Andy Kopciuch's Blog

Summer

2009-08-26T16:38:00.003-06:00

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. ;)

HTTP_Request(2), Tough Times & Band

2009-05-25T01:27:00.002-06:00

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.

db2sql, download quotes & the brier

2009-03-29T01:22:00.002-06:00

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!

Romanians, Toolkit 3.0 & Alabama Slammers

2009-03-03T09:24:00.004-07:00

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

...
time passes
...

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.

day2, night 3, day 3

2009-02-06T23:54:00.003-07:00

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!

night 1, day 1 & night 2

2009-01-23T06:16:00.007-07:00

MONTREAL! (Jan 18 / 19 - 2009)

So I drove down to AJ's and left my car there. The sponge bob coffee mugs I got from them were AWESOME! Robyn came and picked us up, we went and found Scott in his green (They are not green) condos and off we went. The flight down was alright, watched some TV, and "Hustle and Flow". We arrived around 12:30(ish) ... ish is important on this trip. Caught a cab to downtown. We discovered (again) that beer is sold at 7/11 and grocery stores, but not after 11:00 P.M. So we were out of luck. Checked into our hotel on Lincoln ... no one ever knows where Lincoln is. The joke of each trip. Crashed it out, and our trip had begun.

Our arrival was scheduled for 10:00 (ish). We got going in the morning, and had a totally scary cab ride to Jevco offices. Anouk greeted us and the adventure for the day was "Follow Anouk". That's what we did ... follow Anouk. We dropped some gear off, and began to separate. I had the morning to spend with Brian Harper. AJ and Scott met with Lisa Carbone. Time flew past and before I knew it Anouk was back ready to take us for lunch. AJ had lunch with Serge across the street at some restaurant that no one else seems to want to eat at. Apparently it is like the second best place for smoked meat in Montreal (next to Schwartz). We had lunch at cafe Solaris. It was one of Brian's team members birthday. So we had some shots. What a nice start to the trip. More meetings in the afternoon. AJ and I met with Dino Fontes, Scott met with Brigitte. We caught up with everyone later. Our brains were so jam packed full, we decided to call it a day, and take another scary cab ride back to the hotel. Stop for alcohol along the way.

Anouk was picking us up around 5:30 (ish). We had a few drinks, and when she arrived, we all headed down to crescent street. We hit a pub called Brutopia (right next to Hurleys). AJ had the Rocket Fuel, and we had a few (ish) rounds of shooters. The waitress brought me the rest of the shooters mixed when we were leaving in a glass ... alright ... let's shoot that as well. We headed off to a restaurant that ended up being closed. Stopped by the Bell Center for Scott to organism over the statues of Rocket Richard, and John Belliveau(sp). I continued being drunk in the car. I don't even know the name of the place we ended up (somewhere in old Montreal). It was a great place. Apparently the wine was excellent. I continued on the Rye and gingers. no shots, but the drinks were pouring smoothly. During the conversations we determined that the world requires a new website :http://www.whatsanoukgonnacook.com. AJ didn't even realize what he said, until we were all roaring in laughter. Finished the meal, and we were off for more escapades. Back to Winston's (our old haunt ;)). Winston's is the only constant in every Montreal trip AJ and I have been on. We had a short discussion with Anouk's fiancée on the phone ... drunks are always entertaining. The place was pretty dead "It's Monday!". So we sat at the bar. Our waitress, Tanya, not Tonya, was exceptionally beautiful ... and a total blast to boot! The drinks kept coming ... in a quicker fashion. Yagger bombs, Sicilian kiss shooters, ryes, beer, and Scott was on the double gin and tonics. The conversations were great, and we were having a blast. Anouk left us there ... then things started to derail. Scott was having popcorn containment issues. Every time he grabbed for the popcorn, more landed on the bar and floor than in his hand. We also had the drunken idea to talk to Anouk again. She can receive text messages, but can not reply (some company restriction). So we all started prank texting her. I got in a fight with Scott and was going to jail, Scott had aids, AJ didn't know what to do ... on and on. Yeah ... drinking is fun. We had smokes with Tanya on the patio under the heat lamps, and continued to bond. She says to Scott near the end of the night "I'm impressed by you, you can really hold your liquor". She turned around and not even 2 seconds later he bit it, and fell down on the floor. Me and Age were howling, uncontrolled laughter. Tanya leans over the bar and says "I take back what I said". At this point in the night we had a decision to make. Back to the hotel, or continue an adventure down St Catherine's Street. We opted for home, and thank God we did. AJ and Scott discovered microwave kraft dinner, and other munchies in the lobby. We all crashed out ... good thing we said we would arrive at 10:00 (ish). Good day 1.

Toolkit 3, VIN Decoding & Snow

2008-12-13T03:05:00.002-07:00

Kevin and I have been diving in full force to the new Toolkit (version 3). We have completely re-designed how we are doing things. Taking a much more OO approach with new Application, Applet, Panel, and Bulletin classes (and many other classes required therein). We've been going as fast as we can and moving all of the current functionality existing to operate under the new framework of Applications, and Applets. It's been fun work actually. Kevin seems to be excited, and others have mentioned he seems really into what's going on lately as well. My time is more limited, as I have Bikerpak stuff to do, Southland stuff to do, Helping Alex, Boats, meetings, Montreal got postponed, we've had parties (I've skipped some, and skipping more), trying to make it home for Christmas. It's rather hectic right now. What started the whole Toolkit 3 push, was I implemented the fax to email processing, where Toolkit will process the mailboxes, and store the fax attachments, and people will receive the bulletins, and you can re-assign a fax bulletin etc. etc. AJ finally saw the big picture of what I was doing when we talked about all the new movement happening.

VIN decoding. Long story short. Can't find XML Web services for Canadian motorcycle VIN decoding. ANYWHERE! Until AJ and I discovered we were stupid, and the IBC already has this service, and provides it for free with your Broker Portal access. (YAY). I received the entire specification, and had an account created. I took me today to get it all working.; Successfully decoded a valid VIN from a motorcycle via a single PHP class (using HTTP_Request from PEAR, and SimpleXMLElement ... which I didn't know existed in PHP5 core). It's aq pretty significant accomplishment in the grand scheme of where we are driving our development ... not just for Bikerpak. The only thing I am stopped on is the XML does not seem to provide the engine size, yet the Portal interface does provide it. I need to inquire as to how I can get that information. It was not shown in the spec document I was given.

I hate snow. The l&Y Xmas party was in Cannmore last weekend. It was a great time. Some young kids drunken drama was somewhat entertaining. McSquirty was in the middle of it ... poor kid ... people need to learn how to handle their alcohol. i've been pretty wasted, and we've all made an ass out of ourselves at some point. But even as drunk as I was that night, I was thinking ... fuck man ... those people are out of control drunk. :( Anyways ... the drive back the next day was interesting. Snow storm ... bad highways ... not for Rich driving in the new EVO ... super slick ... everyone else speed limit 70 KM/h, us ... 140 ... no problem!

We are now in the deep freeze, super blizzard and a foot of snow. I had no idea, as I had not even looked outside in over a day. Was coding a VINLink class remember? So out of smokes, I decided to make a trip, and even to go to Walmart at 2:00 AM (Walmart is open 24Hrs in Calgary). Yeah ... warm the car up ... can see the ground through the foot of snow ... takes 10 mins to back my car out of the parking lot behind my place ... driving down the alley ... CRUNCH! Fuck! Smacked the right front tire into something ... I just knew I fucked it up. Regardless I trooped on. Shopping at Walmart is super fun at 2-5 A.M. Mostly staff stocking shelves ... or drunk people form the bar getting "stuff". A few others with no life like me. Staff are always super friendly. I got some supplies for a few days, coffee, milk, pizzas, snacks, socks ... lots of socks (I needed socks .. the washing machine monster keeps eating mine) ... and smokes. I am now camped out at home ... car with a flat tire in a snow bank ... bitchy ... but at least the VIN decoding thing is way cool. I just canceled my attendance to Ryan's "Tight & Bright" party tomorrow (tonight). No way I can get my tire fixed tomorrow (today). Plus In this blizzard I just do not feel like it. Sorry guys :( Next year.

Less Work, More Work & Back Pain

2008-10-30T12:15:00.003-06:00

Recently I decided to give myself less work to do. I took a step back from duties with Fortress. There are a a great deal of reasons why. The primary reason is I wanted time for me. I decided to take up playing drums in a pipe band again (more on that later). I found the day to day tasks becoming things I really didn't care to do any longer. The company has been changing, not necessarily in a bad way, just in a way that doesn't suit my lifestyle, or the work environments I want. I did not leave abruptly, nor am I turning my back in any way. I have just changed my role to be purely a consultant. I'm not going to be hands on any longer (or only at very specific requested times). I had a lot of good times in the past 3 years. I just want to focus on some other things.

Now that I have less work with Fortress, I have more work with everything else I do. Bikerpak is rolling ahead, and we are really excited about that. Possibilities in B.C, and we are also looking into something with boats as well. That's busy. Toolkit is super busy as well. Kevin and I have been ripping up the code the past few weeks. Southland portal, HR, Lloyds stuff, Commercial features, new version features, it's exciting. We need to find some time, and really house clean the code base, and morph it into a new development plan.

I woke up Sunday with back pain ... was not fun. I woke up Monday, and could not straighten up. It was painful. You'd be surprised how many day to day things you take for granted with a working back. Certain bathroom activities become rather difficult. :( I am no longer in pain, but just discomfort yesterday and today. Hopefully I'll be back in game shape for next week.

I am picking up Peyton from school today. Aaron is in Oslo, and Mikala has a meeting. Tomorrow is Halloween and I'm picking Aaron up at the airport at 8:00ish. Lets just get through this week, watch some football, and get to next week feeling better.

The News

2008-08-25T23:45:00.002-06:00

In Calgary, AB ... the top news stories for August 25, 2008 are :

- A massive recall of meat across Canada due to listeriosis bacteria (12 dead)
- A 21 yr old was arrested for murder on the hobema reserve (captured in Edmonton)
- A 15 man brawl outside a bar resulted in a critical stabbing last night
- Greyhound is stepping up security on busses due to a decapitation (yes ... head removed) on a bus in Manitoba earlier this month ( ... WTF?)
- Calgary's growing crime is to be battle with 200 new recruited police officers over the next 3 years
- A newly couple had their video stolen from their videographers vehicle while their still photos were being taken.
- Lets not forget about the daytime murders (like 4 or 5) in the past couple of weeks.

Oh wait ... there was something good. Some passer bys rescued a drowning woman in the bow river.

The world (and our smaller chunk called Calgary) is quickly becoming a darker place. :(

I lied!

2008-05-27T05:39:00.002-06:00

Rich was somewhat angered by my post that he "turned 40". Apparently, some people felt it their duty to inform him of the headlines. I must retract that statement ... he's "thirtysomething"! ;)

The Upcoming Good

2008-05-27T05:22:00.002-06:00

There is so much going on right now! Every industry is pushing capacity, which in turn means people like me in the IT world are pushed beyond capacity sometimes. I'm not going to complain about "too much work", because it's better than not enough. Instead I would like to focus on all the upcoming events in the near future.

Bikerpak - is going so strong. It is motorcycle season season. It is a challenge to keep up with requests for features / issues some days, but production is good. I am working on implementing the new set of rates. We already automated abstract requests, and work flow. AJ and I rolled the ball on the numbers audit, and getting that looked after. I am also looking into doing VIN decoding on the vehicles in real time to avoid data entry mistakes (wrong vehicle year or engine class was entered).

L&Y - Is also exciting. We are planning a long term (3-4 months) of development on the toolkit, and "facebooking" it. Including modularizing everything (Applications / Applets / Screens) ... that's our names for our design. I also have the mail processing in proof of concept stage. Kevin is working on some container / panel designs for things. Lots of planning, and slowly starting to implement things. Kris resigned to head up north somewhere. We are on the hunt for a new IT person there. The Power-soft guys were in town for convention, and we worked through some issues with them. I was out tonight for drinks with them, and AJ came along, and then Serge. It was good to see the Jevco folks. Apparently he has same "plans" for us. So says AJ. We'll find out about that coming up.

Fortress - Ian has some skills to help out, and take load off of Ray mostly, and me to some extent. Lots of work being done all the time. I sat in on Ray's Asterisk presentation, and learned all about the PBX world. We moved the CN servers offsite, and minus a couple of really minor glitches, it went super smooth. the RAM upgrade was fine, and things are rolling along peachy keen!

Planet - I worked all long weekend adding in the pricing features. I did an initial review with Jonathan, and went back and changed some interfaces around after I was finished with the first swing. A couple of minor features left, but that will come. We are planning the testing party coming up in a couple of weeks. I reworked the testing suite to be way more intelligent, and removed about 5 major steps, and the need for 3 files for creating a new test! I want to roll that into Pantheon at some point. I also rolled a release, and documented the procedure for future reference.

Personal - My sister is applying for some jobs. I helped her out with her resume last week. I have not talked with her since, but I hope she gets what she wants. My mom is selling the car apparently. I've been keeping low key. The playoff beard is gone since the Pens beat the Flyers. I'm geared up for a poker tournament tomorrow night. I'm chillin in the early morning right now. Maybe kick back. My mind is not into coding right now. I need to re-charge the batts, as I have 5 days to get the rates finished and tested.

ta,

IMAP, EVMS & Rich Bilec Turns 40!

2008-03-20T00:08:00.003-06:00

So I started to have some problems with my E-Mail lately. I have cached IMAP account setup on my desktop and laptop. It had been working fine for many moons now. All of a sudden, something bizarre started to occur. I would check my email, and later when I checked again, I would receive the same messages again. Strange. So I investigated, and when this happened once many months ago, I ended up forcefully removing a problem email, that was causing problems. No big deal. This time ... that was not the problem. In fact I still do not know what the problem is.

The symptoms were discovered after many trial and error lessons, and some digging on my mail server. Turns out that when IMAP checks the mail the mail spool file is not shrunk. Not a problem ... I only checked once, so it's not pushed back the changes. but it should push back all of the changes when I check my mail the second time right? Nope ... seems something is borked with the IMAP process. I'm not sure exactly how, or when this happened. I rebuilt the indexes, several times ... individually, and recursively. I have refreshed the IMAP cache, same dealio. I have cleared out folders, and synched them individually. Kmail would crash when refreshing the IMAP cache on the "inbox" though. Odd. I really ran the gamut of possibilities, and still had this issue. I thought ... maybe the KDE packages have problems I'm running. Maybe I'll just dist-upgrade to gutsy. That should be stable. I'll get to the upgrade in a minute. After the upgrade I realized I was already running the gutsy version of KDE, so I effectively upgraded to the same thing. meh.

I was working all day on the laptop, and started to have the same problems. I finally gave up because I just couldn't live without email all day on site, working on 3-4 different projects at once. So I sort of solved my problem this way. Removing the IMAP account from "Check Mail", adding a POP3s account to check mail, and letting my filters shuffle email around into the IMAP store, and then manually synching that. I shouldn't have to do that ... but I can not afford to waste any time dicking around with email ... I NEED THAT TO GET MY WORK DONE!

Back to the upgrade. Let it run over night. Woke to something completed, and ran apt-get dist-upgrade again ... to make sure all is good. Watched it do its thang and all seemed good. Until I rebooted. So I basically had a useless box at this point. the screen was repeated showing a device mapping error, linear, ld-liner or something to that effect. Continuous looping output on the tty. Nice ... well done unbuntu.Thank god I have multiple machines around, and could get to google.

It turns out that EVMS is installed during the upgrade but breaks the kernel 2.6.22, and it totally broke the kernel, so I couldn't do _anything_. Back to grub, boot into safe mode on an older kernel. apt-get remove evms, reboot. All is good again. It was alarming, and a big piss off for me. Then I thought ... what if this happened to some novice linux user on their only home computer? What would they do then. They would have been screwed not knowing the solution, and not having the ability to research it. Then I also thought ... why isn't this fixed ... 4 months after release? Why has ubuntu not placed a newer kernel in the updates, that could have been applied during the dist-upgrade? That's just plain bad. I mean ... get on the ball. I have to honestly say, when I got my machine up and running, I spent some time looking into Open SuSE.

I lied ... he's not really 40. I'm not saying how old he is, he's a little sensitive ;). I went out on the weekend for a little socializing. Diner at Tony Roma's with Rich, Claudio, Jono, and Craig. Then to the Kilt for some drinks, met Kish, Vish, and Preet. I quit drinking early on. I ate too much at diner, and it just wasn't going down. Plus I was super tired. I headed home around 12:30ish. Got to watch the flyers take a shit kicking the next morning 7-1. but they won last night ... Hanging on to 8th place baby!

Semi Random Summaries

2008-02-18T06:50:00.002-07:00

There's been so much going on in the past few weeks. Blogging kind of fell to the wayside. I finally have some time this weekend (Today is a holiday in Alberta for "Family Day"). I had a relaxing weekend. Played poker with marlon and some friends Friday night. Saturday night I enjoyed some pizza, and a few games of Risk 2210 with Aaron and Peyton. Aaron slaughtered us both. I keep telling Peyton "Don't listen to him" ... and maybe now he's finally learned. ;)

The eyes are better now. Still not quite finished the drops. I forgot them when I went back to MJ at the beginning of Feb for my moms B-Day. We had a great supper with family. I met Tammy, my brothers girlfriend. I went out with my sister a few times, and she is still bouncing around with what to do in life. She has recently ended her possibility of going back to Nova Scotia. I called her yesterday to make sure she was O.K. seemed alright, and I'm sure she'll pass through this phase of life.

On the L&Y front I added some features to enhance the EFT renewals, which involved re-writing the Abeyance system to a workable product. Now it can be easily enhanced for other systems without much effort. Kevin spent a while working with pantheon on a new website for L&Y. I think I wrecked him with cooltext.com (check it out). And AJ is over the moon with how pantheon works.

Kevin did stress the barriers of pantheon out of the gates, and found several small bugs which are patched in the 0.9 branch, and trunk. My plans are to roll a new release from 0.9 soon (I have no firm date ... need to figure that one out). I was really happy with the use / progress on there. I have patched a few other odd things in the framework, and it's time for a new release. I have one major thing on my list before release. I need to change the way the sql_addDate* functions handle dates. CASTing them is not portable, even within PG itself due to the datestyle setting differences. So we decided to move to under the hood using to_date, and we can handle the formatting from there. I just don't want to patch quickly, as it's used "EVERYWHERE". I want some testing on it. I just need to find an afternoon and do it. meh

Bikerpak is rolling again. I have fixed some bugs, and finally added the synch features to upload the CSV reports from Jevco, and have the controlling carrier IDs mapped to the proper policy. Now it's easy as upload, preview, I even made it possible to edit in place the CSV file uploaded on the server, then process for real. I am very pleased, and it's been working like magic. I'm already onto some new need (re : waiting for) features for a while, but the buzz is back on.

