Month: April 2003

More work, less hacking, unless it is for work

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It is monday again, and I am off to work. Today we meet with another telecom provider to see if they have a good deal. We need to make a decision this week.

OK, time for me to gripe about something. I am on the train, and cannot stand it when people receive cell phone calls (or make them) and have an entire conversation. In addition to that these people usually talk like a plane is flying by. Now I am all for cell phone use. I have 2 of them, and I don’t even have a home phone (another story). When I am out and about I will receive calls but only talk for a min if it is not important. If it is a work emergency (which I get more often than I would like) I talk. What is with this casual talking on a train with 100 other people. We don’t care what you have to say to your friends or family. We don’t need cell phone restriction laws, we need some etiquette from people. Ok, I am done ranting.

Speaking of cell phones I am kind of bummed that my main phone (an AT&T GSM Provided Sony Ericsson T68i) won’t work in our office in Kingston. Actually it wont work in kingston at all. I am not sure what will work well up there. I know verizon works, and t-mobile, but not sure if either of them provides good signal at our site. I have a verizon phone but I wanted to cancel it. No I am paying the monthly fee to wait and see. I also have a T-Mobile SIM card, but no phone. I am holding onto that for a bit longer also.

I gotta tell you, I go through phones (just like PDA’s) fast. I just upgrade to the latest and greatest allot. I was on ebay last night looking for a phone for the CEO of my company. He is going to europe and wanted a phone. He has a SIM already, but no phone. Since I didn’t have any extra he said to look for one. Well after looking I don’t see any GSM phones that do everything I want, except for the one I already have. For my CEO we are just going to rent one, but I started looking for myself also. Like I said I don’t have a phone for my T-Mobile SIM. It is weird. For the first time in a while I am ready to spend money.

OK, back to work talk. This post was supposed to be about work. I ended up sending back the low end Compaq 1U server we got. FYI, 1U is the size of it. Computer racks are broken down by U’s. Each standard rack has 42U. A 1U server takes up 1U of that 42. They are really small. It turns out the compaq server we bought does not have a RAID card for IDE like were were told 3 times. The were going to send me one for free, but I decided to send it back instead. Part of my reasoning is that we were going to get 2 of these. And I want to get them and see if I like them. if I do like them I want to standardize on them later on. If we got a free raid card, I would have to pay for them in the future. That would put the cost well over what I wanted to budget for these low end machines. I ended up ordering a super micro box and saved like $600 off my original quote. It is a no name brand, but we already use no name VA Linux machines, and this thing has a 3 year warrantee. I will see if they are any good.

Still Tivo hacking, not so thirsty anymore.

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I was able to extract 1 show onto a DVD. I can get them into MPEG2 format which is what a DVD is made up of, but I am still having issues with the part where I actually get it onto a dvd that is viewable in my DVD player. I did this one, and it seems to work. Even better the video and audio at the end seems to be in sync. That is a problem with alot of these conversions. The down side is I left the burner on all night and I don’t know when it finished. it took a while. Also unless the numbers are wrong a 1 hour tv show took up 3 gig’s of space. The MPEG2 file on my hard drive only took up 1 gig, so I am not sure if that is correct. This whole thing is a work in progress.

I am going to show Gus my work today. I was on IM with him last night. he was excited about the possibilities for him. I think he is out of room on his Tivo but does not want to delete anything.

Blog roll online

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I can do html or any other coding when it is just cutting and pasting! That is how I was able to get blogroll to work on my site. Well actually I can do a little bit more than just cut and paste, but sometimes it feels that way. I have not become daring enough to try to customize my moveabletype setup too much. I am slowly working up to a redesign on the main template layout and color scheme.

All this tivo hacking makes me thirsty!

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If you don’t watch the Simpson’s you don’t get the title of this blog. No big deal. I still thought it was funny. I actually did it. I was able to extract video from my tivo. I am working on the assumption that it is legal to do what I am doing since I am truly archiving my video for my own use. Like I had 50 video tapes with old TV shows on them. I have no plan on distributing anything. That being said, I was able to export video to my PC, and then encode it to a mpeg2 file. I have not yet been able to get it to a DVD and watch it in my DVD player, but I was able to view them on my mac. I used a program called tystudio. It is a Windows or Linux based client and a program running on your tivo called tyserver. Once configured you can even encode right off the tivo without copying files off of it. I have not let the indexing complete yet to do that, so I am extracting what they call the ty stream file and then converting to mpeg2 on my PC. it takes a while for an hour long show but it is worth it.

To get this extraction to work you do need to have done previous hacks to your tivo. Such as install and configure a network card, FTP, and Telnet. I had my hard drives upgraded and the network card installed for me by PTVUpgrade last year. It is cool. I can program the tivo over the network, or telnet into it. But this is the best feature so far.

