Chainring Circus

In short, I returned my e-book to Narbik. I would recommend Micronicstraining to anyone. In fact I am now even more likely to go to Narbik’s class then I was before this incident.

The long version.
Later that day I called Micronicstraining to discuss my misgivings with them and actually spoke with Narbik. He was very helpful and understood my concerns saying that there would be no problem giving me licenses for more than one computer. With that I got off the phone placated to some extent. I tried to install LockLizard onto Wine and figured I would just deal with the inconvenience. But the installation onto Wine failed and I did not install LockLizard on Windows nor did I try to open the e-book. I didn’t even unrar the files.

That night I tossed and turned, woke up in the middle of the night and pondered my predicament. I figured I had nothing to loose by asking for my money back. That next morning I sent an email to Narbik explaining my dilemma. It is below.

Sir,

Regretfully I am writing to you to request a refund. I have not
activated my LockLizard license and am requesting that you have it
deactivated.

I would like to thank you for taking the time with me on the phone
yesterday. I had fewer misgivings concerning the number of computers
I would be allowed to study on after our conversation, however, I have
developed a study routine over the past 18 months and shoehorning
Windows into that process would not be beneficial at this time. I do
realize the lab PC runs Windows but I had already decided the last few
months of lab practice would be done in a Windows environment, not the
core of my studies.

I am truly disappointed. I downloaded the free workbook and have done
a number of labs from it. Because of that previous experience with
Micronics I did not expect the type of copy protection used in the
workbook as there is no mention of LockLizard on the Micronics
website. Over the past few months I have frequently visited the table
of contents for your workbook to map out my studies. My work
environment is based upon Linux, I do not have a Windows PC at home,
and I would be forced to change my study process in order to use the
workbook.

If you decide to change your copy protection to something more along
the lines of O’Reilly Media or Internetwork Expert please contact me,
I will be the first to purchase your workbook in a more portable
format. If you need to speak with me directly, my office phone number
is (xxx) xxx-xxxx and my cell phone number is (xxx) xxx-xxxx.

Sincerely,

Jud Bishop

Yesterday I ordered the Advanced CCIE Routing & Switching 2.0 Work Book from Narbik and figured I would share my experience.

If you have read my post on the TSHOOT book you have an understanding of my disdain for DRM and the reasons for it. It boils down to the fact that I use Linux as my primary environment at work and home, we don’t even have a Windows PC at home, and most of the DRM out there requires Windows. So then I have to load whatever I need on my work laptop, but if I am studying at home I have to make sure I bring my laptop home.

Imagine my disappointment when I got the following email from Micronics after I spent $350 on an e-book. I could not find anything on the Micronics website that says the DRM is this draconian.

If you follow the link inside the quote, it says you must use either Windows or a Mac. I am going to say this again, get SafariBooksOnline, O’Reilly is a company that understands technical people and caters to them. I am sure that Narbik is a great teacher and I hope these books are as good as they say, otherwise I will know I got ripped off.

Dear Student,

You will receive three separate emails.
1. Locklizard License
2. Vol. I & II
3. Vol. III

Since you will have only one license, choose a PC or Laptop that your Secured File will reside.

Please follow these procedures before you open the attached file:
1. First you need to open, Download and Install Lizard Safeguard Secure PDF Viewer Email (sometimes this email is considered a SPAM and if you have Gmail it goes to “7 or More” section of your Gmail).

2. Once you completed this step, you need to scroll down the page and double click on the .llv file and download.

3. After installing your PDF Viewer, open the Secured PDF Files that you have received as an attachment.

You can check the operating systems requirement on the following link:

http://www.locklizard.com/LockLizard_Secure_PDF_Viewer_v25.pdf

If you have difficulty opening your files you contact me as soon as possible so we can walk you through this process.

Thank you for your business – we appreciate it very much.

Janet Kocharians
Director of Marketing & Sales
Micronics Inc.
Mobile: (818) 331-2419
Fax: (818) 249-8388

Last week we had in a consultant from one of our electronic medical record (EMR) vendors and we were working on a RedHat cluster. He was asking me to check whether a service started at a runlevel and wanted me to ls /etc/rc.d/rc5.d, I looked at him and said, “There’s a command for that.” (The command is chkconfig.) I’ve been chuckling about it for the past few days.

The Linux and BSD foundations need to get together and start an advertising campaign, it would be a great parody.

Today I read about Vino’s unpopular win at L-B-L. That is fine, we can all sit and wonder why or how, but there was no outrage about Valverde getting third. Valverde could not compete in the 2008 TdF because it went through Italy and the Italians had proved he doped through a genetic match in the Puerto Affair. Now the UCI is trying get a worldwide ban on Valverde racing but no one cares.

On the same front page where they are excoriating the win by Vino they also state that Valverde’s Italian ban has been confirmed by Swiss courts. Why is Valverde still racing? Where is the outrage? Why are fans not complaining that Valverde was caught doping, has been trying to get off on a technicality, and is still racing?

