Advogato blog for rmorgan

23 May 2000

Tue, 23 May 2000 17:33:51 GMT

Austin

Finally back from Austin, TX. Went down to see IBM and some of their latest technologies. Very cool stuff. Their commitment to Open Source is not a marketing scheme either. That is a Good Thing (tm).

Did lots of Austin stuff, like dinner at chuy's, dinner at waterloo ice house, frequent trips to Amy's Ice Cream, and a Round Rock Express game. That rocked.

Forgot how much I like Austin, though the heat is dreadful. The great beer there helps though.

Music

Positively loaded up on CD's at Antone's and Waterloo. I am now diggin new stuff from Rollins Band, 8 1/2 Souvenirs, Joe Ely and The Texas Plainsmen.

Statistics

I always knew stat would come back to haunt me.... I am testing some stuff and need to make sure I gather the right kind/amount of perf stats. Uggh. Had to buy a book ("The Pocket Statistician") to help me out.

Abby

Got 8 rolls of film developed. Should be posted on the website soon.

Tux.Org

Rolled out the new website for Tux.Org. Getting loads of feedback, mostly good. Yeah. Glad that project is mostly done. Still need to add a search engine and sitemap to the site.

Coding?

Read the Perl/Tk book from O'Reilly, and part of Havoc's Gtk development book last week during the trip. Started some perl/tk demos yesterday. Fun and easy.

not coding, but fun anyway.... I installed BeOS. It rocks, but won't replace Linux in my heart. Very slick. And the software devel for it seems to be coming along nicely. Damn, we have such a great community.

Benson

Ah jeez. Who let that freakin' benson in here. :) Hey brother, welcome to the Machine. Missing you here in NoVa.

14 May 2000

Sun, 14 May 2000 03:43:10 GMT

What a day. It all started by me falling asleep on the couch last night and waking up there, sweaty and unkempt, at 830am today. Uggh. I hate that feeling from unintentional crashing. Must have been tired. Long hours at work this week, and the heat is sapping my strength.

Went out and got Laura a couple of Mother's Day gifts, since she is a real Mommy now.

Had lunch at Copeland's with Laura and Abby and shopped for some sci-fi at a local used book store. Got some stuff on the recommendation of bradley, who lives to drive the jihad bus, yet I like him anyway. David Drake and Keith Laumer. We'll see if I like their stuff.

Rained this evening and I have no energy to hack at anything. Cruising the web now with the drool of disinterest on my chin...

I saw Henry Rollins on Sessions at W 54th and realized I really wanted to listen to House of Hair, but my headphones with the really long cord are at work. It's always more fun with the headphones.

10 May 2000

Wed, 10 May 2000 21:26:34 GMT

If this gets posted, it will be a miracle. Our building has a radio connection to the rest of the network. It is supposed to be an OC-3 equivalent, but, being in the microwave range, it is impacted by rain. And it is storming like a bastard out there now.

Continuing tape drive evaluations and learning about scsi parity errors. Feh.

Tried to get Laura's win98 box on the network at home. 14 reboots and it is still locking up. It doesn't like the network card. So, I got her to use my laptop (Linux, of course) and she is happy. Slowly working the opensource/freesoftware mojo on her.

Finalized my Austin travel plans. It has been a couple of years since Iwas down there. Can't wait to go! I spent most of my college years there, dating the 'Heather'.

Read a good article on linux.com about projects being started but dropped soonafter. I am guilty of this. Most of my personal projects are in a shambles. The cobbler's children go barefoot....

3 May 2000

Wed, 3 May 2000 15:13:40 GMT

It's about time. I know, I know. Finally back to the diary entry. The past few days have been hectic, but good things may come from them.

On Monday, I submitted a summary paper for presentation at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in October. Now. the question is: will they accept it and let me present, or will they toss the contents of the rubbish bin on me and give me kick in the arse out the door?

We'll see...

Been monkeying around with a bunch of tape drives. We are evaluating them, whatever that means.... I have the normal single cartridge and changer units, but we also got in a couple of those little robot libraries. Very cool. One of them got bashed in shipping (f***ing UPS, again) and the case in dented. Hopefully the damage is only skin-deep.

Spring is springing nicely on the mountain. The hawk is back and patrolling the skies above our house. Best not leave Abigail outside. that would be bad. :)

What else can I tell you? Presenting a short topic on fetchmail at this weekend' s NOVALUG meeting.

Dug out some old CD's and have been spinning them in the car. Thinking of happy times back in the early 90's, when I was half-assing my studies and hanging out too much. And then there was the beer, but we won't get into that here. Ummmm.... beeeerrrrr...

To work! I go now, Kicking Bird!

28 Apr 2000

Fri, 28 Apr 2000 04:19:07 GMT

kbs

Working on the knowledgebase tonight. Moving the html drop-down boxes from hardcoded html to mysql lookups. That way, I can write a little tool to maintain them and not be scrounging around in the program to fix hardcoded entries when we need to add/delete things.

Feeling like hacking tonight. It may be a late one. I am working from home on Friday, so getting up is not a requirement. :)

What are you thinking?

