topology. If you take the terminator off of the end of the bus cable, would electricity, energy, or data just "spray" out of the end of the wire as if it were a water hose? No. Just like electricity is not just "spraying" out of your wall sockets right now that have nothing plugged into them. The network cards on each of the computers sends out little modulations or perturbances in the current that represent bits of data. Like ripples in that "sea" of electrons we were talking about. So one computer on a bus network cannot send a signal to just one other computer on the network. Because you can't just tell electricity where to go. (Unless you use resistors, incidentally.) So every signal sent by every computer is picked up by every other computer on the bus. It's just that the NICs are programmed to ignore all the chatter except for the signals that have their name (MAC or IP address) on them.

Said another way, when one computer sends out a signal, because of the very nature of electricity itself and because it can't just be told where exactly to go, the signal is going to propagate throughout the entire cable, and every computer will be able to hear it.

Now here's where the terminators come in. What they do is absorb that excess energy (their resistance converts the energy to heat) that makes it to the ends of the line... think like the signals sent out by the NICs are waves in a system of canals, and the terminators (resistors) prevent the waves from bouncing back in the opposite direction. Because if we let the waves just bounce back in the opposite direction, they would interfere with the signals still coming down the wire.

So there you have it.

I'm finally taking the one class in my entire degree that I knew I would truly love: Computer Networking. Not only do we get to sit in class 3 hours a week and just ramble on about awesome nerd-shit like length specifications for different categories of twisted pair ethernet cables and load balancers, but we also have a lab that's a big playground of computers that we get to hook up and configure in different types of network topologies for a grade. It's nerd-heaven for me.

Also, I deactivated my Facebook account because I just didn't really see the point in it, so if you know me, don't be offended if it appears as though I de-friended you or whatever, because I didn't.

Just got this installed yesterday. I've had cable Internet since I moved away from my parent's house and dial-up modems, about 10 years ago now. Of course the name of the cable company changes from year to year as the assets get traded like Pogs or baseball cards... @home, ATTBI, Comcast, Road Runner, Time Warner. Whatever you want to call it. But I finally got tired of their pricing, their unreliability, their inbred customer service reps... it was time to start looking for something new.

So I signed up for AT&T U-Verse. They had a nice and simple website that let me choose exactly what package/bundle I wanted to sign up for, exactly what speed of Internet I wanted to pay for, how many channels I wanted... turns out it would be $20/month less than what I was paying Time Warner. And it comes with a DVR. And more channels. And the same Internet speed. And a 21st century HUD on the TV so you can read descriptions of what you're watching and what's coming on next and all that. Time Warner didn't have any of that. It was just a piece of coax coming out of the wall that spit out a plain old analog signal, a la 1970's era technology.

From what I understand, it's fiber-optics up to the neighborhood node, and then they use whatever existing copper is available to get it the rest of the way into your house. (I think they can do it over coax or phone lines, or even a combination.)

The installation was sort of intrusive, as the installation guy had to check for phone cords or whatever all throughout the house, despite the only television being in the living room. But it was pretty quick. Got a big modem/router thingy, which they call a "Residential Gateway." It has a built in wireless router in it, which replaced my old WRT54GL modified with DD-WRT... which made me sort of sad. But my PC now gets better wireless reception than I ever did with my old router, which really shocked me. And now I realize what all those "2WIRE624" wireless networks are that you tend to see when you're looking for a wireless network to connect to. (And yes you can reconfigure the AT&T router however you want, that's just the default SSID.)

This is just another test post so I can make sure things are running smoothly. Here's a picture of my childhood dog, Molly. R.I.P.

So here we are. Another pointless website. But hey, a lot of fun coding goes on behind the scenes here, and I really enjoy coding. I wrote all this shit from scratch. Including my own post-submission system so that I'm not just doing something as stupid as manually editing the index file and uploading it via FTP every time I want to make a new blog post. I can do it from the web now. And I've implemented a system where this blog page only displays a certain number of posts, so that the size of this page never gets out of control. Self-sufficiency is one of my biggest goals this time around. As in, I'm trying to build this page so that it could operate with practically no divine intervention from me. But there's still a ton of work to be done. To wrap up this little test submission, I'll include a quotation: