Plato’s Pharmacy

I realized yesterday what football has been missing for me these last few years of wrapping up the division by Thanksgiving: Playoff and wild card math! Yes, us Colts fans have become spoiled, no longer knowing the fun and excitment of figuring out who needs to win and lose and how the tiebreakers need to fall to get you an elusive playoff spot. Let’s take a look:

AFC Wild Card Standings

• Jets, 6-3
• Pats, 6-3
• Steelers, 6-3
• Ravens, 6-3
• Colts, 5-4
• Dolphins, 5-4
• Bills, 5-4
• Broncos, 5-4
• Chargers, 4-5

Stampede Blue’s shake n bake does a good job with what we as Colts fans want to happen next week, but I’d disagree about a couple. First, Jets@Pats: I’ve got no faith in either of those teams being able to hold a lead in the AFC East. It’s a surprisingly tough division, with all four teams in competition to win it. Given that, I want be sure I’m competeing against the Pats for the wild card, a team we’ve got a tiebreaker locked in against. Second, I’d disagree on Chargers@Steelers. While I like his idea of hoping for the Broncos to win their way out of competition for the wild card by just taking the AFC West, he’s partly presuming that on the Colts beating the Chargers. When running the playoff numbers like this you of course need to bank on your team winning, so that makes sense. But if you’re betting on the Colts beating the Chargers later this year, you have to take into account that this would put them two back of the Colts minus the tiebreaker. Thus, I’d say cheering for a loss for the more dangerous Steelers. Right now we don’t know what’s going to happen between the Steelers and the Ravens in the AFC North, but we do know that our Steelers tiebreaker doesn’t help us until they get handed another loss.

Thus, my theory on who Colts fans should be cheering for next week looks like so:

Jets@Pats: Jets

Broncos@Falcons: Broncos

Ravens@Giants: Giants

Raiders@Dolphins: Raiders

Titans@Jags: Titans

Chargers@Steelers: Chargers

Browns@Bills: Browns

I hope to be back next week with a look at how things went, and a reassessment based on the actual outcomes.

The US has elected Barack Obama, our first African-American president. Amazing.

And help end our long national nightmare. Good luck everyone.

First, The-Plural-of-Anecdote-Is-Not-Data Edition:

• While running around meeting with potential wedding vendors, Beth and I drove past the City-County Building yesterday. The early voting line was out the door, down Market to Delaware, around the corner, and 2/3 the way down that block. Mostly African-American.
• Then we went over to Chatham Tap to meet a friend for lunch, and he had an interesting story. His dad was apparently one of the first people to early-vote in Hamilton County. The lifelong Republican, outraged by his party over the last few years, was there to vote Obama. But here’s the kicker: So was everyone else in line he talked to.
• Two weekends ago we found ourselves in a small rural area between Indy and Franklin, just off I-74 (we were getting pumpkins). In what one would presume to be a staunch conservative area, Obama and McCain yard signs were roughly tied.

Now for election night predictions:

• Presidency: Obama wins 353-185. He loses MO and IN (yes, after my anecdotes above, I still just can’t bring myself to believe he will win the state) but wins all the other “battleground states” (yes, this is different than a prediction I gave my friends. I’ve become more favorable to Obama winning NC). I’ll also say he wins the popular vote by around 6%.
• Senate: The Obama wave means the Dems win all the “Tilts Dem” or better states. That’s 59 Senate seats counting Sanders & Joementum.
• IN House Races: All incumbents win. Obama wave isn’t enough to beat Souder I’m afraid, as much as I wish it was.
• IN Governor: Daniels wins easily. I’ll say 12%, +/- 3%.

Finally, some thoughts on the Nixonian style of the McCain-Palin campaign’s game of cultural resentments, and how I think it portends an even uglier era of politics ahead of us as the conservative base is forced to deal with being roundly rejected at the polls. But for this I’m going to outsource to Rick Perlstein at the end of “Nixonland”:

Richard Nixon died in 1994. At his funeral, Senator Bob Dole prophesied that “the second half of the twentieth century will be known as the age of Nixon.” In a sense he surely did not intend, I think Bob Dole was correct. What Richard Nixon left behind was the very terms of our national self-image: a notion that there are two kinds of Americans. On the one side, that “Silent Majority.” The “nonshouters.” The middle-class, middle American, suburban, exurban, and rural coalition who call themselves, now, “Values voters,” “people of faith,” “patriots,” or even simply, “Republicans” – and who feel themselves condecended to by snobby opinion-making elites, and who rage about un-Americans, anti-Christians, amoralists, aliens. On the other side are the “liberals,” the “cosmopolitans,” the “intellectuals,” the “professionals” – “Democrats.” Who say they see shouting in opposition to injustice as a higher form of patriotism. Or say “live and let live.” Who believe that to have “values” has more to do with a willingness to extend aid to the downtrodden than where, or if, you happen to worship – but who look down on the first category as unwitting dupes of feckless elites who exploit sentimental pieties to aggrandize their wealth, start wars, ruin lives. Both populations – to speak in ideal types – are equally, essentially, tragically American. And both have learned to consider the other not quite American at all. The argument over Richard Nixon, pro and con, gave us the language for this war.

Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue that they do not.

How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.

Ok, so while this blog technically isn’t open for buisness yet, I do have a recent curiosity I ran into at work that I wanted to get down for posterity. Who knows, it might help someone else out someday.

So one of the many things I do at my job is maintain our outbound email relay servers. My company makes its money through an e-commerce site, and one thing that’s part of all that is sending large amounts of email to our customers. This has been handled for years by several old Sun boxes running Sendmail behind a load balancer. Unfortunately, our outbound email traffic had finally gotten to the point where these old systems couldn’t take it anymore. Enter our new relay system. Taking advantage of modern technologies, we set up come VMWare instances running Red Hat and qmail, naturally with much more processing power and memory than our old Sun boxes. And they worked out great! With the exception of one particular domain, which I’ll call xyz.com. Any email sent to it never arrived.

Checking the qmail logs, I found this error: “deferral: CNAME_lookup_failed_temporarily._(#4.4.3)”. Certainly nothing I’d ever seen before. A bit of searching later, I discovered this problem and patch. Easy enough, I installed the patch and expected everything to be well. Except it wasn’t. Same problem, no help at all.

Next came tests with the “host” command. I discovered I could not resolve an ANY query from the qmail servers on xyz.com, even though it worked just fine from the old Solaris UltraSPARC 10 on my desk. From the qmail server, failure looked like this:

[root@qmail-relay01 ~]# host -t ANY xyz.com

;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode.

;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

There’s the key, “retrying in TCP mode”. For some reason, I assume because the response was greater than the 512 bytes allowed by a UDP packet, DNS resolution was resorting to TCP and then failing. This could be confirmed when I tried a lookup on a working domain:

[root@qmail-relay01 ~]# host -t ANY google.com

google.com mail is handled by 10 smtp1.google.com.

google.com mail is handled by 10 smtp2.google.com.

google.com mail is handled by 10 smtp3.google.com.

google.com mail is handled by 10 smtp4.google.com.

google.com has address 72.14.207.99

google.com has address 64.233.187.99

google.com has address 209.85.171.99

google.com text “v=spf1 include:_netblocks.google.com ~all”

google.com name server ns1.google.com.

google.com name server ns2.google.com.

google.com name server ns3.google.com.

google.com name server ns4.google.com.

google.com SOA ns1.google.com. dns-admin.google.com. 2008100200 7200 1800 1209600 300

And then forced a TCP lookup on the same domain with the “-T” option:

[root@qmail-relay01 ~]# host -Tt ANY google.com

;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

Why? Easy. The firewall the qmail relays are behind had been configured to allow DNS (port 53) UDP traffic out, but not TCP traffic (yes, our DNS servers are on a different network segment from the mail relays). A quick call to the firewall admin, and everything worked great. So the lesson here is to remember when you’re setting up your firewall rules, DNS will use both UDP and TCP. Who knows, maybe my writing this up will help another admin someday. :-)

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….here in Indy was the best concert I’ve been to in a long time. Here’s the setlist:

15 Step – In Rainbows
Bodysnatchers – In Rainbows
There There – Hail to the Thief
All I Need – In Rainbows
Pyramid Song – Amnesiac
Nude – In Rainbows
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi – In Rainbows
The Gloaming – Hail to the Thief
Climbing Up The Walls – OK Computer
Faust Arp – In Rainbows
Videotape – In Rainbows
Morning Bell – Kid A
Idioteque – Kid A
Reckoner – In Rainbows
Everything in its Right Place – Kid A
Just – The Bends
How To Disappear Completely – Kid A

Encore 1
You and Whose Army? – Amnesiac
Bangers N Mash – In Rainbows (disc 2)
Exit Music (For A Film) – OK Computer
Jigsaw Falling Into Place – In Rainbows
Karma Police – OK Computer

Encore 2
House of Cards – In Rainbows
The National Anthem – Kid A
Street Spirit (Fade Out) – The Bends

Tonight we’re seeing Wilco, which I’m sure will also be amazing.

Popping in to say that GigaOM’s series of posts on their infrastructure conference, Structure 08, have been incredibly interesting if you’re in the field. Wish I could have been there, or even had the time to watch the video.

Yes, we disagree about a lot. Still, I’m not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, and I’m glad you guys have the right position on telecom amnesty and are doing good work in the fight against it. So for that, thanks.

But I do have a question: How do you feel about the fact that Congressman Paul didn’t even show up to vote on the issue today? Just curious.

Also: What Jason said.

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