So I am sitting here extracting video’s while doing my laundry and the dishes. This sunday is shaping into clean my apartment day. I am cleaning up the mess from a week of neglect, and cleaning crap off my tivo. Even with 120 hours or so you can fill these things up. I have been waiting for a solution like this for a while so I can get stuff off the tivo. I am a sci-fi fan. Yes, I like computers and science fiction, what a shock! I don’t like all sci-fi though. I am rather picky. So I liked this show that was out this september called firefly. I have most of them on Tivo, and I have not deleted them since the show was canceled. I figured keeping the tivo files was the only way I was going to see this show. Well I am extracting them now to save like 8 hours of space on the tivo. I also have like the past 10 24’s that I have not watched yet. Can you tell I am excited about the new found ability?

What I cannot seem to do is get simple html to show up in these entries. Not sure why. I am looking into what to do.

I just turned on the pinging options, so maybe someone will read these things now. I have not advertised this blog’s existence until now.

Gadgets good, shopping bad!

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We went drinking Friday night. A bunch of us from work went out. Rajive was back from the caman’s so he wanted to drink. Also out was Sam, Aaron, Miguel, & Vijay. All those guys are in my company’s development team. Also out was jennifer, from our call center. I had a good time. I did not drink though. I had a headache around lunch time so I took to butabital (aka furiset) and that is not the correct spelling. I am actually getting slightly concerned that I am taking this stuff like twice a week. I used to suffer and not take the drugs, but over the past 2 years I have taken some med or another whenever I get the feeling that I am getting a migrane. Going out and not drinking is always interesting since you see everyone all stupid. At least friday no one got sloppy drunk.

Miguel and sam were thinking of going to Las Vegas friday, but Miguel has to run a softball practice for the company Saturday so they are not going. They are planning on going one weekend soon. I think some other guys are going to try and go with them. I am interested in going but the weekend they are looking at right now is bad for me. I will be in chicago that monday so I cant do a redeye sunday night back to NYC.

I got my HP Ipaq thursday. It is really small. So far I like it allot. I just haven’t needed the bluetooth internet connection yet. Then I will hate it. I just went out and bought a cheap case at bestbuy on Saturday. It didn’t come with one. I am ordering a nice metal case but it does not come in until may 15. Those people at rhino skin are awsome. they make great PDA cases http://www.rhinoskin.com. I also got a 128 meg CF card. I think I could have gotten a cheaper one online but I was at the store already. I put a bunch of eBooks and documents on it. I will see if I need a bigger one.

I goto the BestBuy near the Roosevelt field mall in garden city long island. If you are from NYC you know what I am talking about. So since I was there, I decided to hit the mall. Man I cannot stand the mall anymore. I used to love to goto the mall. My friend Jayson and I would hang out there a least once a week. This wasn’t in college or high school. We were already out of school and just liked to go. Now it is so crowded and people have no manners. I was in J Crew and I saw some shirts I liked and I actually stopped and thought, hey I should get this online. The funny thing was I actually didn’t get the shirts. The line was really long and I figured “i could get it online” and not wait on line.

So now I have to go online and do some shopping for clothes since I didn’t buy any at the mall. Actually I am on hold with the online shopping. The union that represents the doormen in my building are thinking of going on strike Tuesday. if they do I won’t be able to receive any packages, since fedex and ups wont deliver. I guess they wont cross someone else’s picket line to deliver stuff. I don’t get it, but I am screwed by it. I am waiting and seeing until Tuesday.

Frontpage site fried!

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While trying to relay traffic from my apache server to my IIS server I caused IIS to stop responding. It probably just needs a reboot. I also realized that by pulling out pages from a front-page web and putting them into an apache server causes behind the scenes problems. Even after stripping out lots of frontpage code, more html remains that tries to reference the frontpage extensions. I knew that frontpage wrote bad html, but not this bad. It is not a big problem on my main site. I am working on my photo site now. That is a bigger problem. I have tons of pages, and hundreds of megs of images. I decided to do it from scratch even though I have a backup of the site. That backup has all the frontpage code. I am now generating page templates out of iphoto. Each category is exported separately and all I need to do is tie all the pages together into a cohesive site, and I have a new photo site. Sounds easy, but it will take some time.

While I am making these changes, I took it upon myself to clean up my photo album images. While doing this I realized that I have been taking less pictures over time, not more. I thought with a digital camera I would be taking more, but I guess I have not had much travel or stuff to take shots of.

I also need to learn how to do virtual sites in apache. that way I can keep the photo site name of photo.sitename…

The traditional Passover dinner.

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Well we didn’t have the traditional dinner. Like were were going to. It was a small group this year. My sister and the baby. Her good friends lorrie and don, and their not so baby dara! My parents and myself. My brother-inlaw came for a bit but had a early rotation friday so he left.

My dad does passover the way I like it. No service, no prairs, just sitting down and eating. As predicted I had a dam good steak. I had to turn down seconds because I had a late lunch.

