Shawn

Fun!

Fri, 13 Jun 2003 05:47:41 GMT

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MySQL

Tue, 27 May 2003 05:10:10 GMT

I read an article in SysAdmin magazine today. It went over a Perl script that POPed your mail and stuck it in a MySQL database. That is just twisted. And I kind of like it. Not for everyday use, but for archiving my mail, I think it would be handy.

Register.com

Sun, 25 May 2003 03:08:36 GMT

Why would anyone use a registrar that points your domain to page (they run) that brings up a pile of popup ad windows (including one that trys to install Gator) until you get your site up? That's even worse than NSI.

The end

Wed, 21 May 2003 04:55:17 GMT

So I watched the final final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer tonight. It was pretty good. The ending leaves tons of room for spin-off's, but also ends the show really well. Some of the effects were pretty bad, but I was also impressed with some others, especially since it's TV.

I got BlackBox installed early this morning. So far I like it. I am still trying to get all the apps I need installed. I tweaked some things so they work the way I want, but I still have more things to find and tweak.

FreeBSD as a desktop is working out pretty good too. The ports tree is great, my only complaint is it takes so long for me to find an app that does what I want because their are so many to choose from. So far the only problem looks to be OpenOffice. My /usr partition is 3.9GB with 1.5GB free, but OpenOffice says it needs 4GB to compile. I am going to let it go and see if it can squeeze by. If not, I will have to see if I can find a binary somewhere.

Our new switch should be in tomorrow, so now I have that to figure out. I might try to get it set up this weekend, but I am kind of thinking that isn't enough time to really figure it out and once it is in production, I can't really play with it. We will see.

Well, I should get some sleep, last night I didn't get to sleep until 5:30am :-(

FreeBSD

Mon, 19 May 2003 19:56:23 GMT

So I am now running FreeBSD on my workstation at home. IT was a pain because I had a bunch of data on the drive that I had to get off, so I had to grab a different hard drive and throw Debian on it, then recompile the kernel to get ext3 and RieserFS support.

The install was painless, I have done it so many times for work. X is up and running, but right now I am running Windowmaker, which isn't great, but I haven't installed blackbox yet. I need to recompile my kernel and install the latest ports tree. I can't decide if I want to run --current or not.

One thing I can't wait to get up and running is Mozilla. Netscape 4.7 really sucks. I would love to run Phoenix, but it looks like it's only available for Windows, Linux and MacOSX.

It's driving me insane

Mon, 12 May 2003 08:34:22 GMT

My cable modem performance at home is sucking big time. Unfortunately, I don't have time to actually take a look at it. I need to rebuild my gateway, but it will be Thursday/Friday before I have time.

I took a chunk out of my right middle fingernail tonight, it's pretty nasty. It's all bandaged up now, but it still hurts.

I am seriously thinking of buying a Mac laptop. Specificaly a 14.1" iBook. But the 12" TiBook is also tempting. I will have to go down and play with them.

Sigh

Fri, 09 May 2003 14:39:43 GMT

So many things I want to do, but never have time.

Where did the weekend go?

Mon, 05 May 2003 05:00:46 GMT

Friday afternoon we went to see Xmen2, which was great. Then we went to a bar and had some drinks. Someone that works for us in Hungary had just got into the city (he is here for the summer) so we called him up and even though he had spent the last 18hrs flying, he came out for some drinks. It was great, just like last summer.

Yesterday I went over to my bosses to fix his computer. They were pretty easy, so it didn't take long.

Then I came home and started cleaning up my work area in the basement. Unfortunately, I don't think I really made any progress. I basically shut everything down and pulled all the cables that were run all over the place and cleaned them up. I also pulled out my desk from the wall so the back of the monitors could hang off the edge (giving me much more desk space). I also re-arranged things so I can have two monitors on the Octane[0]. But I didn't make much of a dent in the actual tidiness of the area (other than under my desk). I am going to have to take it easy on the OT this week so I can get it cleaned up before the inlaws get here next weekend.

