GlitchNYC.com

The Streets Are On Fire

There's no better place to begin a story than with the image of the narrator sitting on the toilet, wondering if they should have stopped eating before the third ear of corn last night. No, I know it's hard to believe that I didn't concoct this amazing little teaser, but I'm just not that good, folks. I can't just whip up literary gold like this.

So there I sat, minding my business, when the light dimmed, and then flickered. I waited, hoping the brownout would pass before either of my computers crashed or the fuse blew again. It doesn't take much to pop the fuses in this old building and running the big living room ac and a computer could certainly do it.

I turned the light off to take a few amps load off the system, sitting in darkness as I finished up. It occured to me that the light was flickering under the door as well.

I turned the light back on to find it still flickering like a candle and turned it back off. This was some brownout.

Out in the living room, Sara had already turned the AC off. Something was awry here. All the lights were flickering in a seizure inducing candle pattern. Even the kitchen, which was on a different circuit.

Sara suggested I check the hallway, and I did, and then walked to the hall to see if other buildings were flickering too when I realized it wasn't just our apartment.

I was shocked to see a car on fire directly outside the building. I didn't really know how, but somehow these two things were related. The back of a PT cruiser was lit up with bright orange flame, and our lights were flickering in kind.

I got Sara and we watched, bemused for almost 3 minutes, waiting for someone to act, something to happen. I'd heard "Of course I've called 911!" from a man running around down on the street a few minutes ago talking with other gawkers, so I took him at his word and watched.

It hit me, as we were watching, that it wasn't his PT Cruiser that was on fire. It was the street.

My rational brain kicked in for a second. We were okay to be watching this, and there was no need for panic, but I wanted Sara and I to have our shoes on, a flashlight, and her ring. If our place went up like Double G (the pharmacy / residential building that burned about a year ago in a ConEd underground system fire) everything else could be replaced.

The firetruck arrived and the men all stood in a semi circle around the car with a limp hose. They appeared to be wondering what to do and then hosed off the car.

After a while, fire died down, and the firefighters hosed down the now charred and melted back of the car, and opened the doors, letting smoke pour out from the inside.

It seemed that there wasn't much more to see. We reasoned that our power was probably flickering because the car torched the line above it, not because of a system fire.

Except our power didn't stop flickering. Hearing more noise, I checked on the scene about 15 minutes later to find the car moved, and three great geysers of smoke rushing from the manhole cover holes.

It had been the street that was on fire.

I gave Sara a quick heads up that we might have to move if the rest of the system caught (dust throughout the tunnels can send a fire raging from manhole to manhole, taking buildings with it) but that it looked like it was dying down, and that I was going out to take some pictures.

Snapping a few pics, I asked the firefighters the likelihood of our buildings catching from the fire. The first one I talked to wasn't that reassuring.

"Eh, I dunno, which one are you?"

"On the corner, right there."

"Oh. oh."

"So should we be worried, I mean, if the fire's underground, could our buildings go up?"

"Uh, hey, well, Uhhh" He said, looking like he wanted to say "Yup," but didn't want to cause a panic.

"That's not very reassuring"

"I tell ya what, I'm just a probie, so I'm the worst guy to be asking technical questions. Look for the guy with the white hat and shirt."

"Okay if I take a few pictures"

"Sure, but this is as far as you go"

"Okay"

I snapped a few pictures, trying to keep the camera steady in the extremely dim, smoky light. I finally got one or two by getting down on the ground and leaning against a parking meter.

"You're done" I heard someone say, curtly, to my right. I looked up to see the lieutenant in the white shirt.

"Sorry, I'm done. I didn't think it would be a problem. Can I ask you a few quick questions? That's my building right there, should we be worried?" I asked, diffusing him by letting him do his job.

"Nah," he said, "If you were right here where all the smoke's going, we might not want you there with all the gasses going in. But over there, just close your windows, and maybe open one on a "clean" side of the building.

ConEd came about an hour later with their red emergency truck,and began sending giant roto-rooter tubes and gadgets down in the manholes. I imagine the problem will be fixed by morning. It's still a bit scary to think how ancient the system this city is built on top of is. It's amazing there aren't more problems.

