The Life of Lou Ruppert

J’habite ici

Well, first off, here are the pictures I promised of the before and after views of my room. Taking it from this angle, I think I would agree with my friend Malone’s suggestion that I add some tint to the ceiling. I like the new green. It’s like what electricity would look like, if it was raised organically and then splattered onto the walls like a crime scene. I feel really alive every time I go into that room, and don’t even notice the imperfections in my work now that I’m done with it. Click the thumbnail to see a closer shot.

An end to my youth

I got a haircut yesterday. While I was getting clipped, I was playing with the hair that had fallen onto the apron. Then I saw it, like a splinter of broken glass in my cornflakes:

THE GREY HAIR!

I’d always dreaded the day I would find my first grey hair. It’s the lump in the breast of my eternal youth. Suddenly I’m looking at a whole new future, one which contains things like heart pills, eyeglasses for reading the paper, and the ever-looming threat of the annual colonoscopy, complete with amnesia pills and the sympathetic glance from the nurses. Already I’m hating the music the kids are all listening to, when one of my friends observing the whole thing helpfully offered her theory that grey hairs actually come from stress. I’m going with that explanation for now, despite the shred of sympathy in her voice when she said that.

The car gets it too!

December is my car inspection month. Each year, I procrastinate as far as I can in order to try to squeeze another month out of my car inspection. This year I decided to be a good citizen and renew it when I’m supposed to. Maybe the grey hair reminded me that I’m slowly reaching an age where I can no longer spend one month out of the year ducking my car into alleys and staying on back roads to avoid the cops. So $50 later, my car has a new brake light, a new wiper blade, and the vague promise that if I lived in NYC, I wouldn’t be adding a significant amount of smog to the already foul atmosphere there. Not that millions of grubby human animals jammed into a concrete feed pen helps, but at least the problem of my car accidentally wandering 300 miles off course and adding a bit of haze is solved.

Oh, right, the day job thing

We’ve finally decided on an IDS product, but I won’t tell you which one it is until we’ve signed the contract papers. We have to do a bit of haggling still. Meanwhile, I saw the sugary goodness that is Harvard’s security portal and am very envious. I feel like the poor kid growing up in the Sahara at the precise moment he realizes that whole nations have so much drinking water that they can defecate in a porcelain bowl of it on a daily basis. Our campus perimeter is crawling with Russian mafia gangs, clumsy PRC military probes, and various other menaces, and we’re doing the best we can with pennies while Harvard has the air-conditioned dog house and private jet.

That having been said, my duct-tape and cardboard redneck hacking skills are among the best, so I’m dusting off our old log search application in the hopes of rigging ourselves something comparable to the cooler portions of what Harvard has. The worst code in the world is “other people’s code” and I’ve been slogging through it for days. The two guys who developed the first edition of the application would write things like this:

<%
String const APP_URI_PATH="/logsearchadmin/";
%>
Here is <a href=”/<%=APP_URI_PATH%>/searchy.jsp”>searchy link</a>


The problem is, when you deploy it into production, maybe you want to name it searchyportal which then means you have to go back and change all of those links. No fun! So, I read up on it and JSP has a routine that tells the application where it lives. It goes a little something like this:

Here is new and most improved <a href="<%=request.getContextPath()%>/search.jsp">searchy link</a>

Much better. Now I deserve to go load up at the free luncheon that’s been going on while I wrote this blog entry.

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