[0] I now have a 20" SGI monitor and a 17" Sun monitor on the Octane. It's nice to have two desktops, but I have to figure things out a bit better, right now, I can move my mouse across both of them, but I can't drag a window across or have it split between them. When I Ctrl-N to open a new Mozilla window, it opens in the current window. If I run Mozilla in the second monitor, it wants me to create a new profile. So, I generally don't use the second monitor as much as I would like. I am sure it's just some config I have to play with, but it I haven't had time to find it yet.

Today I slept in, then went grocery shopping and made dinner (3cheese tortellini in mushroom alfredo sauce with grilled asparagus, yum, yum). Then we watched Lilo & Stitch, and just as the credits started, my phone rang and I spent an hour on the phone with someone in Vancouver walking him through creating a DOS boot floppy so he could flash the firmware on some hard drives.

I need to rebuild my firewall. Right now it is a SPARCclassic which is only a 40MHz processor, so SSH takes forever. I am going to use a SPARCstation 5 this time, so that should be much better. While I am at it, I am going to build one for the hosting company.

This summer could be insane at work. We could have lots and lots of work, which is good, but it could get pretty hectic.

Well, I should get back to cleaning up down here.

Oh yeah.

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 05:30:22 GMT

My books came today. What an amazing deal. 22lbs of books for $40.

I'm alive

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 05:26:36 GMT

I've just been busy. I have been working an average of about 80 hrs a week trying to get things working properly. Some seriously scary stuff could be coming down the pipe.....

In my tests FreeBSD is faster than Windows 2000 Advance Server, but not by as much as I hoped. With Windows we were getting 25MB/s over 1Gb/s ethernet. It didn't matter how many machines were hitting it. The weird thing was the read and write performance was the same.

Now I have tested and tweaked FreeBSD (well the basic FAQ tweaks) and I am getting about 35MB/s for writes and 40MB/s for reads. Better, but I had hoped to get better reads. The drives can read at about 100MB/s (dd if=/dev/twed0s1e of=/dev/null bs=10m count=100) and write at about 65-75MB/s (bonnie). I had hoped that we would get into the high 50's low 60's for reads and high 40's for writes. I still want to try and see if I can find more tweaks before I report my findings. But, time is running out.

In other news, I am getting annoyed with Gentoo. I decided to emerge world (make world for you bsd people) and it hasn't gone well. First I had to recompile my kernel to load the new nVidia drivers, which wasn't a big deal, but kind of annoying (yes I know it's not their fault). Now, kdemultimedia won't compile correctly. It's probably some small bug that will be fixed in the next couple of days, but I am X'less without it (no, I am not going to install another window manager until it gets fixed). I am tempted to throw Windows on it even more now (I would like to play around with some things that I can't on Linux (3ds Max, Digital Fusion, etc).

Irix isn't fairing much better. After burning 11 cd's to install gimp (talk about dependancy hell), I am still unable to because the ncurses package is corrupt. I have tried downloading a new version after deleting the one on my drive, but alas that one is corrupt as well. Of course, I decide to do all this while my PC is out of commision.

One good thing about the Octane is that it is now dual headed. I have two SI's now, and I threw more ram in (yipee, 768MB). Unfortunately, the second monitor is four feet away, so it is kind of useless. I have to rearrange my desk to put the two monitors closer (the other one was on my Ultra 30).

Some other good news (well good for me, bad for Coke) is that I have pretty much given up Coke. I decided that I consume WAY too much sugar. So, I stopped drinking Pop all together. It has been a little difficult, I can't drink many juices without getting heartburn, and most 'juices' we have at work have almost as much sugar as Coke. I have been drinking a lot of Cranberry juice, water and Milk, which I rarely drank before. I still have coffee in the morning, so I haven't eliminated caffeine (yet), but I have severly cut back (and I have the headaches to prove it, thankfully they are pretty much gone too).

I found out today that I put in more overtime than anyone else in the company. So, I need to cut back on how much I work.

I have a meeting tomorrow, with people I don't know, to talk about my side company. It's kinda weird. I am not exactly sure what they want, but if it's what I think it is, I am wasting both our time. We will see. Maybe they want to buy me out ;-)

Well, this is long enough. And I need to get some sleep.

