A Collection of Links

Corporate Tax Receipts as a Pct of GDP

2021-04-19T13:36:00.006-05:00

https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Corporate%20tax%20receipts%204.13.21.pdf

From the Atlantic - Research Proves It: There’s No Such Thing as Noblesse Oblige

2021-04-14T09:57:00.004-05:00

Lots of thought provoking stuff in there.

The most interesting part of the experiment, Piff said, came after, when players were asked to talk about what they had done to affect the game’s outcome. The obvious answer was that the fix was in and the rich player got lucky. But the rich players were almost twice as likely as the poor ones to talk about game strategy—how they’d earned their win. And so it goes in the world.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/does-wealth-rob-brain-compassion/618496/

Excessive Deaths Through the Covid-19 Pandemic

2021-02-25T09:39:00.005-06:00

Linking to an excellent post at kieranhealy.org that I appreciate for the ability to clearly tell a story through graphs and data. As I spend more of my time thinking about business intelligence and how to create compelling visuals to convey relevant data when I see it done right it jumps off the page. Not to lose sight of what a terrible tragedy these graphs reveal, but if you want to understand the true impact of this pandemic it's a reasonable place to start. Great work.

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2021/02/24/excess-deaths-february-update/

Democracy is a Threat to White Supremacy

2021-01-14T15:46:00.003-06:00

In the wake of the storming of the capital on January 6th 2021 this post makes a lot of sense. While the unique narcissism of President Trump somewhat explains his refusal to acknowledge the results of the election, it is not lost on my that there is a strong undercurrent of black and brown votes don't/shouldn't matter. When you consider the current day Republican party is relentlessly trying to make it harder to vote for certain everyday citizens it's clear who they are targeting. Lot's to unpack for me, but anyway here is a link to a Ford Foundation post that resonated with me.

credit to Kottke for the discovery.

Democracy is a Threat to White Supremacy

If the future is so bright, I can't understand why more people are not wearing shades

2020-12-03T16:39:00.003-06:00

Found via kottke.org a post discussing the current state of energy sources. Carbon emissions, price per kilowatt and safety. It is so obvious that having the government put their fingers on the scales to support renewable energy will be a gigantic win for the planet. Honestly a win for everyone except the large corporations that earn their dollars pulling fossil fuels out of the ground. They are and should be marked as dinosaurs, just like the stuff they are pulling out of the ground.

Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? And what can we do to use this global opportunity for green growth?

There is nothing new under the sun

2020-12-01T10:05:00.002-06:00

Pretty sure my tombstone will read, "Here lies a man who was happy to let those around him do the hard work"

From the Daring Fireball again (https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/11/30/the-paranoid-style ) comes a link to a Harper's article from 1964 that reads like it could have been written last month. I've had a sense throughout this ordeal (Trump presidency, 2020, pandemic - take your pick) when it seems like we are in totally new ground of craziness that it must have felt this way before. Not many facts to base that feeling on, just bits and pieces. Tweets about how the country reacted to the Spanish Flu in regards to race relations, that sort of thing. History is trending upwards, I do believe that to be true, I just have to keep the faith. Anyway, thanks to Gruber for posting this link, it makes me think we might be fine after all.

https://harpers.org The Paranoid Style in American Politics

More thoughts on the current state of the Republican party

2020-11-30T15:43:00.000-06:00

Linking to this post by Gruber so I will have it to refer back to. Not so much for the David Brooks piece which is trying to define the current Republican state, but for the link to Maureen Dowd's brothers Thanksgiving OpEd written from the position of a Trump supporter. It's hard to fathom how there can be such a radical differing of views about this presidency. I have no doubts that absent something worse coming along in the next decade, this administration will be forever recorded in history as the most corrupt, dishonest administration in our time. Lying right out of the gate about pointless stuff like inauguration size, no shame about coining the phrase 'alternative facts', firing one inspector general after another to hide the corruption within the administration, it was a relentless 4 years of corruption and greed. To be indifferent to the attack on the foundations of democracy by refusing to acknowledge the vote and actively trying to get state legislatures to appoint electors favorable to the president regardless of the election is unimaginable to me, but here we are. I'm dismayed but not surprised at the demographics showing the portion of wealthy Americans voting for Trump, that is truly give me all the money I can get now, who cares about the deficit and the fate of the next generations. Disappointing sure, but not surprising. They are happy to play along with whatever the base chants, and will keep their knowledge of the facts to themselves. The statistics showing 70% of the Republican party believing the election was stolen from their candidate is what is alarming, how will this divide ever get repaired?

