Pure-Essence.Net » rants

Daily wtf Watson story: Active Directory

pureessence — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 11:38:27 +0000

A coworker of my husband’s, let’s call him Watson, has some interesting ways of dealing with situations. As a system administrator, he has unique powers.

Two days ago my husband received a support ticket regarding a temporary employee unable to log into her machine. My husband updated her password and verified and he could log in and closed the ticket. A day later, the ticket was reopened with the same issue. This time my husband tried her login on a different machine and true enough, he got the invalid username or password error. He searched Active Directory looking for the temporary employee’s login and found nothing. It appeared someone had deleted the employee’s account.

My husband scratched his head and inquired Watson:

“Watson, did you do anything with Mary’s account?”

Watson: “Yes, the manager requested that I delete her account.”

My husband got the manager on the phone and asked about the situation. The manager confirmed that he created a ticket to have Mary removed from a certain mailing list. As my husband was on the phone with the manager, Watson was listening and became rather irritated and printed the ticket and showed it to my husband. The ticket titled “Remove Mary from mailing list ABC”. My husband said to Watson:

“Watson, the ticket requested her removed from a mailing list, you deleted her entire Active Directory account!”

Watson: “How else was I supposed to get her off that mailing list?”

My husband: “Remove her from the mailing list?”

Watson barked: “Yes! I could have done that!” and stormed off and did not say anything else.

My father’s Gui Lin experience

pureessence — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 14:52:32 +0000

Gui Lin (Chinese: 桂林; pinyin: Guìlín;) is a prefecture-level city in China, situated in the northeast of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on the west bank of the Li River. Its name means “forest of Sweet Osmanthus”, owing to the large number of fragrant Sweet Osmanthus trees located in the city. The city has long been renowned for its unique scenery.

My father and his girlfriend’s family visited Gui Lin about a month ago.

Although the scenery was exceptional like you’d expect but his experience was far from it. Gui Lin is a cyclone for tourist traps. He shared some of his bad experience and they were so jaw dropping, I have to blog about them.

The Taxi
There is no meter on any of the taxi in that city. You bargain the price prior to your ride with the taxi driver and then s/he takes you to your destination. See a problem with this particular arrangement or lack of governmental enforcement of honesty? Well, he’s experienced it.

On the way back from a previous trip, my father inquired the average cab fare from his hotel to the dock for his next day’s cruise. The driver indicated around 60 rmb. The next morning, a different taxi driver wanted 80 rmb for the ride. My father did not give in since he thought the fare should be 60 rmb. The taxi driver instead of not agreeing to the ride, took the 60 rmb and dropped them off at a different dock than their actual desired destination. It took them a while to figure out they were at the WRONG dock since they were unfamiliar with the area. They were late for their cruise and had to spend additional fare in order to travel to the correct dock.

The Bamboo Raft Ride
A bamboo raft takes you down the stream of the river slowly by its current. My father had arranged a taxi to pick them up at the end of the trip. Although the price of the ride was advertised to include food, they provided inedible dishes on the raft so they could market other dishes for extra cost. There were various vendors who stationed at different locations down the stream. Some claimed the fish dishes were prepared with fish freshly caught in the river earlier in the morning. They charged a lot for them. My father and his girlfriend’s family did not purchase any. They were later dropped off at a dock in which they thought was the end of the trip. However, after a half hour wait for the taxi, my father called the taxi driver he paid for. The taxi driver informed my dad that he was dropped at the wrong location. The raft people dropped them off way prior to the end of the trip. My father was once more duped for exercising his right of not purchasing overpriced marketed tourist goods.

Gui Lin has been on my list of must visit places for a long time. Based on my dad’s accounts, I think I’m going to wait a little longer for that wish.

Grails: I will not use you

pureessence — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 03:17:50 +0000

After the cijug presentation on Grails, I’ve decided I will not use it.

I know Grails is hot and cool but I don’t like it. It’s probably just a personal preference.