Cheap Books

Fri, 18 Apr 2003 19:08:02 GMT

This place (http://www.bookcloseouts.com) has some pretty cheap books. I just got the following.....

ISBN Qty Title Status Price Total
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

0672315092 1 GIMP (Teach Yourself in 24 Hours) Ordered $1.99 $1.99
076152407X 1 The GIMP Guerrilla Guide to Great G Ordered $1.99 $1.99
0735709114 1 GIMP Essential Reference Ordered $1.99 $1.99
0764546406 1 Gnome/GTK+ Programming Bible Ordered $1.99 $1.99
1565920546 1 Learning the Korn Shell Ordered $1.99 $1.99
0937175757 1 Managing NFS and NIS Ordered $1.99 $1.99
1565925424 1 PNG: The Definitive Guide Ordered $1.99 $1.99
1565921267 1 Porting Unix Software: From Downloa Ordered $1.99 $1.99
0761523340 1 Programming With Python Ordered $1.99 $1.99
1565925882 1 Programming With Qt Ordered $1.99 $1.99
1565924258 1 Protecting Networks With Satan Ordered $1.99 $1.99
1565925009 1 Python: Pocket Reference Ordered $1.49 $1.49
157870040X 1 Solaries System Administrator's Gui Ordered $1.99 $1.99
1576105474 1 Solaris 7 System Administrator (Exa Ordered $1.99 $1.99
0809457164 1 Space Ordered $0.99 $0.99
0130406120 1 Tuning Netfinity Servers for Perfor Ordered $0.99 $0.99
1576105067 1 Under The Radar Ordered $0.99 $0.99

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sub-Total: $30.33
Shipping: $7.49
Handling: $1.00
Tax: $2.71
ORDER TOTAL: $41.54

Those prices are US, but still.

Grab your Credit Card and start buying.

THIS SALE ENDS TODAY!!!!!!!!

And back to rebuilding a server for me :-(

Wow

Wed, 09 Apr 2003 23:40:05 GMT

I just saw a thing on The Matrix Reloaded on Entertainment Tonight. Wow

Ugh

Tue, 08 Apr 2003 04:40:12 GMT

So I am half asleep, I can barely keep my eyes open. But I keep going, I am installing OpenBSD 3.2 on my Sun AXi machine (it's a Sun Ultra10 on an ATX board in a 2U Rack mounted case) so I can host a big ass website and I get this when I reboot after I think I have most things installed....

auxio0 at ebupanic: psycho0: uncorrectable DMA error AFAR 1eafb90 (pa=ffffffffff
ffffff) AFSR 270000ff40000000

kdb breakpoint at 127fabc
Stopped at Debugger+0x4: nop
RUN AT LEAST 'trace' AND 'ps' AND INCLUDE OUTPUT WHEN REPORTING THIS PANIC!
DO NOT EVEN BOTHER REPORTING THIS WITHOUT INCLUDING THAT INFORMATION!
ddb>

Joy.

Doh!

Mon, 07 Apr 2003 17:09:17 GMT

I came this >< close to hosting a pretty impressive site. The site is currently hosted on MTS and their server died this morning. The person freaked out and called me asking if I knew anyone to host it. I offered to host it and they were going to do it. Then MTS brought the machine back up :-(

They are doing 2GB a day with about 50k hits/day (with huge spikes). They were fine with the price especially once I said I would give them a dedicated machine.

It would be sooo nice to host a big site because MTS wasn't cutting it. It would have only been for a few weeks, but still. Oh well, what can you do.

Stats Can

Mon, 07 Apr 2003 05:30:52 GMT

I love playing with data. Too bad I don't really trust their data too much. I see that they are going to be providing raw data starting in 2004. That's kinda neat. I can't wait to play with it.

Wide awake

Mon, 07 Apr 2003 03:49:12 GMT

I had to watch some renders last night/this morning. They didn't finish until 11am this morning, so I ended up sleeping until 5pm. Now I am wide awake, and I expect to have a real hard time sleeping tonight. Which sucks, because I need to be here extra early tomorrow so I can take off early.