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/11/30/brooks-rotting-of-republican-mind

Still trying to process this divide between parties and that somehow scientific facts are now caught up in it.

2020-11-30T15:26:00.001-06:00

Perhaps it's always been this way and I just never noticed...

Issac Asimov Quote

The troubling case of US life expectancy

2020-11-10T17:31:00.001-06:00

The troubling case of US life expectancy

Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?

Hat Tip to The Big Picture (ritholtz.com)

S&P 500 Rolling 30 Year Annual Returns

2020-10-19T15:58:00.001-05:00

S&P 500 Rolling 30 Year Annual Returns

Great visual from https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2020/10/how-comfortable-are-you-holding-stocks-for-30-years/

Annualized Returns During Presidential Terms

2020-10-07T16:47:00.006-05:00

Image lifted from https://ritholtz.com/2020/10/random-thoughts-2020-election/

FAQs on Protecting Yourself from COVID-19 Aerosol Transmission

2020-10-03T11:03:00.004-05:00

FAQs on Protecting Yourself from COVID-19 Aerosol Transmission

I'm not certain how long this link will be available, but as of Oct 3rd 2020 it seems to be some of the best collected data points for understanding the Aerosol spread of COVID-19 and how to reduce your risk of invection.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fB5pysccOHvxphpTmCG_TGdytavMmc1cUumn8m0pwzo/preview?pru=AAABdQ5s5mA*YrLy9epGlHWhKPSl5JMT3w#heading=h.k10zp34x5s0p

A great description of conservative versus progressive

2020-09-12T14:59:00.001-05:00

David Schell wonders the same thing I've been wondering - 'Why all of these posts and stories about pedophilia?" Only he actually puts his thoughts into words and posts. Including a quote from Footloose.

https://davidmschell.com/conservatives-pedophilia/

New Effort - Bookmarking graphs of things that are true so I can refer to them later

2020-09-12T14:34:00.003-05:00

I'm not a numbers person, although I work with numbers all the time. Maybe it's not so much that I'm not a numbers person as I just can't remember any numbers. So when discussing things of importance, with people that are ill-informed, I need a reliable place I can go to grab those facts, or charts, or statistics. After thinking about this problem for a few months, it occurred to me "Hey, I have a blog!! I'll just put stuff there!" So a few more months go by and we are finally here - I'm ready to post my first link.

I anticipate these posts might simply be links to other web pages, I still have to figure out the details. So I'm just going to plunge right in and begin, and worry about those pesky details later.

https://www.statista.com/chart/22727/seasonally-adjusted-real-gdp-in-the-us/

Selecting into a view with no where clause is much faster that adding a where clause

2011-02-24T16:21:00.000-06:00

Pulling my hair out with this. The following query returns in 9 seconds if the where clause is omitted, but takes minutes with a where clause. A select all into a temp table and issuing the where clause on the temp table takes ~22secs.

SELECT
Style AS Item
,Color
,[Size]
,QtyAvailable
,UPC
,Status
,DateAvailable AS EstimatedAvailDate
FROM
[LAN_VW_B2B_Upcs]
WHERE
ItemGroup = 'FG'
AND ProductSegment IN ('BASIC', 'CORE', 'POS')
AND Brand NOT IN ('IL')

Quick Update on Nexenta and Super Micro

2010-12-03T12:03:00.000-06:00

Just a quick note regarding our Nexenta storage solution. Sunday afternoon a few weeks back (why do these things always happen on weekends) we had a truck knock over a utility pole just down the street from our office and we lost power to the building. Our server room contains one badly underpowered UPS with no generator backup so it wasn't long before everything in the room was shut down. I cancelled my plans, headed into the office and waited for power to get restored, then proceeded to power everything back up (This is always a nerve wracking time). All went well with one exception - Nexenta reported being unable to see any disks in my array and therefore failed to mount any shares. All our data drives are housed in our Super Micro 836E2-R800B JBOD Chassis. I headed into the server room and the system light was on but no lights on any of the drives.

