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Everyone Hates A Chain Email. Here's The Mother Of Them All! Happy Sunday! If my calculations are correct, it should be around 4pm your time. If it's any earlier, you either didn't stay up late enough last night, you need to get some sleep now that yesterday is today or you should get back in bed and ponder why you have so much energy and what you can do to avoid this sort of awkward situation in the future ;)

You may be in BIG trouble, mister ;) This week's bit of Linux/Unix humour comes from deep within the pages at keithlynch.net. I'd highly recommend you go check it out. It's a very simple page (as in "no flashy graphics") but, once you get through half of his life story, I think you'll find that it's amazing he has a sense of humour left. Seriously; check out his page. He's been through the ringer. Nevertheless, he is also responsible for some pretty funny stuff.

How to replace system boards using DR for maximum uptime on Mx000 series Sun servers. Shifting gears again, today we're going to take a look at doing some hardware maintenance on Sun's (or, technically, Fujitsu's) new Mx000 series servers. At this point, I think there are only 4 variants available; the M4000, M5000, M8000 and M9000.

How to rescue your friend's Windows box using LinuxDefender Live ;) Did I actually mention Windows and NTFS in the title of this post? It's a good thing I managed to squeeze a little "Linux" in there or I'd commit myself to the nearest convalescent home immediately ;) Actually, though, if the title is a bit off-putting, this post is all about freeware Linux and how to use it to fix NTFS partitions if you need to.

How to boot RedHat Linux Rescue with USB Support Enabled. This post is for any Linux admin out there, who uses RedHat (or any similar distro, really - the differences are generally minor) and works in a shop outfitted with the latest and greatest hardware to "drive the network." I'm not sure what that expression means, but I heard it in a meeting once and it seemed vaguely motivating ;) It's also the first post on using grub since our post on using grub to change the root password.

A quick script to pull up famous quotations based on keywords or phrased you provide on the Unix or Linux CLI. Today's Linux/Unix bash shell script is yet another follow up to a whole cavalcade of scripts we've written to mine the knowledge on tap at reference.com, although this one is grabbing its material from QuotationsPage.com. If you missed any of the others, you can still find them in our older bash script posts to do encylopedia lookups, access the online Thesaurus, translate between different languages and, of course, the use the online dictionary.

The "official" explanation of "foo" - RFC 3092. Hope you're having a great Sunday :) Following up on a joke post we did last week regarding RFC 3093 For the Firewall Enhancement Protocol, I found a site that lists even more of them. In fact, if you visit WYAE you can find a pretty good listing of all the known joke RFC's that have been released (all the way through 2008). Who knew there were so many in-jokes out-there ;)

Finally, an answer you can give your kids when they get up the nerve to ask :) We made it to another weekend (somehow) by working, and/or sleeping and/or both for another 5 days ;) It's time for a joke or two to help us forget the fact that we're on-call all weekend :P

Here's a little something to finish the week off and tie up some loose ends. You may have noticed in our Perl script to maximize guaranteed matches in any give number pool that we did all of our work using permutations, which we then went through the trouble of sorting and removing duplicates. Probably a few people out there were thinking: "Why permutations if 1,2,3 and 3,1,2 are going to be considered equal? Isn't that just a bunch of extra work?" The answers to those questions are "why not" and "yes" ;)

We'll, this week's been completely out-of-sequence. Today's post was slated for the day before yesterday and Tuesday's number pool script that was supposed to come out yesterday ended up getting published on Tuesday. If there's one thing we've learned this week, it's that my day job is starting to interfere with my hobbies ;)

It's been noted (and I know that it's true) that the spread-system used in the last portion of our Perl script (posted yesterday in our entry regarding maximizing guaranteed matches) was somewhat uneven. The end result, of course, being that your given set-numbers from pool-numbers (3 from 5, 4 from 6, etc) guaranteed that the sets would be included in the generated pools, but (as was noticed by a few people, including myself) the downside (?) ends up being that the front-numbers are more heavily weighted.

Breaking tradition (or continuing it, depending on how often you read this blog ;) we're going to have part 2 of yesterday's two-parter tomorrow and put up our final Perl script to find the maximum guaranteed number sets, or lists, within larger number pools. There's not too much else to explain about it, but we will lay out this road map, so that you can see (or possibly revisit or avoid ;) all of the different topics we covered that are included in this script and/or are directly relevant (kind of a list of directions to this post and its attached script).

NOTICE: The script in this post is terrible on purpose!

Today, I found a little RFC for you that isn't just funny (and an "official" April Fool's Day joke), but is actually real and can be found on the official IETF RFC Page. This RFC (RFC 3093) is a request for comments on the, then, newly proposed Firewall Enhancement Protocol, which basically suggests a way to completely bypass firewalls, without compromising them, by allowing the tunnelling of any and every protocol under the sun through simulated HTTP sessions, which (it argues) should be allowed to pass without question :)

Where does the time go? It seems like just 6 or 7 days ago I was sitting in much the same place I'm sitting now, doing the exact same thing I'm doing right now. It's moments like these that make you realize that life is, indeed, fleeting. Speeding along at halcyon pace, savagely hurtling toward the finish line; before you know it, 59 or 60 minutes have gone by and you're once again faced with the stark realization that yet another hour of your life has passed you by. And the only real and true questions you can ask of yourself are "Did I LIVE those 50 minutes or so? Did I stop to smell the roses? Did I breathe in the intoxicating aroma of nature's bountiful harvest and reap the benefits which I’ve most surely sown? Or did I just spend a lot of time reminiscing about "a little while ago?" ;)

As promised (I think ;), we're back today with some code (not the entire script that encompasses the last 2 weeks worth of posts, of course) to grind out the final concept in this string of surprisingly wide-ranging topics all centered around the concepts of number pools and guaranteed matches. We've covered a lot of different aspects of mathematics, regular expression matching, etc just moving toward our Objective.

Here's hoping everyone's having an enjoyable day at work (or, even better, an enjoyable drink on the beach :). I'm currently wading through a sea of bureaucracy the complexity of which demands to be taken in with nothing less than total awe. The term Byzantine been taken to another level of meaning for me. It's always an interesting thing in life when you realize that, just the other day, you thought you had it all figured out ;)

We're just about done with this series of somewhat disjointed posts on number pools and guaranteed matches. Hopefully, each post in the series has been somewhat entertaining and far enough removed from the starting post that we kept up some sense of originality. It wasn't too hard (unless we screwed up ;) since there were so many unique concepts to cover within the realm of reaching the Objective of the original post. Please refer back to our post on number pools for definitions of all the major terms and a listing of the Objective (although that definition is repeated in a few other posts along the way).

Here's another topic that relates to our larger series on number pools and guaranteed combinations within fixed lists while still being worthy of having its own post. Regular expression matching with Perl for Linux or Unix is fairly simple at its most basic (as are most implementations of regular expression matching). Taken to its most remedial level, you can use a regular expression as a poor man's "grep" (and, oddly enough, the "re" in grep actually stands for regular expression). Although this use of regular expression pattern matching does have its place, it doesn't really merit use outside of tools designed to apply it in that manner and will suck all the joy right out of creating your own regular expressions.

How's this for some light Monday reading? ;) Actually, the title sounds a lot worse than the concept or its application. In fact, if you read the equation in its "native form," above, it looks like gibberish, unless you're really into mathematics or engineering ;) For our purposes, we'll reduce it to something that looks like regular mathematics (which it is) and tie it back into our series of posts from last week. This is what the derivation looks like in English, assuming n=4 and k=3 (no math involved ;)