Morgan was not in a good mood last night but I got to hold her for a little while. Not sure if she was just tired or hungry. She did eat like 2 times in 3 hours. At least I got to play with Dara. She just runs around and is the extreme kid. She is not even 2 yet. Out of all the baby’s I have seen I hope morgan grows up to be like dara. she has personality, and is a good kid. But kids tire you out. I am sticking with playing with other peoples kids and then going home to my quiet apartment for now!

I had to bring over my luggage for my parrents. they are going on a cruise next week and needed my big set. Man I forgot how much crap I had. I don’t know what they will do when we all go on vacation together. I will be using my luggage, so I don’t know what they will do.

Not sure what else to say about the semi crazy family. I wouldn’t like normal anyway!

Bidding wars, no its not a movie

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So we have the bidding going on for services at my new office in kingston. We got people asking to provide Internet service that I never even heard of. We also have two big voice providers coming in to bid this week and next. This week is the contender. (no names just yet), next week is the guys who have our biz, but need to work to keep it.

I also got news that we have a new hire for monday. I ordered his computer last night and should have it today. I hope justin can build it in time. We are out of phone ports so that will be interesting. we also have no place to put the guy so a phone is no big deal. it is now starting to get fun with space.

I am in the subway tunnel now, so I will hopefully write more later.

Kingston project is a go!

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Even though officially our project was a go for a while, we finally sat down and ironed out time table’s, and things. Our CEO wants everything ready at the facility by June 6. June 6, by the way was the date we moved into our current office last year. That poses a problem for me since I have vacation plans for that week. I am in barbados with my family. My boss Gus says to chill and wait and see if things actually shape up next week. Realistically I don’t think we can make that date, but I am told to aim for that date, I have to do everything possible to do it. Even if doing all that won’t change the fact that we wont make that date. it is an interesting position.

I also got the cd-rom / hard drive for the new server we bought. I believe I talked on monday about the discount server we got from comaq that didn’t ship with a cd-rom or floppy drive. Well that problem is resolved. I need to build the dam thing now.

It just started raining in NYC. I wore light khakis thinking it would be nice out. They are going to get messed up by the dirt and water kicked up when I walk around now. Oh, well.

I am on my own today, well I have justin but he can’t do everything I need him to yet. Keith is off due to the holiday. Not really sure why since he is not very observant, but I think he said something about having to travel to jersey or something. Should be an interesting day. We shall see…

Islanders suck (at least they did last night) Dell sucks all the time!

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I finally remembered why I haven’t gone to a hockey game recently. It is because as much as I like the Islanders, they find new and interesting ways to prove to me how they suck. I went to the game last night. And if you asked me if I had a good time, I would say yes. Why you ask? Not because the team played well or they won. No, because I got to hang out with some friends and make fun of how bad the islanders played yesterday. They gave up 2 goals in the first 5 min (back to back goals). They never recovered from that. it was brutal. And they lost to Ottawa! Come on. I know that the senators are the best team in hockey but I have an old running joke about them since when they sucked, and I was in college. I had a teacher from there and we never let her live down that she was from Ottawa. In reality I have been there, it is a nice city, but I still like to make fun of it. Dam islanders, now they have to win 3 straight to win the round. I realistically know that they won’t do that, so the islanders will be playing golf by sunday.

I went with dan to bestbuy, and got him his gear. I think I am going to configure his router today at work. not sure if he was going to try it on his own or not. While I was there I looked at the PDA’s. The moron’s at that store were like the model I liked was discontinued or recalled by HP because of a problem. I was like I just saw it in another bestbuy, and I see great reviews with no complaints about it all over the web. I don’t like when I goto buy something, and I know more about the product than the people who are trying to sell it to me.

The reason I was looking at PDA’s in the first place was that my Dell pocket pc didn’t ship. Those guys say it will ship on one day and then do nothing about shipping it. DELL, its not a computer, you don’t need to build it. It should not take a week to put a pocket pc box in a shipping box and address it. So I called them up and they were like your order is on hold by the credit card company. I was like hey guys I have no problems with that card, so why is it on hold. they of course had no clue. then they wouldn’t cancel the order because the order was on hold. I was like if you did nothing to the order yet, just cancel it. after showing them some logic (AKA, if it remains on credit card hold it will get canceled anyway), the women on the phone canceled my order. But a billion dollar company like dell doesn’t give you a cancellation number or anything to prove you actually changed your order. That will come back to haunt me, I can feel it.

I ended up ordering the HP ipaq 1910 from one of my hardware vendors. I should have it today. I should have done this first, but the ipaq does not do bluetooth, so it doesn’t meet all my needs. I will see if I like it. But for the price I paid I can sell it on ebay later without any issue. We shall see.

FYI, I also took 2 butabital’s (furiset) in the car before the game. I didn’t want to but I had no choice. I should get to the doctor again. 🙁