I started getting software installed on my faster Octane. Last time I tried to install Mozilla, it was a nightmare, I had tons of dependancies that I had to track down, but this time was super easy. I think I am just going to download the entire freeware.sgi.com archive and throw it on my file server once I actually get the file server set up. That way I can just point all the various SGI's at it for new packages. It should make things easier.

Speaking of SGI's, I finally got the third Octane sorted out. I set bid monkey to bid on it just before I left for Vancouver, a few days later (after I had completely forgot about it) I checked my email and found I had one. I really only bid on it because it had a decent amount of ram and a PCI card cage. Now I have to decide what I want out of it and what I am going to sell, because I REALLY don't need a third Octane. I guess we will see once it gets here.

I have to start trying to save money (time to block eBay at the firewall ;-) if I want to go to SIGGRAPH this year. I haven't gone before, but I would like to go this year. Timing could be in my favor, but we will have to see.

I actually haven't been on eBay in over a month. I am pretty impressed.

Joy

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 08:41:09 GMT

I get back from sunny Los Angeles and it's -10C and freakin' snowing.

Ugh. Can I please go back? It was 30C there.

Call me Mr. Jet Set

Fri, 28 Mar 2003 18:03:52 GMT

I found out Wednesday I leave for LA on Saturday. It's only for a few days, but still. It's LA! In some ways I am nervous (US Customs), but I am also pretty excited.

I would have liked a bit more time at home before I left again, but what can you do.

I loaded the LA area onto the iPaq, and I downloaded a huge ass arial photo of LA too.

It should be fun.

The Core

Fri, 28 Mar 2003 17:45:02 GMT

Comes out today. Go see it. If you haven't already ;-)

The Core

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 08:39:54 GMT

I must say, The Core was really good. And I am not just saying that. The jokes were funny and the 'action' sequences were good. Some of the effects seemed rushed, but that's not a surprise.

The cool part was that the director (Jon Amiel) was there and did a little speech first.

Well, I have to get up early tomorrow, so that's it for tonight.

I love Vancouver

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 01:13:08 GMT

It is so nice here. It rains a lot, but it is so warm. I am staying at one of the nicest hotels in town (thanks $work) and it's pretty cool. The stuff we are working on is beyond cool, too bad I am just setting up the computers, etc.

The biggest thing I like so far about Vancouver is how busy it is. You can go out at almost any time of the day and their are people out doing stuff. I walked home the other day at 4am and people were still out. I guess it's becuase I am right downtown (Robson and Burrard), but still.

We have also had some fantastic food. The first night I was here we went to a small little restaurant (Allegro Cafe) and had the best food I have ever had. I had Ahi Tuna and it was soooo good. Then a couple days later we had another excellent dinner (Joe Forte's).

And I have been on a major caffiene high since we got here. Their are Starbucks everywhere. Hell, they even have one on opposite sides of an intersection just up the street. It is going to take me weeks to come down once I get home. I have had two Grande Caffe Mocha's already today. I think I had four in one day last week.

We go to this small little bar quite frequently and we always see movie/tv stars. Last night was the best because we saw Eliza Dushku (aka Faith on Buffy). We have seen Rebecca Gayheart, Tony Danza, Zachery Ty Bryan (older kid on Home Improvment), Jeremy Piven, Lea Thompson, Nestor Carbonell (from Suddenly Susan) and some other people. It's pretty cool, it's a really small bar, so it's kinda nice.

I ordered a Compact Flash sleeve for my iPaq before I left, and picked up a Linksys WiFi card out here, so I have been 'war walking' quite a bit (really I just leave the program running with the iPaq in my pocket and when it finds a network it plays a tune). I can't believe how many their are. It's really cool. I wish I had a GPS unit that I could hook up and actually map some things out. I think I will have to either buy or borrow a laptop when I get home and drive around a bit with a GPS unit.

I also found this computer book store that sells all their books at half price. So I have 16 books to take home with me (some are for other people).

