Thursday, April 05, 2007
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
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