Rebooting the Nexenta head unit did not resolve the issue. After a 20 minutes of high anxiety I noticed the power supplies in the 836E2-R800B were amber. All our other Super Micro boxes have green lights. I powered down Nexenta then unplugged the power, counted to 10 and replugged them in getting a green light on the power supplies. Restarted the Nexenta head unit and everything came back in line. A quick reboot of all our servers using iSCSI luns from the Nexenta restored those drives and we were back on line.

Overall still pleased with our Nexenta system. Still a bit of a learning curve, regretting my decision not to thin provision my DPM luns as that totally defeated any space gains I would have seen from deduplication and compression. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that Nexenta doesn't get acquired by some big iron shop and killed.

A big thumbs up for Nexenta Storage

2010-07-22T21:17:00.000-05:00

OK I'm stuck at work for a few more minutes waiting for a job to finish so I'll throw out a bit of info regarding my newly built Nexenta storage platform.

Based in part from sticker shock looking at Dell or HP low end storage devices as well as on the advice from Mike from over at IPHouse.net, I bought some Super Micro parts and built the storage cluster myself. I started with a 836E2-R800B 3U chassis just for housing the disks. I wonder if there is some kind of cheat sheet for Super Micro products because it seems confusing as hell. I will clue you in that the E2 on the end signifies dual input/output SAS connections. The SAS connections plug into a Super Micro 6016T-NTRF4+ 1U Server. I'm sad to say that I have absolutely no idea what all those letters signify. I just picked the one Mike picked (although I've since ordered another server with a different config so I can start to compare). I stuck 2 Intel E5620 processors in it, 12GB of DDR3 RAM and a couple drives to mirror for the OS and I was done. Well except for the initial allotment of 10 Seagate Barracuda ES 1 TB 7200RPM SAS 3Gb/s 16 MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive drives and a JBOD Uio Lsisas 068E Raid 8CH Sas 16MB Pcie SAS card, a power control board SUPERMCIRO AC CSEPT-JBOD-CB1 Power Control Board (since the storage chassis won't have a motherboard to handle power issues) and a couple sets each of cables (CBL-0168L,CBL-0166L). Did I mention all the parts?? Luckily my supplier decided to ship me each part individually so I had boxes coming in for days (grrrr).

After all the hardware finally arrived and was assembled, including the 45 minutes spent trying to figure out what is supposed to plug into the power fault connection on the Power Control Card (We never did figure it out, so I chose my typical method for resolving all my problems, just ignore it and hope it works out OK). Next up was pop in the Nexenta CD, power up the server and 20 minutes later I've got a brand new shiny SAN. There are some standard network config questions to answer on the console, followed by pointing a web browser at the network location you just set up and you're faced with a nice management GUI. There is a great Wizard that walks you through the initial setup process and just like that you're done.

We are using iSCSI as our method for connecting to the storage, and I must admit I was a little concerned about that part. My last experience with iSCSI was at least the Windows 2000 server days, if not NT and all I remembered was one problem after another. Imagine my surprise to discover my Windows 2008 R2 server includes the iSCSI initiator right on the Administrative tools menu. I entered my IP address in the Target box hit the quick connect button and my target appeared. Off to the Volumes and Devices tab where I hit the Auto Configure button (right,like this will work) and just like that, all my storage devices appeared, already configured to auto reconnect at restart. In short I was done. Wow. There is an additional step to perform on the Nexenta if you want to restrict visibility of the volumes to a specific host target but it's nothing too complicated.

So just like that I'm pushing my new SAN into backup duties. So far one of the great things I've found is the richness of the stats I can get from the box. I'm sure this is due to the Sun Open Storage platform but comparing it to our IBM DS3400 (which is the only other storage device I've had any experience with) it truly is wonderful. Every metric I can think of (down to the individual disk level), built in Deduping (which should be great for backup data), built in compressing of the iSCSI volumes, man I can't wait to watch this thing run. One of the nice things about Sun Open Storage is if my needs change where reads become important I can pick up an SSD drive, pop it in a drive bay and a few mouse clicks later I can have a large fast cache device. I have to say I'm itching to point a SQL Server instance at it just to see what it can do, but before that happens we will need redundant network paths and switches and extra ports on servers and who knows what else. Although I suppose I could always host our dedicated read only reporting instance there.