Planet Foods kind of got knocked down in priority for me as of late, but I have done some sporadic things on there. I have laid out some time later today / this week for doing some very much needed features to the system. I have had some meetings, and conferences, and Jacques has been going hard on the commits. I need to get back in the swing on that project.

I'd like to thank the Giants for winning the superbowl this year. And big great big HAHA to the patriots fans who guarunteed a perfect season. Guess not huh?

I just got all of my Corporate tax stuff finished. It's waiting in the appropriate folder to take to the accountants tomorrow. Whew! Not late this year! YAY! I have also paid off the taxes in arrears for last year. Now I have a few months of breaqthing room to pay off some debt and bills, and stock up for the next run. But it is a way nicer feeling to be ahead of the game this year.

With the no smoking anywhere rules in ALberta now, I've pretty much given up on the gambling scene. Which is kinda nice. I really played too much out of boredom. Traveling out during the day, and stop in somewhere for a coffee and a smoke, and roll the dice on the slots. That got nipped in the ass, and I don't really mind. I played once this year ... in like a 6 week span.

I've really been camping out at home alot. Stocked up on the bulk crap from Superstore last week. I'm happy to be a home body for a while. The travel have worn me out in Dec / Jan. Although I am planning to head back to MJ once more at the beginning of March for Dolly Van's Birthday ... plus I'm trying to make it home more often than I used too with my brother moving out, and my sister not going to be sticking around much longer. I'm worried about mom being alone all the time, so I'll have to make some more trips that I used to the past few years.

Here's to a great upcoming, shortened week. And warm weather.

Request Tracker, KDE 4.0 & My Eyes

2008-01-23T00:13:00.000-07:00

We determined the need for a ticket system at L&Y before Christmas. I had looked into several options. I even installed phpticket, which was very simple. It was a little bit too simple. I looked into the code a little bit and it kinda made me choke and puke a little bit. I already saw way too many problems expanding the system into what we would want to do with it. I did not feel like hacking on yet another PHP project. Granted it is actively worked on (to what level I don't know), but it just wasn't a fit.

I went on to install (without much effort), the Request Tracker system. I knew it was much more complicated than phpticket, but I also figured it would give us everything we wanted. Written in Object Oriented perl. It uses PG as a database back end by default. Packages are available in feisty. So we gave it a whirl. I spent the afternoon with Kevin and Kris one day walking through all of the scenarios that we would be using it for. Opening tickets, stealing and assigning tickets. The differences between commenting, and replying to a ticket. How the emails worked, and the most important thing ... how the ACLs worked. You get to control _everything_ via ACLs in RT. Which is both nice, and also involving to set up. Once you have the hang of how it works, you can get around quickly. The level of control is so fine grained. You have to specifically grant rights to each user / group / both in order to do things. It is also highly extensible, and we eventually plan on making use of additional features (like mail processing). But for now ... we're on our way.

Last week I went to the KDE 4.0 release event in Mountainview, CA. The event was at the Google campus. I accompanied Aaron there. We had a full day of travels to San Jose on the 16th. We arrived at the Wild Palms hotel in Sunnyvale that night. It was a fantastic hotel with great staff. What up to Elicia (sp) who made me PB cookies 2 nights in a row. She rocks the front desk at 2 AM. That night I met several KDE people and my introduction to Aaron's world began. Franz (Media Man for the event), Martijn (Marketing), Jos (Marketing), Jeff (Kopete? / Amarok?), Wade (Just awesome), Holger (KDE Windows), Ingo (KOffice), Adrian (KDE E.V.), Helio (Madriva), Sebastian (KDE E.V.), Stefan (Sun) ... just to name a few. A group of us went for diner at a Perisian place across the way. Greta kabobs! Great conversation. We mixed up a few drinks back at the hotel, and it was a night.

The next day started off with Aaron and I missing the bus (oops). So we cabbed it to Google, and the were kindly directed to our building. We got settled in and I met some more people (I won't name them all) I sat in on some BOFs, one for Konstruct, and the other for KDE on FreeBSD. I had lunch with Aaron outside with Dirk Muller and John Terpstra. I enjoyed a tour with some Google folks in the afternoon as I was not going to be around on Saturday for the next tour. Aaron and I got a ride back to the hotel with Jimmy Johnson. I ran and grabbed a quick bite and some cash. The mixer that night was going for a while when I joined. They had a wild awesome spread. The fruit kabobs were AWESOME. California has the best fresh fruit! We had drinks, and I chatted with all sorts of industry folks about programming, and we were basically a bunch of tech geeks. It was so enjoyable. We did meander down the street to the Oasis bar. Zack Rusin showed up late and joined us. We had a few drinks, and I made friends with Stephanie the "Bar Bitch" as she called herself. She called me "The crazy Cannuck", because I wanted Canadian Club. I guess she does not get too many requests for it, but she sure has a heavy hand when pouring ... more on that later.

The next day was the major event, and there was no way I was missing the bus 2 days in a row. Zack and I caught the last bus (there were 3 of them). We hung around, and found our seats and waited for the presentation. Aaron did a fantastic job. It was an excellent presentation, and a great success in my opinion. I didn't catch most of the KOffice presentation, as I was outside with people. We broke for lunch again, and I enjoyed it outside with Pat Volkerding (Slackware) and it was quite enjoyable. I had the privilege of joining some folks from KDE as they met with some Google Kernel people, one of whom was Andrew Morton (Kernel 2.6 maintainer). I was basically an observer, and it was a really interesting meeting of minds to witness. We wrapped up, and drinks were available. I was with Zack, and Chris Lee (Nvidia), and we were waiting for Aaron who was talking with John Terpstra and the CME guys. We left without him, and they were to be meeting us at an Indian restaurant in Sunnyvale somewhere for diner. It was an amazing Indian buffet! Tandoori noodles, and vegetables, Achari chicken, tandoori chicken, flat breads, saffron rice, and some other chicken dish I can't remember what it was called. Thanks to Chris for taking us there! It was awesome. Back to the hotel, and onto the drinking. I cracked the bottle of Rye, and dug in. Went with Zack to Oasis again, as they had Karaoke going on that night. My heavy handed Stephanie kept the drinks coming, and I got royally ripped up. Back to the hotel to find Aaron in the kitchen with everyone, and more rye, then back to Oasis. We closed the place down. Now at 2:30 in the AM. Aaron went for a hot tub. I went to pack, and drink non alcoholic beverages.

Our flight left at 6:30 AM, so we needed to be at the airport around 4:30 AM. It took a few phone calls, and a trip to Aaron's room to find him. I was still fully in the bag when the cab dropped us off. The line up for security was INSANE! I had never seen anything like that at 5:00 in the morning. I was fine at the hotel, in the cab, in security, and turned a shade of green right at the gate. So I puked a lot before I got on the plane. the take off did not help, and spent some time with a barf bag in the bathroom of the plane. It was a rough flight to Denver for me. We had a short lay over, and onto CGY! The flight crew ended up giving me a whole row to myself on the second flight. I got to stretch out, and actually sleep a little (as best I could). Still feeling like crap, but only a few long hours left until my bed. We arrived in Calgary, and headed through customs. Waited for our luggage (2 of the last 3 bags off). And then home Jeeves! After all was said and done, I had an extraordinary time, although if I was to do it again, I would avoid the Indian buffet and getting hammered, then skipping sleep to catch a 6:30 AM flight. That can all be avoided with some careful planning though. 6:30 PM flights! Thanks for asking me to go Aaron!

So today I broke some blood vessels in my eyes. It sounds way worse than it apparently is. I was at the office, and went to the bathroom, and after washing my hands saw my face in the mirror and went WTF?!?!?! It really freaked me out. I was like ... am I having a stroke? I went to the clinic. I apparently had a minor eye infection (I just attributed it to being over-tired and lack of sleep causing itchy / dry eyes). That apparently strained my eyes, and I remember a large gust of wind when I got out of my car at the office. Wind can cause your eyes to "bruise". The doctor said this is like what happens when you bruise your arm, only it's on my eyes. It just looks freaky. I had no irritation, no pain, no vision problems. He took my blood pressure, and it was fine (114/84). I got a prescription for some drops, which I have already begun to take care of the infection. The bloodshot on steroids will take 10-14 days to subside he said. But to not worry ... it is apparently normal. So I am much calmer than I was at 3:00 this afternoon when I discovered this. But I am going to take it easy the rest of the week. Here's to not straining my eyes!

2007

2008-01-02T00:09:00.000-07:00

Happy New Year!

The 2007 year in review - I was having drinks with Aaron the other night. We conversed about all sorts of things as we normally do. He said to me that I don't look back on the past enough. I'm always in the moment, and looking into the future, but the past has value as well. I had said it was a tuff year, and he said ... "It's always a tuff year, but it was a way better year than the one before". I have been thinking about that, and he's right.

All the good things that have gone on this year : I got to visit with my sister twice this year, which has not happen for many years. My company revenue is the highest in it's history. I have solidified friendships, both personal, and business. It is my privilege to be working with people like Ray Bowler, Marlon Lee Him, Kevin Brown, Stan Leung, Jonathan Nituch, Jacques Tedoux now. And I remain to work along side with people like Aaron Seigo, AJ Young and Gregg Shields. I have taken on responsibilities for other team members in various projects. My brother is moving forward with career opportunities, my mother seemed very well when I saw her. I actually got to go home for Christmas with the entire family there (7 years past).
My flyers went from the basement team to contenders (YAY) ... lol. My knowledge of business, and technology, and so much more has grown.

I felt like it was a hard year, and I realized it was because there was so much progress made everywhere, it just felt like hard work all of the time. Some things I would like to work on for the next year is to get myself feeling better and back to the gym. I want to get back to some social rings that I have unintentionally ignored (like Jaman and the poker boys, and the gang out on the west coast). I want to start eating better, and everything else one wishes for themselves at the beginning of a new year. I think everything ties together into time management. So I'll be working on that.

What are you going to be working on?

Santa Pics, Banana Girl & Christmas

2007-12-27T00:47:00.000-07:00

Tradition time again, and Rich and myself have to go and get our picture taken with Santa. It started years ago in Saskatoon, and you can't break tradition. I was heading out of town on Friday, and we arranged to meet at his work (in the mall), and then get our pics taken, and I could hit the highway easily from the mall. I arrived just before 11 AM when the Santa castle opened up. We took a look, and the line up was already huge. Rich was like "I can't wait in line for that ... I just got to work". So I decided to wait in line, and call him when we would be close. It was about 45 minutes, and he came back. We got the pictures taken, and then went out the other side to pay for them, and this is where the commotion started.

There was a guy at the both complaining about the Santa pictures of his kid taken 2 weeks ago. Apparently the cuff of Santa's sleeve was showing as he was holding the baby, and this guy thought it wrecked the pictures. It was green, and really wasn't a big deal, but he was raising hell of it. He went on and on. The girls working the booth told him there was nothing they could do. When you get your picture taken, the show you on the computer, and ask it your are satisfied with it. It is company policy to not print the photos unless you give the OK. His girlfriend was the one who did the photos, and he said "Well my girlfriend isn't as smart as everyone else I guess". He kept going, and the girls told him he could call the head office of the company, but they would tell him the same thing. This had been going on for a few minutes now, and he was getting more belligerent. He even turned around and was like "Isn't this stupid, look at this photo, wouldn't you be mad". I looked right at him and said "Nope".

They asked him to call the office, as they couldn't doing anything, and now things started to escalate. He got angry and started to get insulting. He started calling them "bitches", and was getting really rude. He was like "It's my kids first Christmas, and his pictures with Santa are ruined". The one girl replied ... "Well if it was that important, maybe you should have been here for you child's first Santa pictures". Rich and I looked at each other and were like "YEAH! ... go girl!". One left to go call security, and he was even threatening, "I guess no one else is getting to buy pictures, cuz I'm not leaving until I get my money back". The fight was on, and they said they were now going to refuse to deal with him, because he was being so rude. He said something rude and something about them not having real jobs. I had had enough, and stepped in. "Well I have a real job ... and you are wasting _my_ time ... so MOVE IT ALONG!". He was ready for a fight, and turned his head around ... directly into my chest, then looked up to see the big guy staring him down. The punk changed his tune and cowarded back a bit and sheepishly said "well go ahead then ... if they'll help you".

Rich bought the photos, and security had showed up by this time, so we left. Before I went to hit the highway, I went back and talked with the girls. I left my card and cell number with them, and if they had any issues with the mall of their company they could pass along my information, and they thanked me. Security had come back at this point, and I told them that the guy was being obnoxious, and they girls were perfectly within their rights. They thanked me as well. For god's sake ... it's Christmas, kids are around, and you are calling Santa's elves "bitches"??!?!?! What a loser.

Along the drive back to Moose Jaw, I could feel my brain start healing from all of the scars over the last year. I left the laptop in Calgary, and had no internet anyways. I arrived around 8:00 P.M. and was bombarded by my sister's dog Georgia. She's a pug / beagle cross (puggle), and she is the most hyper active dog I have ever met. She's really like the dog from snatch that eats everything. I watched her destroy several toys over the vacation. And eat some strange stuff. Mom looked well, and Diana has been drunk for weeks (lol). She was at the bar, and phoned later in the night. I declined joining her, as I was tired from traveling. I was ready to relax, not go out. I talked with mom about all sorts of things catching up, and went to bed. The dog woke me up jumping all over me. Not fun ... and I was not used to it. I decided it was time Georgia learned to be zen. So I spent the next few days teaching her to just chill. We bonded pretty good, and by the last day before I left she was very open about joining me wherever I lay down, and just sleeping on me. Funny dog.

I did some shopping, and watched some movies Saturday. I met my sister and Dolly, and Jana down at the Casino for some drinks later in the night. We wet to the park afterwards. It was packed, and I felt like an old man. I recognized a couple of people, but didn't really "know" anyone. I did run into a couple of friends from high school near the end of the night, and chatted for a bit. I was getting tired, and went and found the girls. Dolly had left with Scott, and Jana was leaving. My sister said she was staying. I reminded her we were going to Regina in the morning. She assured me it was fine, so I offered Jana a ride home. She was like, you don't have to do that, I was like it's no problem. "But it's all the way to South hill". I started laughing. MJ is only 30,000 people. It takes me longer to drive to Rich's house in Calgary, than from Moose Jaw into Regina. So a 5 minute round trip to South Hill and back to Mom's house is not a problem. Small town mentality ... I'm just not used to it anymore. lol. So I pulled into the wrong drive way, and she was getting out, and said "Thanks Andy". "Anytime" Then she says to me "Do you remember my name?". I was like "I know who you are Jana". Then she says to me "Well most people forget my name, and I have to remind them ... you know ... it rhymes with banana?". It was the funniest thing I heard in weeks. Totally made me laugh. The funny Banana Girl. Diana and Dolly had a good laugh over it too.

Sunday we drove to Regina and took Grandma K out for brunch. We chatted, and had a good time with her. 85 years old, and still looks great! We drove back in the afternoon, and I had my plans changed on me Sunday night, and ended up keeping it low key. Diana was hanging with Dolly again I think. Xmas eve I did some last minute shopping, and then wrapped some gifts. Ted was working all day, but came over for diner that night. Meal was FANTASTIC, and I'm sooooooo full. Diana had been baking as well, and I scooped some cookies (triple chocolate somethings ... mmmmmmmmmmmm). We did the gifts and hung out. It was really really awesome. Later that night (midnight). Heath called me as he was in town now, and was finally free. He had been looking after his nieces and nephews because Matt's wife was sick, and the triplets were still really small, and should be around that. I picked him up and we went over to Kevin and Breann's house. We talked for hours, and had coffees and told the good old stories. At 4:30 I was like "I gotta go." I dropped Heath off at home, and made it back to the house just as Diana and mom were leaving for Regina. Diana was flying to Nova Scotia at 7 AM, so they had to leave. We said the goodbyes, and hugs. Then I went to bed. I drove back to Calgary later on Christmas day. I had a stop over at AJ and Kym's place and gave the kids their silly string (what a blast!). Then relaxed at home. Fell asleep during Ben-Hur. Today I have been feeling ill, and did nothing but sleep and watch TV, and play some poker. So A merry Christmas to everyone, and Happy New Year!

Travels, Work & Holidays

2007-12-21T00:26:00.000-07:00

December has been more hectic than I ever remember. Typically December is when the IT stuff slows down, and I get to catch up. Not so in 2007 as it comes to a close. I have already travelled out of town 3 times, and I am leaving again tomorrow. I am looking forward to next week where I can finally catch up (I really need to catch up on the whole year ... I can do it in 3 days ;).

I went to Edmonton with AJ. We stayed over in Leduc, which is our new plan from now on. It was a real productive day at the L&Y Edmonton office, meeting some new staff, and getting close to the pulse of end users is always nice. I got some great ideas and feedback from Suzi, and Kevin just finished putting her ideas into motion. Then I was back for < class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Banff. Rich and I travelled together. We stayed at the Banff Rocky Mountain Resort. We had a few (_alot_) of cocktails before diner. We were definitely the fun drunk guys at all of our respective tables (Me, Rich, John, Craig, Scott). I brought my bottle of port with me as usual, and was willing to share. Great meal, and good fun at the table I was at (Kevin Brown, Jess + BF, Crystal + husband and others). For the first time I did not close down the event with AJ and Rich and the usual suspects. I was so far gone, I had to go back to my room at about 11:30. I did manage to pick up some spaghetti, and a HUGE bottle of ice tea before, and they were my savior. I watched Eastern Promises, and passed out. It was a great weekend. But it was the coldest day of the year.

So then I was back in town for < class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">AJ and Ian.Thom dropped us off at the Airport in his new Jeep. The flight was alright. It went quick going down, but my knees started to lock up somewhat. We ran in Ron's wife Christine at the airport waiting for luggage ... and I didn't recognize her. We felt like asses. Sorry. We found our hotel downtown near crescent st, and AJ picked up some drinks and snackies. We settled in and headed down to Thursday's. Good eats ... GREAT ONION SOUP!. Then it was off to the Downtown for some fun and games. The bouncers outside were entertaining trying to convince us which club to hit up. The beer was glowing green, I forgot that highballs are served with the coke on the side, the bar was dead, the girls were alright. Volley Ball girl was good for a dance. The waitress was the hottest girl in the place. And the funniest thing ever was her explaining to me and AJ about the peep show place next door outside when having a smoke. The amateur session (impromptu) was interesting. We eventually head back to home base. I opted for the couch, but was too tired / lazy to pull out the couch. The knees paid for that the next day.

