Summer Summer just takes your attention from normal routine into "everything else". It has been a pretty busy summer. I have not been at the keyboard churning out code like I'd like, but A lot has happened. I'll try to summarize in chronological order.

L&Y launched the new digital processing system in Toolkit near the end of June. It has gone fairly well. Changing entire processes is never as easy as you hope. I am glad to say it seems to be rolling smoothly. Still scanning, processed nightly, delivery and filing handled in a central place. Thumbnail previews, assignment, emailing, full preview (replacing adobe, foxit). The full size preview is not overly fast, as the page numbering calculations seems very slow in FPDI. I'm looking into caching images, and optimizing as best I can. In the future. Right now it works, now we can make it work better.

Anouk, and Micheal were up in Calgary during Stampede times. We went out one night, fun times. Talked a little business. In general the bike stuff has been placed on the "out of sight out of mind" table. The fall is going to be focus back on there (I hope).

I went to Vancouver in July, stayed with Heath for a few days. Was good to catch up. Drove down to Seattle, and stayed in Auburn for the Enumclaw highland games. Was super hot. 40 degrees, and totally dehydrated. The band got second both days to New West Minster Police. We did win drumming on Sunday though. I drove back Monday, and got ultra sick. Cough , cold, flu, fever, chills and shakes. It was really terrible. Recovered now, but I'm still burned out.

I just got back from a whirlwind trip to Winnipeg with Ray & Marlon. We met Les, and saw his new facility. Went out partying. It was bang bang, in and out. 30 hours plus on the highway in 3 days. Was a fun time though. Hangin out at the Toad, and hoooligans. We'll be back sometime. I did talk with Les for a while, and he was raving about the google OCR stuff. I'll have to check into it for all the document stuff we've been dealing with.

We've been playing server transitions for a while, and have the web server built up. It needs to be re-done, as Jeff made a really really tiny boot partitiopn, and I'm afraid with using optimized kernels, it's a little bit small to be safe. Nothing is running on it yet, so no harm it redoing it.

Band is rolling agina, doubling up the practices for the next 2 weeks. High river on Sat, Calgary / Canmore next weekend. I just need the fall to get here. Then maybe I can feel like I can start getting things done again. Johns birthday on Friday, Ted's Birthday long weekend (Sept 6). My sister quit her job. There's just so much goin on. My body feels fine, my head just can't get into anything. Oh yeah ... Aaron moved to Vancouver a few weeks ago. Geez ... so much goin on, no wonder I can't get any work done. ;)  ¶ 4:38:00 PM 0 comments

  HTTP_Request(2), Tough Times & Band To further the research in db2sql. I actually found built-in PHP modules for DB read access. So I could have in actuality written something to deal with the dbf files. It does not provide access for "note" fields, which is a rather important piece of information in the data set. It was a neat look inward, but it turns out this way is just easier. In developing this utility, I kept in mind future possibilities of others someday using it, so i could not create something specific to our in house setup. I wanted an easy way to push the converted SQL file up to the web server, but also know some things. Oh ... and lets not forget securely. This is when I discovered the PEAR module HTTP_Request, and HTTP_Request2 (rewrite in PHP5 class structures). Nifty little libray that implements the HTTP protocol. You can add GET / POST vars, and all sorts of other HTTPish things. I won't ruin your fun, but I do recommend you check it out here. This will come in handy for some other intranet features planned, like auto logins to all the different portals for staff. So they can just store username / passwords, and click a link to log them in. It supports basic auth, not sure about NTLM portals or anything. I have not investigated much.

So over the past few months, it's been some tough times in the industry. I'm not in a hot seat (AFAIK ... knock on wood). I have seen companies, and people I know around me close shop, lay-off, trim down. It can be a very stressful time for some. I've been lucky with some of the gigs I have been involved with over my career, that I'm fairly stable for now. My gut feeling is this will continue to be unstable for another 8 months or so. At least the end of the year. Not catastrophic, but up and down. If you have something going right now, I suggest you hang onto it.

Aside from work, all my spare attention has been on band. Our first contest was last weekend in Moose Jaw & Regina (Moosgina ... haha). We won 3 of 4 events over the 2 days. We won all 4 drumming events! It was my first contest and trip with the band (although I've played with and known several members for several years). I was personally extremely happy with my performances. As a group we all felt we could have performed better, leaving some of our better plays in the tuning circle, or at the legion in Calgary. That can only mean better things for us though. I did have some terrible back problems on the Sunday though. I could not even stand up straight that morning. There was no way I was going to let everyone down, and not play. So carefully (and frequently) timed intake of painkillers, and muscle relaxants. Along with leaving the drum off as much as possible, oh and a last minute back massage from Katey MacLean who is a massage therapist, I pulled it off. I was really proud of that. It's kinda like the NHL playoffs. Play through the pain, and do whatever it takes. we had this Thursday off from practice, but I'm kind of itchin to get back to it.

