Technology

No cable modem

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The unthinkable has happened. Worse than no phone or TV, I have no internet access! I woke up this morning and went to check the weather and I found myself without internet access. Now I have had my cable modem go out before. In baton rouge it went out almost every week for like 5 minutes. The last time I lost my cable modem it was down for a week. That is why I am so concerned. These moron’s can’t do anything over the phone so for any problem they send a tech out. I should be thankful that I got an appointment for tomorrow (friday) because going a holiday weekend without it would have been bad.

This blog is being written now while I goto work on thursday morning, but I have no idea when it will get posted since my web server is down due to this outage.

I should get used to no access. When I am on vacation in 2 weeks I won’t have cell, pager, or internet access for the entire week. That will be interesting.

We have FTP, almost!

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I have worked out allot of the problems with hosting an ftp server on linux. I have a red hat 9.0 machine setup with users configured. It actually works. The last thing I need to do is security on the public folder I created for our applications directory. We have a space to keep needed app’s that may be downloaded. I need to setup a real test machine and get users onto it before I feel confident. The next major phase is to setup another FTP server on linux and sync them together with RSYNC. I also need to sync a windows machine the same way. If all that works, I have a working solution for our secure FTP site for a perspective client we have.

Of course someone may ask for SFTP and then I have to rethink the whole solution!

must learn read hat flavored linux

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I am slowly picking stuff up. Not nearly as fast as I would like or need, but there is only so much time in the day not taken up by work that needs to get done before I learn.

Today I am going to try and pick up as much as I can about linux ftp. I need to look at the config files of an existing server to compare what I want to do.

I also need to do MRTG, but that is less important than the FTP project.

All the other standard work stuff also needs to get done today also. I have a 2pm meeting with our telecom provider about installation of our long distance T-1’s. I also need to call a telecom provider that wanted our business to let them know they didn’t get it. I am actually pissed at them for showing up to just talk to Gus because I didn’t return the guys phone call in a few hours. Sales guys take note, I am busy. So are other people. If I don’t want to call back in 5 minutes, I am not going to. Get over it. If I need or want you, I will call you. Some sales guys are cool about that, others are dumbass. If you are a dumbass I am not dealing with you.

My computers & Blogging stuff

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I realized yesterday that I wrote a bunch of blog entries. I decided to write an entry on on topic, or group of topics. So if I want to discuss a few things at once I will have multiple entries broken down for your reading enjoyment.

I am back into my routine of writing on the train. that is how we got the morning and afternoon posts yesterday. I just forget to post when I get to work and just have to post time-stamp things later on. I tried to use the thinkpad for blog entry’s. I found a bug in w.bloggar. Well I think it is a bug. The dam thing wont work on my laptop. I use it once after install and then it crashes every time I try to open it after that. I just gave up on Monday. My powerbook works great, and it is light. I can do without the thinkpad some days during the week.

Yes I do have two laptops. You are reading correctly. I have my own personal Apple Powerbook G4 12″. it is the little powerbook. It is awesome. I am new to the mac’s. I have only had a mac since last july. The other machine is my company issued Thinkpad T31. It has a bright screen and weight’s around the same as the Powerbook even though it is bigger in shape. It is also an awesome machine. The down side is that as much as I tried, I cannot get any windows laptops to go into and out of standby and hibernate modes properly. The mac usually works. Also the smaller mac is easier to open on the train.

Then we have desktops. I have 3 computers at home (not counting the laptops). I currently have an AMD Atholon XP 1500+ computer running Windows XP Pro. That machine is my main desktop computer. I don’t use it nearly enough anymore, but I bought it in December 2001 when my desktop was my main computer. This box is tricked out even though I don’t utilize it that much. It has a gig of ram, 180gig hard drive, etc.

My next two machines are used as servers. I have my old desktop, A Pentium III 800 with 780megs of ram. I use that to test different things on. It used to be my windows 2000 server. Then I have an old Dell Dimension desktop that I think has Pentium III 700 in it. That is now my main server running Red Hat 9.0.

While I am on the topic of my computer gear I can say that I am using a Linksys DSL Cable router with 802.11g wireless built in. That gives me fast wireless while I am on my Powerbook!

There you have it. I am trying to shrink down the size or amount of stuff I have so it doesn’t look so bad in my living room. I just put the AMD computer into a new smaller & cooler looking case. The other two are already in mid tower cases so I am not sure what I can do with those.

