This coming Monday I’m flying off to Atlanta, Georgia for the week. Not keen on going as Atlanta is like descending into the armpit of summer. I’m hoping that the weather co-operates and I don’t melt. 
I’m flying down there for work, we’re beta launching a product for a customer (that’s based in Atlanta - go figure) and they (the customer) have requested a contingent of us from work be on site for the release. So it’s me and two others from the UK.
We’re down on Monday then flying back home on Friday evening - I’m hoping to be in bed by midnight (landing 22:05 - 30 minute taxi home, getting bags and immigration and such). A SysAdmin that works for our customer suggested Zuma sushi bar to me for sushi. I like sushi a lot and hope to stop in for some glorious sushi.
Last month I made a post about using rrdtool and ruby to graph hard disk temperatures. I recently had some hardware trouble and something with permissions went crazy. Today I took the time to look into the problem and fix it.
The /dev/hd[egik] device nodes were owned by root:disk and 660. However, the hddtemp binary was trying to do some restricted ioctl operations. Even though the binary was setuid and my non-root user was in the disk group I couldn’t access the disk to get the temperatures.
I found out that there is a hddtemp daemon which can query the disks for my unpriveleged user.
The daemon listens on a TCP port and provides output like this:
|/dev/hde|ST3160811AS|39|C||/dev/hdg|ST3160811AS|40|C||/dev/hdi|ST3160811AS|38|C||/dev/hdk|ST3160815AS|39|C|
Should be easy to modify my disk_temperature.rb to connect to that port and parse the data.
Now my temperature graphs will have new data (as soon as the change is made).
I received an email to my work account today that started with “Dear Sirs…”. The email was sent, presumably, to a large number of customers at once about a networking issue by a UK hosting company.
I am female and at the time the salutation bugged me. In normal society one doesn’t generally greet a member of one gender with the salutations of the other. When I received the email my brain put together discussions from LinuxChix mail lists and other recent discussions on women in IT.
I took offence at the salutation “Sirs” because it implies that there are no women working in IT which is clearly not the case.
Anyways, I sent an email in reply to the email (which went to a support@ email) saying that I didn’t appreciate being addressed as a “Sir”. Less than 25 minutes later I received an email from the managing director of saying he wrote the message and thought the salutation “Sirs” was …was an acceptable greeting if the gender of the other party is unknown. I’m not sure I agree but I appreciated the feedback anyways and replied to him thanking him for taking the time to reply. Hopefully he will do as his email says and take my feedback on board and change the way his company addresses emails to women.
My good deed for the day is done.