Why don’t I want to use Grails

It’s built on spring and hibernate, so why not just use them directly?
It’s just adding another layer of complexity. Now if something goes wrong, you need to know grails (groovy) plus all of the frameworks it uses underneath.
The generation bit is nice but personally I want control over all of the magic. You will need to modify them anyway. So why not just write them from scratch and LEARN YOUR HTML? This reminds me of the old Microsoft FrontPage HTML generation that always bit my ass when I first started creating web pages. But it probably wouldn’t be as bad since Microsoft was targeting their own browsers with the HTML generated.
The URL mapping is stupid. Spring’s innate annotation style mapping is so much easier.
I’m not a fan of the taglib. Why do I ever want to write HTML in Java? It makes me feel dirty. Plus it’s harder to debug. Personally the only “taglib” I like is facelets’ version. It felt more like writing HTML.

The only thing I really liked about Grails based on the presentation is the orm custom mapping. I prefer that over hibernate’s innate xml or annotation.

class Person {
  String firstName
  static mapping = {
      table 'people'
      firstName column:'First_Name'
  }
}

But that’s hardly worth a complete switch.

During the whole presentation I was thinking of a pyramid:

I remember not too long ago Spring and Hibernate are the newest and coolest kids on the block. Now we are just piling it on. What will we add next? I mean do you still need know Java any more to support applications? You really just need tons and tons of framework knowledge. Where do you get these knowledge from school? They are not going to teach them in college.

jQuery UI even though you disappointed me, I still figured you out

pureessence — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 22:01:11 +0000

So I upgraded to jQuery UI version 1.8.2 at work and thought that I should instead of using the autocomplete plugin which is deprecated, switch over to use the jQuery UI build-in autocomplete widget.

jQuery UI autocomplete widget is NOTHING like the original jQuery autocomplete plugin!!!

At least by jQuery UI version 1.8.2 it’s not.

The jQuery UI autocomplete widget is crap just like I remembered when it first came out.

Things I found that annoyed the heck out of me:

Highlight doesn’t work. Use this hack instead.

Must match doesn’t work. More info available here.
I ended up using a separate javascript function I wrote.

function jQueryUIAutoCompleteMustMatch(input) {
	var found = 0;
	
	var matcher = new RegExp( "^" + $.ui.autocomplete.escapeRegex( jQuery.trim($(input).val()) ) + "$", "i" );
	
	jQuery.each($('.ui-autocomplete li'), function(i, val) {
		if(jQuery.trim( $(val).text() ).match( matcher ) ) {
			found = 1;
		}
	});
	
	if (found) {
		return true;
	} else {
		$(input).val('');
		return false;
	}
}

inside of your autocomplete setup, do

change: function(event, ui) {jQueryUIAutoCompleteMustMatch($(this));}

To mimic the scrollHeight property on the autocomplete plugin, you will need to use css overrides. More info here (Example).

.ui-autocomplete {
	max-height: 220px;
	overflow-y: auto;
	/* prevent horizontal scrollbar */
	overflow-x: hidden;
	/* add padding to account for vertical scrollbar */
	padding-right: 20px;
}
/* IE 6 doesn't support max-height
 * we use height instead, but this forces the menu to always be this tall
 */
* html .ui-autocomplete {
	height: 220px;
}

To mimic the behavior of the option formatResult in the original plugin, you may do something like:

$( "#tags" ).autocomplete({
	source: availableTags,
	minLength: 0,
	delay: 0,
	close: function(event, ui) {
		var numberOnly = $(this).val().match(/\d+/);
		$(this).val(numberOnly);
	}
})
;

Above is to format the result as number only.

If you want the pop up search results as soon as the user has the focus on the input without entering anything, you will need to bind the search call on the focus event of the input. More info here.
I ended up with
```
$(input).autocomplete({
		source: list
	})
	.focus(function() {
		$(this).autocomplete("search");
	})
	;
```
I finally recognized that the jQuery UI autocomplete widget has far fewer options you may set. For example, by version 1.8.2, below are the only options
- disabled
- appendTo
- autoFocus
- delay
- minLength
- position
- source
If you wish to get your autocomplete working the same as your old one, chances are you will need to add a lot more additional code/hack.