Anyway, enough of that. Here are a few quick photos of the management screen:

From Nexenta screen shots

Data Protection Manager 2010 - Connection to the DPM service has been lost

2010-07-22T19:58:00.000-05:00

We are in the process of migrating our backup solution over to Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010 and ran into an issue that other might find useful. Although it's early days, overall I'm very pleased with the product. We are a MS only shop so it's a good logical fit for us.

We are using an IBM TS3200 tape library for our tape storage connected via FC. I installed DPM, configured the FC switch fabric and then I just went into Management/Libraries and hit Rescan. DPM found the library but just identified it as a single tape drive, not the library. Off to the IBM support website for their usual cryptic search led to proper drivers (IBMTape.x64_w08_6209.zip). Installed the drivers and hit Rescan in DMP and just like that DPM recognized the library. So far so good.

The Inventory library option worked like a charm discovering all the tapes in the library, however when we tried to do any other option such as erase or identify unknown tape the entire DPM console would crash and restart. Luckily I found this post System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: Tape problems which took care of my problems.

The issue seemed to be caused by duplicate records getting into the database for the same device - first when it got discovered as a plain tape drive, then when it was properly discovered as a tape library. So the moral of the story I suppose is to properly install your device drivers prior to trying to discover whats on the end of your fiber.

I'll warn you up front, the solution is kind of ugly. You have to fix the database, which involves running a script Query.txt that cleans up the database by renaming duplicate items. Oh and to potentially save you another Google search remember you define the connection to a local express database by (local)\databaseName. I always forget that.

Hope this helps someone.

P.S. The disk storage part of this project is a solution we build using SuperMicro parts and running Nexenta software which gives us a sweet Open Storage platform from which we can mount ZFS volumes. Very nice. I'll have a post later on that, it was much easier than I feared and iSCSI has come a long way since I last looked it over.

Headphones, take me away

2010-04-30T08:59:00.000-05:00

I suppose at this point it is pretty well established among my friends that I love to travel. Well addicted might be a more accurate description. As a frequent traveler I do get to experience the joys of First/Business Class travel. While I'm no longer awestruck to find myself there, the richness of my memories still surprise me. This is most visible (or I guess audible) to me in the strange connection of certain songs to specific trips. As much as I struggle with remembering things, I'm always a little astonished at how strongly a specific song can place me in an exact point in time. The most vivid of all of these memories seem to take place in a first class cabin. Maybe it's because I can totally relax, while not actually able to 'go' anywhere, that allows my mind to fully absorb these memories. It's strange, because often these songs that end up holding such a special place in my heart are not songs I would normally include in my favorites.

The most recent, and motivation to write all this down, is John Mayer's Heartbreak Warfare. Every time I hear that song I am instantly transported on board Delta Flight 283, a 747-400 flight from LAX (Los Angeles) to NAR (Tokyo). I'm sitting in seat 74K on the upper deck, sipping a glass of orange juice (although if I had known my brain would choose this moment to record a permanent picture I would have taken the champagne). We are 15 minutes from pushing back, and I'm just in the process of changing my mental focus from grind to relax. The reason for this is I had no idea I was going to be upgraded, the gate agent looked at my name when I was boarding and told me I had been upgraded.

I can remember with such vividness the baseline feeling of excitement I get when starting a journey that is more adventure than trip. Wondering if Hong Kong was going to have the same incredible energy it did as last time. Looking forward to seeing my friends from England that I had not seen in several years. A great place and a great feeling and over the general loudspeaker Delta was playing Heartbreak Warfare. So just like that, a song I would have never given an extra thought about will always hold a special place in my life.

