IIS Stupidity, LInux Wankers & The Cannucks So I hate IIS. I mean I really, really hate IIS. What a horrible web server. The other day I got a call from Marlon. A server at a client had crashed, and he rebuilt a new SBS server for them. Running exchange, and some other things for them. Not to mention it is not a very powerful box. Not my problem. Apparently they had a custom application in PHP + MySQL running on there, and needed it restored. Marlon had a backup of the old server on one of the drivers, and I began to take a look.

I could re-install MySQL with the installer they had there ... it just would not work. No services installed, no shortcuts, no applications. I was not about to try and set that up manually. SO I grabbed a newer version of MySQL 4 and installed that quite easily. At least you can copy MySQL data cluster files manually and they will work. So rebuilding the DB was not a problem.

PHP with IIS has always been a huge pain in the ass. ISAPI or CGI ... ISAPI or CGI? dlls, IIS script mapping. All that process you have to go through to set it all up. And normally making at least 2 attempts. Not to mention I have only 1 desktop to work with (and have cluttery windows open in), and that I don't know how anything works on windows. (I had to ask where the web server logs are ... meh). After being _positive_ it was setup correctly it would still not work. html pages served up fine, php pages always get a 404, not found. Yet I _know_ the files are there. So something is wrong. After a couple of hours of mucking and remucking about, and reading, and researching. I finally discovered that by default in server 2003 IIS disallows unknown ISAPI filters by default. Even if you explicitly install the filter for a website, you have to go into the web extensions services thingamabob somewhere, and explicitly tell IIS to allow "unknown (re ... not made my Microsoft" ISAPI filters. That's annoying. It's like installing PHP with apache, but then having to tell apache "Oh ... by the way ... it's alright for you to load modules that were not written by the apache development team" ... stupid.

I told Aaron about a KDE introduction success the other day. He blogged about it here : http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2007/04/kute-little-story.html. Then some wanker went and pissed all over it. I guess some people just can't let others be happy. I responded, and he again went on with his negativity. Aaron stepped in, and set the record straight. I think it was slightly disheartening for both of us. Open Source is about positive movement, and it hurts everyone when people are negative about it. :'(

So the Cannucks barely scrapped past the first round of the playoffs. I think they had some help from the refs. I'm not a huge Cannucks fan, but the Flyers were the shit team this year, and I picked Van in my pool. So GO CANNUCKS. They had some issues against Anaheim last night though ... they can rebound!  ¶ 9:45:00 AM 0 comments

  What Bullshit So my last excited announcements about karma have done me no good. It was my birthday on sunday. Aren't you supposed to have an elevated mental state for your birthday? Aren't things supposed to go your way? I decided to take it easy and play a little poker online. This just pissed me off. Didn't matter what I had ... I was beat. I flop a joint straight ... someone else flops a higher joint straight. I flop a set, they go runner runner for a flush. I have an open ended straight flush draw, bottom pair wins. It was ridiculous that way the cards were spitting in my face.

I decided to head out and spin the slots for a bit ... I'd spin away $40 without making a single cent back. It was not fun at all. Today I had to go to a meeting I forgot I set up, afterwards I had a coffee, and decided another shot on the VLTs. There's a game where you hit the free spins, and 7's become wild ... in short, you usually get them at least once while you play (if you throw in like $100), and sometime you can hit big, but mostly you win something back, and you can play for a while. I spent $400 just trying to get them. I watched the people beside me hit jackpots, and free games a dozen times ... I couldn't hit anything. Got the free spins on my very last spin (I was out of money). You know what? I got 0. That's zero ... ZERO. Not a single credit back. What a kick in the teeth.

It became more of a mission to get them, than actually playing the slots. So now even more pissed off. I decided to get a slurpee on the way home at 7/11. I finished my coffee on the drive, and had the slurpee to sit down and program with. It is then when I taste my wonderful slurpee I was so looking forward to that it tastes like coconut. Yeah that's right ... my pepsi slurpee had obviously been just changed over an old flavour, and I had a disgusting coconut flavoured slurpee being poured down my drain now. ICK!