Konfabusomthing

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I use an Apple powerbook as my main personal computer. Well this week I do at least. But I digress. I have a Powerbook that is cool. I got this neet program called Konfabulator on it. It is like the old microsoft active desktop, but it actually works. I just downloaded a few neat “widgets” apps that run in Konfabulator. Yeah, they call them widgets, not me making stuff up. One of them is an offline blogging tool. Not sure if it better than Kun-Log, the program that I currently use. Tons of other useless but fun tools also. My favorate is the iTunes remote control and the magic 8 ball…

Gus gave me a bunch of other cool mac software to look at but I have not had time to look at it. I am still messing with VMWare.

Lazy Saturday’s

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I am being lazy today. I need to get a mothers day gift for my mom, but that is all I have on my agenda today. I slept late, and I am just hanging out now. My idea of laying low is very geeky. I am installing VMware 4 workstation on my desktop computer. I want to get red hat 9 on it so I can use windows xp and red hat on the same machine. If it works it will be awesome. Right now it is installing red hat.

My mom instructed me that she wants some pocket book or something. I will give her money and she can go get it for herself. That way I don’t have to get the wrong thing. I was also instructed to get flowers. I just love the surprise involved in this day.

Since Gus fixed my linux box I now have a choice. Should I leave my site on Red Hat or move it back to Windows? As of right now I have a copy on both. My friend jayson is letting me use his box to host my site, and I still have a copy on my Red Hat server. I am thinking I am going to leave the blog on red hat and have the rest of the site on windows. That way I don’t have to mess with taking the front page extensions out of the site. I was trying to deal with that for a few weeks and so far have gotten nowhere. I just don’t have the time. For now I will leave everything in both places. Unfortunately I don’t have the photo site up at all during this transition. it is 800+ megs and I don’t want to deal with it right now.

I have been following the apple music store since it was announced last week. I have a mac. I like it allot. I also find I use iTunes over winamp 99% of the time nowadays. I also went out a few months ago and got an ipod. That also kicks ass. So I am in a position to use this new music service. 99 cents is not bad for a song. I am still unsure if it is worth it. I saw an entire album I want to maybe buy and see if the service is any good. Limewire and the gnutella clients, and kaza are tempting. I am on the fence right now. The file format is supposed to be better, but I still like MP3’s. I was not sold on Microsoft’s windows media format, and now I am skeptical of this new AAC stuff. What is weird is that Microsoft comes across as more evil big company like, and Apple is the underdog hip company. In fact they are probably both just as evil. Right now for work I of course an clearly a Microsoft guy, but for home I am a apple guy. All this rambling boils down to eventually will buy stuff on this music service. If anything I want to know if I am missing out on something really good, or just saving my money.

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…

Computers, do they suck up or free up time?

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From the title you may think I am pondering the usefulness of computers. Not true. I think they are great. So much so that I made a career out of working with computer networks. But, sometimes I think they can cause tons of wasted time. I think that today because I needed to spend hours yesterday and today rebuilding my computer. Last Wednesday I blew my desktop away and re-installed windows xp. tuesday night I put the machine in a new case and during the move I physically destroyed a hard drive. Out of the 4 drives that I had I lost the one with the important data on it. The good news was that I made a backup of it that morning. The bad news was I didn’t get everything. I left off some less important stuff. you don’t realize how important it is until you don’t have it. But ok, there I was with a bad drive and a backup. I was feeling dam proud of myself for making a backup. Well try importing the data back off the dvd backup I had was a pain. At first I didn’t think it would work. I kept getting major bad errors when copying. I ended up throwing the dvd in my mac and restore it from there. At this point I may just leave the “personal data” like word doc’s, pdf’s and images on the mac. I didn’t want to do that, but it is turning out to be ok. Yeah, I am just grumbling. Everything seems to have turned out ok, but it took a day and a half working on and off to get things restored. That does not count all the programs I still need to reinstall on that XP machine. I will be doing that for weeks. So this week, computers have been a drain on my time, not a savings. next week hopefully will be different.