Thinking about submitting a paper for ALS in October. I have never submitted or presented a paper at a conference, so that might be a frightening event. Summary deadline is Monday. Better hurry....

26 Apr 2000

Wed, 26 Apr 2000 14:04:51 GMT

Quiet...

Quiet time. The NT->Linux conversion seems to have gone well. We have had no complaints and things seem to be running well. I hope I am not jinxing things...

I am trying like mad to finish Cryptonomicon. It is so long and reading only before bed is making me nuts. So I have been staying up late every night this week. It is an awesome book, especially the WWII history. Plus, it is rare to see unix commands and perl scripts in a fiction book. About ~120 pages to go.

Certifiable...

I am starting the certification process for the LPIC. We are going to study as a group at work and take the test in early June. Looking at the topic list, I do see holes in my knowledge.

Abigail

It has been a while since I mentioned the kiddo (at least 4-5 minutes, anyway). We started her on solid food this week. Messy, but she is relishing the new flavors. Sweet potato, rice cereal, and apples, so far. Laura is making food for Abby.

Raph, you have this to look forward to with Max. It is awesome to watch them grow and try new things. Wide-eyed wonder. Congrats and good luck.

24 Apr 2000

Mon, 24 Apr 2000 14:36:25 GMT

Back again

Long span between diary entries. Work has been so busy. We converted from Windows NT file server in my building to a Linux box running Samba. I did the conversion on Friday and moved all the data (5.7g from several NT servers), which took a long time. We were moving data across the network from buildings several miles away. Luckily, as Friday evening approached , I got full use of the network as everyone left early for Easter holiday. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall in the NOC when I started sucking up ALL of our bandwidth.

But, success was mine. We are using Linux as a file server and I have had no complaints this morning. Yeah!!!!

Weekend

Had a quiet weekend at home, resting. Read the entire "Programming the Perl DBI" (O'Reilly book). Found some good new tips to use. Copied videotapes of Abigail from the digital camcorder to VHS, suitable for viewing by Grandma.

Certifications

Getting ready to begin the certification process with some guys from work. We will do the LPIC exams to start with. Can the person who recently took the LPIC exam (and posted a description in their diary) pop up again? I'd like to read the diary entry again but can't find it.

18 Apr 2000

Tue, 18 Apr 2000 13:15:19 GMT

Kick Me

This is from yesterday (Monday). Brad, my cube-neighbor is a recent convert to Debian from Red Hat Linux. So, he is most vocal in decrying RH as the tool of the devil, bloddy, bloddy, blah....

So, we got some systems in a while back that had new box sets of RH6.1 and RH bumper stickers.

Who ever really looks at the BACK of your chair? Certainly not you.... So, I plastered the big RH sticker on his chair and let him sport it all day. It was quite hilarious to point out to visiting folks, especially those knowing Brad's proclivities for the distro jihad.

BTW, we call him the driver of the jihad bus. :)

14 Apr 2000

Fri, 14 Apr 2000 03:44:09 GMT

Samba

Tomorrow is the day of truth for Linux/Samba at The Company. We are converting NT user home directories over to a Linux box for the entire building. So, I should be in bed now so I have a clear head for that little project.... I expect a long day. And I am sure our rotten LAN will damn me at every turn as we transfer files. Urrg. At least I was able to do some scripting to handle some of it.

Like bma, I wish I got to do more coding at work. Brian jumps at the chance to do perl stuff when someone mentions a problem. I told him that he was like a dog that you have living in an apartment, when you come home, it jumps all over, ready to run and run.... he laughed....

I did do this knowledgebase thingie in perl/dbi that I like and keep pushing, but The Man says I have more important projects to work on....

To bed. Not too sleepy, as Abigail and I napped whilst Laura sweated it out at aerobics.

But, One More Thing

I really like the low-key hyperlinking that gets done here on advogato. It seems a little less garish than most of the GARBAGE you find out on the web, in general. And, is anyone else concerned about search engines having a hard time, now that more and more sites are being served dynamically? The bots can't crawl pages that only exist for a moment while being viewed when served from a db. Is there a way around this? This doesn't keep me awake at night, I promise.

Ok, perhaps now to Bed.

12 Apr 2000

Wed, 12 Apr 2000 21:19:57 GMT

Afternoon

Another meeting.... while all the 'important topics' were being discussed, I tried to lay out the db design for a program I want to write.

Most of the decent genealogy software only runs on windows/mac, and that stuff even can suck. The databases are notoriously unstable and prone to losing things. One of them even won't reclaim your space after you delete things. You have to dump and reload the entire thing. That is damn poor, IMHO.

So, I am going to write one myself. I will start with a web interface and perhaps add a gui later. I know jack about GUI programming, so that would be chance to learn, something like gtk or whatever.

Travelin'

Got my vacation approved for late July. Also, I am going to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Monterrey. That ROCKS! Especially since work is paying for it.

Folks

bma admonished me to do my diary entry today. Getting in the habit slowly....

All of our houseguests are gone! Thank heavens. Quiet time.....

Abby is happy again. Fever gone. I am happy too.