It was nice to go home, and spend time with family. Saw Ted & Tammy, hung out with Diana, and met her boyfriend Bill. Mom, Diana + Bill, Dolly + Scott watched me perform in MJ. Mom said it was the best band I've ever played with. Saw Kevin B, and Breanne for a while. I headed back later on Tues, and then took a few days off to recoup. Just moved everything from the car in on Fri, still not quite unpacked (but almost), and laundry is _almost_ done. I know I'm slow, but pffffffffffffft. My sis phoned my on the weekend, apparently shortly after she was in a car accident. She rear-ended someone, when her dog jumped and distracted her. Poor Diana, poor Georgia. She'd only had the car for a month. 2009 Corolla Sport. Ooops! At least she is not hurt.  ¶ 1:27:00 AM 0 comments

  db2sql, download quotes & the brier So really working on the Power Broker to Toolkit integration last week. Jeff did a bunch of the leg work, and produced a dump of the dbf file with a utility from whitetown. They seem to be dbf conversion specialists. Handy tools they provide. We switched to the conversion directly to Postges SQL format, instead of CSV. So now it is a direct import. I ran into a couple of small issues with escape characters, and how close to the SQL spec PG is with regards to string literals. I now have a working script that sets the proper options, and the right sequence of events. Also converts the encoding of the data to UTF-8. Which is required for the import to work properly. Onwards and upwards.

I also spent some time back in the world of bikes. I changed some of the navigation, and added some options to download a copy of the quote in PDF or email it to your address. Didn't take too much effort. It's nice to have handy libraries like FPDF. I also did some quick work with jpgraph for some of the statistics pages to get them going. Again ... nice to leverage existing work.

So the brier was in Calgary a couple of weeks ago. I had some tickets. I caught 1 draw, and our party never made it back from the brier patch for the evening draw. Ian, Scott, yaz and myself. TOTALLY SHITFACED! We were all gong-show drunk. It was such a great night ... well ... early night as it was. Kinda funny that happens when you start drinking at 2:00 P.M. Cheers to the Brier!  ¶ 1:22:00 AM 0 comments

  Romanians, Toolkit 3.0 & Alabama Slammers Back up a few weeks. Craziness ensues! So I was not even back from Montreal for a whole day before the crapola hits lots of different fans. :( We had some typical SPAM problems, although 350,000 SPAM messages from a single source is not really "typical". Yeah that took like 4 hours to clear up. Added some extra postfix options, but they still need a policy server to control the connection / bandwidth limits properly. Or something else entirely. Nothing heard since, so I am guessing it's all good.

Immediately following that debacle. I ended up dealing with a compromise. A pretty nasty one at that. I was shown some of what was going on after the fact. Some nasty passwords recording in clear text. Box was completely owned. Someone else was tracking them down outside the box, following them in IRC channels etc. Turned out to be some Romanians (not that I have anything against Romania ... that's just where they were from). Translate the IRC chats, and they are talking about Bank accounts, and Credit Cards. Some nasty folks. Box is since rebuilt, and deployed.

Right around this time is when I discovered OSSEC. Sweet IDS. Easy to install, nothing to configure, but insanely extensible. XML configs, and crazy options. it alerted me the other day when the # of log entries in mail.log, increased over the average entries for a time span. WOW ... that's what I like to see from an IDS. The active response to block IPs under certain conditions is really nice to see as well. Brute force on SSH ... See Ya!

So during, and after all of that craziness. We released the first Toolkit 3.0. Kevin and I were there all Sunday until the afternoon Monday. Do what you gotta do. It went exceptionally well considering the gravity of the changes. Of course there is some small noise from things, but nothing major. We were all quite pleased. So now we are onto 3.1 development. We have moved to roughly 2 month release cycles. So Early May is planned for 3.1. We are adding the "Opportunities", "Power Broker Data Integration", and some distribution changes. There's soo much needed to be done, and some things are simply going to be pushed back to 3.2

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time passes
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Looks like I forgot I had started a draft. :S oops.

I'll sum up this blog with my recolection that Jack Ass sized Alabama Slammers @ Jack Astors are super yummy, they taste like cool-aid, and when you pound back like 4 or 5 in the time the rest of your party has 1 drink ... you tend to get a little smashed. I'll just end on that note.  ¶ 9:24:00 AM 0 comments

  day2, night 3, day 3 MONTREAL! ... ctd. (Jan 20 / 21 - 2009)

So it turns out the next day that "ish" was not allowed in the morning. of all times we required 10:00 (ish), that was changed to 9:30 A.M. so AJ could meet with Serge (#1 ... that's also important later). Serge #1 was meeting with some other people we knew and wanted to speak with AJ before he left. So up we get, and Scott was understandingly a little sluggish. I was also wondering about the egregious amounts of snacks ground into the carpet of the hotel room. I could just see the boys last night : "mmmmmmm ... trail mix". Scott was like ... when did we get trail mix? I just laughed. I remember him disappearing when we got back, and walking in later with handfuls of things bought from the front desk.

