Thanks, Guvnor!

"If you look at the big picture, you probably wouldn't get out of bed." http://t.co/Sz1DBGyOWZ Another Philly school year starts in crisis.
— NewsWorks (@NewsWorksWHYY) September 8, 2014

The "Wooder Ice" Challenge

I love the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. It's wonderful, memorable, and apparently really successful as a fundraiser. But, a friend of mine, Chris Heerschap, pointed out that a one in six Americans go to bed hungry. That's 49 million people, and 16 million of those hungry people are children.

I decided that instead of dunking myself with ice water, I'd partake in a Philadelphia tradition and have a water ice, and then add up the cost of a water ice once a week and turn that in to a monthly recurring donation to Philabundance a local food bank.

So here it is - the first "wooder ice" challenge.

That (Time) Sinking Feeling

If you've ever considered yourself a computer geek, at any level, you recognize this scenario:

It's not bad enough we do this to ourselves, but when vendors get involved . . .
Recently, at the day job, a vendor asked to put a "portal" server, a freebie "value add" for their product, in the DMZ. Said public facing web server would then connect to the Production (!) (Read Only Warehouse, anyone?) Oracle DB inside the secure network. Read only, limited privs to specific views, etc. but nonetheless hitting the production DB, with all of the inherent risks of possible data exposure. But at least that data would be encrypted traffic between the DB and the DMZ Portal server.
Except for one thing - the Oracle "Advanced Security" suite is required if you want encrypted listener traffic. And Larry charges something like 25 thousand dollars _per_core_ to purchase it (per server - we have a _lot_ of Oracle servers), plus yearly maintenance. Not going to happen just so one department could implement a freebie add on "customer portal".
What about an SSH tunnel, you say? That's exactly what I said. Just start an SSH tunnel, and forward the Oracle traffic via SSH. Secure. And Free!
I did a little thinking and settled on whipping up a custom script in Python using the Paramiko library. All in all, probably about a day, maybe a day and a half from first glance to done, including getting the vendor to test. Definitely looks like I've avoided the time sink detailed in the XKCD, right? Well, kinda.
That was mid-December. The first week of January Oracle announced they are now bundling several features from the "Advanced Security" suite in to the base RDBMS. Among those features? End to end encryption for listener traffic.
Argh.

Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner's Daughter

Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner's Daughter, a photo by oscary2008 on Flickr.

So today I turn 44. Which means I was 10 years old when this movie premiered. I have to confess I had a bit of a school-boy crush on Sissy Spacek way back then. She was so cute in her ten-gallon hat and bangs.
Yesterday I watched the movie Deadfall and Sissy Spacek plays Charlie Hunnam's mom. Sigh. We are all inexorably bending to the will of Father Time.
I gotta say, though Ms. Spacek still looks fantastic. Happy Birthday to me.