This is the biggest disappointment for me since I started using jQuery.

>>> My Example with everything configured the way I want <<<

AT&T rethink possible…to still use your service

pureessence — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 20:12:04 +0000

Tried to add a new line with AT&T was almost impossible.

Got the new phone today and trying to activate it was unusually painful.

Their online activation gave the error: ACT015: We cannot process your request at this moment due to insufficient data. Please contact Customer Care at 1-800-331-0500.
On the phone with the first customer service representative for 20 minutes. The representative insisted he could not activate the phone because we did not agree to their terms and services. We never got the email regarding the terms and services in order to AGREE to it. He didn’t consider a recorded verbal agreement was enough. In addition, we’ve been with AT&T for over 6 years and we figured we probably have agreed to their terms or services some prior time. The representative gave us another 866 number to call.
On the phone with the 866 customer service representative for over 40 minutes. 39 minutes of the 40 on hold. She repeated she was working with their account management to activate the new line. Finally she hang up on us.
Tried the online activate again and got the same error.
Tried to forget about it for three hours.
Just tried the new phone again, the SIM card registration error magically went away.

Hosting Drama

pureessence — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 18:02:42 +0000

Obviously I am nowhere near as actively on the whole personal web world as I used to be. Most of my sites are shut down. The only somewhat active site is this one. Amazingly I still get so much traffic that makes this site top the resource usage sites on the server.

Today I got the following email from my web host hostquack.com:

Hello,

Your account has been suspended due to consuming high resources on our shared server. I would recommend you to optimize your database and php pages in order to utilize server resources properly to see if it works. If this won’t help, I would highly recommend you to have a vps or dedicated server.

Let me know your comment.

Here’s my dilemma: I want to keep using pure-essence.net because well I had it since I met Andy. I do not wish to give up my domain name. But obviously after 10 years, this name gets known and some of my posts get popular. I no longer use it that frequently but I seem to have to pay the price for its popularity. No shared hosting can handle it well any more. I really DO NOT wish to have to spend money on a VPS or dedicated server.

My temporary solution was to optimize my site. I found this wordpress performance enhancement post and followed its suggestions. I turned on WP build-in object cache and installed and activate wp-super-cache plugin. My host agreed to monitor how my site is doing after the tweaks. Fingers crossed.

I spend most of my non-working hours on the pet society game nowadays. It’s a mindless game but trading items make it well addictive.

IE input background image issue

pureessence — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:19:36 +0000

IE strikes AGAIN!

Just when I thought I was 100% done with the revamp of New Millennium, I noticed an UI issue in IE. I’m surprised I didn’t notice this before. It shouldn’t be anything new. I did some google research but didn’t find anyone mentioning it either.

Applying background image to input tags should be nothing new. You see the little search icons for search inputs all over the web now but did anyone notice in IE if you have a background image set to no-repeat and someone puts some very LONG text in the input field, the background image SCROLLS with the text? This causes very odd behavior.

Here’s my input background-image. I pick this one so I can do background image affect on hover by manipulating background-position.

CSS:

input.formInput {
	width: 255px;
	background: #a99787 url(formInput.gif) left top no-repeat;
	border: 0;
	padding: 3px;
	height: 22px;
	color: #302721;
}
input.formInput:hover,
input.formInput:focus {
	background-position: -261px top;
}

In Firefox, it looks great but in IE if you start putting very looooooooooooooooong text in the input, it will look like crap.

Try it out yourself

So does anyone have a good solution for this issue?

If I were to do it, I’d wrap the input in a container and put the background image on the container and hopefully by applying the hover affect on the container, it would get the desirable effect. ~~Of course I will need to test out my theory. But it’s past midnight so I should get some sleep for now.~~

AND it does work. check it out.