I also have 5 Sun A5000 drive shelves in my hotel room. They are friggen' heavy. Each of them weighs 120lbs. I had originally planned on picking up one for myself and one for work, so I had to figure out how to get them home. I found a place that will crate them up, then we are getting them sent back on a truck. The fibre channel cards have already arrived (thanks to eBay) at work, so I should have them up and running pretty quick. I plan on using mine for my web server.

I am going to a sneak preview of 'The Core' tonight. I really hope it is good. I just read a review in Discover magazine which is pretty cool ( a science magazine reviewing a movie ).

One cool thing they have out here is London Drugs. They are a cross between a pharmacy, Walmart and Future Shop. They have the usual drug store stuff, but they also have a computer section. That's where I picked up the CF-WiFi card. They also have laptops, so I have been fondling the Titanium powerbooks everytime I go there. I would really like to get one. Maybe in the fall.

Wow, this is quite a post. My hands are starting to bug me (very bad posture from badly placed laptop), so that is all for now.

I'm leaving on a Jet Plane

Sun, 02 Mar 2003 02:49:26 GMT

And I don't know when I'll be back again ;-)

So, I leave for Vancouver in 16hrs. I am both excited and worried. I have to get everything working and people up and working very quickly, so the pressure is on. I am excited because I have never been to Vancouver, hell, I have never seen an ocean. Yeah, I know. Pretty bad.

The sheer amount of stuff I am bringing is mind boggling. Some stuff went out on Monday and I am still bringing three big ass cases of stuff. It should be interesting.

One bad thing, is the person I am to share a room with is sick :-( Just my luck, I will get sick as well.

I bought MS Streets and Trips 2002 last night. It's really cool. You load it on your PC, then if it detects you have ActiveSync installed (meaning you have a PocketPC device) it asks if you want to load PocketStreets. Once you load it, you can save any map to your PDA. I loaded Vancouver and Seattle. I am not too worried about Vancouver, but Seattle could be interesting (if I get down there). I hope so. The number of Sun boxes could potentially double by the time I get down there. Time to start looking for GBIC's and Fibre Channel Cards on eBay.

I also ordered a Compact Flash sleeve for the iPaq. It adds about 1/4 inch to the iPaq, but it allows me to plug in CF cards....like the CF Wireless card I also ordered. Or a MicroDrive if I can ever afford one. They work out to about 1/2 the price of the iPaq, but they will be nice to have around the office and in Vancouver. I might do some war walking when I get back >:-) Speaking of which, I should download NetStumbler for PocketPC while I am here....ARGH! The CF card I ordered isn't supported. I wonder how much the right one would cost?

Well, I should get going. I still have to pack my stuff at home.

W00T!

Wed, 26 Feb 2003 22:56:55 GMT

My Octane is here. And it's in AMAZING shape. No scratches, no dust. It's like new.

Me Very Very Happy

Yay

Wed, 26 Feb 2003 02:51:52 GMT

My Octane left Minneapolis this morning, I should see it Thursday or Friday. Now I can't decide if I should strip my old one and make a nice dual headed machine (I would kinda feel bad about it) , or keep both (I don't REALLY need two Octanes, but it would be nice), or sell it (Cash is always good).

I am looking forward to Vancouver. It is a really cool project (sorry NDA's) and I have never been to the coast (either of them). I might be taking a drive down to Seattle to pick up some sweet sweet Sun gear (a couple A5000 Fibre Channel Drive Enclosure 9GBx14 (one for me, one for work)). So, I could go to Vancouver AND Seattle. Pretty cool (can you tell I haven't travelled much?).

I finally got a Linksys VPN Router working with out firewall/vpn box. It wasn't too complicated, just lots of settings to tweak and if you don't have the exact same config as the author's of all the documentation, it's a pain. But it works. Now to get one set up in our Vancouver office (then again to a different location once I get there).

Right now I am missing a meeting that I arranged and planned because I am writting out a tape :-(

Norah Jones won a whole pile of Grammy's (is it Grammy's or Grammies?) which is really cool. I love her album.

Well, I should finish up this tape....

Zee pictures

Sat, 22 Feb 2003 19:17:26 GMT

Moby's site had lots of cool pictures.