On with the day. More "Follow Anouk". She had some very school girly business suit, with stockings and I remember she was very sassy! Well done! We lined up a meeting the day before with Serge Pronovost (Serge #2). We talked about boats. It was a _fantastic_ ... not fantastique (that's later in the night) ... fantastic meeting. It was exactly what we wanted. Serge was all business, in and out. He had a list of 6 things he wanted. Don't screw me, and I won't screw you ... shake the hands, and we're off. Great meeting, followed up with a great coffee, and some shmaggers (smokes) downstairs. Waited around a little bit for lunch. We went to the same Italian restaurant next door that we had been to in the past. We had lunch with Brigitte, and talked about everything with bikes. She had some requests, we had some questions. Everything is in the notes. AJ and I argued ... the good argue ... not a bad one. If forgot about the waiter. Turns out it was a kid who is from Estevan Saskatchewan. We started into the typical SK conversation. He might know a couple of people I know from Estevan. It was a strange coincidence.

So after lunch was finished up with Jevco for our trip. We said goodbye to Serge. He got called back into the doctor to look at his elbow, which was broken. Nothing they can do for him. AJ showed him the calendar pictures from the L&Y Beefcake calendar. I'm not sure if that made Serge feel better or not. Scotty tried get a Jevco cup, Anouk failed in her attempts to acquire one. She walked us out. Kiss Kiss (both cheeks). What a great business trip! Now onto the fun.

We took yet another scary cab ride back to the hotel. Stops for supplies, and then kick back and relax. Scott decided he wanted to take a nap. AJ and I sat in the common area and get right into the drinks.He had monster beer, and I was into the rye. Somehow we killed a couple of hours, and then Scott was awake and ready to go. We kept on the drinks, and decided we were going to hit "Solid Gold". So we cabbed it there. It was a little bit of a journey. We passed a road rage scenario, and then we were at the club.

When we arrived it was really early, and pretty dead at about 6:30. We sat on an elevated level in the comfy chairs. Our waitress could barely speak a lick of English. She apparently just moved to Montreal 2 days ago from Quebec City. So that lead to some interesting communication. We watched some of the girls dance, it appeared to be a shift change. There was this old guy who we saw disappear for hours at a time upstairs for private dances. Then the hockey game came on. Solid Gold has a deal where during the Canadiens games, if the habs score everyone gets a free shooter. If they win the game you get a free drink. They lost the game, but we had 3 free shots.

So after being there for a while. I met a girl named Nancy. She was from Montreal all her life, but could speak English very well. She said her school was bilingual, and it was just like that for her. So we went upstairs for a while. I can not release the private details. ;). She was kinda sad as her and her BF were on the outs, who also worked there, and it was "uncomfortable". We had a good time. I came back down, and we hung out for a while. We continued to step outside, and smoke, and have drinks. We order some food. Which turned out to be a big mistake ... for me anyways. It was great at the time, but food at a strip club ... no-no. We continued with the drinks and action. On a smoking trip I was not part of, some other guys who were there for every mtl game were telling AJ and Scott about how one girl was giving him a blowjob the night before, and stole his Iphone. He noticed it in her stuff later, and they busted her for it. Apprently she was there again earlier that night. Crazy tales.

So after a while this girl who looks like Jenny McCarthy comes and sits beside me. Shorter, and bigger boobs, but she was a Jenny! She's like "Hi how are you? Would you like me to dance for you?". Why yes ... yes I would. After my stint with Nancy I said to myself, alright enough dances, you spent your money, had some fun, all is good. That went right out the window with Crystal. Without giving away the details again. WOW! Holy Frack! I had to go or I'd be broke. I came back down. I remember AJ calling his wife, and was like "Hey honey, at the strippers, thinking about you". haha. I was sitting for a while, and then I realized I was not feeling good at all. I eventually went outside and found AJ and Scott talking with a couple of girls in the smoking hut. They were learning how to say french words for window, and floor. I sat with them, but was kinda out of it. I was really not feeling good. I needed to go. I said to them I was needing to go, and was leaving. AJ was like ... can you wait for like 20 minutes (which really meant like an hour) ... I was like ... no ... I think I'm going to puke on your shoes. His eyes opened, and he was like ... OK ... I get it. I said just stay ... I'll see you back at the hotel. And I left them. During the cab ride, my problems shifted their position to a little lower than the stomach. Could not get back to the hotel fast enough. Then my room key wouldn't work, and finally I got into the bathroom, and after I was somewhat relieved I crawled into bed. AJ checked on me when they got back. It's nice to have friends who care. :D

Scott got one of the girls "Lilly" to sign a card for Ian back in Calgary. Ian was famous to everyone there, cuz we kept telling everyone about him, and how he couldn't make this trip. Ian appreciated the present. It was a good laugh. The next morning was rather quick. We checked out, and headed to the airport. The flight was fine on the way back. We arrived in mid afternoon, and Ian picked us up. Dropped us all off, and that was the end of another French Adventure! Can't wait for the next one!  ¶ 11:54:00 PM 0 comments