We met with Serge and Brigitte at Jevco. Always great to see them. Business plans got changed on us, but it was not vindictive. Just not what we planned. Life goes on, and Serge took us out later. We snacked on soup and poutine at Winstons, which filled us up too much before diner with them. Weinsteins and Gavino's was a great restaurant. The platter was insanely huge. Sausages and peppers, I even at Octopus. Which I didn't even mind much. It was seared, and spicy ... pretty cool. We went clubbing again, and Chantal from Ottawa was a sweetheart. AJ disappeared walking Serge back to his car, and I was left at the table alone for quite a while. The night was fun. We headed back to sleep. I pulled out the bed this time. Bigger mistake. My back paid in the worst way. I could barely move next day. We headed to Brossard and met with Marine Expert. Cool people. We went for lunch at Vinnie Gambini's. Another great Italian meal. The lasagna was massive, and sooooo good. I couldn't even finish it. At the end of the day Guy dropped us off at the airport, and we waited around for our flight. We ran into Christine at the Airport again. She didn't notice us, so when we called out her name, we totally redeemed ourselves. the snow storm hit, flight was delayed, and the head winds made a long flight, loose a couple of hours for time change, and we end up in Calgary at 1:45 AM. the trip was 3 days, but seemed like a week.

So now I've been back for < week. Had the Fortress Xmas party at Gregg's on the weekend. In between travels I have tried to keep up on the work front, and there's so much happening. Co-lo moves, hard disks fail, programming, research, meetings, help, on and on. Maybe it's just because I'm so intermittent this year. But I am so ready for a break. I'm not even taking the laptop with me when I leave.

I'm heading back to the homeland (Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan) tomorrow. Right after Rich and I get our pictures taken with Santa. Then the drive home. Meeting up with Diana when she's back from her concert deal. Saturday is unplanned, Sunday is a trip to Regina to see Grandma. Monday is Christmas Eve, and that's when we are celebrating. Diana is flying back to Nova Scotia early morning on the 25th, and I am going to drive back to Calgary. So it's all planned out. That way I am back for a few days of peace and quiet catch up, instead of sitting around in MJ twiddling thumbs. So a very Merry Christmas to all, and I'll probably catch up with you in the new Year.

Testing, Java & Family

2007-11-28T22:30:00.000-07:00

There's been so much going on in the past month. No time to blog! I have to make time. Leaving for Montreal in about 1 hour, and I am waiting for laundry to finish packing. Having a coffee, and decided now was the time.

The planet foods project is well underway now. Another project utilizing the pantheon framework YAY. Check out http://www.pantheoncms.org for more! ;) We are going ahead with the XP (eXtreme Programming) methods. So we need to test test test! One of the first things I did was create a test harness for PHP. spent a couple of days (nights actually), and hammered out a couple of different classes to aid us. The testing offers multiple output (console ... colorized via PEAR classes, HTML, real time, and export to files). I still have to actually "write" the file export, but the hooks are there. Using it is as simple as writing one PHP function for a test, and creating the test object. The adding to the test factory. Neato! I was happy with the short time span I worked with.

Recently I was having troubles with my PC at home. I thought it might have been time for a new one, because a couple of times it made some Handel like beeps and would just randomly shut off. So I thought at first. Until I started running gkrelim again, and noticed when I would play online poker that my CPU would spike to 100% after a couple of minutes of playing. I discovered that there is some bug in the java app from one of the poker sites I play on that obviously does not seem to like my java implementation. I have Suns 1.5. I decided to try a new one, and jumped to 1.6 with the same results. On a whim I tracked down a copy of blackdown's 1.4 (they cease to exist now). To my surprise the 1.4 JVM worked without killing my computer. Neat. So I now have 3 versions of java installed, and konqi is using 1.4, Firefox is on 1.5, and 1.6 is just idle.

My sister was in town for a visit last month as well. Her and Dolly Van came and stayed with me. We went out, visited, they visited friends. They managed to break _both_ of their digital cameras. Never could find the coffee shop they wanted to go to, we had eats and fun. They didn't seem to care much for the football, but come on the Riders were in the western final. Which they won ... and then proceeded to win the Grey Cup the weekend after (Sub Party ... mmmmm ... fat). She is also going to still be in MJ for Christmas (although her 5 AM Xmas day flight is cutting it close!). So I am planning a trip back to the motherland for the holidays.

I have so much more I could talk about, but my ride is here in 50 mins, and I need to get ready. ciao for now, and the Montreal stories will be forthcoming!

Laptop? Testing & Secret Diaries

2007-11-11T22:08:00.000-07:00

So due to some circumstances beyond my control, my sister arrived back home in MJ to have no internet, and more importantly no computer for said lack of internet. :S So AJ let me have a laptop to send to her for a bit. Kris had to set it up, and couriered it overnight. To bad they could never get it working. Not network cards recognized (even with the included drivers installed first). I even had them send the windows disc, and re-install. No dice. It was super frustrating, as I can't trouble shoot a windows problem over the phone. Actually I would probably be no good having the computer in front of me either. The entire thing bothers me to no end, and the parties have since given up, and my sister has made other arrangements. My good intentions were fraught with obstacles. I feel bad ... I did what I could.

With the PF project moving along, and another new developer reading and waiting to get going, we kinda of need to get some of the base lego blocks in place. I have the base site setup, and working on the test machine. I did a walk through with the new guy, and he's reading through code, and the project development guide (Oh yeah ... I had to write that too ;)).

With eXtreme programming being the way to go, we kind of need a testing harness before we can go to work. So I spent a night working on a new simple unit testing mechanism. I wrote a Test class, and a TestFactory to handle the multiple test, and test groupings. You can register dependent classes, run your output directly to console (colorized via Console/Color.php), directly to a browser, or to flat HTML / Text files (which I'm not quite done yet ... a few lines of fopen / fwrite and it will be all done. The point to that is night runs of the tests, and archived for us.

Overall I am quite happy with how it all worked out. Sure it could be way better, but I'm not into writing the _best_ PHP unit testing project in history. This makes it simple enough to write a single function performing the test, and placing a few lines of code in the right test file for it to be run. Colorized output in many forms, and historical data. Good enough for me.

Amidst all that coding I discovered my new favorite TV show. "The Secret Diary Of A Call Girl". It is shown on ITV, but I am lucky enough to grab them from tvtorrents. I find it sexy, funny, and brilliant how you get wrapped into both the working girl persona "Belle", and the real person "Hannah". It's a struggle for anyone to separate their work life from their personal one, and it just goes to show how much your work affects your person, no matter how much you try to keep them distinct. It's only 8 episodes apparently, and I'm waiting for the final of 8 to be uploaded. Check it out if you get ITV

pantheon, pbuilder & halloween

2007-11-04T01:38:00.000-06:00

Nov 1 was a big day for the pantheon crew. We had a hack session, committed some patches, and reworked some features. We tagged and rolled the release, and announced it on the lists, and uploaded things to www.pantheoncms.org. It was an all around exceptional day. Aaron and I had a well deserved drink afterwards. We never did get a chance to discuss the roadmap for the next while. Next coffee session for sure.

So my latest PITA was more side effects of the dist-upgrade / PHP5 upgrade a few weeks back. I decided to keep the servers in tandem, and upgrade the mail (Kolab) server as well. I have Horde running for webmail installed on the system outside of kolab/openpkg. So the dist-upgrade went fine, but the corporate webmail was borked. You could login, but the sidebar frame was completely blank. I finally had some tiem to start looking at it. Checked all the standard things in php.ini settings. I delved into debuggin Horde itself, and quickly gave up after one fix was followed by another problem.

I was running an older stable version of horde packages, and decided to try a newer version(s). I gave a whack with the horde "groupware" version, and gave up after screwing with it for a couple of hours. I seemed to be caught in the "neverland" of versioning problems. I had Kolab 2.x, with PHP4 + Horde that worked, and the upgrade forced to PHP5 which broke horde, and no PHP4 is available in feisty. Kolab 2.2 is not ready with horde integration yet, and I needed to make this work ... like now. I decided to try and find a way to install PHP4 on feisty. I found someone who rolled his own debs, and placed them in a repository. It was a really bad connection, so it took forever ... oh yeah ... now is when I find them incompatable because I forgot these are 64 bit boxes, not 32. meh.

Here is where pbuilder comes in. It was time for me to build my own debs from source. So it took me a while to figure out how to get it rolling, and then use the "universe" repositories, and get the dependencies all squared away. I finally got PHP4 to build, and created a local apt repository. apt-get install away, and bingo ... horde is working again. what a workout!

It was just recently Halloween. I did not really partake, as the last few weeks have been crazy so I stayed in. I've got so many things on the go that I just really don't have the energy or time to socialize right now. My day in the sun will come though. My sister is back in MJ from Nova Scotia. My brother moved out taking his computer right before she moved home, so I acquired a laptop, and with Kris' help sent it to her by courier. She'll be looking for work, and hopefully getting up here to visit me before she goes back down east.

php5-imagick, Compromise (mebe not) & The Fly

2007-10-23T18:02:00.000-06:00

So I had been running feisty for quite a while now with no issues of any of my code base on PHP5. And since Kev was working on some new OO code, we decided to up to PHP5 in order to benefit from the improved (well over 4 anyways) versions. Not to mention 4 is EOLd in Dec this year ... time to move on. That is 95% as easy as it should be on dapper, except there is no php5-imagick package in dapper. I decided to compile from source, but the resulting imagick.so would core dump apache at load. :( I bit the bullet and just did a double dist-upgrade to feisty, and had an available php5-imagick. Thom is happy again, now that he can manipulate his photo albums online. ;)

I had an interesting adventure a while back. In mid-days work, I got a message about a possible compromised box for a client of a client etc etc. So I got access to the box. All I knew was that they thought it was very "fishy". High CPU use, very sluggish. I downloaded a new chkrootkit from source, and everything cleared. I trusted my binaries, and started to look at some logs. Nothing strange. top shows high CPU percentage, and massive disk I/O wait. ps ax ... why are there all these sendmail processes?. /var/log/maillog ... shows very strange messages. They should not be repeated in public ;)

This is a box in non-production, and basically left alone since installation. The root email is aliased to an account called "admin". /var/spool/mail/admin was 2.0 GB! yup ... 2.0 GB. I guess the kernel was not compiled with LARGEFILE support, and sendmail cracked trying to deliver mail to the spool. Causes a mail to be generated to root, which could not be written to the spool, which generated a mail to root, which ... you get the picture. HAHAHA ... it made me laugh. I zapped the 120,000+ mqeue, and also zapped the spool file. The cause happened to be root crontab with 3 jobs running every minute, with no output suppression, generating emails every execution. That has since been fixed. not a compromise ... simply poor administration.

So I have a fly in my apartment. I will call him Charley. Charley is one of those "smart" flies that seems to disappear for hours, but pass right in front of your nose at the most inopportune of times. My smashing tube of rolled up paper sits by my side at all times. But Charley is onto my game, and rarely lands on any object suitable to be squished between with my smashing tube. I almost got him on 2 occasions, but he's really making use of his hundreds of eyes. I am not giving up though. The riders are still on their win streak, and how bout them Flyers ... 5-1 to start the season! I socialized slightly on the weekend, it was Kirsty T's B-Day, but I really hate Limerick's. I did make an appearance, and got my picture taken with the princess. It was worth it, but I must now re-emerge into the land of work.

eXtreme Programming, Tables vs Divs & Windchill

2007-10-01T09:06:00.000-06:00

So I am undertaking a new project with Fortress. It is a web application, and the team is being assembled, and things getting underway. My role is mainly from a management role, and to give some direction as to how to run a software project. I started out with some recomendations, and talked with Aaron before his last trip. That discussion changed my mind on how we would run things. I'm used to a waterfall design approach (go figure working on the Space Station, and XM Radio). He lent me a book by Kent Beck. I have read the first section, and keep trying to make time to finish it. I'll have to the next couple of days before Jonathan comes out from down east.

It is all about eXtreme Programming development, and test-driven designs. It is a very good read, and I highly recommend it to anyone working in small project groups. Even for larger ones, but for now I'm in the small fish bowl group. ;) I won't wreck the enjoyment of reading it for you, but as a programmer, architect, project lead, project manger, and all of my other roles I have found usefulness in every facet that I take on. It it written at a very personal level, and does not make you feel like you need a PHD in english to read it. I especially like the short chapters (which is in tadnem with the methodology) ... deal with pieces in small chunks, and you will be much more productive.

So that was my positive. Now I get to bitch about something. For years there is the argument between web developers about the use of tables or divs for layout. "tables are for tabular data!". Let me tell you why "programmers" like me tend to fall abck to tables all the time. BECAUSE THEY RENDER PROPERLY!

We spend much less time laying out parts of the page in a table than we ever could with CSS and divs. It is not because we do not understand divs, not is it because we are not driven to learn something different. I have spent years doing web development, and I cringe every time I start with a new layout, and making things "look" the way I want them. The biggest issue is that it never looks the same cross browser. Sure ... you eventually get it to what you want ... usually after 2 pots of coffee, and a pack of cigarettes, lots of yelling, hair loss ... etc. etc.

With one of my projects I decided to port some old code to using divs for the layout. It is basically a simple 2 column form with labels on the left, and the form elements on the right. Seems easy right? Even writing this from scratch would have taken me a few minutes with tables. I spent hours making it render properly using divs, and CSS. Of course the problem was IE. The problem is _always_ IE. I had it render perfectly as I wanted (and expected) in Mozilla, Firefox, Konqueror / Safari ... I think even Opera got it right. After several experiments, and loads of research I discovered that my layout and code triggers a bug in IE because of it's broken float model. The bottom line is that when an object with fixed width is next to a floated object, inside a nested div, the parent div is not rendered first, but last, so the left hand column is actually rendered behind the parent.

Here is the screen shots to explain :

Form in Firefox : yay to firefox
Form in Konqueror : yay to KDE
Form in Internet Explorer : boo to Microsoft

Is that not enough to drive someone mad ... I don't know what is. Because I happen to be a programmer, and I consider myself a fairly intelligent guy, I did manage to fix this. I changed some layout models. Back to the original point. At least with tables I could quickly render (and properly) the layout in all browsers ... they seem to get tables right. Using divs however ... it seems to have proven that the concept to browser developers at Microsoft was just to difficult to comprehend. Stupid broken float model.

Last week my buddy John came over with a treat. Our hometown friend (I went to Elementary school with Heath), had been in a movie called "Wind Chill" (starring Emily Blunt). It was never released in theatres in Canada, and went straight to DVD. John purchased it on Amazon, and it was a big event for us. Heath was in the movie for all of 3 seconds! We phoned him up. The scenes were edited out, the conversations, the car crash. Basically it was down to him and the other guy who died showing up as ghosts. I must admit ... it was a really odd movie, and a definite B horror film. But I have a movie star friend now. That's awesome! Best quote in the movie ... "If you ever get in a fight at a bar with a guy, smash him in the face with a bottle cuz then his eyes will fill up with blood and snot and stuff". HAHAHAHA

dummy invoicing, mdadm & perfect coffee

2007-09-11T00:19:00.000-06:00

So a while back there came an immediate need for a consistent and easy way for some brokers / staff to create a simple invoice for their customers. The time span for the actual insurance companies to produce paperwork is getting deeper and deeper, and this was causing some pain and suffering at the offices. So I took an evening and whipped up a quick little form asking for a few pieces of information, run it through and FPDI template, and voila! There was immediate use, and a few bug found (I mean cmon ... how many invoices am I supposed to create for oddball scenarios?). All seems good, edit old ones, reproduce, and most importantly ... GET PAID!

I had an adventure with a server a couple weeks back. I got an email / phone / IM about "The server is read-only" ... WTF? So yes ... it apparently had remounted / as read only ... I say again ... WTF? So some panicky checking later ... hrm ... disk problems, raid problems, XFS problems ... bad disk. Nothing can be done right at that moment. On to the disaster plan. The server was almost completely functional, as services were still running ... the only affected partition was root, and the RAID took over properly for /home, and /var ... so everything was still accessible, (except adding new accounts needing writing to /etc/passwd and other things.

So after some careful planning with Aaron, and discussing with other ... we planned to fix things after midnight the next night. So this is what I did. Installed a new hard disk in the open IDE slot (only 2 SATA connections available.) I then installed Dapper on there, with open partitions for the RAID volumes. Once the system could boot properly, as the old RAID array was pooey, I could add the new volumes in, and resync the arrays, and now have a working /var, and /home upon next reboot. YAY ... only took like 3 hours to resync ... meh.

Now came the fun part ... I have a bootable system, with / on a non faulty disk, and /home, and /var in active arrays again. Lets see here ... the /var partition where the apt DB is thinks everything is up to date, yet the binaries under the new / are still the inital installation. now what do I do? I'm not going to bother trying to even attempt fixing this and screwing with apt. Lets try something neat ... worst case I start all over again, and put things back the way they were (cuz I never touched the original disk at all). Lets mount the old / on the faulty drive (we can still read the data ... nice). Lets' rsync /lib ... cool, rsync /bin ... cool, rsync /usr ... cool, now the neat-o-rific one ... rsync /boot, vim /boot/grub/menu.lst, :1,$s/sda/hda/g, :wq, reboot ... cool.

That was by far ... I MEAN BY FAR! ... the coolest thing I have ever done on a linux server. Once I thought about it for a minute ... I went ... hey, same distro, same version ... just instead of fixing an out of sync apt to the system binaries, lets just move the old ones back. The boot loader, and actual linux images was the really nice one. So my notch in the linux bedpost is ... broken disk ... just install on a new one, and rsync the kernel image ... no problems ... and I say again ... cool!

Being a coffee fan, most of the time coffee is just that ... coffee ... a required beverage. Every once in a while though ... you are not even thinking about it ... and you take a sip ... and you go WOW! The perfect coffee. Maybe the roast of bean, the perfect ratio of cream and sugar to coffee, the perfect temperature ... liquid gold. I had that this morning ... I was so happy, and satisfied ... until I decided to dump it all over my keyboard, both mice, mouse pads, laptop, and everything else on my desk ... right at the exact same microsecond as the cup was tipping over, the phone rang with a server down. Three cups later, and I never did get back to that perfect coffee ... hope to see you in 6 months or so. coffee.

svnmerge, here-doc & Fruit Source

2007-08-22T01:52:00.000-06:00

I have another mid-finished draft, and I've been so busy and lazy that I never finished it, and now I have a problem where I'm not really thinking about what I started anymore. Oh Well. Vacations are over, and everyone is back again for the most part. It was calm for a while, but I've gotten so much done in the last couple of days. Yesterday I did 9 different tasks for 9
different people yesterday before noon. It was craziness. From SPAM tweaking, to conference calls, account setups, renewing domains, coding, you name it ... I did it.