I could not even find any solace in dominoes online. I mean I don't expect to win every game I play at all, but I lost 9 games to the same player. It was so unreal. I have never played, or even seen dominoe games like this. It did not matter in the least what happened. Every move I was forced with only one dominoe to play, and she always had the best possible counter. I get forced into making five, and she could always make 10 or 15. She starts a game, scores 10 every time, I lead out with 0, and she takes 10 off me. It was so bad, she asked if I was letting her win because she was a girl.

So here is a big fuck you with both middle fingers to karma.  ¶ 1:23:00 AM 0 comments

  SATA, Short Rates & Karma I needed to build a short term box for some big storage. I was given a bare bones machine, with a couple of extra 500GB SATA drivers. Told the board had 4 SATA connectors on it. SO I figured use the 80GB drive included for the OS, and use the 500GB drives for space. Well after pulling the case off to install the drives I found only 2 SATA power connectors. Oh well. this is not a real important production server. So use the 2 large drives themselves. I went about using Dapper as normal. Too bad the installation hung the first time. I thought I may have set up something wrong in the partitioner with LVM or something. Lets try it again. Hung again. So I started wondering about the LVM with SATA drives etc. So my idea was to install on one drive, and manually add the other one with LVM afterwards. That's something I wanted to "refamiliarize" myself with again anyways. No go. Then I figured there was a problem with dapper and these sata drives or more probable the onboard sata. I gave Edgy a whirl, and it installed no problem.

I went about adding the second drive manually. And It was eventually a go as well. One thing I realized after was to resize ext3 filesystems, they must be unmounted. reiserfs_resize can do it's work in place. Which is cool. So I did one more install using LVM in the ubuntu partioner, and choose resier as the file system for /home. All seems good, although I was disappointed that dapper was a no go with the SATA (I want the long term support).

That being done, I have massive amounts of work to do with bikerpak. As of my last meeting with AJ we talked about some issues with Jevco's system not allowing multiple vehicles on one policy, yet our new system does. So I needed to manipulate the data containers to track a controlling vehicle ID across multiple policy version. In addition to that, I needed to change the transaction containers to now also maintain multiple details of each vehicle ID as that's how they need to see them in the borderaux. meh. That all being done at the same time, also needed the Short Rate calculations. Mid term changes are base on a pro rated table because the motorcycle season is not a full year, so you have 0% earned premium during Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb. but mid-term changes may only effect a single vehicle on our multiple vehicle policy, and only for a portion of the policy term. Does this sound confusing yet? It gets a little snaky, but I finally have it all working the way it needs to ... I think. I hate short rate calculations. It affects everything. The quote, PDF generation (values), data containers, transactions ... _everything_. So I had touched a great deal of the base code all at the same time. testing was fun, as something gone wrong was harder to track down along the path of "where did it go awry?".

I was so mad at having to rework so much code on Monday I had to get out of the house. I went to my local Boston Pizza Lounge where I can still smoke. I grabbed a free cup of coffee and played the VLTs for a bit. Turns out I won $600. I wasn't even that happy about it I was so mad at work. Well I finished things later that night, and yesterday decided to take the day off. I went out and bought some new shoes and sandals, a new TV remote (as my old one had bit the dust a little bit), some pillows, and just general junk I had not gotten in a long time. I went down south and talked with AJ. We conferenced with Briggette in Montreal, and our deadline got moved to May 1 (YAY). So I was feeling much calmer than the day before. I decided to treat myself and buy a new jacket. It was a brand new sales clerk, and he had some troubles with the till. The total was $104.49. I gave him a fifty, three twenties, and two quarters ($110.50), so I expected $6 in change. He gave me $56 in change. I brought to his attention that I only gave him $110 and that I should not be getting fifty back. He was confused. The manager was right there, and figured out he had punched in $160, and just did what the till told him to. The manager thanked me for being so honest. In addition to feeling good about myself, I now had a new jacket, and a $25 gift card for the store. SWEET! This is where the karma comes in. I could have said nothing and kept the $50, but I did not. I then went up the street to another local pub to play the slots. I won another $600!!!! I guarantee my good deed entitled me to another win. I could have taken the fifty, but I believe I would have lost that, and much more had I done that. karma baby! What goes around comes around.