Boggles the mind. Whether or not Vino is contrite has nothing to do with him paying the price. He was suspended for two years, did his time and is back racing. Valverde should not be racing at all.

Tailwinds.

I wish I knew who to attribute the quotes who have no attribution. If you know the author, please contact me. These are not my own. I will update this occasionally.

Associates do a task until they get it right, experts do a task until they can not do it wrong.
— Relevant to CCNA vs. CCIE.

I’m confronted by my own ignorance or misunderstandings all the time.
— Anthony Bourdain

The worst elements in a group reflect on everyone who chooses to associate with them.
— mtbr.com

In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
— Bertrand Russell, this is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence.
— Common saying

We are what we repeatedly do, therefore excellence is not by chance but a habit.
— I have this on my desk at work. Why settle for being mediocre.

When your IQ is higher than your body weight, you can’t always find what you need at the family bookstore.
— Chris MacAskill, SmugMug.com

The patent system should not be a roulette wheel.
— Richard Silver

If it ain’t broke, you’re not trying hard enough.
— Google Test Blog

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
— Albert Einstein

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.
— Howard Aiken

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.
— Albert Einstein

Open source asks “How can I fix this.” Closed source asks, “How can you fix this for me.”
— Richard Silver

Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.
— Albert Einstein

Profit is accounting opinion, but cash is fact.
— Chris MacAskill, SmugMug.com

You need to purchase Troubleshooting IP Routing Protocols.

For all of the other CCNP tests I have read two books. I enjoy the different perspective from two books and the extra reading has reinforced my understanding of the topics. Unfortunately for this exam I only had the TSHOOT Official Certification Guide and had been keeping my eyes open for another book.

I came across a recent CCIE blog post that mentioned Troubleshooting IP Routing Protocols by Aziz, Liu, Martey and Shamim. I wish I could give that guy credit because this is the best routing book I have found. I sat down to glance at the chapters and began to read a section on BGP, I was stunned by the clarity. It’s not the newest book, but it is written by four low digit CCIEs and is a great book, I have not been disappointed in a section I have read yet. Unfortunately it does not cover all of the topics of the TSHOOT exam but I am glad to have this book.

One of my friends got onto me that my blog was all about work. He wanted to read stories about some of my cycling adventures. Rather than launch into stories about riding across America, I’ll start with some stories from my distant past.

Every city has that one ride that is the crazy all out sprint for the roses and kisses. In Auburn it is the Wednesday Night Worlds. When I was in Los Angeles it was the Pier ride, in San Antonio it was the Helotes Loop, in Omaha it was the Wednesday night Train Track ride, and in Montgomery it was the Thursday night Emerald Mountain ride.

Out in LA they meet at the piers. When I got to LA I went to Helen’s Cycles and asked where the club rides met. The guys told me, “The pro-1-2s meet at pier X, the 3s meet at Y and the 4s at Z.” So I showed up at X, hey I wanted to go to nationals that year, why would I ride with the 3s? There were maybe 25 of us and we headed down the beach bike path, at each intersection we would pick up a different group. By the time we made it to the city streets there had to be 150 riders in the peloton. It was so big that when the front half made it through the light the rest of the peloton made it too, even if by that time the light was red. I was working in the front and when it was my turn to pull I looked at the guy behind me and said, “I don’t know where I’m going.” He replied, “Don’t worry I’ll tell you where to turn.” About that time I got in behind some little red hatchback, must have been a Yugo, there were 150 riders behind me and I was drafting that Yugo at 30mph praying he didn’t put on his breaks. I stayed with that little Yugo until I pulled off the front.

The LA ride ends in a sprint somewhere over by the airport and it was crazy fast. There were about 10 of us contesting the sprint, guys would pull and when they were done would immediately get shelled, and it was my turn to pull again. So I gave it everything I had and all of a sudden it was like I had on the breaks. Guys were coming around me left and right. Somebody won the sprint and I asked, “What were we sprinting for?” One of the riders replied, “The fire hydrant.” I should have known.

That was Tuesday morning and Wednesday night I went to Burger King and got a Whopper meal. Thursday morning I showed up at the pier and the guys were nice to me this time around, because now they knew I could ride. That morning I had a burger pit in my stomach, I was wishing I would just throw up my dinner from last night so I could ride. I don’t even think I made a pull that morning and I remember that suffering to this day.

Well I had purposely made my plane reservations out of LA for late Saturday so I could do the Saturday ride. It did not disappoint. I believe it’s called the Doughnut ride. Anyway I was careful what I ate the rest of the week because I wanted to redeem myself for my Thursday morning performance. The ride got started and the engines moved to the front so I went with them. Some pro rider had shown up and launched himself off the front, and I grabbed his wheel, just the two of us swapping pulls. At some point we hit a stop light red and he started doing a track stand. Dummy me, I decided I would too, even in my hypoxic state. Of course you can see where this is headed, I fell over and he rode off and left me. Because I had no idea where I was I had to wait for the chase group in order to find my way back to the car. My pride was hurt more than my skinned knee.