Over the past while I have started working with Kevin more on the programming side on L&Y things. We ventured forth into the land of svn branching and merging. On the suggestion of Aaron, I looked into svnmerge.py. Kevin and I both started using it on separate branches. It seemed simple enough in concept. NO LOCAL MODIFICATIONS! I have to remember that. Branching was no problem. Syncing with trunk was no problem for me, Kevin needed to upgrade his version of svnmerge.py, but worked it out. merging back into trunk was another story. It didn't work out so well for me. I'm not giving up on it ... it was only a first experience, and somehow the merge back only brought in some of my commits. Maybe it was a shortcoming of the merging, or maybe I bollocksed it up. I ended up doing a manual copy and commit to ensure things were right. We'll see what happens next branch.

Today I got back into my PDC installation. Samba + LDAP on feisty. I had this all working perfectly on breezy a year and a half ago, but things have changed. Not so much with Samba, but PHP5 is not required, as 4 is obsoleted. And the new version of PHPLDapAdmin is all OO, so I have a new curve to get into. I decided to make the apache2 configuration a little less obtrusive, and did some really bizarre and fancy bash scripting using here-doc syntax. Basically I open a config file at a specific line, and interact with vi through the here-doc to insert text at a specific point. I thought it was nifty. I tried for a few minutes to enter it in here ... but the syntax is so brutal, this editor just can not seem to handle it.

I'm all about living off of these sun riper "fruit source" bars. They are snack bars ... totally natural fruit / veggies. They taste awesome, and count for 2-3 fruit / veggie servings per bar. I still rock out with real fruit, but these dried fruit bars are so convenient, and easy. I'm all about them ... tasty. I think this is the first time I've been up until 2 AM in forever. Almost a month for sure. I'm beyond tired, and am heading to sleep right after this is done.

pfqueue, Telus & Riders - 64bits, V240 & hot

2007-07-14T23:44:00.000-06:00

That's right ... I doubled it up in this blog. I've been so consumed lately, I never really wanted to write anything. It's about time again ... so here it goes.

Was having some problems with a mail server. Been ongoing issues, and I couldn't really figure them out in short time. I needed to really dedicate myself to it at some point. When I finally did I tried to get a postfix queue listing with mailq ... Big mistake when there are thousands of message in the queue. I did some searching and found pfqueue. Nifty little ncurses program for postfix queue management. To cut the really really long story short, I found that one of the accept subnets on the server was an 'A' class subnet. Not needed ... and no one knows why it was in the original list of networks to allow. So some spammer found a closed relay, which was an open relay just for him on his subnet. YIKES! So that has been rectified, and that spammer crunched at the kernel level.

Also had some joyus fun with Telus again. 2 connections from Telus at one location. The new one is not working. no DHCP address returned, not even 10.x.x.x to get to OCA. ????? Stan took over from there with the support calls. We were finally informed it is a managed Telus High Speed account, so the static IP is actually assigned, and not done through DHCP. Gah. If only I had been informed of that to start with ... I've configured a network card or two in the past ... but maybe I would have need to read the man page on interfaces. (/me is done being sarcastic).

My Riders are off to a great start to the CFL season. Undefeated Pre-season, and start the season 2-0. We gave Calgary a massive thumping 49-9. It was super sweet. John P. came over for the game. We had some slurpee, and some Vern's pizza. Nice day.

Dealing with Cent OS on a 64bit system. I was updating the MySQL, and PHP for a hosting package called Interworx. Seems pretty nice, although I do not really play with it much. We ran into a problem with recompilining the src RPMS, 64 vs 32 library problems, but I managed to get most of them fixed. The perl-DB package wouldn't recompile, and we decided to skip that one, until we realized it was required by spamassassin. So off to work I go. Seems that the MySQL 5 does not compile with -fPIC, so when other packages link against libmysqlclient.a it bombs out. I fixed that by changing the rpmrc to compile with fPIC, and Craig says everything seems to be working jsut fine now.

Lost 2 days of sleep. Gord phoned me one night at 2:15 A.M. We took over a new client, and he installed the new rack. Turned the Solaris servers off, and they did not come back online. Damn! I knew right away they needed to be manually booted. no monitors (not even video cards), so hook up the serial cable. All he had was DB9 to DB9 serial, and the Sun Fires had RJ45 serial connectoions for the management ports. Bah! So gregg ended up bringing a DB9 to RJ45 cable, I met him wee hours of the morning, hyperterm was a bust, we could see things, but not typey typey on the keyboard. We finally got some information from the previous maintainer, and found that the net management was on, and serial was never tested. We also found a PuTTY config already available on another windows server. So ssh in, type boot. All was good. Thank goodness it was their Stampeded BBQ, but we did get them up and running ASAP. Michelle gave us care packages with Fiddle Faddle, Poppy Cock, Candy, and some Amaretto tumblers. It was sweet ... I was tired, but happy.

HOT HOT HOT. Stampede week has been blazing hot, and 30+ temps the last few days. B.C. has broken records all week. Osoyus (sp) was 42 or something insane. So let me stock up on the water, and try to keep cool. Central air is the shit ... but I live in my heated apt ... but life is no fun unless you can complain about something.

TS Hell, GTK Hell, Holy Rain Batman!

2007-06-06T07:24:00.000-06:00

Who needs sleep? L&Y had massive problems with their TS last weeks. They have been having issue for quite some time, but it came to a head last week. AJ was drowning, and asked me for help. Se we didn't sleep for a few days. We were doing everything. Power, Internet, Memory, Hardware. round in circles for hours. The server would just reboot itself randomly. And after changing some things, we got it to the point where opening Word and printing with 2 simultaneous users would reboot the server. Neat. Kris, and Kevin came in the morning, we finally got things up again at 11:11 A.M. Ended up rebuilding the original server, and switched the drive rack with the new one (from the sister server rebuilt), and everything seemed to work. I suspect a bad controller on the mobo, or the mobo itself. meh ... lets not speak of this again.

For another client I have been building an installer for the linux desktop to run their offline application. It is written in PHP using PHP-GTK to launch the interface. php-gtk has to be compiled from source. No packages are available. I thought I would be smart and just apt-get install the needed dependencies and away we go. Worked fine on my Edgy box, and feisty. turns out the test machine we received is debian sarge. no go. It could not install gtk from apt. So I went ... alright we'll just compile that from source as well. i was hoping to avoid compiling everything from source, and here is why.

COMPILING GTK IS SCREWED! OMG!!!!!!!!!!!

I went through dependency hell to get it all to compile. GTK requires glib, and ciaro, and libjpeg, libpng, libtiff, and to compile cairo you need a font engine, so freetype and fontconfig from source, which require libaml, and before glib we need pkgconfig, and gettext ... oh and I forgot about atk. What a gong show. So 7 hours later, I got it to compile everything from source, on a clean installation. So I figure I am good. The next I go to try it on the test box, and find out libx11-dev can not be installed due to some messed up sarge deb dependencies. I give up ... If I can not have a build environment for X11, no point in continuing ... so I need to speak with some other people at this client, and find out what is going on.

Last night we had a torrential rain storm. Lots of lightning, and flooding. Knocked out tons of lights and roadways. Like 3 inches of rain in less than an hour. I got trapped at the office for 2 hours. I was scared driving. Wipers on high, and I couldn't see a thing. On my way home I took a back road to avoid the traffic jam. went through a puddle, deeper, deeper, deeper, road takes a dip and holy crap water up over the hood to the windshield! thank god my car did not stall out. I would have been fucked. Breakfast is cancelled this morning, and roads and lights are still out all over the city. The Internet is filled with havoc right now, and the storm knocked out our major Internet feed. My phone woke me up in the middle of the night. bah ... such is mother nature.

Clear The Dust!

2007-05-07T02:47:00.000-06:00

So I was a week late on my GST return ... and now I am probably in Shit with CRA. Oh Well. April was the shits, and I'm exhausted still. I'll take the penalty. Amidst the whole quarter of paperwork, I always end up "house cleaning" because I really need to sort through every piece of paper lying around my place, and also need office things (stamps, pens, envelopes etc.).

During the clean I moved the business cheque book back to it place with the corporate documents, and I found my screw driver. Not any screw driver ... my awesome ratchet really wicked screw driver I thought I had lost. YIPPEE!.

I also realied my apt is SOOOOOOOOOOO dusty. I really need to get to the spring cleaning (well finish the spring cleaning), and do all the gross jobs like clean along the edges, and really make the place sparkle.

Dishes 95%
Laundry 50%
GST 100%
Bathroom -50% :(
Floors 0%
Car 0%
Clearing the dust 0%
Throwing out the pack rat garbage 50%

So I've made a dent ... I knew it was a multi day project. :D

ta

NUSOAP, Tech Groups & NHL

2007-05-06T16:29:00.000-06:00

So I've been investigating web services in PHP. I've worked with them before, and now I have a need for them again. I need two separate system to communicate. I could have taken the shortcut and just written some PHP to directly access the other DB, but it is my plan that eventually the systems will not be on the same shared server ... what will I do then. I may as well byte (lol) the bullet and do it right now.

I downloaded and installed nusoap for PHP, and it's quite simple to use. The debugging advice is really useful as well from the nusoap site. It was actually very simple to get a simple WS up and running. So I have found that going carefully, and slowly changing small parts as I move along is the best approach. So I will have a functioning EFT web service. YAY!

I was bumbling around the Internet today. I went to a local tech groups website. I have been on and off involved somewhat over the years. Most lately I have had 0 involvement because I have no real use for the group. The community is mostly junior / intermediate in technical expertise, and I found myself never benefiting from anything, but always providing aid. I just don't have the time to "teach" right now, and they just irked me in general. I know of others who I associate with who feel the same. Sad really.

Well I checked out a recent blog entry around Kubuntu. I had wanted to post a couple of relevant comments to help someone out, and also clarify a statement regarding the LTS cycle for Dapper. Well I can't because I don't have an account. No problem ... let's create one. So I go through the process of creating an account. I wait for quite some length of time before receiving the credential email. Probably due to my grey listing ... not their fault really. So I go to log in and realize I still can't. I get a "password incorrect" error. After some investigation, I find that my account is created, but not "approved" ... so I still can't post some advice.

I find that entirely disheartening. I mean ... all I wanted to do was give some advice to someone who was having problems. I had to jump through hoops to set it up so I could, and I still have to wait for "approval" of my account. Things like this are exactly why I removed myself from them in the first place. They just don't get it. Instead of growing the community, and letting knowledgeable people with the expertise to share it, they have closed themselves off. I mean ... screw them now. There is no way, even when my account is approved that I am going to waste my time going back there and making any posts. I mean ... it's annoying that a group who is based upon the ideology of "sharing" that they think it's a good idea to restrict under their kingdom of who should be allowed to share.

So the Cannucks lost, Sens won, Sabres won, and Det is up 3-2. I'm pretty dead in my pool thanks to Vancouver. Oh well. I was in the money last 2 years. Time to let someone else make good in the cash.

IIS Stupidity, LInux Wankers & The Cannucks

2007-04-26T09:45:00.000-06:00

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!

What Bullshit

2007-04-24T01:23:00.000-06:00

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.

SATA, Short Rates & Karma

2007-04-18T09:00:00.000-06:00

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.

MDT, mediawiki & snoozester

2007-04-05T05:23:00.000-06:00

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!

Montreal, Disasters & the Montreal Flu

2007-03-04T23:38:00.001-07:00

So this is another "after the fact" account, so I'm sure I may miss out on a few details, but I'll break you off a piece of our trip to the land of maple syrup and strippers.

AJ and Ian picked me up in the morning, and we were off to the airport. A quick phone call to Serge along the way to confirm plans, and the excitement begins. We checked our bags, and had a coffee, and we dashed for a last smoke before the flight. Apparently the Calgary Airport is even doing away with the smoking rooms past security starting April 1st. I don't see any harm, but I don't make those decisions.

AJ had his seat elsewhere, and Ian and I were crammed into the very last 2 seats at the back of the plane. The gentleman with the ginormus melon for a head decided he should lean his seat all the way back for the entire flight. Being that we were the last seats, and I could not recline mine, and given the fact that I am the complete opposite of being small this made for a very very uncomfortable flight. AJ seemed to find some humor in the situation ... I did not.

So we landed finally, and on our way out the door to smoke, I said to Ian "So I'm thinking that guy holding the Jevco sign is looking for us". So we went over and met Guillaume. AJ will never ever be able to say his name correctly. He is one of the marketing reps for Jevco, and Serge asked him to pick us up, and take us out for the night. Guillaume is totally awesome. Young guy, likes to have fun. He used to work for Imperial Tobacco, and he let us in on some interesting things about the cigarette industry. We found our hotel on "Lincoln" street. Every time we told someone where the hotel was we got the same answer "Where's Lincoln Street?!?!". We're the visitors, and no one seems to know where the hotel is in their own city. It became quite humorous for us. It's a little side street in downtown Montreal, on the corner of Atwater. Just a few blocks off of rue sainte Catherine.

We dropped off the bags, and we were on our way to centre bell. Serge had organized tickets for the hockey game. Montreal Canadians vs Toronto Maple Leafs. It was sure to be a good game. We parked a block away for like $8, and walked to the Bell Center. I must say that is a very impressive facility. Being used to the traffic jams, expensive parking, walking for ever to even get to the front doors, and then the dead halt of the cattle jam in the Saddle Dome, this experience was refreshing. The layout of the bell center is _way_ better. Better seats, better traffic movement. We even had escalators to get up to our level. tres cool. Ian and I sat together in the white section (front row, third level), while AJ and Guillaume sat in the blue level (second) somewhere on the other side.

[backtrack]

Disasters:

It never fails that as soon as I leave something goes down. I got to the bell center, and turned on my cell phone to find numerous voice mails. "Server is down, SMTP is not working at all!". So now in a slight panic, I make a phone call to find out that someone restarted something, and all seems to be good again. Thank goodness, cuz I'm in a hockey arena, and there is no laptop, and no internet.

Disaster fixed

[/backtrack]

So now that we are settled, my body starts talking to the brain and informs it that I am in need of sustenance. FEED ME! FEED ME! FEED ME! (Good on those who caught the little shop of horrors reference). So off to get hot dogs. The bell center has totally awesome hot dogs. Not the typical bun with a wiener in it. At the bell center they have hot dogs in toasted flat buns. You pre order with mustard and relish (or none if you choose). I was super impressed. No pissing around at the condiment center after, and they are smaller, and tastier than big soggy buns. They were so good, I had to go back for more after the first period. The hockey game was awesome, MTL gave a serious thumping. And since I hate the Leafs I was quite happy. I must say, the fans are so hard on Toronto. My favorite chant of the night was "Worst Team In Canada". It's funny cuz it's true.

So hockey game is over. Lets get on with the night. We dropped the car of at our tour guides house, and took a cab to "Solid Gold". Beers and boobs were in order. They even had porn going on the big screen. The French sure know how to do up the debauchery right! Being used to the degrading throw loonies at the girls in Calgary type strip clubs, I much like the Montreal clubs. Dancing, and private dancing, and much more excitement than we are used to. 5 of 5 stars for sure! Thank you Guillaume. You are my favorite person in Quebec now. ;-)

We had to make a food stop again. But being in a new city, we ended up with little choices, and the cab stopped for us at McDonalds. We loaded up. Some more than others. AJ ordered a double big mac meal, a double cheeseburger, and three mini chickens. Oh and on the ride home he ate half my fries, and half Ian's fries as well. So full, and so hurtin the next morning. McDonalds and drunk is not a great idea!

Now we are feed, watered, and entertained night one. Lets remember that we had a business meeting tomorrow. Serge was expecting us to be a little bit late anyways. He knew what we were up to. So we got up in the morning, and I grabbed a quick complimentary breki downstairs. just cereal, and some coffee. Nothing to harsh on the tummy this morning. I brought AJ a muffin, but he never touched it. I ate it later. :S. We caught a cab, and headed down to Jevco.

We arrived, and got shuffled around a little bit, and ended up in a board room. I met Serge, and several other people we were meeting with. Apparently Serge had already been appraised of our activities, and was warned that I was "Big like a football player". It's funnier when you hear it in a French accent. We also met with Briggette (sp), Martin (briefly), Michael (?), and a few others. I'm just the tech guy I can't remember all the names. the meeting went very very well. We were all quite happy. I think they were quite impressed with us. Ian said AJ and I did very well in the presentation. I am happy.

Serge took us all out to the Italian restaurant next door "Villa Rossi". Apparently Jevco ended up buying the building to do renos on the outside of their building (some property line thing). So we actually ate at "his" restaurant. Great lunch. So the day was done, and now we were free for the rest of the afternoon, and meeting Serge for drinks at 5:30 downtown. We got back to the hotel, and took a well needed nap. Watched some really really bad curling, and passed out at intervals.

We traveled down to Crescent Street to find the meeting place "Thursdays" pub. As it turned out the pub had no power. So as we were waiting for the guys from Jevco and having a smoke we saw the extensive advertising for the strip clubs. I've never seen a truck with a rotating sign in the back with jiggly girls on it. Impressive! Serge and Martin showed up, and we headed next door to Winston Churchills pub. Nice little pub. We started in on the drinks, and they were going down smooth. Serge wanted to take us to this Brazilian restaurant, where they serve the food on "swords". Alright! This should be fun.

I think the place was called Le Milsa. It was totally awesome! Everything was grilled (chicken, bacon wrapped turkey, sirlon, sausages, pork ...) and it all comes around on these big sword like grilling spikes. They just bring it around, and cut you off some chunks. All you can eat. You also get chili mushrooms, rice, and breads. For desert you have your choice of ice cream, and grilled pineapple. The grilled pineapple was FANTASTIC. Glazed in cinnamon. So tasty. They even had live entertainment. There was a man and woman. She was dressed up in bikini, and these puffy feather head wear, and tail. He had a tambourine. She danced, and performed. Got the patrons dancing (Serge, Martin and AJ). It went on for a good half hour. I myself was really impressed with the tambourine work. Really neat musicianship. It was totally fun. I highly recommend it to anyone traveling to Montreal.

After dinner we took a little trip to Wandas. We hung out, and watched the ladies for a while. Since Serge and Martin were not really on vacation, they left shortly after there. Ian, AJ and myself headed elsewhere to "The Downtown". Rye and cokes come unmixed, and I enjoyed that. Drinks were tasty. girls were nice. The establishment was a little suspect. Around 1:30 AM we decided to call it quits, and headed back to pass out.

