That which fades into the ether.

Overheard on the airport PA

“This is your final boarding call for flight 1347 at gate A9 going to”, short pause, “dez mone aze”.

Must be new to the job.

Place your bets

It’s time to start recording all the speculation on Baby A and Baby B.

• Nieves: 2 girls.
• Margaret: >= 1 boy.
• Valerie: 1 of each.
• Rick: 1 of each by way of a dream, where he trains them to be Jedi knights
• Kevin: 2 girls
• Natalie: 1 of each
• Arielle: 1 of each, from comment.
• Mark G: 2 girls, because he things my sanity needs the challenge.
• Maia: when given a choice, decided she wants “sisters”.
• Kathleen: TBD.
• Angelo, Kathleen’s dad: 2 girls, cuz, that what he’s used to.
• NorDelle: 2 boys (not an official prediction, but, that was the jest).

ahh, what the heck, I’m going out on a limb and saying 2 boys.

And, what might you think?

Allow me to introduce: Baby A and Baby B

Last Monday, Valerie went in for her first pregnancy check-up, which happens around the 10 week time frame. This is when they confirm the due date and you get the first sonogram picture of the baby.

I was supposed to be there but the doctor’s office was running late and I couldn’t wait. I was back at work wrapped around fiber optic cable trying to connect up some test equipment by the time Valerie finished up. I’m in a noisy environment from high-pitched fans screaming in every direction.

My phone rings and I expected Valerie to be a bit miffed that I left the waiting room before the sonogram time came; she wasn’t. She said something that sounded like “we’re having two babies”, and it didn’t really make sense to me. She repeated, “we’re having twins, but don’t worry, both babies are just fine.”

My brain just shut off, “Ok. I’m glad your appointment went well. I’ll talk to you later”. The minimal thought required to plug in the cables in front of me became all the challenge I wanted.

I called her back an hour later, “Were you joking with me?” She assured me she was not. “There are pictures to prove it when you come home.”

Now, almost a week later, we’ve both settled into the reality and are excited about it. Not entirely confident, but, we’ll make the best of it.

I always joked to her that the only way we’d have 3 kids was if we had twins this time. That’ll learn me…

Notes on my postfix + sasldb + tls settings

There’s a great “how to” here.

Some of the key things that I always forget about my setup that haunt me later:

• I’m using sasldb2 (in /etc/sasldb2 )
• When using sasldb — saslauthd daemon DOES NOT RUN. The simple DB file replaces the need for it.
• The realm I’m using in sasldb2 passwords is ‘mail.foobert.com’
• Thus, add a password is to the db:

saslpasswd2 -c -u `mail.foobert.com` username

Create /etc/sasl2/smtpd.conf

pwcheck_method: auxprop
auxprop_plugin: sasldb
mech_list: PLAIN LOGIN

Network tar using SSH

Never realized how easy it is to duplicate a directory tree from one machine to another through the network without building an intermediate tarball and finding room for it and the original files all at the same time. Simply pipe the tar command through ssh and untar it on the fly.

For example, suppose we have direcotry “pictures” on SRC_HOST machine and I want to replicate it over to DST_HOST, do this from the SRC_HOST machine:

tar cvf - pictures | ssh user@DST_HOST “cat | tar xf -”

Or, if you just wanted to create a compressed archive of “pictures” on DST_HOST:

tar czvf - pictures | ssh user@DST_HOST “cat > pictures.tar.gz”

I’m ashamed to admit how many times I’ve jumped through hoops to find the free space on both machines due to making a compressed tarball, copying it over, unpacking it, then deleting the tarball.

Update: While the above is functional, it’s all rather academic. Not but a few days after writing this, I stumbled across ‘rsync‘. Yeaeh, this is a little easier:

rsync -avz user@DST_HOST:pictures pictures

And how to do it on a Mac and get all the resource forks to transfer to a non-HFS file system requires extra care and a better version of rsync than Apple delivers.