I think this marks the 2nd time I've actually lived up to the name of this blog - "GlitchNYC - a Glitch in the city." Last time was the Blackout - this time, the streets are on fire. And here I thought it was just a clever play on words be cause my screenname was Glitch. Maybe the name was a bit prophetic, or maybe if you live here long enough you just see some crazy stuff.

1:30 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Problems with Samba Authenticating to Windows 2000 Domain Controller

I've just set up our new intranet at work, and this time I was determined to get samba working better in our Windows network.

Samba lets you share files from a unix box just like you would share a folder in windows. The one hitch is that if you set this up simply, everyone you want to give access to this folder needs to be listed in your smbpasswd file. Synchronizing the passwords between this file and your windows accounts is a headache even with one user, and setting the password to something different requires the user to map the drive with a different username.

Luckily, Samba provides you with a way to ask the domain controllers on the network if a user is authenticated, and what groups they are in. Setting this up is a fairly nontrivial task, but not impossible.

There's a great howto at samba.org which will walk you through setting this up. If that works for you, congratulations.

If you find that you can't log into your samba share after going through those steps, it is quite likely that in the initial setup (before you ran into trouble and found my site through google) that an earlier connection to the domain controller left some improper accounts lying around.

At the end of the day last friday, I knew I have everything configured correctly, and it still wasn't working.

When I initially connected to the domain controller, smb.conf still had the default values for the UID range to use, which was somewhere in the 16 million range. Now that I had specified the range to be between 10000 and 20000, those leftover values were throwing a wrench in things.

After a bit of searching (read: a day of bashing my head) I finally found a solution.

HowTo fix a bad join to an NT domain where winbind is used: (lifted from this linuxquestions thread and cleaned up a bit)

Stop your samba and winbind servers

Delete secrets.tdb and smbpasswd

Add a line to smb.conf to make it easier to get the login info
rejoin the domain
Restart winbind
test to see if domain users were read
You should see a list of users from your Windows machine. This is nice, but we had this part working before.
If this information shows up without the domain, (for example Administrator instead of MYDOMAIN\Administratior, don't panic. It seems that newer versions of samba will drop the domain prefix when they are properly joined to a domain)
Now, lets see if we can get actual login information
This should show not only your local logins on the linux machine, but also from your windows domain
restart samba
Test the login from another computer

For me, I remoted back into my windows box, and accessed \\intranet\public. It let me in without even prompting for a password, because I was already properly authenticated.

Happy Sambaing!

1:05 am | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

Ants on a Log

I've finally completed the second "Ardvark the Aardvark" story. I'm much happier with this one as a "children's book" as far as length goes, and I think I'll probably put this one together in book form first.

Many thanks to Christina for helping me put the pieces together one night at Arthur's Stellastarr* show, and to everyone who's encouraged this project along the way.

Read the story [PDF]

As always I'd welcome revisions, edits, and new stories or drawings - this is all under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 2.5, so feel free to share it, remix it, print it, sell it, or whatever, providing you 1.) Give proper attribution and 2.) release any derivative works under the same license.

You can contribute and edit collaboratively right on the wiki

No clue what this is all about? Check out my other posts on the topic

5:14 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Fluff In Brooklyn's 50th Comic Fiesta!

Colleen has already hit 50 comics of her hilarious stuffed-animal-roommate-comedy-biopic Fluff In Brooklyn. Zany Delta Burke infused humor abounds in episodes 1-50, who knows what the future holds! The 50th comic came complete with a fantastic party in Brooklyn that the characters themselves attended. Check out the comic and the pics.

Congrats Colleen! You've successfully posted 47 more web-comics than your average web-comic-poster, and 48 more than I ever managed. Here's to another 50!... And then another party. Wink wink, nudge nudge, NUDGE POKE PUNCH TACKLE... Oops, uhh, sorry about that. Umm, here, let me help you up. Oh. Okay, yeah, yeah, I'll just... I'll just leave now. You sure you don't need.. okay, yeah I'm gone.

step step step step... creak... cha-thunk.

creak. "it was a great party, throw another!" cre-cha-thunk.