Man, I just love IE.

dodo has been online for ten years

pureessence — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 02:12:56 +0000

the other night i realized something amazing. i’ve been to the online world for ten years. i got my first modem at home when i was 16 and i’m turning 26 soon. TEN YEARS.. that’s a long time. a very significant part of a life. from 16 to 26, a person can change so much. so i started to remember everything that happened in this ten years. i became so emotional i couldn’t sleep. perhaps every generation has its own thing that’s bound to change people’s lives and the internet is the one for mine.

now please excuse my poor english. i can never express my emotions in english the way i do in chinese. therefore i notice when i get emotional, i speak in chinglish.

i was born in a very unhappy family. my father’s family never got along with my mom’s and til this day they still do not get along. after my mom married my dad, as chinese tradition, she started living at her parents in law’s home. they fought so much. but since that was i came to this world, everything was merely hearsay. then i came, the fighting continued. after my parents stared living on their own, they fought about everything. my childhood memories were full of fighting, moving, glass breaking, door slamming etc. the happy moments were very limited. my parents fought with themselves and fought with their parents. the fightings many times turned physical. my mother had chipped tooth and my father had bloody nose.

when i was in the second grade, my father found a job in the US and moved. my mother and i were left in china by ourselves. since she hated my father’s family, she forbid me from having any contact with them. i was seriously scared to see my father’s side of family. my aunt and uncle some time visited me at school, i would run away from them. one time my uncle insisted giving me ten RMB (about 1.25 U.S. dollar) and my mom found out. she took the money and threw back to their faces and said “who wanted your (insert your cuss word) money”. because of this, i really did not know anyone from my father’s family well. the last two times when i went back to china, i felt rather awkward meeting them. altho i know they are family, i have very little to share with them.

many things happened in the four years when my father was not around. i still don’t know til this day if my parents ever loved each other after they got married. it seems their lives were filled with abuse and hatred. my father stopped writing to us about six months after he left. i felt my mother had some mental breakdowns but i was too young to understand. then finally things changed around and i was told my father invited us to go to the US with him. but before he invited us, he first invited his parents for a short visit. when my mother and i arrived, my father’s parents were still here. at first my mother tried to get along with her parents in law. but that did not last. the fights turned physical and a couple of times even the police arrived. i was 12 at the time, i understood and got hurt a lot more. some of most dirty things i’ve witnessed as a human happened in that period. they seem vivid even now.

after my grandparents left, i continued my life in my parents’ constant fighting. they had separate bank accounts because they distrusted each other. then they fought about monetary responsibilities every month when the bills were due. this fighting continued to money i needed for school. it’s funny. it really does not cost much for a child to go to high school in the US. only a few times i needed money for math competition trips. when i asked my mom, she said to ask my dad. and when i asked my dad he said to ask my mom. as no one wanted to raise me. i remember i couldn’t come up with the money a few times and i was thankfully the teacher still let me go.

then came the emotional abuse from my mom. i loved my mom. i tried to protect her when she fought with my father only because i felt as a woman, i understand how easily hurt we are. but my mom didn’t feel the same for me. there are so many stories i could talk about. i will just tell one. my junior year the fighting between my parents escalated. at the time we lived in a 1976 trailer that cost $5000. it was in horrible shape. but since my mom paid for it (long story) she thought she had the right to drive my father out. of course she did not really want my father to move out, she wanted him to pay the utilities/or whatever she wanted him to pay. for many many days, my mom would get up at 3am and bang on my father’s door and yell from the top her lung “get the **** out of my house” and then continue yelling until the morning. i was sleeping in the next room with a sliding door. it really scared me. altho i was using to their fighting, this new style certainly could cause heart attack. one snowy day i came home from school, the house looked as if it was robbed. there was broken dishes and glasses everywhere and there was no water, electricity or heat. i left and stayed a night at a friends house. the next morning my mom called me. she said to me on the phone and i should come home and check out my dad. she said she gave him a bloody nose and he looked like a clown and it was hilarious.