The next day, another business meeting fell through, and we basically spent the day being vegetables. Way slept in, and lounged around. A hectic no sleep weekend, followed by 2 days of partying had taken it's toll. We were kinda worn out. Later in the afternoon, we took a walk down St Catherines. I stopped in a shop and bought some souvenirs. We headed back down to Crescent st. We choose to go back to Winston's for a bite. I got to try my authentic poutine. I never did make it to La Belle Province (recommended), but there has to be something left for next time. We kept it pretty low key, as we were fairly tuckered out. We started to walk back. I guess a big fat guy like me walks to slow for AJ and Ian, so they pulled over a cab after a few blocks. They did try and spare my feelings, blaming the coldness ... liars! ;) AJ went and grabbed some beer for the motel. We chilled, and watched the Flames game on TV. AJ passed out and spilled his beer. We went to bed with aspirations of getting up early. AJ had a 7:00 flight, meaning arrive at the airport 6:00, and leave the hotel 5:30. Somehow, both my alarm, and Ian's alarm did not go off. So getting out of bed at 5:50 seemed scary. We mad dashed to pack, and get into a cab. Somehow we arrived at 6:25. AJ still had time to make his flight. Although his luggage would not. Ian and I got to relax, and smoke. Have a coffee, and hit the gate with time to spare.

After a nice flight home, Ian and I realized in the mayhem, AJ did not provide keys to the Izuzu, so cabbing it home was in order. I though I had a sore neck from sleeping upright on the flight. No bother. Turns out I was getting sick. Next came the sore throat, and the headaches, stuffy nose, and cough. So I am calling it the Montreal flu! Hopefully will be feeling better by tomorrow. Although I could use some time off to relax (not party relax ... relax relax). I know there is so much to be done. Lets get to it.

Ktorrent, Coding & Dusk 'Till Dawn

2007-02-24T23:35:00.000-07:00

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.

FDPI, Xvid & Car Seats

2007-02-13T11:19:00.000-07:00

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.

xinerama, SSH & Emergencies

2007-02-11T04:22:00.000-07:00

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.

I'm Going Insane

2007-01-27T23:05:00.000-07:00

Prepare for the vent!

I have way too much shit rolling around in my head! In addition to that I'm in a shitty mood, and have been for quite sometime. Sure I'm over being sick for an entire month, and what do I have to look forward to as soon as I am better? Having my limbs pulled in every direction possible.

Let's see what I've been up to? Built my own debian 3 kolab security rpms, because the kolab group are wankers and "don't have any clients on debian 3.0 anymore". Done several dist-upgrades to dapper each with their own oddities. Bombarded with "Can you add this on the website" emails. "Can we add this feature to the system?" conversations. I've built new servers sitting here beside me. Chased down domain problems because other providers are fuck wads and moved domains without telling the owner cuz they get a kick back at another registrar. I've been to several new client meetings. I've investigated unfamiliar technologies to see if data conversions are possible. I've trouble shot servers, and firewalls, and network problems. "I get this SSL error saying the server doesn't support SMTP + SSL". Well if you hadn't changed the firewall to block the traffic on port 465 it wouldn't be a fuckin problem now would it? Oh yeah ... and meanwhile I've written a system to do motorcycle insurance policies.

I'm grumpy. I am in a never ending world of my todo list and people nagging at me. With all of that going on work related, everything else in my life is just compounding on my unhealthy mental state. So I try to relax and play some poker then maybe I can be calm enough to tackle some work ... WRONG! Lets finish in the bubble boy spot in 3 tournaments in a row (last guy out before you can win any money). So now I want to throw the monitor across the room. I forgot that my internet periodically just shuts off for a while, and the modem can not connect. So lets call Shaw once again, and have a fourth technician booked to come out.

Lets see here ... what else can I bitch about? Oh yeah ... the crazy lady in my building is now knocking on my door every couple of days. I know it's her because no one else comes to see me, and I haven't buzzed anyone in. I just don't even answer the door, but it annoys the shit out of me. My kitchen sink tap is now in very bad shape and turned a full 90 backwards to shut off, but the plumber is hard to get a hold off apparently. My car seat is still fucked, and I need to get that fixed. GST return is due in 5 days and I have not even started my accounting. I have to go and chase down some paperwork, and get a cheque from someone. The first cheque had a problem, and now I can not seem to hook up and get the new one (they are not avoiding I must say ... just playing phone tag, and scheduling issues). I have not bought new clothes in like 2 years ... and I just realized some of my pants have a _HUGE_ rip right in the ass. A non-fixable rip I might add.

I was offered to go to Scotland with the pipe band, and spent a bunch of time making some changes to the drum scores so they are prepared to make a run at the contest, some of the drummers didn't take to making changes ... IN JANUARY! when the worlds is not until mid August. Stupid lazy fuckin drummers. wah! I don't wanna learn something new in 6 months. Not to mention there's a big shitload of police / band politics about who is going on the trip now, and I might not even go. It's a wait and see ... and honestly I really don't feel like putting in any effort whatsoever to make it happen. If I can't go because of stupid shit ... then fuck em.

I am really on edge, and I'm scared that the slightest thing is going to set me off soon. I just realized today that my plan was to get back into going to the gym in September. Take mornings for myself. Well 5 months later, and I am so far away from that plan it's not even a glint on the horizon. There is not enough tea in the whole world to calm me down right now.

I must say that I am thankful that my arm is not broken. A girlfriends father did not shoot me in the back (My friend from back home : James Hayward, rest in peace). I am not going through a break up with a significant other. I have a warm place to sleep, and my grievances are really minor in a humanity scope. Just don't be the next person who cuts me off in traffic.

Maybe I'll go into the office to work tomorrow. A change of scenery could help.

*sigh* ... pounds fist on desk ... *ouch*

Sick, Christmas & Poker

2006-12-27T01:15:00.000-07:00

So I'm breaking the norm and skipping anything work related. Not because there isn't any happening. I admit work slows down in December, but lately I have not been doing too much work. I have been extremely under the weather with the flu for almost 2 weeks now. I've had some ups, and them some downs, but it hangs on, and seems to be back somewhat. I am functional now, but for a while before Christmas I was residing mostly on my couch or in my bed.

I've been pumping the vitamins, and cold medication. For a while I started off my days with a double neo citron ... and took the cold/flu pills with that. It made for an interesting buzz and I think I'm missing a few days in there somewhere ... but whatever. Drinking gallons of tea, and I rediscovered my love of Sunny Delight. I tried some new cold medicine, as the usual (Contac) changed their formula so there is less pain killer, and less juice in them. I bet there was some medical regulation and they were originally too powerful. That's why I used to use them all the time ... because they were soooo powerful ... gots me well in a hurry.

So still being sick the Christmas holidays did not wait for me to get better. I ended up jamming on some festivities (a lot actually) because I was so under the weather. Rich and I did manage to get our pictures with Santa at the Sunridge mall though. He still has my picture from last year. But the tradition lives on. Rich ended up heading to Flin Flon. The Youngs are all in Hawaii for Xmas. I drove them to the Airport, and as such I have Robyns new Tundra while she is gone. Man I love that truck. Big V8 ... so fun to drive. I feel like king of the road. Jono came over to my place on Christmas eve. We watched a little football, and then watched the original Star Wars. I just got the first trilogy on DVD. It was relaxing. Christmas day I slept in, and when I got up I headed over to Mikala's for dinner. Her Mom and Dad were in from the Island, as well as her sister Penny. Of course Mahlah, Peyton and Aaron were also there. We had a delicious dinner. BBQ turkey with trimmings, and even stuffed peppers. It was a feast for sure. I didn't stay too long, as I'm still not 100% so being out and about tears me down quickly.

I've been on a bit of a poker tear lately. Since I've spent so much time sitting around at home, and have no energy to do anything productive I've been sittin in the poker rooms online. I got 4th in a tournament with 600 people. Then 2 2nd places in about 100 person tournaments, and then I won a tournament on Christmas eve night after Jono left. Today I woke up to a message on my phone from Johnny P. He was driving back to Calgary from Regina, and said he wanted to pick me up and hit the casino for a poker tournament. We headed down to the Cash Casino. $50+6 tournament, John said he thinks he was the first person out of the tournament. I was playing prime, and I ended up getting 3rd place winning $620. It was a fun night. John had some time to kill, but ended up watching the final table I was at. It was a fun night. I think a break from the poker is needed. Back to working on the projects is the plan tomorrow. I'll explain all of that later.

Happy Holidays!

NTP, Backups & P/M Steve Patterson

2006-12-01T00:06:00.000-07:00

I had a little task that was requested of me to setup NTP service on a couple of servers for a network. Apparently NTP traffic is mistakenly identified as P2P traffic and throttled at the doorstep on the network. Should be easy enough yes? Well it would have been had I not found out about the network limitations until after I had it working. ;-) I had installed ntp-server packages then I started changing some configurations. Since I have never run my own NTP server, as I do not have an atomic clock in my possession, I was learning as I went along. I mean I know how NTP basically works. I had to find some nice stratum 1 servers I could freely use, and although ntpq -p showed all the right things (eventually ... not more jitter of 4000). I could not make use of the servers with ntpdate from my machine. I spent time checking configs, reading up on the web, checking everything on my system, my firewall. Everything seemed correct, and I simply could not figure it out. Then I got the bright idea to try another server on the same network and bingo ... all is well. I am glad that the entire network has available NTP servers.

I also had the bug to fix some backup routines for ourselves. I have changed my method of backing up parts of kolab to simply taking an rsync share of /kolab. It's just way easier to restore when you have the whole tree. There is no recreation of LDAP, not reconstruction of mailboxes. Nothing to copy. Simply make sure the kolab users and groups exist and start kolab. So things moved around, and I'm backing things up to a USB drive. Gregg came back to me with some access issues. Seems in my rsync of the file server shares, I also synced the backup directory with symlinks to the file server with the backup directory with symlinks to the file server with the backup directory with symlinks ... well since windows has a 256 char limit on paths ... oops. I rectified that immediately. I also discovered the joys of using --link-dest option with rsync for differential backups. Hard links make things much nice, and easier to care for. I need to do some more testing, but that is definitely the way to go.

Last night I attended a special band practice for the Calgary Police Pipe Band. I had not been around the band for quite a while. It was nice to see everyone, and I even sat in a little bit on the practice. It was a truly special event because they were having a special presentation to the the former Pipe Major Steve Patterson. Steve had stepped down, and retired from the band this year. We headed to the cuff for drinks and pizza. Al Redford, the previous band officer, gave a set of kind words for Steve, and presented him with a plaque from when we performed with the Strathclyde Police Pipe Band in George Square in downtown Glasgow.

When I joined the band Steve was the PM. In his thank you speech he mentioned members he played with in the band over the years. And although as a leading drummer I played with Steve near the end of his time, he thanked me personally in his speech. I was quite moved. I also owe Steve a thank-you in return. Steve did many things over our time together to help me. From arranging uniform fittings at the airport when the taylor had a 20 mintue layover, to meeting me in parking lots with uniform parts, to hand delivering my #1 tunic to my apartment the day we were leaving for Europe. But I will forever be indebted to him for one special act.

I do not remember the exact dates, but the trip deposit was due for our trip to Europe in the early year of 2004. Just before it was due I was in a car accident and spent almost $8000 to fix my vehicle. When it came time to push of shove for the deposit I had to back out of the trip. Steve paid my deposit out of his own pocket to get the money in for the deadline. I repaid him in due time, along with a bottle on single malt as a token of appreciation. The point is that had it not been for Steve's generosity, I would have never been able to make it to Scotland. I had never been in my life, and Steve told me neither had he. So the best way to say this is "Steve ... we lost our cherries together". Thank you Pipe Major Steve Patterson.

slainte,

kolabadmin, dist-upgrade & Riders!

2006-11-17T01:29:00.000-07:00

I had not mentioned it as I have been super busy. But I had submitted a patch to Tobias for kolabadmin. I started experimenting, and realized that the interface did not do any sorting, so I took it upon myself to do the leg work. It turned out to be not so difficult, as most of the sorting could be done on the LDAP object. So my patch included that into the qldap class. There was only once instance where the entries were added one at a time, so I used a qHeapSort to do it. I even had to write an operator for the class. I hadn't really done any C++ work in a while, so it was quite fun to get back into it. I just heard from Tobias a little over a week ago, that he applied my patch (with some alterations) upstream. And thanks for the work. I noticed he change to use qSort. I am not as familiar with QT as someone of tokoe@kde.org would be, and I mentioned I just didn't know what else to do there. And I see QLatinString now in QT4, instead of QString. It's all good ... I'm contributing again to Open Source!

So I got brave and decided to do a dist upgrade on one of the servers. I'm aiming to get everything running on dapper (server good until 2011). Well I was doing it remotely on an non busy server ... with a complete backup prepared and saved. Was going from Hoary to breezy, and then breezy to dapper. I should have know better than to try this remotely. And I also should have done it when I was thinking clearly. I did not reboot after the breezy upgrade ... and I _know_ I should have. Then the dapper upgrade failed to work as the new lvm2 package fails to install because the old kernel is still running. And after reboot without lvm2 ... things get bad. So a trip to the ponderosa the next AM was needed. I spent hours trying to get the box back on the internet. I finally got things installed, and downloaded and burned onto CD some needed packages. Yet the NICs would simply not work. SCID error messages, and just not working! After hours of mind bending and scratching, and research and no solution. I re installed dapper from CD ... and no problems! Thank God all that ran on the server was a low volume kolab. Which by the way is insanely easy to restore. I backed up the entire /kolab. Just dropped it back in place, and added the kolab users and groups, and started it up. All is good. Yay me. I must say the 1.5 hours to upgrade a different server from breezy to Dapper went on like a champion ... and I have had no problems at all! My grumblings about dist-upgrade not being my friend have ceased.

So Jono had tickets to the Riders Vs Stampeders game here in Calgary. Since I'm a die hard Saskatchewan fan ... "OF COURSE I WANNA GO!". He came down to my pad that morning, and we walked down the block to the local pub. 11:00 and let's get a pitcher of Rye and Diet Coke. I couldn't believe they actually served that ... but the bartender was like "Why not?". We watched the Argos Vs Bombers game on TV. We got invited to some tail gate parties from the bar owner, and eventually took a cab up to the stadium. No its onto beer and tail gaters. Then into the herd going into MacMahon Stadium. Up to the seats while Jono goes for more drinks ... so now we're onto doubles. So I'm like 8/9 drinks into it, and I haven't eaten for like a whole day ... I offered some guy $20 for his hamburger ... because the line ups were _way_ long. Finally I faced my fears and went to get us food. Those burgers were so good! Jono kept provoking me with scotch ... I kept refusing. We got more drinks ... the Riders made a comeback from 21-5 to win the game like 38-25. It was a sea of Green by the end. So awesome. I predicted the win. And I also predicted the Bombers loss .... and INTERCEPTION! Kevin Glenn is a bum. LOL.

Fun with Macs, Sooke & Getting Back

2006-10-28T23:18:00.001-06:00

So it was Monday already and everyone was kinda on their own with things. AJ drove up Island to see Bernd and Bridgette. I let him take my CDs. I got an email mid morning ... "And Justice For all ... I Love You!". I'm here to please. Marshall had school all day, and I had planned to hang out with Brooklyn and do some business stuff with her. We hung out on line for a while, and we figured out how to do certain things with her website, and how the system works from her hosting provider. I think she's all good with that now. We created some new sites, and tested all things out. It happened to be a *nix type system, and therefore I happened to immediatley understand everything that was happening. Permissions to paths ... it all made sense.

I napped again, and she had a meeting. We went to the store for some food, and had a small lunch of sandwiches. And my sour ju-jubes were a hit. I also got supplies for diner the next night. I had said I would cook for everyone. Marsh stopped by for a bit in between class, so we had the car for the trip. When Marshall got home we hung out for a bit, and we had to get Romeo's. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm ... Romeos pizza ... so good!. So now we were fed and watered. AJ arrived after a while, and we were chilling out and looking through AJ's pictures from his trip up Island. Everyone had a fairly low key day. Lets get back to the booze and the battling. Oh yeah ... and some more Asshole. AJ also discovered CDs ... and decided to burn every CD I had, as well as Brooklyn. So several hours after we were all asleep, I could still hear AJ awake. In our drunken states we discovered "photoshop" on brooklyns Mac. The results are quite amazing, and I can not believe the pictures are actually me and AJ ... but they are. Somehow AJ's pics made it into tookit ... but not mine. ;-)

Tuesday was a day for Sooke. Since I was now well rested, I was also first up, and out of the shower while AJ snoozed. We finally headed out to see the power soft folks. We arrived welcomed by the "Welcome C.U.N.T.S. Calgary Chapter!". Dunn is kinda funny. So I visited with everyone. Caught up on the gossip and whatnot. It was all good. Aj, myself, Chris Dunn and Chris Lang all went for Lunch out to the 17 Mile. Aj has a family car which resulted in all of us getting out and Lang got locked in the back seat. He was quite embarrassed ... we pointed and laughed. Lunch was good. AJ and Dunn started off with Tequilla. I stuck with the ice tea. They finally conviced me and Lang to have a shot with them ... then I got in shit because I don't drink Tequilla ... and had Sambuca instead. Lunch was good ... Lang was the butt of many jokes. It was great to hang with them again for a while.

Back to the office. AJ went biking with Dunn for a couple of hours instead of playing golf. I got to hang with Rudy and talk shop. That was my plan all along. He showed me some pretty nifty things he's been working on. I helped him out with a couple of issues, and showed him some cool stuff too. It's too bad Mik wasn't around ... i had wanted to talk shop with him too. AJ was late getting back, but he thought he was on time. We just needed to get back to Vic because I was cooking. Not really a big deal ... I would have wanted to stay longer myself ... but we had plans.

We bolted back to the apartment, and started diner. I had some help, but I was in charge ... make no mistake. I was excited to see Karen and Johnny. They are engaged ... and expecting. That day they had an ultrasound and brought the pictures. It was awesome to see them. Non smoking and totally couplized. Bought a house ... planning a wedding ... and a baby! It was awesome ... they seem so happy. I was excited for them. I made my famous meat sauce, and we had coloured rotini pasta. Brooklyn made pizza bread to go with. I paced myself and was not over full like I normally am. I was quite please at the amount inhaled by everyone. I was more impressed at the amount marshall and brooklyn had for left overs! And by the way ... Brooklyn informed me Orange Cheddar Cheese is bad ... because it is orange dye ... which is bad for you ... but I don't care ... I dig the orange. More battling ensued ... oh and more asshole.

