A Month Of Using Twitter

After a month of usage, I believe it is a pretty good platform to monitor the quick status of the person/entity, you are following and jotting down random non-sense.

I need to blow these nags out:

1. The 140 characters limitation is cramping my style!
2. No line breaks.
   
3. Invite from other networks function keeps crashing and burning.

Amtrak Burns

I am burned by Amtrak today. Supposedly, A595 was to departed from Irvine at 9:56PM, but it hadn't arrived from San Diego until 11:56PM. The trip to LAUS took roughly one hour and I arrived around 00:50, instead of the scheduled 11:00PM.

Since the last Gold Line train left LAUS at 11:54PM, I have to take the earliest one to Sierra Madre at 3:45AM.

I am having so much fun waiting for 3 hours at LAUS. What a nightmare.

Netsh Is Not Working

If you encountered a problem where netsh couldn't pull the interface name and show the UID instead:

>netsh interface show interface
Admin State    State          Type             Interface Name
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Enabled                       Dedicated        {38E7FAC8-FC0C-46CE-BA06-59C5323F1CEF}
Enabled                       Dedicated        {59F5094B-3EC3-4F9B-892A-DF5F773292D9}
Enabled                       Dedicated        {92C5A1C0-8075-486C-B8A8-AAF8914F7E96}
Enabled                       Dedicated        {A9BC217F-9B17-44C9-843D-7C1B8471EAC3}
Enabled                       Internal         Internal
Enabled                       Loopback         Loopback

This inability to get the name of the interface is a problem since netsh will not work properly. The command only will take interface name, not UID.

The solution is outlined here.

I am unable to get this to work when I try to specify the interface name. "Local Area Connection" is considered invalid, and gets me no where. When I dump the netsh info, it lists all my interfaces as some gibberish like "{ADB7473C-C67B-49DE-B0D9-A25E990A39F5}", but even using that, and otherwise following the examples, the interface is called invalid.
i have enabled remote registry service then it's working [...]

>net start remoteregistry
The Remote Registry service was stopped successfully.

>netsh interface show interface
Admin State    State          Type             Interface Name
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Enabled                       Dedicated        Local Area Connection
Enabled                       Dedicated        VMware Virtual Ethernet Adapter (basic host-only support for VMnet1)
Enabled                       Dedicated        VMware Virtual Ethernet Adapter (Network Address Translation (NAT) for VMnet8)
Enabled                       Dedicated        Local Area Connection 2
Enabled                       Internal         Internal
Enabled                       Loopback         Loopback

This only took 2.5 hours of my life. No biggie.

Back To SoCal

Arriving at ONT at 10AM, show up at the office around 11:30AM.

While finishing the NGS Policy XML - database verification, I uncorked nasty application behavior. Consider:

<party>
  <name>Acme</name>
  <address>Address1</address>
  <address>Address2</address>
</party>

Normally this XML is transformed into:

Party table
PartyID	Name
1	Acme

Address table
AddressID	PartyID	Address
1	1	Address1
2	1	Address2

But nooooooo, the wise developer did this instead:

Party table
PartyID	Name	Addr1	Addr2
1	Acme	Address1	Address2

Now I have to think about catching the wrench before it hits the wheels.

Anyway, mum bought a big painting on Sunday. Since it didn't fit into Lisa's car, I was volunteered to transport the items.

I managed to get some rest around 10PM.

Long day - it is.

Scheduling Mishap

Oh boy...

Stepping out of Metrolink #682 only to find the buses were gone. The train was only 5 minutes late! I was wondering, these buses were supposed to be there for us (the Metrolink riders), if they decided to depart without us, we needed to wait for another 1 hour for the next one.

What were those people thinking?

Luckily, the next OCTA 471 SB arrived early and the driver decided to send us to work immediately, rather than waiting for another 40 minutes. Others were not so lucky: one of our developer decided to walk and the bus passed him. Tried to help, but the bus couldn't make safe stop for boarding. The others (470) were still waiting when we departed.

Work Work Work

Alright, someone is replacing a network card on production system. Conducting test to see if there is any interruption of service.

Testing is done at 11:30 and the systems is good.

NetBIOS Over TCP/IP

We just endured agony from dealing with the team on the other side of the pond. Problem is relatively simple: the India team need to be able to access a shared folder serviced by a Bufallo NAS system, but we want to make sure that the port are opened on the corporate firewall.

First problem: someone changed the corporate WINS, and somehow the clients are not aware of this (even if it refreshes IP address). So \\MachineName is out, must use \\IPAddress instead, lucky that I setup the machine with static IP address.

Second problem: Since the Bufallo NAS is running Linux OS, the machine is offering shared folder service by talking SMB (old version). This poses a grave problem, it doesn't response on port 445, it only replies when someone talk to port 135-139. First the firewall administrator only open port 445 for TCP/UDP, this problem is solved quickly after mentioning Linux box and SMB.