unable to live under my mother’s rage, my father and i planned to move out. we did after two weeks and my mom went crazy. she wanted to find out where we lived so she could continue fighting. she started showing up at my school. i tried to avoid her but one time she caught me by surprise. two weeks earlier a teacher realized my problem and notified my counselor. they told me if my mom showed up again, i could bring her to my counselor. i took my mom to my counselor’s office and my counselor could not do much to help me. my mom cussed me out in chinese and accused me of persuading my dad to divorce her. i had to translate what she was saying and asked my counselor to give my father a call to verify my innocence. i know, how utterly funny. but that sorta things filled my life.

now i did not actually intend to write down all these when i started writing. but before i realize it the “i was born in a very unhappy family” led to such a long digression. i don’t usually fill my blog with my personal problems but sometimes i do feel like ranting a little. this is the only other entry i can think of where i went into some details about my mom. and i’ve also encountered plenty of oppositions in my feelings toward my mom. i used to be a part of a group called asian abuse and we went through a huge debate about abuse. the most touching part came out the debate was andy’s words.

because of my family, i thirsted for love while growing up. i did contemplate committing suicide because of my mom. i felt i was saved by friends and some of these friends came from the internet.

the first two things that changed my life when i got internet access at home was ICQ and the yuan club at sinanet. i met many other chinese friends on the yuan club. friends who helped creating my first website. friends who are willing to listen to my story and understand me. i remember my days were filled with email writing. they also called me long distance. i recorded my singings and greetings in chinese and sent the tapes all over the world. what a crazy 16 yo. but it was a very precious time.

and then i met my first love online. we loved so beautifully. full of poetry, dreams and touching moments. you can only understand the kind of romance if you’ve read qiong yao‘s books. it was the kind of love she writes in every book of hers. at the time i constantly have things to write about. i kept a chinese diary that addressed to him for two entire years. i’d write at least once a day and sometimes more than once a day. altho my family did not give me love, i still had a lot to love about. every little plant, scene or object would make me happy as long as it reminded me of him. he was someone i could close my eyes and dream about the universe with. some of those dreams were captured in our sky but much were not.

in our third physical meeting in two years, i broke up with him. i realized that the kind of love i had was not practical. some feelings have to happen in real life not just dreams. but i would never regret to have loved him. even if it was an illusion. it was the most beautiful illusion a person can have. i feel i’ve definitely experienced something most people couldn’t. the kind of out of body soul touching love that may last forever if we don’t have to worry about washing dishes, making dinner or paying bills.

aside from this love, i found another true love in my life. that would be my love for web programming. it led into something much more practical like a career.

i started my very first website in 1998. it was hosted on tripod.com named dodo’s world. back then i used to use a microsoft graphic software, frontpage to make webpages. i used to own many projects like webrings, button exchange, cliques, group blogs etc. after my experience grew, i registered my first personal domain. that was regretless.com. this is the first layout for regretless.com. it’s a picture of me.

it became a collective domain of mine and hosted many projects. one of the most popular sites was dodo’s new world. it had tutorials, games, fun stuff and services like cute graphical counters, voting system, alarm alerts etc. i spent pretty much all my spare time in college running my web projects. my message board which started by using UBB (cgi script) to then ikonboard (php script) and then XMB, devBB and finally a complete script written by myself has such a long history of amazing stories. some of these memories were captured by our 2003 and 2004 yearbooks. i remember the people on my board made so much beautiful gifts for my 20th birthday. it made me speechless. i regret i did not save that page as it was hosted by daynah.

Project Reminiscence

Dodo’s New World version 1

Dodo’s New World version 2

Dodo’s New World version 3

Dodo’s Ikonbaord version 10

lil button exchange version 6

New Millennium webring version 4

Regretless.com version 9

Unfortunately I don’t have a screenshot for every layout I have ever made. If only I knew better back then, I would have taken a screenshot for each layout. They are so precious.

Nowadays the internet continues to be a great source of entertainment. i can watch full chinese soap opera and entertainment shows on youtube. share all kinds of interesting stuff with friends and coworkers.