We relaxed and one last round of battling and Asshole. And then night came. We had to get an early start to catch the early ferry and get back to the mainland ... we had a long drive ahead of us. We opted for the "VIP" lounge on the ferry. $10, and you get the comfy chairs, all you can drink coffee, and contenental breakfast. It's totally worth the money. It's quiet, and we read about hockey and current events in the papers. We hit Vancouver, and onto the highway. Immediate mood changes happened. As soon as we were off Island ... grumpiness set in ... followed by AJ and myself screaming "FUCK FUCK FUCK". Not being on the the just sucks ass ... period. We miss Victoria ;)

So we headed back the way we came in, and actually knew where to turn this time. Soon we had bypassed all of Vancouver and were back on the higway. We stopped to gas up in Chilliwack. It was then AJ introduced to to "stackers" at Burger King. Quad stackers ... like the mammoth mountain of hamburgers ... sooooooo good. It's hard to not make a mess all over the place with them ... but we managed well. We had to break in between to relax and get hungry again ... it was definitley required. The drive was going fast. No stops unless needed. We bolted through Kamloops without stopping. It was burning season ... so we had passed many fires along the way. Nearing Revelstoke we saw some massive smoke clouds in the bush. "Hey look ... maybe the enchanted forrest is on fire!". We laughed. Then as we neared we realized ... that was the exact location of the Enchanted Forrest. So know we don't know what to think. We when finally see the sign all we see is smoke directly behind it. We had visions of a village encompased in flames, and dwarves jumping out of castle windows. We had to investigate. When we drove through we discovered someone was buring rubble in a pile right behind the sign. Wow was that weird. A quick stop in Revelstoke at the shell again for gas and diet coke. Then we bolted through to Calgary as fast as we could. We made good time, and I was back home before 10:00 P.M. It was a good trip ... with lots of stories. I can not wait until the next one.

Getting there, Brunch & Goldstream

2006-10-28T23:18:00.000-06:00

So this is long overdue, but AJ and I took a "fake business trip" out to the Island. We decided to leave on Sat the 21st. Too bad I had been on the night shifts, and by the time 4 A.M. rolled around, I decided It would be better just to stay up and wait for him. He arrived around 8:00 with Timmy's in hand. We ventured forth with coffee and new breakfast sandwiches ... which were totally awesome. I came prepared with a newly stocked case of CDs. We started the trip with "The Offspring's greatest Hits".

After a stop in Canmore for AJ to use the can ... while I refilled our coffees, we were back on the high way with a new disc, and only 10 hours to go. The drive goes way faster with someone else, and the towns were kicking past like no time. Soon we were in revelstoke stopping at the shell / Tim hortons ... do you see a pattern? We were coffeed out, so diet cokes it was. Still not hungry we decided to bolt straight through to Kamloops. About this time we decided to get ourselves out of the car. We stopped for diner a Harolds(?) family restaurant. Our waitress was quite funny, and the food was not overly pleasing ... I just remember they had really weird french frys. So after leaving Kamloops I tell AJ "dude ... I'm fading ... I might fall asleep on you". And I did ... I found out later it was only for like 5 minutes, but it felt like hours. So down the mountains, and on to Vancouver. We took the turn at Langley to get to the ferries. Neither of us had a map, and we stopped for directions ... we were so close (We knew we were not far off) ... and a quick turn and onto the highway to the terminal at Twassen.

We were early for the 7:00 ferry, so we hung around in the terminal and drooled over the chocolate makers inside. I was past exhaustion, and just kinda fucked ... but AJ refueled on coffee again. We hit the ferry, and found the amazing massage chairs ... we reloaded until all of our loonies / toonies were gone. So then we found the arcade, and I got my ass handed to me at Ms. Pac Man. We got off the ferry and onto the Island ... relaxing. We phoned up Marshall and Brooklyn and made plans to meet at Christies pub for drinks and eats. It was good to see them. We caught up and joked around. Then it was back to their new place. Brooklyn and I stopped at the store for a few things, and the boys stop at the Liquor store for a few necessities.

Their loft style apartment is really nice. I mean there is an upstairs, but not closed off. Really high ceilings. and quite stylish. We hung out, and started the trend of playing asshole, while AJ / Marsh started to battle. By this point in time I was beyond falling asleep, and I am quite sure I passed out on the futon before anyone else went to bed.

We got up in the morning and headed to the Six Mile for brunch. Brunch is soooooo good at the Six Mile. My mind was awake ... but my body was rejecting being up. Brunch included Marshall putting a creamer in AJ's beer when he was gone, and AJ returning fire by putting eggs in Marshall's beer. Marshall drank the beer eggs and all though ... sick. Yet not as sick as when the Rat came to visit us on the patio. It was like sick and coughing, and just sitting there on the deck. We brought it to the waitresses attention ... she got scared and got another waitress ... who prompted grabbed a menu and brushed it off the deck ... remind me not to ask for a menu next time at the six mile.

So after brunch was done we took a little drive around. We went through Mechosin, and around back of Royal Roads University. Through some cool housing. Then we hit the High way and went up to Goldstream Provincial Park. We were a bit early for the salmon Running, but the environment was so beautiful. We were down in a gulley, with huge trees (Some were marked with signs stating ages over 200+ years (1700's I believe). The trunks were several feet in diameter. The leaves were falling, and it was just calming. We walked along the trail for a while. After goldstream we drove up Island to Cowichan. We planned on catching a small ferry cross the inlet bay, but just missed one, and would have had to wait for a half hour. We just turned around and drove back to Victoria.

It was a really busy day. I was beyond tired, and my body was starting to give out again. The crew went to Spinakers, and I napped for an hour. Then after a shower I felt refreshed, and went down to meet them. We had nachos, and drinks, and played darts for a couple of hours. The final round was for asshole position. Marshall and I were victorious. Back to battling ... I mean Asshole. Monday is coming up quick ... stay tuned.

Ksysguard, Xming & Tofurkey

2006-10-28T22:56:00.001-06:00

I've been wanting to write about quite a few things for a while, but I just have not been in the mood, nor had time when I was in the mood. But tonight I vow to catch up on my blog, and watch some hockey.

it was Thanksgiving weekend (Canada), and I thought I would get the weekend to relax and catch up on some code or similar activities. it was the first hockey night in Canada on Sat, and I was excited to see hockey again. Nix to that says Fortress. I was woken up in the afternoon (I keep programmer hours usually), and found several IM logs, and emails. In my zombie like state I tried to figure out what the problems were. I had messages from people that upon reboot md0 was fine yet md1 failed. So immediately I think there is a RAID / disk problem. Logging into the servers is extremely slow, and sluggish. I did some md util tricks and rebuilt the array, and things were of no help. The /var partition is on md1 which would make sense to several processes not operating properly.

I called in the cavalry for another look. It always makes me feel like I've done my job when I hear Aaron say things like "neat" or "wow". It also makes me very very nervous. After some more investigation we determined the disks to be fine, and a network problem to be the cause. Try convincing others of that after claiming it to be a disk problem first. No dice. So I picked Aaron and Peyton up and we went on a field trip to the ponderosa where the servers are. We did stop to stock up on candy and appropriate amounts of other junk food.

We arrived and investigated every piece of hardware. Aaron drove, I drove, Aaron drove the clients radios and routers, and after several hours and really really really convincing it was a network issue on their side, it was realized that their new DOS prevention software marked the main mail servers as trying to DOS themselves, and clamped down the network. Nice. By this time Gregg and his family were home, and I had missed all of hockey night in Canada ... Peyton was over tired, and Aaron missed his movie with Mahlah.

While we were out there Aaron did turn me onto kysysguard for monitoring. ksysguardd also for remote monitoring. I love the ability to configure each and every page and sensor on each page. The next day I went to work, and installed such wonderful goodies on all my servers. Now I have a ksysguard which has too many tabs to fit on the screen, but I can monitor all the servers easily now.

This spawned my thoughts of how awesome this could be if we could use it on windows, and I started the looking into of Xservers for windows. I knew about Xming, but never really did much work with them ... c'mon ... when do I ever do anything on windows? But I must rave about it. It was super duper easy to install, and run a little wizard to log in with putty and run a program. I created a few little icons for Xlaunch files, and now I could run ksysguard on a windows machine. Mostly I thought this was cool for some other shared lower level admin people who survive in the land of windows. Neat though. I highly recommend it if you ever need to run X programs through windows.

Thanksgiving was good. I was invited to Mikala (sp), who is Mahlah's sister for diner. Brad (Mikala's BF) was there, and other friend, Mahlah, Aaron and Peyton. I brought Mikala a nice bottle of port as a gift. Since some folks were veggie / veganites. The joke of the night was the tofurkey. There was real food for everyone else, but some people were force fed the fake bird, just to see what it was like. I think Rob said it best ... "Alright ... but I think if I had to eat a whole plate of that I'd puke". All in good fun, but I can't stand that stuff ... it takes very much getting used to ... like 10 years of eating paste. ;-). I glad I'm back to being a carnivore ... I got tired of being hungry all the time.

Pantheon, Installations & Nova Scotia

2006-09-28T00:26:00.000-06:00

"pantheon" ... we finally settled on a name. Aaron and I had a few hack sessions, lots of online conversations, T. has done massive work on documentation, and Aaron came up with the name "pantheon". I was not opposed, and we now have the domain and mail lists ... yet to build a site, but cmon ... it's been a busy month.

I have to admit that my contribution as of late to the project has not been on the scale that aseigo the commit king was. I did do some pretty major things. I did the leg work for integrating the new WYSIWYG editor. fkceditor . So I spoent several hours reading javascript and testing things, writing a plugin, figuring out how to integrate it smoothly, and allow for upgrading, and customization. I'm sure it will change ... but Aaron made some changes as well, and I think with a few things wrapped, and our simple changes we ended up with some really cool things.

Aaron went on to write the CMS Object insertion dialog. It's pretty swift ... nicely done ... CMS Object images ... the whole 9. I frantically finished the internal documents, and pages linking the night before he went to Dublin for Akademy. The whole goal was to release in Oct, and have a beta ready for him to show of our new toys to some people he meets with. So I was fairly happy, and we'll see what happens next.

I've been have a hard time finding time to code for my own personal things ... although I do really enjoy it. Life and work seems to get in the way. We had a project for a new client. I got a low level HP server. Couldn't install it ... the SATA RAID controller is unsupported in lunix ... well people have "made" it work. Proprietary closed source drivers available for RHEL, and SLES ... so I just told Gregg get me a new card. Some Adaptec card ... the RAID doesn't work ... but I didn't care as it's jsut a BIOS software RAID, and the Linux SW RAID is faster ... so as long as I could read the hard disks ... I was a happy camper. Set up the box ... Marc installed the MyBooks stuff. and we installed on site. I made a total of 3 trips out to Linden. I was quite happy with the project. There were no major problems once I could build the box. Things are good.

Yesterday in sort of a "we've been told" kinda way ... we had to move an entire rack to a different floor in a building. It was so bad ... although I did get stuck in the elevator with it. It kept getting stuck on the slots of the doors, and then the alarm would go off ... so down a floor, and back up and give it another go. We did scare the crap out of some ladies on the 11th floor. I guess it could be kind of alarming to walk into an 8 foot computer rack when you are not expecting it. We did get to clean up some cables, and power cords / supplies. Thigns went quite smooth there as well. Took total time of about 3 hours start to finish.

On a personal note. My sister has moved to Wolfville Nova Scotia to attend Acadia University. She's having an interesting time ... but I have talked to her a few times. I've forgotten already again ... but I believe she is doing her masters in sociology ... go Diana! Maybe I'll go see her next summer ... maybe.

Lukas Lukas Lukas

2006-09-14T15:33:00.000-06:00

I remember some time ago mentioning something about Dilana getting second place? I called it pretty close I thought. I predicted Magni vs Toby, and Magni gone. I said all along it was a coin toss. I admit I picked Toby, and he went home next. I think the audience was really surprised with that. Dilana was so cocky ... pick me ... I'm the best ... bitch.

Good for Lukas ... It's so justice the he of all the rockers beat her out for the job. I'll bet she still wants to just strangle him now. HAHAHAHA. Canada kicks ass on rock star.

Lukas has the "swagger" they were lookin for. He's got the talent, the attitude, the personality, the brains ... I don't care what Lang says ... he deserved it from day 1.

Rockstar - Hard Call

2006-09-13T03:09:00.000-06:00

Covers :

1. Magni
2. Dilanna
3. Lukas
4. Toby

Originals :

1. Lukas
2. Toby
3. Magni
4. Dilana

That's my thoughts on the performances. We've already heard the originals once (or twice) before. Lukas revamped Head spin into an acoustic powerhouse. Toby didn't stray much from his original setting, but it is such an awesome song. I disagree with Tommy a little bit, Magni's song is much more memorable than Dilana's. Her original sounds like a soundtrack song, that isn't a hit.

As for the covers tonight. Magni shook the show with a Deep purple cover of hush. He was awesome. As much as I don't care for Dilana, she has guts. She took a kiss of death song in Roxanne, and made it a huge success. The other guys sang back up, and when she sang ... it was brilliant. Lukas did a Radiohead cover, and it was good ... nothing spectacular, and his preformance was great too. Toby's cover seem lacking to me. There was nothign special, and it's not an overly great song.

Although it is a hard call. I will not disappoint, and make my predictions. Dilana has totally redeemed herself, and will stay out of the bottom. I think Lukas will pull through because of the bands praise. I think Tommy's comment did Magni in ... bottom two for sure. I also think Toby didn't bring it like he did the last few weeks, and he'll end up squaring off against the ausie.

With that being said ... I think Magni with bite the dust. He's great ... just hasn't been over the top great ... which you would expect the winner to be. So between Toby, Dilana, and Lukas ... I think if they have to perform another original Dilana is screwed. She just doesn't have the creative talent ... and a voice isn't enough. If Toby really brings the pizazz ... I think he has the edge. And If Lukas nails whatever it is he takes a stab at ... then he's got the edge as well. So flip the ol coin between Toby and Lukas. I'm going to throw down the staff and declare Toby my choice to win. If they choose Dilana ... I'm boycoting all purchases of supernova materials.

Final Rockstar Rankings

2006-09-05T23:03:00.000-06:00

Hello fans ... this is the final week of Rockstar rankings as next week is the finale. I'm not sure if there is another vote, so I may add one more list ... who knows. Anyway ...

1. Toby Rand
2. Lukas Rosi
3. Storm Large
4. Magni
5. Dilana

Toby kicked serious ass all over tonight. His cover of "Mr. Brightside" was spot on ... great song for him. I love that song ... and he totally nailed it to the wall. His original song was awesome as well. It was really high energy ... I could listen to it getting pumped up to go to the bar. Lukas ... he has balls the size cantelopes. He took the untouchable Bon Jovi classic "Livin on a prayer" and made it his own mellow and deep track. His original song I really really liked. Mellow again, something I would listen to all day long while working on the computer. Storm rocked on her cover of "Suffergate city". Dave Navarro jumped ons tage with her. She sang like it was just a wild party. Her original was very high energy. It was a great song, good lyrics, and well created. I didn't like it all that much, it just wasn't my speed, but I goot give credit. Magni had a stock good performance, but nothing really different than previous. I don't know if it will be enough to carry him all the way ... but he is very talented, and does fit the mold of the front man really well. I loved his original tune. I would totally rock out to it on a road trip. Dilana had a memorable performance on her cover tune. She actualy sang awesome for some of it instead of growling. I thought she was _way_ better than last week, but compared to everyone else she just didn't compare. She was forgettable. I did not like her original song in the least. It was too simple ... I agree with Gilby ... she just doesn't have the creative talent the others seem to have ... I predict this is her downfall, and based on her original ... she'll get the axe tomorrow.

Yellow

2006-09-01T23:23:00.000-06:00

I just bought a bag of Peanut M&Ms ... I did not realize it was the special bag of "Pirates Of The Caribbean" M&Ms. I opened the bag to discover ... every M&M is yellow. Different shades of yellow to represent a treasure chest is the gimick. I fucking hate Yellow M&Ms!

Killer Rockstar Rankings

2006-08-29T22:52:00.000-06:00

1. Toby Rand - Rebel Yell
2. Lukas Rosi - Lithium
3. Magni - I Alone
4. Ryan Star - Clocks
5. Storm Large - Bring me To Life
6. Dilana - Mother Mother

It was a totally awesome episode of Rockstar this week. And by the way Tara ... even if it had been on at the same time ... House would be worth missing to watch Rockstar ... hands down.

Toby was out in front in my opinion. He sang great. It was an awesome song. And his stage performance was head and shoulders above everyone else. He got some honeys up dancing with him. He got the crowd singing with him ... it was great. Lukas had an awesome song. He performed great, sang to the audience the whole set. Brought the house down. Some of his vocals go a little bit wonky, but he has such great performance he gets my appreciation. Magni gave an over the top performance compared to previous. He also had an awesome song. He moved around and was captivating. Ryan started out behind the piano, and I thought ... "again? ... change it up man". He did surprise me by ditching the piano and jumping on top of it. I don't really like Coldplay much so I was not impressed by the song much. Then he went back to the piano again ... I thought he stepped it up ... I guess the same old is what he is about. He can wail like a champ ... he's got a set of pipes on him. Storm looked great and she can sing, but I didn't care much for her singing on this song. I think I was also a little bored with this song ... since it has already been done twice by other performers. It was a little played out. Dilana was last. Dave raved about her performance ... I disagree. I admit I'm a Dilana hater. Her voice was terrible tonight. She sounded like Steve Erkle meets Buckcherry. I also really really dislike the song she got. She was not in the initial bottom three. I think cutting Magni's head when she smashed the glass lost her some points with the legion of junior high kids, regardless of what comforting things Tommy Lee, and Dave Navarro say to her.

I predict Dilana will live this week ... might be in the bottom 3, but I have faith in the tweenie idiots to make sure she isn't. I predict Storm bites the dust. She was by far below the other performers.

It's nice to be right

2006-08-23T22:07:00.000-06:00

I said Patrice was going home ... and so she did tonight.

"Dilana ... I gotta ask ... what the hell were you thinking?!?!?!?!" ... Dava Navaro is my favorite person in the world right now.

It was so hilarious ... they showed a ton of clips from the past week showing Dilana being an ultra bitch ... and she got nailed for it ... the other singers don't like her ... I don't think Dave likes her ... and they didn't even ask Supernova about her ... which in my mind means they were beyond unimpressed. The crowd actually booed her. IT WAS AWESOME! And still she couldn't even suck it up and just move on ... she actully tried to defend herself.

Magni ripped it up playing Jimi Hendrix - Fire. Toby fired up the joint with Stone Temple Pilots - Plush. Patrice picked a song by the Pretenders ... as I said before ... her music style jsut isn't there for this band ... she's too poppy. Oh well ... I'd still nail her. ;-)

I predict Dilana lands in the bottom 3 next week.

