Ktorrent, Coding & Dusk 'Till Dawn So Aaron got me into Ktorrent. I've never really been into using torrents, but do know somewhat about them. Aaron started raving about watching TV shows, and he sent me an invite to tvtorrents.com with a 5GB download. (Thank you BTW). So I checked it out a little bit. They have TONS of television shows in torrent. From Knight Rider to ER and the latest episodes of Lost. Whatever you happen to be a fan of they seem to have. They have m,maintainers, and the torrents are verified, so it's not like there is garbage videos in them ... which is really nice. Works on a credit system, so you have a limit, and if you don't share your downloaded torrents, then you run out of credits, and that's it. It induces sharing ... which is what I'm all about. :D

Anyways ... I'm getting used to Ktorrent. And actually I found a bug on my first torrent. I tried to download an episode of Fraggle Rock (yeah ... I'm a Jim Henson fan). "Dance your cares away, Worry's for another day. Let the music play, Down at Fraggle Rock. " ... heh ... so as I tried to download the torrent, Ktorrent crashed, and would not start again. Repeated Kcrash dialog. So I checked into things a little bit, grabbed output, and the backtrace. I asked Aaron to look at it, and decipher some output for me first. He recommended I submit a bug report. It seems there was a problem handling the torrent's files with non ascii characters (Someone else already submitted the bug report). But since then I have had no issues.

Aside from watching episodes of Third Watch ... I have been insanely busy writing code for the bikerpak. Amongst other duties, and backups, and support, and customer meetings, and ... well it's been busy. We are leaving to Montreal on Monday Morning (++excited). So we have to have some things up to speed for our demo. I have it to the point where the quoting engine is working, and the point of sale (quote input) is working. Binding information collected, the policy is issued and printed to PDF, as well as pink cards. That's a lot of stuff in there. It gets pretty large when dealing with legal data. I can't just leave everything tied in the DB based on ID (if the values change, it wrecks the historical data) ... so I devised and export / import scheme from a quote to a policy, and back into a quote for any modifications. That means more processing power, and more coding is required, but life goes on, and it means things are correct. *sigh* ... my head is starting to hurt, but I keep telling myself just a few more days.

We'll blow off some steam in Montreal.

From Dusk Till Dawn ... it does describe my working schedule lately, but that is not the reason I mention it. It is on TV right now. I know it was weird, and basically 2 movies in one. I mean ... robbery, criminals on the run. Then ... bam ... coven of vampires! I can't help watching it though.  ¶ 11:35:00 PM 0 comments

  FDPI, Xvid & Car Seats I have to rave about FPDI. I'm working on a system that will provide some legal documentation (not legal size ... but legal as in lawful). So what we need to do is take the existing PDF, and create a new one from it. I've used FPDF before to very much success. And In the FAQs I found the add on to import an existing PDF document. Basically you can plaster it in there like an image, and just go on about your business. I spent a few hours working with it, and I had the process for document generation based on the templates down. I really love it when a plan comes together.

Since I've had my new monitors I've been playing around with settings and a few things. I discovered my "bugs" were not really bugs. Rather side effects of other settings like my focus model. Certain features are turned off under focus models for "sanity reasons" ... or so I am told. I'm running the proprietary nvidia driver for my card ... meh ... it was in the repository. I also have the nv driver, I just happen to have configured it with nvidia. Maybe I will experiment with the other driver when I have time. I never had hardware acceleration on my other via card. At one point I could install a proprietary driver for certain versions of Fedora, but that went away really really quick. Since video was never really an issue for me, generic drivers it was. I had a discussion with Aaron about Xvid the other day, and went to investigate mplayer. I discovered that I had not compiled with xvid support, but merely xvidx. So a couple of apt-get commands, and a recompile later, I had full screen available for mplayer. I was impressed.

Today I had an appointment to get a new car seat. The frame had been broken for quite some time, and I was starting to get a sore back after I drove anywhere. I took my car into the mechanic. With the blizzards over the past few days the roads were terrible. The taxi phones were overloaded. I tried to get through for 40 mins from the mechanic. He offered to push my car through, and just get me out of there instead of waiting for a cab. So It took a little over an hour, and I was on my way home. My back greatly appreciates his kindness now.  ¶ 11:19:00 AM 0 comments

  xinerama, SSH & Emergencies So I think I'm somewhat over feeling insane. Not totally over, just not as bad as it was a couple weeks ago. A large part of that is due to AJ. It's nice when people appreciate you. AJ phoned me up one day and was asking the difference between PCI and AGP cards. I'm not a hardware guy, and off the top of my head do not know. So it was left at that and he had to go. Later that afternoon I got a call from him that he was close by, and wanted to stop in. He came bearing gifts. Two 19" flat panels, and an AGP dual head card! SWEET!. He was surprised I was not running dual monitors. "I heard somewhere having two monitors makes programmers more productive". So it was a totally awesome thing to do, but when I think about it it's like "hmmmmm ... how can I get more work out of Andy?". lol. I know that was not the intent. He told me they just ordered 40 of them for the offices or something up there like that.

I installed the monitors, and cleaned off my desk in the process. Installed the AGP card, and hooked things up accordingly. It took relatively simple X11 configuring. I apt-get installed the drivers (I love kubuntu). And then started to fiddle. I do only have one DVI, and then one VGA. You can totally notice the difference in quality when side by side, but I am in no way complaining. Since the VGA is always registered as screen #1 in X, and I wanted the DVI on the left, I had to reverse the screen orientation (left to right / right to left) as one would think to make it work the way I wanted. All in all an hours to get going, and I am very much happy. So much more space. I noticed a couple of little quirks in KDE (like alt+tab no longer showing a window list, but whatever).

I have also reinforced my love of SSH. It is so useful for so many more things than just secure logins. The key generation, and usefulness for secure scripting is a huge benefit. Recently I reworked the majority of my backup procedures for clients to use rsync over ssh. For the mostpart it was never really needed, as it was synced internally, or to the attached USB drive. And the rsyncd was setup as securely as it can be (passwords, limited host connections). I was never concerned with the rsyncs I had in place. But this way with rsync -e ssh, I can entirely eliminate the rsync server from running, authentication is handled, and the transfer is encrypted, so it's all around a better choice. Slightly slower, but better. And with some new servers, require remote offsite backups, it makes for a nice way to sync up the data.

So I've still been having troubles (massive) with my internet and phone. I did manage to call and order flowers for my mother on her birthday (She really really liked). Today however, I lost service. The internet came back in 10 mins, yet the phone remained out of service. I finally had to call tech support at 8:30 at night, they found some problems, and did shit. I happened then to finally get my voice mail and found a message from a friend saying she needed me to call, and it was an emergency ... she actually said "emergency". So now I feel like a jack ass, and when I called her back (a mere 10 hours later), she was not home. So now I am somewhat worried, and feeling bad. Hopefully tomorrow I can find out what is going on.  ¶ 4:22:00 AM 0 comments