going dark part one

my mom and my stepdad live in a retirement community in the tampa, florida area. one of their neighbors is a married couple, both the husband and wife of whom made their careers in the federal intelligence community. the husband is still an active CIA agent who spends long periods of time in the middle east. the wife worked for the FBI but is now retired. at some point, she and my mom were discussing social media and my mom brought up having to use her friends' accounts to snoop around since my brother and i forbade her from joining facebook. her friend laughed and said we had done her a favor. when my mom asked what she meant, she replied "if you are on facebook or twitter, get off. that's all i can say."

i have been anti-facebook for a long time but not always for the same reasons. facebook appeals to the narcissist in you. if you can't admit to that, you should know that they are in the intelligence business but more in the google sense of collecting every bit of information on as many people as possible rather than only spying on 'bad guys' like the my mom's neighbors. i always considered myself the paranoid brother between matty and i but something triggered a change in him and he started making me aware of all of the different ways sites collect your information (i'll write about this in a different post). i stopped using google as a search engine in favor of duckduckgo but there was far more work to be done

back to facebook - i had quit previously but always came back, usually while drunk and powerless against my impulses to spy on someone or post something inappropriate but hilarious. since i quit drinking, this was no longer a factor and so i quit facebook and instagram months ago and haven't returned. this left twitter (which i couldn't tell you the last time that i used - probably humanafest last year), foursquare, swarm and linkedin. unlike facebook which retains your data seemingly indefinitely, twitter deletes your handle, history and all information after 30 days. i don't know why this made me hesitant but it did. i love swarm but not for any good reasons. i like being the mayor of places, especially where i work where it has always been an active competition between my coworkers. yesterday i decided that neither the public availability of my twitter history nor the prestige of mayorship were really adding anything beneficial to my life so i left facebook, swarm and twitter. linkedin is a colossal annoyance except for when you are looking for a new job or entertaining job offerings to get a feel for the market when you are negotiating your salary. if anyone from dynamit is reading this, meet me at the current median going rate of a software developer in the columbus area with thirteen years of experience and i will leave linkedin immediately and complete the circle

that's the history that led me to write this. next will be why going dark was important to me and why i take pride in having done it (with the one exception already stated)

be wary of the results of sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats

my coworker (@developingjim) and his team was troubleshooting a client database production down issue this past weekend and discovered something that neither he nor i were aware of - the sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats function only scans index parent-level pages (leaf-level +1). the results of this versus running the function in DETAILED mode (which scans all pages and returns all statistics) can be drastically different. The image below shows two queries and the results for each:

The first query lead the team to believe that index fragmentation was not an issue; the second revealed that this was far from the truth and the crisis was resolved after the massive fragmentation was addressed

windbg - issues loading sos for .net framework v4

from stack overflow:
"The CLR runtime dll was renamed to clr.dll with .NET 4. So in order to load the correct version of SOS you need to adjust your .loadby command. I.e.

.loadby sos clr"

sql server best practices: disk configuration

• store the data and the log on different physical drives
• use the appropriate RAID level depending on the importance of performance and redundancy
• performance only - RAID 0
• redundancy only - RAID 1
• performance and redundancy - RAID 5 or RAID 10
• place files on subsystem connected to different controllers
• mirror the transaction log
• mirror the master and model system databases
• stripe the tempdb database
• store the user database files on a different physical drive from the master , model and tempdb system databases
• monitor the default filegroup or allow for automatic growth
• RAID, SAN and NAS appear as driver letters
• use direct-connected hard drivers or SAN instead of NAS or network file shares
• use NTFS

humana fest 2012 review: the veri**on play

writer: lisa kron
director: nicholas martin
summary: jenni made a minor mistake three months ago on the payment of her cell phone bill and cannot get it resolved no matter how many times she speaks with customer service and is assured that it is taken care of. she eventually reaches the breaking point and joins a support group for others dealing with similar life-altering experiences with evil, incompetent customer service departments
grade: B
comments: basically a one hour and twenty minute bashing of the pathetic quality of modern customer service.  verizon wireless is the main focus of the insults and rants but shots are also fired at other companies and industries (anthem blue cross/blue shield, greyhound, credit agencies, mortgage brokers, etc.). the actors that played jenni and her sister did a very good job but i would not say the same about the rest of the crew. if you take it for what it is - a comedy dealing with modern day frustrations that mixes intelligent and funny dialog with over-the-top, intentionally dumb humor - you will probably enjoy it

humana fest 2012 review: the hour of feeling

writer: mona mansour
director: mark wing-davey
summary: a young palestinian man (adham) who recently received his doctorate in english romantic poetry meets some bumpkin broad (abir), quickly marries her and then the couple moves to london where a prestigious university has asked him to give a lecture.  the lecture is a success but abir speaks no english and doesn't fit in well in the company of academia so their marriage struggles almost immediately.  war breaks out in the middle east and adham must choose whether to stay and pursue his career or return home with his wife
grade: a-
comments: i thought the play was engaging, very well written and did a good job of mixing in comedy with the drama.  i was very impressed with how the way the writer tied events from the beginning of the play and discussions of poetry between adham and his colleagues with the final scene

humana festival of new america plays 2012 reviews

i saw six plays this year: the hour of feeling, death tax, michael von siebenburg melts through the floorboards, oh, gastronomy!, the veri**on play and how we got on.  overall i would consider this collection of plays the second best i've seen in the four years that i've attended the festival.  i was also happy to see such a wide variety topics in the plays as opposed to the last two years where the overriding theme was male homosexuality and each year it seemed like the directors and/or writers competed to see who could edgier starting with the abundance of live dude dick i saw two years ago and escalating to full-fledged cock-in-ass last year.  rather than reviewing every play in a single post, im going to write about each individually since i don't know how long it will take me to get through them all and i want to publish my thoughts on the ones that really stick out in my mind while the memory is fresh