Oracle Installer, Postgrey & Broke Back Italy

2006-08-23T00:20:00.000-06:00

So I've been getting some grief about not bloggin much. "Your blog is all about that Rockstar show now". Yeah yeah ... I realize the work / life details have been missing recently, but I just haven't been motivated to actually reflect on what's been going on the last month.

something I have been waiting to write about is my abhorment of the Oracle installer on windows. For a client they connect to a production Oracle database locally and run Crystal Reports on it. So SSH tunnels through PuTTY, and CR is bad enough. Installing and setting up Oracle on their new systems was enlightening.

Several pages of documentation left by the previous head geek to the boss geek, and passed on the worker geek (me), to try and help the lemming geeks set this all up. Pages of fixes for windows running on Pentium 4 machines and fixes to get the applications to launch from the start menu ... yes ... you have to hack things to get their applications to launch from the menu.

You need to pass -nojit to the java options in order for things to work properly. Oh and the net assistant gets launched during the installation, but it hangs, and you have to manually kill it. But the install still works, and go on your way kludging things. Bizarre! Not to mention after you are all done we had to manually edit tnsnames.ora to remove the appended local domain which is magically appended during the install. Whatever. I know what to do ... the instructions are noted and altered to our specific needs ... done.

So I've been back in the land of SPAM again. Some sticks have been poking in my sides. After some discussion with a new colleague, he mentioned something about "greylisting". I said I would look into it. Greylisting is when unknown messages are received by a mail server, it will reject with a temporary failure (450) and to try again later. The idea is that most spam is not through legitimate servers that will make a second attempt. So if we never hear back, no spam. In the case of valid email, the original server will requeue and try again later.

I found "postgrey" which is a greylisting daemon built to integrate with postfix. So I tried it out. Luckily there is a great ubuntu (debian) package available. apt-get install postgrey, edit a couple of files to set my timeout, and max age values, and add a single policy to the postfix smtp_recipient_restrictions. Immediate results. My personal mail server I was getting about 140-170 spam mails per day. In the 6 days since I turned this on I have received a total of 15 SPAM messages (all of which were caught by spamassassin). That's a decrease of 98.3% of my SPAM. WOW! Gregg had a reduction of 100% of SPAM for the short period after we set it up on his personal server. We quickly installed on the fortress servers. I install on L&Y ... and they have been _RAVING_ about the reduction in SPAM. Jack said to me ... what happened to the 30 crap emails in my inbox this morning ... I'm not getting them anymore? ;-) We just installed on another client. Gregg said to me ... "Why doesn't everyone do this?"

We do realize that legitimate emails will be delayed for a short time. And potentially quite some time depending upon the originating mail server's queue times. But the benefits _way_ cripple the disadvantage of a few late emails. And after a configurable amount of successful challenge and response runs, the sending servers become whitelisted, and they are not challenged any more. There is also a postgreyreport utility to analyze the logs and see who is getting the spam and from where it is coming. Nifty.

So the other night I went out to meet some people. Rhonda and Courtney were our mystery guests on the pub crawl a year ago. Rhonda was back in town from Italy for the weekend, and I went to meet them at Kilkenny's. It was good to see Courtney as well and not just have a IM relationship with her ... she does actually exist! I met some of their friends, and it was a relaxing night all around. We were discussing a friend of mine who is an actor. Court was skeptical of the story of "actor", but it's true. He's in a real movie produced by George Clooney. Speak of the devil he phoned me while we were at the pub. I talked to him briefly and got some news from him, that he has another role in a new production. I had to tell John the news and we laughed only because we know our best friend. I put it to John like this ... do you think he is more a Heath Ledger, or Jake Gyllenhal type?

Rockstar rankings

2006-08-23T00:06:00.000-06:00

1. Toby - layla
2. Magni - Smells like teen spirit
3. Ryan - Back of your car
4. Lukas - All these things ...
5. Storm - Cryin
6. Dilana - Every breath you take
7. Patrice - Beautiful thing

Alright ... I know I skipped last weeks Rockstar, but I was late getting home from poker with the guys, and I missed Sayra's performance ... not that I apparently missed much ... but I felt it would be unfair to comment without watching the entire group.

I made sure to catch the whole show this week ... despite the TV stations from messing up my times. It was on global at 8:00, and CBS @ 11:00, instead of both at 10:00 like it should be. Whatever.

I have to say ... people bug me ... they are so dishonest. IMO Toby should have been canned a couple of times ... but all the tweenie girls think he's hot and vote a jakillion times online. Just like everyone saying Dilana is sooooo awesome. Honestly ... she's done nothing special since her cyndi lauper cover. And now she has attitude because she's been getting good placings, and sang with the band. I hope she comes in second ... so close yet so far or something.

Anyways ... I thought Toby rightfully deserves an awesome vote this week. He performed an awesome version of Layla ... musically I was indifferent, but showmanship puts him up in the top. Magni rocked the house as usual ... awesome song too. Lukas was brilliant again ... I agree he turns around too much on stage ... but that can be a habit to break. Ryan had an energetic performance, and his original song was really good. I'd need to hear it some more to give a better critique, but I like what little I got to hear. Storm performaed Cryin ... a song I've always liked, and did a good job. She didn't turn my head doing it ... but someone has to land in the bottom. The band raved about Dilana ... I thought it was boring. And her little boo-hoo I don't talk to my mom and that's her favorite song was pathetic. But as per usual ... the legions of musically inept junior high kids will go gaga for it. Dilana is what Brittney Spears will be in 10 years. Patrice ... my girl ... see at least I'm honest about it. I'm rooting for her and always have been, but her original song is as far from Supernova as you can get. It was more along the lines of Train / Counting Crows. I predict she's out like a gay bartender tomorrow night.

This weeks Rockstar rankings

2006-08-09T20:08:00.000-06:00

1. Magni - The Dolphin's Cry by Live
2. Storm - We Are the Champions by Queen
3. Lukas - Creep by Radiohead
4. Patrice - Instant Karma by John Lennon
5. Dilana - Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who w/ Gilby on guitar
6. Josh - Interstate Love Song by Stone Temple Pilots w/ Tommy on drums
7. Ryan - Paint It Black by Rolling Stones
8. Toby - Burning Down The House by Talking Heads
9. Jill - Mother Mother by Tracy Bonham
10. Zayra - All The Young Dudes by David Bowie/Mott The Hoople

Magni brought the house down this week. I love Live to begin with, but he gave an incredible perforamce ... encore for sure. Storm kept it less crazy for a second week. She sang her heart out on the Queen song though. Lukas let the voice wail out as well. Dilana thought she was setting him up to fail, and he kicked some serious ass ... including hers in my opinion. The close up on her after his performance was priceless. Patrice really picked up her game. She looked like she was having so much fun up there, and she wasn't trying too hard like in the last couple of performances. Dilana gave an O.K. performance but she really didn't wow me like a couple of weeks ago. I think Dave navaro hyped her up too much, I mean it wasn't that great of a song, and maybe the singers want to make the best performance possible and that wouldn't be it for them. Josh finally rocked it up a bit. His head twitchy bobbing thing bugs me though ... I could never buy a CD from Tommy Lee fronted by Josh. The band / crowd seemed to really like Ryans performance of Paint It Black. It was not bad, but I didn't like parts of his singing ... inconsistent ... some was awesome though. Toby started out O.K. then went gimicky with a megaphone ... I didn't think it was terrible, but I didn't care for it, and neither did the band. Jill still annoys the hell out of me ... and she's the screechy queen. Zayra played the part in costume ... but she isn't very talented musically ... or vocally ... plus it's hard to understand her ... I'd rather listen to Canibal Corpse. I predict she is heading home tonight.

My Rockstar Supernova Rankings

2006-08-02T00:11:00.000-06:00

1. Ryan - Losing My Religion
2. Dilana - Can't Get Enough
3. Dana - Teenage Wasteland
4. Storm - Changes
5. Patrice - Higher Ground
6. Magni - Clocks
7. Lukas - Celebrity Skin
8. Zayra - 867-5309 Jenny
9. Josh - Santeria
10. Toby - Pennyroyal Tea
11. Jill - Don't You Forget

That's my official opinion from best to worst. Ryan was absolutely amazing ... piano solo, and killer vocals. Dilana was smokin ... great crowd performance. I personally thought Dana rocked the house down ... but I also totally love the song she did ... and she did perform _way_ better this week. Storm really changed it up ... I think Jason Newstead wants to nail her ... but she is hot! My Girl Patrice kicked some ass with Tommy on the kit. I don't think she'll win in the end ... she's a little too "fake" in her performances ... but a killer voice! I hate coldplay ... so I wasn't overly impressed by Magni's performance ... but credit where it's due ... he performed well. I didn't think Lukas was overly bad ... but no where near previous performances. He seemed nervous this round. I was surprised by Zayra ... her changes seemed to work punking up the tune ... still think she's done within the next few weeks. Josh's performance was unique, but he's just not what they are looking for, and he knows it ... he's too faggy. I'll admit that Toby had a hard slot right after Dilana's killer performance and no break ... he just couldn't compete ... plus he just plain annoys me. Jill irritates the fuck out of me ... and this is two weeks in a row she got slammed by the group. Dave Navaro was ruthless ... I loved it : "It was that performance where people get up and go to the bathroom ... or get a beer". HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Toltec, /boot & Vacation

2006-07-18T05:40:00.000-06:00

It's been quite some time since I wrote. Not that I have not had some things to write about ... I'll admit I've just been busy ... or lazy. But now is the time. I find my self up quite early this morning, and working away on things while a Gov. Schwarzenegger movie is on in the background. I'm sipping on some milk, and enjoying a relaxing cigarette. So I had the time, and have decided to get things down for history sake.

A few weeks ago I took some time to play around with the Toltec Kolab connector for Outlook. Since we have been using Kolab for several months, and quite a few clients (most of whom have no real need for shared calendars etc), I have been bombarded at times with complaints about Horde not working properly, or being too slow, or just crappy in general. I have done more than my fair share of Horde installations, and debugging. So I am pleased with the new adventure.

A client had a need for use of the LDAP address book, since they were used to exchange. So I tried out the LDAP connector from Toltec. It worked like a champion would expect. I was impressed by the ease of installation, and configuration simplicity. Let me back track on some history as to why I was impressed. Originally, before I was around, Gregg and Aaron had investigated the Kolab connectors. They had favored Konsec as it had an MSI installer, and they found the Toltec connector to be very complex in the setup. When I had made attempts with the Konsec connector, I managed to bork my IMAP account. I then became busy and the connector investigation ceased.

When I was forced into a situation where I needed a connector for a client and found the LDAP installation so smooth, I decided it was time to give the Toltec Kolab connector a go. So one night and about 20 minutes later everything was working. I was impressed. I went to see Gregg a couple of days later, and made him do an installation. He found it very easy. And was very impressed as to what he had done before. I'm not sure what version of the connector they had tried before, but much improvements have been added obviously.

Gregg has been using the connector daily now for a few weeks. He has noticed a few issues, not very large problems, but things we need to find answers too before releasing it to many staff members. He is still of the opinion it is very well worth it.

Some short time after that I received an emergency help call from a client. It was the first business day in July. In Canada this also meant changes to the GST. Since I had been up late coding all night I had shut off my phones, and awoke to 6-7 messages on each phone from various people. And my week begins. So I rushed into the office to see what was going on. I think the UPS was being overloaded by the new servers, which was causing some problems ... mainly power outages ... and this time the mail server didn't come back up.

It did not come back up in a very very bad way. The system seemed to be missing the entire /boot partition. YIKES! that's not so good. I have never seen that before. I've seen some hard crashed servers, and some foobar disks, and filesystems ... but if you have no kernel image to load, and no grub files, and not initrd image etc. Things do not look promising. So I spent a short time investigating, and using Knoppix to get a system, and move some things around.

I copied some things from a backup to USB disk, and restored the boot images, and grub.conf. I double checked permissions and all sorts of standard things ... after about 45 minutes of dicking around trying to fix the broken system, I talked things over with Dwayne and we just decided to relocate the mail server to a newer machine, and reconfigure. There are very few domains / users to worry about, and there are no local accounts any longer, as every has moved to other companies, and different mail servers. It was quicker to rebuild from a backup that to try and fix this. I spent a half hour reconfiguring the HP server to have some extra IP addresses, and checked for remote access. I could finish the setup from home. Things seemed to have worked out well ... only virtual accounts now, or email is simply forwarded permanently. Nerves are shot, but things are better.

Before the long weekend in July, I decided I need a vacation, so I took a few days off. I wore my shorts, and t-shirts. Put on the bucket caps, and shades. I admit I did absolutely nothing for 4 days ... I needed a break. I played some poker, I ate junk, I watched some movies, and I did some computer stuff for myself and no one else. It was nice to relax. Now I'm in the mood for another vacation ... but I've got some work that needs doing ... we'll save that for another entry.

Domain Controllers, NVU & Big Pizza

2006-06-27T12:49:00.000-06:00

Man do I hate dealing with windows authentication! As you can probably already tell, I've been dealing in the land of Microsoft for the past few weeks. It has been less than fun. If you log into a *nix machine, and you don't have a .bashrc file, have you ever seen a message saying "I'm sorry we can not find your .bashrc file, a temporary one will be created for you, but it will be removed upon logging out". Those in the crowd now laughing know exactly what I am talking about on windows with user profiles.

First the other samba + LDAP PDC I did a month ago was working fine ... until the building got hit by lightning one day, and everything crashed. Just about the entire LDAP database was missing. And what was there was borked anyways. Running the slapd_db_recover utilities and such. "ERROR, ERROR, ERROR, ERROR, PANIC". Um ... that's not so good. Quick decision time is that there are only a handful of accounts on this one, so lets just recreate them manually. Everyone is good again ... make sure backups are running again. LDIF is useful for things like this. ;-)

So the next Domain Controller was a sweet sweet ride. I spent the weekend working on my auto PDC installation, and had it working perfectly with the windows machine I had. We had a demo on Monday morning which went extremely well. I was quite happy with it. Cudos to the Samba team for everything. I also read awesome things about samba 4. Like an integrated LDAP database, and full AD replacement. The demos of the pre-beta in Australia(?) were crowd inspiring apparently. I can't wait.

The next Domain Controller was a snap to setup, and its ready to go. Enter the windows environment, and some 30+ hours later for myself and another technician ... and the new PDC is still sitting there ready to go. We have no problems with the new PDC ... add users (PHPLDAPAdmin), self add machines, all that works. We can't get the windows network to do what we want first.

We can not get the windows server AD to have roaming profiles, and the local machines push their profiles up to the server. We had all the settings right, Ray followed step by step Microsoft official docs. I sort of got one working. I had to login to a PC, change to my new PDC, logout, login in, then I get a roaming profile on _my_ server, log out, login in as admin, change to workgroup, re-join the original domain, log out, login, log out, log in ... then the original server has a roaming profile pushed up to it.

We figure alright we can copy the profile, and move things to the new server ... well it only half works. Some settings are missing, others are half missing, Outlook is screwed anyways because it is local, and messing with the data file management is not so successful. We spent hours upon hours working with several machines. We had machines now not being able to log into any domain, windows 2000 machines were just broken, It was a mess. We have support calls into Microsoft awaiting responses. All sorts of issues ... and my Linux box is sitting there ... working ... waiting for us to dick around with the windows network and make things work. So I sit and wait now.

In between there I had the task of making some web changes to a site. I managed to get the FTP access, and downloaded the copy of the web site. Lets make a couple of small changes ... and then a couple of navigation panel / menu changes. That when I realize that every page (80) are static, and built with Front Page (also known as the code mangler). ;-) It was going to be insane to make those changes they requested. Even harder since I am a hand code developer.

For something like this ... it just doesn't make sense ... well IMHO Front Page doesn't make sense ... but I understand the need for stupid people to be able to create web sites ... oh wait ... no I don't ... HIRE A WEB DEVELOPER!

So I started searching for an OSS replacement that will let me work with these files spit out by front page. Kontour (KDE) did not work :(, although I did make a KDE attempt before looking elsewhere ... sorry Aaron. I tried Open Office Bluefish ... no go. And then I found NVU (en-view). The project is mostly sponsored by Linspire, and devel headed up by an ex-mozilla guy I believe. I checked for a package , and with a few clicks I had it installed on my kubuntu system.

I must say I was quite impressed. Not to mention it is fully cross platform (Linux, windows, Mac). So I am now recommending this to everyone who ever asks me what to use. It has word editing la Front Page, an HTML code editor, and everything just seems to work. The drop list menus didn't work, but they were also not mangled upon saving. The HTML is relatively clean ... although I am not sure if the code was just so poor from FP that this was the best it could do. The pages I changed turned out good with a few mouse clicks, cut and pasty type things and some table manipulation. All was good.

After some explanation of the time consumption for making menu changes to the client. They looked at my demo of what was added ... and said good enough. No need to waste valuable hours changing navigations unless absolutely necessary. Thank god I don't have to mess with the MS crap from Front Page.

So Marshall and Brooklyn came into town last week. They had a wedding on Sat night. We hung out at my place on Thurs for a while. Then I introduced them to Verns Pizza. We order a momma mia ... It weighs over 10 lbs! One pizza! 10 lbs! Marshall handed it to Brooklyn when we picked it up, and she almost fell over. She had trouble walking with it ... I found it humorous. Marshall was excited about it. The pieces stand about 3 inches high, and they are all toppings. He was even telling people at the bar about it the next night. I'm glad I could make Marshall's trip worth while. Brooklyn just giggled. I miss being in Victoria! Cheers,

Staffing, Tomcat & Graduation

2006-06-04T02:26:00.000-06:00

Wow has the last month been tiring. A good kind of tiring, but very tiring. It seems I have lost a new work partner due to non work circumstances, and some other staff have moved on. This left the bulk of work for Ray and myself. Oh yeah ... Gord was in Hawaii for a week too. Not to slight a man some vacation ... it just felt over whelming some days ... Ray and I look like we feel I think. It's all good ... we are big boys ... I'd say we handled it fairly well. A few things got delayed, but it has all worked out in the end. Maybe we should leave the computer industry and become professional jugglers. ;)

While sitting at one clients, dealing with another, I got an interesting phone call from Gregg. He has been talking with the president from a new potential company in the states. They seem to be having problems with an Apache Tomcat setup. Can you call these people and see what you can do? So of course I jumped right into it.

So dealing with several people involved, all of which are in different locations. California, and who knows where else. I supposed I could find out, but I was on a mission to find out what I needed. When asked about working with Tomcat I gave the professional contractors answer ... "Oh sure ... very familiar". ;) So often all of the conference calls while I was in the pub, I went home to tackle this issue.

I was provided with root access to the system, which is in Newport Beach, CA. I believe. I logged in and started to investigate. The system was SuSE 10.0. I had the default apache install, the default tomcat, and even had the mod_jk installed. So they were on the right track. After some reading, and some googling, all I did to get it up and running was copy the default config files provided by SuSE to the right place and restart some services.