This has gone on longer than I planned (might have to edit this back later) but I wanted to put down at least one other. Deep Blue Something (had to look the name up) Breakfast At Tiffany's. Every time I hear that song I'm instantly transported to a Delta MD-11 flight bound to PDX (Portland) out of ATL (Atlanta). We're less than an hour from landing, we can see the mountains of California and Oregon out the window. We are in a plane that will refuel in Portland and then head off to Asia but I will be changing flights, bound for Vancouver for work. I'm listening to this song on the inflight entertainment system while watching the map detail our progress. I'm happy to be bound for Vancouver, I love the city, enjoy the people I'm working for there and am excited about the job I'll be doing there. Getting to fly in a Business Class seat feels like I've somehow been able to game the system because it is so much nicer than a normal domestic first class seat.

I guess putting this down in words has brought forth something in common. At the point in time these memories live I'm happy and content. That constant restless feeling I live with daily - I'm not moving enough (on all levels) - my job is not progressing, I'm not making progress in my personal life, I'm missing out on fantastic adventures. I live with a constant ache that a brighter, richer, fuller life lives just beyond the horizon if I could just get in motion to get there. That constant sense is gone in those moments. I can relax because in those moments I'm addressing that urge and I am heading to a bright, rich life over the horizon. For hours at a time I have a quiet peace that I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing. Then back home to my ordinary life months or years later and a single song comes on the radio that, while bringing closer to the surface that ache of restlessness, at least for 4 minutes and 30 seconds I know the feeling of being free of the ache. Of being on a track, headed to a bright, shiny future.

A taste of my road-trip mix tape

2009-01-22T16:59:00.001-06:00

Buttons by The Weeks

Anna Begins by Counting Crows

Everlong by Foo Fighters

One new and 2 staples, although the staples tend to fluctuate between songs but the bands are pretty stable. The great thing about music and trips for me is to focus on an album for an entire trip. It has to be one that I am currently hooked on (so not an automatic for every trip). If I am able to have a single album for that trip then for years to come I have a teleporter to that trip. Pop the album in and and the trips feelings and emotions come right back to the surface.

Windows 7 take 1…. and Action!

2009-01-12T10:08:00.001-06:00

My first post from within Win7 and I must say overall I have been very pleased. My understanding is this version is more of an R2 of Vista than brand new everything and I think the early Beta stability represents that (Disclaimer: I am a happy Vista user).

The only issue I have had is the lack of a way to mount an iso except through third party plugins. In this day and age where everything gets distributed via iso files it just seems crazy. We are left to scrounge around in the free third party tools world to install apps that install device drivers deep in the heart of Windows. All of this work to create a stable, secure, and reliable OS and the first thing I have to do before I can install Visual Studio is start loading unsupported device drivers which not surprisingly at all, suck. So for 3 hours last night (until I could find and rip out the offending stuff) my explorer would not work, shutdown would not work and required a hard reset. So until I finally (hopefully) got everything disabled I had to keep glancing at that Win 7 install DVD wondering how much time I would spend on this before just wiping the drive and starting over. All of that pain just because Windows would not mount an iso. It would let me burn one, but why would I want to do that – waste a physical blank DVD for something I only need once?? It’s madness!!

So please great overloads of software, I love your newest version, but please give me the ability to mount an iso from the OS. I trust you guys to write a driver that won’t hose my system, and if you don’t then I’ll be forced to hose my system trying 3rd party tools and guess who will get the blame for an unstable OS. Yup – you will.

Linq to Objects (When orderby does not order by but OrderBy does)

2009-01-08T17:18:00.001-06:00

I must admit that while I have really enjoyed getting to know linq, it is not without it's frustrations. Sometimes things that seem like they should work, compile giving you that warm fuzzy, then in execute mode they turn out not to work. I understand that what this really means is that I don't yet intuitively grasp the internals of what is happening in the plumbing but perhaps one day I will.

With that being said, today's example is about my first use of orderby for a linq to object query. Consider this linq statement:

var needed = from a in myFCs
             where a.Status == Status.Needed
             orderby a.Priority, a.WeeksIncluded, a.QtyPlan
             select a;

Looks ok, compiles ok, runs ok with the small issue that as you step through the collection the objects are not ordered as requested. My first thought was that I might need to modify my object class maybe add an additional interface or two. However a few minutes with google got me to here. Once I have created my needed collection I can then run another series of expressions against it like so:

var needed =(from a in myFCs
             where a.Status == Status.Needed
             select a).OrderBy(a => a.Priority)
                      .ThenBy(a => a.WeeksIncluded)
                      .ThenByDescending(a => a.QtyPlan);

Notice the nifty use of ThenByDescending for a nice direction change.

