The Blog of a Chronic Content Creator
A little over 10 years ago, on March 24, 2004, I posted the first entry on my LiveJournal blog – what would eventually become JonWestfall.com (I actually mentioned in that post that I was trying to figure out how to show the RSS feed from my LiveJournal blog to the relatively static homepage of JonWestfall.Com). 10 years and counting!
One of my favorite smartphone photo editing effects is selective color removal. I used to love Camera360 for this, however they removed this feature a few years ago. Since then I’ve been looking for an app that will automatically select color, not one where I need to “paint” the area I want. The latest contender shows promise, although it isn’t perfect. Enjoy some artsy color selected Jon Masterpieces! (PS – this posts title is in reference to the fact that as a child, I was an atrocious color-er)
[phoneitin]
“Nudging” refers to subtly prompting someone toward one choice or course of action. In the Choice Architecture world, it’s seen as a way to help those who need it make better decisions, while not heavy-handed-ly dictating what to do. But when does it go from helpful to annoying? 2 words: Facebook Notifications! Yes, I know my wife has been waiting for me to play Words with Friends…and Songpop… Nudging isn’t going to help – I play by my own rules… In my own time!
[phoneitin]
Whenever I start a new blog or section of this blog, I tend to post a lot for the first few days and then slowly trail off. From what I’ve seen on the Internet, this is not uncommon. I feel lucky that I haven’t gone a whole year between blog posts (like a few friends I know), but I certainly understand how that happens.
But with the newness comes the worry of overloading the reader (Even as a published author, I sometimes doubt anyone reads my work – if you wish to prove me wrong, use the contact form and I will amend this post to show a real live person read it. But I digress…). This overload problem is why services like Buffer exist. I am beginning to wonder if it matters though – streakiness versus reliability. I follow streaky blogs and regular blogs daily, and while I revel in the reliability of fresh content, there is something special about a friend’s blog being updated periodically. I guess there are pros and cons to both publishing strategies!
[phoneitin]
It’s been said that seldom do well behaved women make history. Extending this, rarely do well behaved cats exist in history. In other words, mischievous kitty who innocently sleeps on the bed, I’m keeping my eye on you!
[phoneitin]
Increasingly, the smartphone has become the way that we communicate with each other. And so in that vein, I’ve decided to start a new feature on my blog called phoning it in. All posts here are completely composed via my phone. What will you see here? Short, pithy thoughts, poems, jokes, commentary, and anything else (probably not long form).
Enjoy the randomness,
Jon
The Telnet protocol might not be the newest thing on the block, however there is still some legacy network hardware that will only accept Telnet connections and not newer more secure SSH connections. Recently I bought an APC MasterSwitch unit, that allows me to remotely power on and power off my hardware, and I ran into a problem of automation. I wanted to be able to remotely reboot the server every night a little after 3 AM, but there was no schedule capability inside the software that shipped with the decade old unit. The MasterSwitch, however did come with a built-in telnet server that one can remotely access and power on and off each individual outlet.
The problem with automating Telnet, is that the prompts are not always uniform between different Telnet servers as they are with SSH servers. So one needs to know the exact keystrokes used in order to accomplish the task they need to do. However if you know all of the keystrokes you can create a command that will type them directly to the telnet client on an *nix computer. Here is my crontab command that navigates through the menus of the MasterSwitch unit and reboots the selected outlet at 3:16 in the morning:
16 3 * * * { echo "USERNAME"; echo "PASSWORD"; echo "1"; echo "2"; echo "1"; echo "6"; echo "YES"; sleep 1; } | telnet SERVERNAME
You’ll see that this command reads sequential to the actual keys that I put in when accessing the unit, first my username, then my password, then the menu commands which use numbers to drill down to the actual outlet, and then confirm that you would like to reboot it. The sleep 1 command at the end spaces them out so that they don’t overload the client.
There you have it, a quick and dirty way to automate a telnet session!
When will Geek Squad employees (or ex-employees) learn that their badges are not worth > $100, even if…
I’ve seen badges like the one below sit on eBay for months until they finally drop the high start bid. In case you’re wondering, Geek Squad badges go for around $60 on average, although I (and I suspect most serious collectors) have gotten them for $25 or so.
Because I know everyone cares deeply on this issue, I’m happy to report that in a survey of 117 students, slightly less than half (46%) believe that they are “cute and cuddly and I lub them so much” while 53% feel “They’re antisocial and psychotic and I don’t trust them at all”. This difference is not significant (p = .4). Student level (100 versus 300 level class) and time of year (fall versus spring) also do not affect sentiment.
Conclusion: Half the population love little fur balls, fur balls that the other half of the population distrust deeply.
Oh, if you’re wondering why I have this data – I use Socrative to collect quiz data from my classes and as part of the first day of class stuff, I have them take a demo quiz. I ask the cat question there, just for fun. I analyze it because I’m a big freakin’ geek.
Since we recorded it the day before I left Shreveport, I sorta forgot to mention (widely) that I teamed up with my friend Todd Ogasawara on an episode of his Mobile Views podcast entitled “Life after Windows Phone, Project Sienna, & Credit Card Security“. It was a great conversation, and perhaps the start of a few more. So if you’re bored, and want to hear me ramble on about things (along with Todd speaking much more eloquently), take a listen.