I also have a good story about my first Helotes ride in San Antonio. The Tuesday night Helotes ride is for the racers. It’s a crazy, all out hammer fest. I was told about this ride from the guys in one of the local shops, but they told me it was 50 miles. I decided it had my name on it, but when I showed up there was the Pacificare RAAM team. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. They leave right at 6:00pm on the clock and it was all out from the start. I remember doing 30mph and loosing ground on the guys in the front. I got to thinking 50 miles of this is crazy, I better find a pack. So I got into the second group which was a bunch of special forces pararescue guys I had gotten to know. When we got back to Helotes it was only 30 miles and I was pissed. The guys couldn’t understand why until I told them I thought the ride was 50 miles, not 30. They all laughed at me and one guy said, “First time huh. Did they tell you about it at the shop?” It seems the shop makes that ride sound harder than it is to deter people they are not sure should be there.

Tailwinds

One of my coworkers solved a problem today that I should have been able to solve. I got pulled into a project that uses a closed system with it’s own programming language that I had never seen nor programmed. My coworker was trying to figure out why his syntax was not working. So we cranked up the logging in Warn.log, Error.log and Fatal.log. We quickly figured out why it was failing, the program was looking for a file that did not exist and he was not catching that error, there is no catch statement.

So I began trying to write an IF/ELSE statement that would check for the error condition. I was given a .pdf of the manual for the system and just started trying different functions that made sense to me. I wrote a nice little one liner in the SYSTEM command that returned TRUE or FALSE if the FILE environment variable existed.

The problem was that we could not set the environment variable with a variable from the program. It has to be a string literal.

From the Trace.log:

We tried a number of different variations on that theme, imported and exported variables to a subshell, tried different return values from the exit command. We got the system to turn circles but what we really wanted was squares.

Finally my coworker called and said, why don’t we just invert the logic. If it falls through to the end of the IF/ELSE statements it must be in the format we want. Let me take a step back and say this was his code, he should have been the one to figure it out. I believe I helped him figure out what his main problem was, which helped him find the solution. I’m not trying to minimize his work, nor am I trying to minimize my input into the solution.

The moral of the story is that I should have taken a higher level look at the problem to understand the solution. I am quick to believe that I can code my way out of any problem, regardless whether or not I have ever seen the language. What I really needed to do was step back and take a higher level view of the logic, rather than dive into syntax and functions.

I came across this post today by way of HackerNews. It explains some of my feelings lately as I chomp at the bit wanting the challenge of a new job. I promised my wife we would not move until we had our kids, so I have a couple more years, but I’ve been straining against the reigns.

That post also explains why I think about documentation differently than my peers. I joke about being raised in the military, I wasn’t, however, the Air Force was my first real job. In the military it is known that you will change jobs every three years and so the documentation you write is not for yourself, it is for the person you know will come behind you. In the military you do not quit, you are moved. If you stay in one place too long or “homestead” you are looked down upon and it can actually threaten your career. As a result documentation is taken seriously and my time in the Air Force shaped my understanding of documentation.

Thinking about past employees as alumni is also the same way veterans think about themselves. I am proud to have served and there have been times I felt guilty I left, other times I have wanted to return. Whenever I leave my current position I will view myself as an alumnist, I just hope my current employer does too.

In the future I would like to find an employer that shares my interest in personal development and also has the room for me to grow. I first hired on as a Programmer Analyst and was promoted three years later to Senior Network Engineer. That is the extent of advancement with my current employer, there is no Super Senior Network Engineer. I don’t mind taking a step back with a new employer as long as there is the ability for future growth as I develop.

This is as close to a rant as I will put on this blog. Don’t get me wrong, I can rant, but there is rarely a reason to rant in public.

I got my TSHOOT book in the mail a couple of days ago. The reading has been slow going in part because I only bought the hard cover. The last version of CCNP books included a pdf of the book on the CD-Rom. Nice. First class even. In this day and age it was refreshing to see a company not try to nickel and dime customers.

Not any more. Now you have to purchase an ebook. I would pay for a pdf of the book like what used to be provided for free. However, that is not how CiscoPress has formatted their new ebook offerings. Check out the this nice press release. Now the customer not only has to purchase the pdf that used to be provided for free, they also have to deal with Adobe DRM on their CiscoPress ebooks and I have decided I won’t pay for that.

I understand that companies need to be able to monetize products, and I agree. I also understand that many of the pdfs ended up on file sharing sites. The way SafariBooksOnline handles pdfs is a great deterrent. Just put my name and customer number all over the document as a watermark. No one would be foolish enough to share content that was so easily traced. Even if I were to edit a watermarked pdf I would be afraid I had missed some metadata.

In the end I just burned a bunch of tokens on SafariBooksOnline and downloaded the whole book, one chapter at a time. I am extremely disappointed in CiscoPress. I would love to tell you how I will never purchase another book from them but they have a captive audience. I will, however, keep a look out for Cisco books from CiscoPress competitors. If you have some favorite Cisco books that are not from CiscoPress please tell me as I am now extremely interested.