On the flip side, I am sitting here with my handy offline blog editing tool writing this blog as my trusty powerbook is taking my photo album I had backed up and sucking it into iphoto. It places them in nice categories. I have very few complaints about the program. I was also able to hack together a non-frontpage enabled version of my website on the apache server. the photo album site of 1gig of my images will take allot longer. Also not up is what I used to call the edata site. it contained data out of an access database. apache can’t read ASP files so I need to figure out PHP & Mysql to do the same thing on apache. that will take some time also. I honestly am not sure if I will take that plunge. I would have to export a bunch of data into mysql and I don’t know it that well yet to be the sole location for that data. I am so crazed about screwing up my apache server and the content that every change I make I am backing up the directory to my windows 2000 server. I just need to get comfy with everything.

Today was another lazy day. I got up late (11:30) and just bummed around all day. worked on the website and cleaning up my desktop computer. Tons of fun stuff:) I also made a ghost image backup of the desktop OS just in case. Also got the TV watching down. Trying to catch up on things I missed this week on tivo. I also watched harry potter II last night on DVD. it was ok, but they leave so much out of the book. I totally understand they cant put everything in the movie, but it is just a let down. that is probably why I didn’t see it in the theater.

My parents probably will call and want to do the traditional sunday dinner. Not sure if I am going to opt in tonight. I had pizza for lunch and that is what they do every sunday.

I am also shopping around for a new handheld PDA. everyone who knows me knows that I go through stuff like that and cell phones relatively quickly. I do a pda about once a year. This year I went through them like every 6 months. The reason I do that is because I have not yet found the perfect device for me. If I did I would stick with it, but alas I cannot find it. also my requirements change as my needs change. what I need now is totally different than what I needed when I was traveling all the time. I am thinking of a pocket pc. the palm I have is nice, and does almost all I want it to, but it does not do everything. the problem is if I switch to a pocket pc I will probably have to give up something. Either weight, wireless ability, allot of $$$ from my wallet, or a combination of the 3. I probably will go to bestbuy tomorrow during work to take a look.

Hot n fresh OS install’s, mmmXP

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So I took the plunge. After more than a year (personal record since I started working in technology) I reformatted my home desktop?s hard drive and re-installed windows xp pro. It took me two hours to just get the OS installed, and service pack 1 with some hot fix?s on this thing. I just installed the latest and greatest Norton system works to get that clean sweep action going on. I am now contemplating doing office install?s. it takes a while and it is getting late. I came to the conclusion hours ago that this install wont be done till after the weekend. I will be finding applications that I need to install for the next few weeks. Who knows the settings I lost by doing this. I really should not complain. This is a task long over due. The final straw was the weird errors I got when I put my new 160 gig hard drive in the computer. Now I have a clean install that I hope to keep free of too much crap. At least my mac is (so far) easier to clean stuff off of.

Besides the virtual cleaning, I did a very quick once over of the apartment. My friend Steve and tom are visiting tomorrow. I wont have time tomorrow to do anything since I will be going to the concert right from work. If you haven?t read earlier posts we are all going to a def leppard concert tomorrow. Hopefully they are good.

Since I am going right to the concert I have to travel light to work. Of course that should be no problem since I can?t sync my palm tomorrow since I don?t have the software on my computer yet. That also means I won?t have my work laptop all weekend. I am taking off work Friday, and wont bring it to the concert. That means it sits on my desk all weekend. Don?t worry, it is locked down in a locked office!

Other news today, I convinced the powers that be at work (Gus) to purchase red hat 9.0. Actually it was a no problem. He was all for it. For $60.00 you get 1 license to the red hat network. If we actually start to deploy red hat servers in any number we can spend like $98 a machine for limited support patch syncing and other cool features. I SO need to learn Linux. I am trying to find things to do in it, but finding time is hard with all that is going on. On that note I want to setup my own blog (running on my server, instead of using blogger). Movabletype looks great, but I don?t have a Linux web box right now. Doing any personal blogging system on windows does not look too fun. All of the documentation is for Linux. Must get red hat 9 at home.

Other news (and then I will goto bed) is that I finally made airline reservations for my vacation in June. My family is going to Barbados to celebrate my dad?s 60th birthday. Got the tickets this afternoon, and even got good seats. My mom is renting a house and all we had to do was get tickets. It will be an interesting vacation. The jury is still out on if it will be loads of fun. I was all for going to a resort, but I lost that vote. I am looking forward to scuba diving. More on that as the vacation gets closer.

More in a few days. Not sure when I will post next since I will have company Thursday through Saturday. We shall see?