1:04 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Why Doesn't Obi-Wan Remember Artoo and Other Questions

Ghent, a blogger on starwars.com does a wonderful job of filling in some of the logical gaps that become apparent when you've seen all 6 star wars movies.

*Why doesn't Obi-Wan remember Artoo?

*Why wasn't Leia a "Hope"?

*Why didn't Owen recognize C-3PO?

1:07 am | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

The reason my office is filled with empty gatorade bottles.

I just clicked on one of the links on my "Referer" page (yes, I know it's spelled wrong, bring it up with the apache crew), and I ended up at a page that was:

Mostly orange

Very Funny

and Featured Ninjas.

Whoo Hoo! Jon is blogging! I've only read a post or two so far, but hot damn, if Jon isn't one of the funniest guys I know. Head on over to http://shucknjive.blogspot.com/ to check out his blogging antics.

Here's a snip from "Stair Master"

After numerous attempts with lots of trial and error, a distinguished panel of experts unequivocally determined that there is no possible way for me to fall down a flight of stairs gracefully.

My first attempt was weak. I wasn't loosened up and I hadn't found a rhythm yet, so I didn't beat myself up too bad when the judges declared my first effort, "the work of a blind, clumsy fool". I deserved that, the way I fell down those stairs was nothing short of amateurish. I was so embarrassed I didn"t even properly acknowledge the judges table after I landed on my side. Sure, it.s a points deduction, but there was no way I was getting anything above a 3 anyway, so no big loss.

For my second attempt of the day, I thought I'd try and make up some ground, so I began the tumble starting off on the wrong foot. I'm naturally goofy foot, so traditionally I begin my fall down the stairs by misjudging the second step with my right foot. The judges know this, so I thought they would appreciate the effort I was putting forth when I instead used my left foot, precariously planting just the last quarter inch of my heel on the tip of that first step and then letting my body weight combined with the awesome force of gravity do the rest. In the end, it came out looking decidedly un-athletic and contrived, which it was. Still, the judges were being generous when they handed me an average score of 6.7.

My last attempt I had to lay it all on the line if I wanted to have any shot at a medal... Read the rest

10:01 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Tux's Long March

There's a new documentary detailing the long journey of our intrepid mascot, and how the collaboration of the group yields so much more than the sum of its parts. The story sounds familiar, but it's not what you think!

Lifed from Pocket Change

9:35 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

My Brain is Trying a Mutiny, Screaming Pirate Slander

It's been a long time since I've written a really good song. I have 2 or 3 in my collection that I really consider worthwhile with the distance of a few years from them, and I haven't written one that fits that description since around 1999.

About a year ago at work I became comfortable enough in fact that no one can hear me as I sing, just barely audibly, with my mp3 collection. I paid no attention to the fact that I was singing softly 3 or 4 hours a day, and simply did it for the love of it.

It seems that my little pastime has been a covert training program, as in the past 3 months, I've re-found my voice and pitch control, and I've had a new stream of songs come directly into my head without pre-meditation. I simply start singing to myself and then "pop" there it is, chords, chorus, and a vague idea of where the verse should go.

I've finally filled in the details for one of these little instant ditties, and it's raw, punky, geeky and ultimately pop. I wish I could record and produce a version that matched what I hear in my head, but I have yet to master the art of production. I'm actually considering renting a studio and hiring an engineer to help lay this one down in professional style.

Anyone know a cheap and decent studio in NYC?

Here's the rough-cut mp3 of "Heavy Eyelids". As with everything else on this site, it's under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, so feel free to share, remix, re-record, and even sell it - just be sure that any work you do based on this is under the same license, and you give proper attribution. It's open source music.

Speaking of, if you'd like to see the "source code," Here's the lyrics + chord sheet. If anyone would like to try their hand at remixing this from the original tracks, contact me at WebFront2005 AT Glitchnyc D0T com.

UPDATE: I've remixed it with some serious tweaking to the electric guitar. It was far to "fuzzy" to be enjoyable before. I also played with the levels a bit. Still not pro, but much better. Click on the link above to download the updated version.

1:50 am | permalink | /life/music | 0 writebacks |