On a more sombre note. Let us all pray for those affected by the tragedy at Virginia Tech the other day. Thoughts go out to the families and friends of those who's lives ended so suddenly. God bless.  ¶ 9:00:00 AM 0 comments

  MDT, mediawiki & snoozester I've been trying to get to writing a blog for well a whole month now. I tend to forget about the blog for a while, and then think about it for a week (or more), and when I finally get around to it, I have a bunch to write about. I am no where near as frequent as aseigo. I swear that man has a USB cable from his head the connects directly to blogger.com sometimes. (teehee).

So march was an interesting month. thanks to George W for instigating a change in the daylight savings time for north america. April 1st was such a logical date. Now it's March whateverthehellitwas. It's all over and done with, so I've erased it from my mind. Kubuntu servers were gems. Auto updated, and the DST timezone files had already been installed. Let's just say some other operating systems were not so lucky. I was dealing with some OpenBSD boxes which are end of lifed. Although there life expectancy is diminishing currently as I have a replacement dapper server already in testing ... we needed to fix it. Too bad the zic compiler on the system didn't compile the timezone files properly (Still had Apr 1 as the date for MDT). I was a little dumbfounded. I must also say I really didn't care enough to find out why. I ended up just copying the MDT timezone file from one of my servers, and it worked fine.

Solaris ... not so lucky. The flock of Solaris birds I watch in their nest also needed to be fixed. However ... the available patch also requires a patch to libc, and touches _EVERYTHING_, and it requires a reboot. That was the killer. We can't reboot these boxes, they had to be fixed in place. We started checking how long they had been running, and we had uptimes of 1660+ to 1957 days of uptime! Yuppers ... thats like 5.5 years of uptime. *nix is king! So I just manually set the time on the rollover, and on mar 31st I rolled the time back, and let the system handle it normally. So for a couple of weeks the time doesn't really match the proper timezone. But we decided this was much less risky than rebooting those things. I have it marked in my calendar for October to do the same as well. Stupid MDT.

I recently had the task of setting up a wiki for the fortress tech guys. It was my suggestion, and I figured it would be easy enough to do. I started looking at options as I had never done that before. I settled on what seemed to be the favorite around "mediawiki". Which is in fact what runs wikipedia ... so an obvious choice. I was happy to see a package available for kubuntu, and found a how two specific for that. It was fairly straightforward, and in very little time I had a functional wiki. Locked down to logins only for everything, allows uploads, it's pretty slick. I'm still learning, but thank goodness there are wikis out there with information on how to administer a wiki ;) Check out http://meta.wikimedia.org. I have found that very useful!

I think Aaron will be quite proud of us following in the KDE wiki craze. We are just starting out, but I'm hoping it will work out well. I am sure there will be lots of questions as we go, but that's why we are all here right? I've started a few pages, and worked out a couple of templates for us to use. Lets get everyone involved and make it work how we want ... that is the whole point of a wiki ... for collaboration of information.

My newest fad is www.snoozester.com. I have a problem getting up for things. By "things" I mean anything business related before noon! I am not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination (It's hard to get up for a 8:00 AM meeting when you were writing code and testing until 4:35 AM). So I found myself asking people for wake up calls now and again to make sure I was present for things.I started to think that there had to be some service out there for this. I mean hotels do it? Why can't anyone do it? I found a few that I really didn't like so much. Most services do offer a test service for you to try out immediately. the problem is you had to sign up for a monthly plan. I don't schedule meetings 5 days a week. I actually try and make them as rare as possible, so I was looking for a pay-as-you-go plan. Snoozester offers just that. I signed up for an account and got 10 free calls. then I can pre-purchase call packs (60 for like $10). It was a no brainer.

I have an interface to control everything. I can register multiple phone numbers which are verified prior to using them. I can schedule recurring calls, or one-time only. I have a choice of single alarm, or "secure wake" which phones me at 5 minute intervals until I answer! That's for me I guess. I even get to choose the character who wakes me up in the morning. Yesterday morning I had the pirate wake me up for the breakfast meeting. Arrrrrrrrrrrr matey!

My biggest problem is I sleep through my alarm clock, and my cell phone (which is usually in my pocket and I can't hear it anyways), but for some reason I always get up for the regular phone. So this is my new bag of gold ... and I'm hooked already!

P.S. I just tried the new spellcheck on blogger! I likes ... instead of a word by word search and replace type box, it highlights all the mistakes, and clicking on them brings up the menu of corrections. Nifty!  ¶ 5:23:00 AM 0 comments