Third and bigger problem: we didn't know the configuration of the PC on the other side. Normally the default advanced settings of TCP/IP looks like this:

But, the PC is setup with a disabled NetBIOS over TCP/IP. Dan found it through network sniffing and this link.

Dealing With USCIS

There is no better way of spending your vacation by queuing up the USCIS line 6:15 in the morning. It was cold and windy, luckily I was wrapped up like Michelin man, waiting in line, alone, until hell broke lose at 6:30. Out of no where, 20 people showed up and queued up behind me. Amazing.

The guards were late, I wasn't let in until 7 o'clock sharp, although I should be let in at 6:45, extra 15 min in the cold. Also I was totally irked by the jackass, who checked my bag, thought I might do the federal government harm if I waltzed in with my Pentax. WTH? I can understand no knife policy, but no camera? What about embedded camera on a phone? Should I go in without cell phone? Jackass private security had no answer. But, in order for me to get in, I had to walk back to the parking lot to drop the camera in my car. Extra 15 min well spent. I waltzed into Room 1001 with the 7:15 people. Ridiculous.

It is great that the USCIS InfoPass system works for people who has an appointment at 7 or 7:15 since I walked out at 8 sharp. I will not recommend using the system to acquire appointment at 10 o'clock since you might end up meeting the officer around 12 (lunch time).

On the way home I heard, from KPCC (NPR), that someone whacked Bhutto.

Also, dad bought eee PC, the 4GB with web cam version, and prayed that it arrives before he departs for Jakarta.

Dinner at Din Tai Fung.

Jammed at 5 Freeway

This is the worst sigalert I have experienced in LA. Since it is raining in the morning and it hasn't been raining for a month, the roads are extremely slick. KPCC says: 'rash of accidents' happens. On I-5 south, around 3rd St exit in Santa Ana, an 18 wheelers and 4 cars tangled. It made such a mess, CHP has to close all of the lanes.

The are forced to open the HOV lane 1 hour later, to let people pass since the firemen haven't been able to retrieve a man stuck under the flatbed.

I missed the opening from I-5 to Main St exit when I came to full stop, and I have to slog for 2 miles in 1 hour (imagine that 2 mph @ 6 AM) to exit at the next ramp.

There goes my day, instead of 1 hour commute, I have to do it in 2.5 hours.

Links:
LaTimes.com
OCRegister.com

Give Me The Last X Records Ordered by These Criteria

While writing a script to analyze application log, written into Oracle database, I found that it is fairly hard to get the last X records using rownum after the records are ordered based on certain criteria.

Trupti Rajparia says:

[...] one should be careful when using the Order By clause along with Rownum. When Order By is used with Rownum to restrict query results, it works only if Ordered By is the primary key of the table.

Since I am not a great fan of PL/SQL (clunky POS), I decided to use Perl instead to slice and dice the matching criteria.

1. Get the INDEXED_CRITERIA from Oracle

SELECT
   INDEXED_CRITERIA
FROM logTable
WHERE
   filter criteria
ORDER BY
   INDEXED_CRITERIA


2. Get the last X INDEXED_CRITERIA (easily processed by Perl with three standard functions)
   

push each INDEXED_CRITERIA into array tempA
pop the last X records from array tempA into array tempB.
produce CRITERIA_TEXT by joining tempB with ',' as separator


3. Get the data from Oracle
   

SELECT
   REQUIRED_FIELDS
FROM logTable
WHERE
   CRITERIA_TEXT are met
ORDER BY
   INDEXED_CRITERIA


4. Process the data returned.

Preliminary EOP Load Test

Add finishing touch to the Dashboard-NGS project:

1. Add several bad packets (e.g.: invalid date, office code, transaction type)
2. Load test
3. Finding out why not all of the bad packets are not being logged to the database: to my horror, I found out that the dev inserts date and time into 2 separate DATE fields. The date information is inserted to one DATE field and the time portion into another one. It is not the inefficiency that irks me but the time portion is filled with mixture of 1970-1-1, 1900-1-1 or whatever as the date of the time. Sloppy code.

We are waiting for the final build for now.

Working Late

Yawn! Another midnight testing going on again... And the environment is totally crapping out.

What A Crazy Week

It started early last Tuesday, and I was feeling good when the day ended: the impossible task of figuring out the proper data was completed.

Wednesday was another story. I knew from my previous experience, working on that JSP framework, that the LoadRunner script is bad if it wasn't properly scrutinized. After looking at the testing scripts I realized that I need to fix lots of scripts. Suffice to say that it was a long Wednesday night.

I wasn't thinking straight when the test blew up on Thursday morning, and spent the rest of the day wondering what was wrong and planned on the next testing cycle.

Friday was spent figuring out how to arrange the script in order for me to quickly update it when the application is changing.

Ran several tests on Saturday, figuring out the impact of changing the script. The result is not good.

Insomnia Strikes

Arrrgggh! Can't sleep