So what about the next ten years? I know the change for me as a person will be less significant. Now I spend less and less time on my personal web projects and more time on the projects I do at work. Unfortunately they do not feel as close to heart as the ones I created from scratch. But I believe I will not abandon my blog. Hopefully I will not abandon my message board either.

So how long have you been online and how has the internet changed your life?

The story behind Chinglish

pureessence — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:31:09 +0000

A while ago I posted some photos of Chinglish. I found it amusing that some people thought they were fake and photoshopped. Well apparently I owe you an explanation. I was reading some of my favorite Chinese blogs today and found this particular entry. It talks in details where some of these translations came from. If you are interested, please read the Etiology and Elaboration of a Flagrant Mistranslation.

IVA – Individual Voluntary Agreement
IVA provides a viable alternative to bankruptcy and is therefore for those individuals that really cannot afford to pay off existing debts any longer. An IVA can help because it is a proposal that is sent to all of an individual?s creditors offering a settlement over a period of five years or so. After that period, the debt is settled. However, there are certain criteria that your proposal has to meet before coming in to being!

Wisconsin Dells Vacation

pureessence — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 06:57:41 +0000

We have planned this vacation in May and we finally did it. Even with all the moving, selling & buying house, getting a new job and going back to school, we still made it. It was an awesome vacation. We stayed at the Wisconsin Dells area for six days five nights. Two at Chula Vista and three at a whirlpool suite at Wintergreen resort. We spent most of our time in the Chula Vista indoor water park and the Mt. Olympus but we also visited Timbavati Wildlife Park, Ghost-Out-Post, went on the original duck tour, the jet boat tour, and watched the Tommy Bartlett Show. We also tried out some restaurants in the area. Here’s how I would rate everything.

Chula Vista – Love this resort. Next time we will definitely stay longer. The indoor water park here is even better than the one at Mt. Olympus. We rid the fast Ruby Run tube ride for oh maybe about 20 times. We didn’t realize it connects to the river walk so we did our walk around in a dumb route.

Wintergreen resort – The hotel is not impressive. The “suite” with the whirlpool is very crammed. They forgot to do housekeeping in our room after the first night. I was not happy. We had our breakfast at the hotel restaurant, it was decent.

Mt. Olympus – We went there coz the tickets came free with our stay with Wintergreen. The outdoor water park is decent but the roller coaster rides cost extra on top of your admission. What kind of sense does that make? After two days we find ourselves mostly in the wave pool and the lazy river. If we had any energy left, we’d probably check out Noah’s Ark but you get wore out after too many rides.

Timbavati Wildlife Park – a tiny worthless zoo. Not worth visiting if you don’t have young children.

Ghost-Out-Post – more disgusting than scary. Pretty short tour and feel cheap.

The Original Duck tour – Very interesting tour on both land and water. Don’t expect a lot of leg room in your seats.

Jet boat tour – Very fun and fast. The boats do hard brakes and spins and you will get wet.

Tommy Bartlett Show – We went to the night show and totally didn’t enjoy the water ski part of the show. I thought it was completely overrated. The the performers made multiple mistakes. The clown was unbearably cheesy. The story line was poorly written. The only impressive thing was the hang glider at the end. The second half was so so. The juggler was very entertaining and kept your attention for the entirety of his performance. Overall it kept me wondering if my money would be better spent going to a different attraction.

Crabby’s All You Can Eat Seafood – $29.99 per person and it doesn’t include drinks. What the hell? The food isn’t bad but it’s just not worth thirty bucks. We regret eating there but it’s a once in life time mistake.

Wild West All-You-Can-Eat Buffet – We stopped by since we had a coupon but the place smelled revolting to me so we left.

Paul Bunyan’s “Northwoods Cook Shanty” – Family style all you can eat restaurant. They just keep bring out fresh food. Very awesome. Loved it.

That’s all the unique places we visited. We were also surprised how many Eastern Europeans were working in the area. I don’t have many photos to share since we didn’t take many. Just two I kinda like.

While the duck was passing thru a canyon

A view of the Dells from the river walk