The real reason the Republicans lost

2008-11-12T17:49:00.001-06:00

I'm starting to realize that the real reason the Republicans lost this election is their constant push to 'dumb down' the government finally bottomed out. The American people don't really worry about hiring your buddies and people that helped in your campaign until something really goes wrong. Then they look around and realize - 'You know, I don't want that guy who is in the back of my house fixing my toilet to actually be in charge of making important financial decisions that really impact my life and the direction of this country. I think I would prefer a super smart Harvard educated guy for that.'

Pres. Bush's decline really kicked into gear when Katrina happened and we all realized that this dumb ass flunky Brownie had zero qualifications to deal with any significant natural disaster. The right wings inability to see this baffles me. The VP pick fits perfectly into this dumbing down mode. After all the spin what the Couric interview really showed America was that this person could not casually talk about issues of significance. Forget talking points - which I hate with a passion - I need someone leading this country to be thinking and interested in important world issues. If she had ever had any deep thoughts about those interview questions she might not have given an answer that fit in her campaigns talking points (which would have earned her respect in my book) but she could have at least given a cohesive answer that made sense. Just like most of my friends that read and seek out information and give thoughts to things. We live in an incredibly complex world and any solutions that we come up with to address our problems will have difficult, technical, and not necessarily obvious consequences. You need deep thinking people to solve difficult and critical problems.

We as an American people seem to enjoy making fun of those educated at elite schools (I know I certainly do - who has not been to a party and had a Harvard grad pull out his library card to prove he went there) but when there are real import issues to solve we all recognize the need to send our best and brightest up there to bail us out. Certainly not a plumber and not a former mayor of a town where all the important responsibilities are handled at the county level.

http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=188638

Visual Studio Gotcha's

2008-08-29T11:54:00.000-05:00

Back coding in Visual Studio for awhile and today have slogged through two frustrating problems. Solutions are recorded to save me troubleshooting time in the future.

Problem 1: When trying to view the settings of a project (References in this case) instead see the dreaded X in a circle with the error message:
An error occurred trying to load the page.
COM object that has been separated from its underlying RCW cannot be used.

It turns out for me the answer was to uninstall the C# Source Code Analysis plugin. Found the answer on the msdn site.

Having done this I could now move on to troubleshooting problem 2 (which was the original problem of the day)

Problem 2: Changing a project created in .Net Framework 2 to 3.5 in order to use linq does not automatically add all the stuff needed to actually use linq. In my case linq to xml was what I was after and I had to make the following mods to get back to square 1.

First (obviously) from the compile tab select Advanced Compile Options and change the framework version. The application will have to close and reopen.
From the references tab add additional references you might need - for me it was system.xml.linq
From the references tab check the additional imported namespaces you will need. For me they were system.collections.generic, system.linq and system.xml.linq
After I did all that my vars were not automatically inferring their types - turns out there is a setting on the Compile tab appropriately named Option infer that must be turned on.

Hope this helps someone besides me - or at least helps me in a few months when I've forgotten this again.

Booting Blades from a SAN

2008-08-06T19:21:00.001-05:00

OK, so this is not the original first post I was going to make, however I just spent 3 hours for the second time in 6 months troubleshooting the exact same problem so I'm posting it here mainly for my benefit.

Our setup is an IBM BladeCenter with a combination of HS21 and HS21XM blades connected to an IBM DS3400 Fiber Channel SAN. We purchase our blades without drives and boot from the SAN. This works great once in production but has proved tricky to get into production (if you are like us and only do this every once in a while). I will list the steps below, however the tricky part that bit me again today is this: Once you have created your luns on the SAN and assigned them to your Blade our DS3400 (quietly) assigns a controller owner and preferred path. That controller owner setting must sync up with which HBA controller you have defined as the boot device. On our DS3400 screen that setting is under Modify/Change Logical Drive Ownership/Preferred Path. Without that setting the blade can see the drive, Windows setup can see the drive however it cannot write to it and strange 'unable to access disk' message occur.

I still have another blade to configure so I'll try and capture some screen prints and make a better how to post.