Scott Alan Miller :: A Life Online
2000 was such a big year because of that awful movie, now it is the year of the even worse sequel. And still, no babies in space.
Since it is a Friday and a holiday I pretty much have today off from work. Not completely but basically. Nice to have a three day weekend as we head into our actual move to Dallas. We have some time to actually relax before having to do all the stress of moving again.
Not much to report for today. Sleeping in and relaxing mostly.
It is Friday and New Year’s Even here in Bayou Vista. It is really handy that the family decided that they are all going to come over to Joe and Britt’s house for the New Year’s Eve party tonight so we don’t have to worry about going anywhere. Very convenient.
I worked today from the house again. This is my last regular work day working from Bayou Vista. It is a holiday tomorrow and then we head up to Dallas on Monday morning! Almost time to head to our new home.
Dominica picked up some Shiner 100th Anniversary Commemorator Texan beer for the New Year’s Eve party for me this evening. It is a dark, German-style beer that is very good. I am very happy with the beer that we are able to get here in Texas. Lots of good, local beer. People outside of Texas don’t really think about Texas being a place for good beer but it really is.
The party was pretty low key. Most everyone just played darts all night. Francesca and I weren’t interested in darts at all so we watched most of Night at the Museum but we were both tired and Francesca fell asleep after about the halfway point of the movie. Once I was the only person left awake not playing darts or reading I decided that it made sense to just go to bed. So I was off to bed with Oreo around ten or eleven.
Today was a pretty slow work day for me. I worked all day from Joe and Britt’s house. I have my laptop set up on the kitchen counter and spend most of the day just standing at it or, from time to time, sitting on a bar stool to work at it. It sounds more uncomfortable than it is. Work is really slow as it is the holiday week so I am walking around and doing other things quite a bit all throughout the day.
Dominica slept in very late tonight. I got up with Liesl and brought her downstairs while I worked in the kitchen. Joe was awake playing PlayStation 3 so Liesl hung out with us. This morning Liesl really starting playing with her new pop-up PlayHut playhouse that we have set up in Joe’s “den” area just off of the dining room (it is all one big open space so hard to call one room one thing and another another.) It is really cool watching Liesl explore her little play house and going inside to be alone and play with all of the plastic balls that it stores.
In the fifties here in the Houston area. In Impfondo it is eight nine degrees today.
After work today I drove up to the north east of Houston to meet Jen for some coffee and sandwiches. We’ve been trying to get together since we hung out at SpiceWorld Austin and SpiceCorps Houston and this is the one week when we are both in the Houston area with some free time.
Getting around the Houston area, or anywhere in Texas, pretty much, using our BMW GPS is pretty much impossible. The system is not very old but every single road in Texas has changed in the last two years and nothing is on the GPS. What little bit is on the GPS is all wrong. Turns are all messed up even with long time existing roads. It easily doubles the time to get anywhere as you are always turning around, getting stuck going the wrong way and just getting lost in general.
After coffee with Jen I drove down to the Grices’ and picked up Dominica, Liesl and Oreo there. It was rather late and we just headed home. Most everyone was already off to bed by that time anywhere.
I am working from the Galveston area (Bayou Vista and League City) all week. This morning Dominica and I hung out in Bayou Vista for a while before heading out to get lunch at Waffle House. We are loving having access to Waffle House now that we are living in Texas.
While I was out in Bayou Vista today I noticed that the water level in the salt marsh there was incredibly low so I thought that I would take a picture. It is neat to see how the slow moving water drops sediments here and is gradually filling in the area making new land where there was none before. Once some saltgrass manages to take hold it is all over and the mud turns into land and the water has no chance to wash it away.
Light rain and fifty one degrees today. We are not yet used to Texas weather. New York is quite cold and covered in snow these days. The lack of winter weather is going to be awesome.
Often we have to use “telnet remotehost.somewhere.com 80” to test if a remote socket connection can be established. This is fine for one time tests but can be a problem when it comes time to test a number of connections – especially if we want to test them programmatically from a script. Perl to the rescue:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use IO::Socket;
my $sock = new IO::Socket::INET (
PeerAddr => $ARGV[0],
PeerPort => $ARGV[1],
Proto => tcp,
);
if ($sock) { print "Success!\n" } else { print "Failure!\n" };
close($sock);
Just copy this code into a file called “sockettest.pl” and “chmod 755 sockettest.pl” so that it is executable and you are ready to go. (This presumes that you are using UNIX. As the script is Perl, it should work anywhere.)
To use the code to test, for example, a website on port 80 or an SSH connection on port 22 just try these:
./sockettest.pl www.yahoo.com 80 ./sockettest.pl myserver 22
You aren’t limited to known services. You can test any socket that you want. Very handy. Now, if you have a bunch of servers, you could test them from a simple, one line BASH command like so (broken so as not to be one line here for ease of reading…)
for i in myserver1 myserver2 yourserver1 yourserver2 someoneelsesserver1 do echo $i $(./sockettest.pl "$i" 80) done