So that was about 75 of the battle. I had to go in and change some settings. Configure the CATALINA path for tomcat to launch apps from the base. There were a couple of errors I found ... mostly it was just permission problems. I created a new runtime dir for tomcat to place the PID file. I had the serverlets working from the examples without any work. The jsp pages needed a bit of tweaking. Following through the tomcat log is a little different, but I found the problems. Fixed the web.xml file and things seemed to work like a charm now.

They had already installed some test apps of their own, and I tried to use those. The launch attempt was made, but the error report showed that the actual java programs were not installed, so it's not going to run. I sent out my findings in an email, and I'll probably end up documenting my efforts more formally later. It sure is nice to be the hero.

So my little sister is graduating with distinction from the University Of Winnipeg (Manitoba, Canada) tomorrow. Apparently the graduation will be broadcast online so I can actually watch it. I have an appointment with my mom on the phone to walk her through any problems she may have. My brother registered the account for her to watch ... so she should be good to go. Congratulations Diana! We are all really proud of you! We'll be watching and cheering you on tomorrow!

Samba Upgrade, Toolkit & Bees

2006-06-04T01:50:00.000-06:00

So I had to build a new PDC. Simple right? Seeing as how I had been working on an installation script for Samba + LDAP + PHPLDAPAdmin on kubuntu, it should be simple enough on RHEL right? ... WRONG! Let me say it's not Red Hat's fault really, it's just a slightly different setup. The major problems were due to the fact the PDC I was upgrading was Samba 2, and LDAP 2. We were moving to Samba 3, and LDAP 3. That proved to be not all that much fun.

Of course there are going to be changes. The samba schemas have changed ... but changed in a big, big way. Oh yeah ... those new things called SIDs? So it was not as simple as an export / import. Thank goodness that the samba group has update scripts to take your LDIF dump and create a new better one. I thought that was going to be easy, but after 4 hours of tweaking the system to install the needed CPAN modules, export the data from the RH8 box, and see if an import worked was more than I bargained for.

After some slight testing, and getting the new PDC working in a test environmment it was ready. So last Tuesady was the day to switch the office over. Too bad it was not a full bore switch, but rather splitting users to the new PDC, and leaving some on the old. Well my sleep schedule is all messed up, I haven't slept the night before, already been at one clients. The new PDC should be as easy as switch the windows domains right? WRONG!

So users with 3GB of MP3s on their desktop, incorrect profiles, LDAP records that do not work, and all sorts of other problems made the night fun, and long. We did not even leave the office until after midnight. Manually copying data into profiles, discovering laptops that have local profiles only, and then joining the new domain the system decides to never ever create and use the network profile. Startup scripts seem to half work, user accounts half work. It seems to be all glued together ... I've only been awake for 40 hours now. The very last thing we discover is that the mail server handling all accounts that have now been split between people is LDAP tied in ... aw crap! So users who we changed to the new PDC, and had to create new accounts for, no longer had email, since their passwords were changed, and the Mail authed against the old LDAP ... so back into the office in the morning ... all seems to be fixed now

In between some of that noise, we have been launching the toolkit web system at another client. I was involved with the user training, and key personnel meetings. It seemed to go rather well. As a developer, I am finally getting feedback from the user base need to make this system move along. I had a few more sleepless nights, but they have a pro rata calculator, global contact books, way better search functionality, reparenting of folder in the DMS, document uploads in the commercial system, and a ton of other smaller cool features and fixes.

AJ and I were talking about how it has gone over much better than we ever expected. There was of course some resistance from certain people which is to be expected, but there was also reall enthusiasm from a large protion of the staff. I've been hearing lots of good comments, and general appreciation for all of the efforts we have put in.

During this time, I wasn't sleeping much, and it was blistering hot for a few days. I got home late one night and stripped down and sat in front of the computer to read email, and unwind. After a few minutes I heard the zzzt zzzt of something baning into the light above me. I figured there was a fly in the house. To my shock when I looked above I saw the BIGGEST bee I have ever seen in my life.

I am deathly afraid of bees / wasps. I am not allergic, but had an incident as a child. You want to see a 400 lb man scream like a girl ... bees. I jumped up and ran into my room and closed the door. After staring at the door for a minute ... completely frozen I thought to myself "what the hell are you doing?". I ventured out into my apartment again. I heard nothing So I sat back down and a couple of minutes later the jumbo jet airplane with a stinger was back. I froze again and try to follow him around the apartment. After a few minutes, realizing I was naked and it would hurt being stung on any portion of my exposed flesh, I went to put some clothes on. So now wearing a hat, sweater, and heavy jeans in 30 degree plus heat I was ready to do battle.

I rolled up a pad of paper in half and decided that would suffice as a weapon. So I began the hunt of the little yellow zebra with wings. So now there is the 400 lb man creeping up inches at a time to the bee crawling around on my ceiling close to the light. Finally I had my chance as he was far enough away from the light as to not shatter glass all over myself. I swung ... hit the bastard and pulled my club away. To my surprise this flying tanker truck now started to head directly at me. HOLY SHIT! Now I've made him mad ... so off I retreat into my room again. Heart pounding ... sweat dripping down ... terrified!

Alright ... one last time to venture into battle. I was not to be defeated this time. I stalked, and watched my arch rival until I had my chance. WHAM! I struck the blow for all mankind once again. And once again he came flying right towards me. In a muppet like flailing I smashed him mid air which knocked him senseless to the kitchen floor. I seized my opportunity and repeatedly smashed the terror of Andy's apartment to death. There was no bug explosion, no mess ... just simply the carcass of the stining winged creature lying on my kitchen floor.

It took my heart about 3 hours to get back to normal. And I was simply to drained to deal with the remains of the deceased. He lay there for a day, until I finally scooped him up into the trash, and tossed the bag into the dumpster. I really, really don't like bees.

Dapper, PCMCIA, Crazy People & Bad Back

2006-05-09T00:55:00.000-06:00

That's right! I'm breaking the system and having 4 topics this post. Take that conformity! ;-)

I got a new laptop last week. I won't go into the details but the 15.4" screen is uber nice. I installed Breezy and immediately did a dist-upgrade to the dapper release of kubuntu. It went so smooth I was pumped to give it a whirl on my PC. Well that did not turn out as well. I did the dist-upgrade to find out my X would not start. I had a module that would not load so I just removed the GLCore from the xorg.conf. So now I have X starting. Too bad there is no flashy kubuntu KDM. Whatever ... least of my worries.

I really do like the applications in KDE 3.5.2 better, but some of the packages seem to have changed, or been separated, and the dist-upgrade didn't pick them up properly. My first problem was there was no sound in my KDE apps. It took me a while to figure it out, but the cause was the akode was installed, but the akode-mpeg package was not. Voila I get to listen to the new Chili Peppers single again. Sweet. The next issue was with Konqueror having a black background in filebrowsing mode. I changed the background, but it did not carry over to sub directories. I had save directory settings separate turned on, but a quick on off of that seemed to fix the problem.

My next issue was when I decided to get smart and switch my primary email account to IMAP instead of POP3. I have another Kolab account, and I am happy to say that KMail seems to support a groupware account with other IMAP accounts much before. Last time I tried this it completely messed up my email. So I transferred everything to try it out. I am current transferring everything back. The filters (which I make great use of) do not seem to work very well with a regular IMAP account. The server connection is just too slow for my liking, and I got fed up with manually running filters. Not to mention the server runs dovecot for the imap dameon, and it does not support subfolders (well it can, but messages can apparently only be stored in leaf folders). Back to POP3.

The whole reason I got onto this upgrade was because my work got stalled. I am working on an automated PDC setup with Samba & LDAP + phpLDAPadmin. I have it about 80% complete. Run the script, everything is installed and configured, default groups, default admin user, wrote some hooks to create user home directories, which is also expandable to whatever else can be done by default. I can find the server, and login authenticated against LDAP. The last trick is to setup the automatic adding of machines to the domain.

I was about to get going on this, when I started to have problems with my other laptop running windows 2000. PII 400. It's an ancient Toshiba that does not even have an onboard NIC. The PCMCIA card finally seemed to get toasted. I got another card from Ray, but I can't seem to get it to work. I installed the drivers ... fucked around with it ... I just gave up and will wait for a new machine from Gregg.

I had been working on the PDC thing over the weekend, mostly for my own interest, and also to just escape from the regular work week. Last week I just got dumped on continually at work. I had emails giving me shit for things not being done which were out of my control, I got dumped on for being late to a meeting (I did phone saying I would be late), but I got dumped on all the same ... it was just stressful crap that I'd rather not think about. I hope everything is just whatever now, and I can get back to doing work that matters.

And for the last couple of months I have had a killer hurtin back. I twinged it getting laundry one day, and I haven't been the same since. Lower back pain. Usually worse in the morning. And I suppose sitting all day long doesn't help. I have tylenol ... I'll be alright. ;-)

Live Server, Teaching & Trick Shot Bowling

2006-04-29T23:37:00.000-06:00

It has been an intense couple of weeks on the work scene. I've been adding a bun ch of features and fixes into the L&Y toolkit. I've added global contacts section, and events calendar, added full searching of the entire DMS (with google like search results). I've added features to the DMS interface, the library, the main dashboard, fixed bugs ... and I'm working on personal information profiles right now.

During one of my stints at the office I received a help desk call for the producers scanning being down. I became somewhat worried when I could ping the box, but not ssh in. The connection would simply close. Through some phone calls and discussion, it was found that one of the hard drives had failed. Good thing there was a SW RAID. Ray managed to make it on site, and swapped the cable and things were back to normal.

At our meeting to discuss our findings the next day it was noted in the report that we had recommended to replace that server. Bad things sometimes make us look good. Ray had assembled a new HP DL 380. 4 x 36 GB disks, xeon 3.4 processor, loads of RAM ... it's a nice little server. He set up the RAID and I was good to get in there. We stuck with the corporate solution and installed RHEL4. We ended up buying a new licence, and everything is registered and updated on the network.

Over a few days I moved things across from the old server, created new accounts, move RSA keys and all the typical stuff needed to set the server up. On Wednesday I told Dwayne, he came down and we shut the old server off. Assigned the new IP address, and tested. We tested in house scanning, and email submission from one of the plants. Everything seemed to work as needed. There were no hiccups, nothing out of the ordinary happened. We were all very pleased. Gregg was excited, and surprised at how quickly it went live. It was a real pleasure setting up this server.

In other areas of work I was aiding a consulting company with the setup of monitoring Oracle databases that are not available to the internet. This is a pretty standard setup ... I mean how easy do you want to make it for people to get to all of your data right? We we decide on a solution that they could SMTP what they needed out. I had to setup some mail relaying on old Solaris systems, but in the end it works like a charm. I was however really shocked at the lack of understanding of simple things like account permissions, and hostnames the people from this company had. I mean ... you deal with Oracle servers all of the time ... you must have done this before? They seem to know Oracle pretty well, just not the systems Oracle is installed on ... oh well.

I'm building a new PDC this week. I am pretty stoked about it ... uber nice server. RAID 5, lots of kick. Good stuff. I also get a helper with me. Neil starts on with Fortress next week, and we decided he can be of use working along with me while learning the ropes at the same time. I'm all for it.

Last weekend was my birthday. I didn't do much of anything ... I watched the Flyers loose. They have come back to tie the series 2-2 now. I lay around mostly, and was actually sick Monday and Tuesday. I think I was just a little burned out. Feel rejuvenated after a good run with the server switch though. This weekend is more of the same ... cleaning, hockey and some work. I do have to do the quarterly books tomorrow ... not looking forward to that.

After the hockey games tonight I left the TV on ... and right now there is trick shot bowling on. I never would have imagined such a sport existed, but there it is. I must admit it is mildly amusing ... nothing I could ever get hooked on though. *sigh* I have no life on a Saturday night ... maybe next month I will have a delayed birthday celebration.

update

2006-04-20T19:57:00.000-06:00

veggie ground round doesn't taste any different the next day

Features, Failures & Veggie Ground Round

2006-04-20T09:33:00.000-06:00

So L&Y has a serious case of featuritis lately. Understandable given the amount of time it has taken us to get the toolkit system underway. Now that we seem to have a group of people using the system, we are also having some regular meetings with a group around a laptop / projector and going through things. It already does a ton of things for the office (DMS, BBS, LMS, In/out board, Commercial Prospects, Statistics, Calendars). There's a lot to be used, and a lot to learn. It just so happens that now when users are actually "using" it they all the disease which cause involuntary "can't it do it this way?" and "wouldn't it be better if".

I admit this is the kind of feedback I have been after for months. I keep telling them I am not an insurance professional. I have no idea what works for them ... I need to learn that. I can make it do just about anything, but what I think it should do is probably not best suited for you. I also realize this sounds like complaining. I really am excited about it, but every time we have a meeting my old TODO list gets pushed back, and the new TODO list takes precedence.

I am keen on adding some features into the PHPFWK framework. Reparenting of folders in the DMS is going to be nice. I don't have my list handy, but there's lots of cool things to be done. It's going to be so useful for them when it's all good and finished. I did just finish a global contacts section (searchable of course). And the DMS searching has google similar results. Nice.

So as I had been doing all of this work on new toolkit features one of the hard disks in the producers fax server died. Dwayne said he could hear the sand grinding 15 feet away. Maybe that's why I couldn't ssh into the machine. Pings fine, port scan shows the right services. I couldn't get down there, luckily Ray could. Pulled out the IDE cable on the master drive, the slave (SW RAID 1), picked up nicely. Funny how our report that afternoon suggested replacing that server ;-)

We also had a new server air shipped in. A nice Dell DL380, 3x36GB hard disks, double RAID 1. Ray has it all setup for me today. I'm going to go in and rebuild the server for them. I am downloading RHEL4-U4 to use right now. It was a task to track down the discs, and Dwayne couldn't burn the CDs for me before he left, so 4 hours of downloads later I might have disks. hi-ho, hi-ho ... you know the rest.

I got adventurous last night and was going to try veggie ground round (soy based replacement for ground beef). I decided to make some meat sauce (spicy Mexican style). I had the Mexican style ground round, some spicy salsa and all the veggies / sauces I would need. I turned out alright ... I however just wasn't in the mood for it after I was done. It tasted alright ... it does taste different. Maybe I'm just not into the "Mexican style". I mean I didn't want to throw up after putting it in my mouth, but I found it a little bit chewy. I almost would have preferred straight veggie sauce, no meat / meat substitute. I'm saving it. Will try again on another day. (At least it won't go bad in the fridge quite like meat would). I ended up having terrific tasty fish and potatoes instead.

Oh ... and NHL playoffs start on Friday ... better get my pools entered.

Busy, CMS & Subs

2006-03-30T18:06:00.000-07:00

Wow what an incredible and busy day. Actually the last few days have been both incredible and busy. I did some playing around with Samba + LDAP. I must say it was quite fun and eye opening. Testing out some possible tools for use in both LAM, and phpLDAPadmin. I like the interface on the later much much more, but the previous apparently has system home directory account creation / deletion. I might have to write something up myself to do that, but it should not be difficult. LDAP admin seems to also have built in support for Kolab2 users which is ++nice. :)

I have done some extensive hacking / problem solving with horde as of late. I did submit a bug report when iTip mail invitation links error out with a Kolab integration because there is no IMAP connection when you click the link. It was just accepted today. I also spent some hours trying to chase down what could be a bug related to daylight savings time. Events created after April 2 seem to be one hour ahead in the invitation and acceptance on the attendee side, but remain fine on the event owner. I'm going to wait until after the DST roll over to see what happens.

I problem solved for clients today, wrote some feature additions for another client the last few days including some new statistics graphs ... (jpgraph is ++cool). I had meetings, which went very well and there is lots of work coming down the pipe. That's uber good news for me. I didn't take any sort of liking to my tax bill last week. I'll get over it, and money always helps.

Aaron and I recently got rejuvenated to put some effort into our CMS. I won't speak before the egg is cracked, but there are some reasons for us doing this, and they are really HUGE. Better init, i18n, better CSS / templates in the DB, new configuration ways, moved to SVN from CVS, better layout. I'm excited. With everything else I'm not sure how much time I'll have ... Aaron has been putting in much more work than I these last few days. We do have an opportunity which could lead to me doing tons more work on it ... which is super cool.

Today I went to Macs at lunch and picked up a sub from Subway. I got a little scratchy card and won a free 6" sub. Neat. The other have of the scratchy is a code for their website. You log in on line, and punch in the code. You then get to play this cool little flash game where you build your own sub. You get to pick the bread and cheese, all the meat / veggies, and the condiments. Then you drag and drop the sandwich into the toaster oven to see if you win a million bucks. I ... Alas ... Did not today, but maybe next time. I quite enjoyed the little break from reality and got to pretend I work at Subway. Nifty. Well ... off to my web meeting.

Solaris, CSS Web Sites & 3 Muskateers

2006-03-22T04:24:00.000-07:00

Holy time batman ... it's been more than a month since my last blog. Maybe this will make Aaron happy now. ;-) Blog damnit! You need to Blog. Sorry I can't keep up to your pace of sometimes 3/4 a day, but I try. Maybe I just don't have as much to say as you do. Or maybe people just don't care as much about what I say. ;-)

So ... Solaris is fun. Not really. I've sort of adopted a big system. Two locations, combination of linux boxes, and some sun boxes running Solaris. Let me stress that these are not _new_ systems. The whole beauty of *nix systems is stability, and the reason for some uptimes on these of 3.5+ years. That's HOLY CRAP impressive. It also means that tricks of the trade to do things that have been picked up over the past say ... 4 years (lets be slim on that time span), are not possible. Old kernels, small disks compared to today's 600GB standards. So I can't use external drives through USB ... and a colleague suggested external SCSI maybe, promptly followed by a smirk. Lets just remember that killall does something completely different on Solaris than on linux. No I did not learn that the hard way.

Remote shell access is always a nice thing. It took some time to learn the network, and how to get from a to b to f to j to c to x. That's quite a few hops sometimes, and let me tell you it makes me appreciate the good things in a sys admin's life. One of those things is bash. I'm not sure if Solaris uses ksh as the default shell ... I can not figure out for the life of me why anyone would ever use that shell ... I guess old habits die hard. Maybe I've just become accustomed to things like tab completion, and up arrow history. I caught myself a few times still in a ksh, starting a bash shell, then tailing a log. Now because I wasn't too careful in my keystrokes, it seems that CTRL-C held a little too long really angers me. It stops tailing, but then proceeds to kill the bash shell, and I'm back to square -1, with no history, or tab completion, and I go back to where I was through a few commands. Lets just say chsh is your first friend to make on a Solaris box.

So throw in a few weeks of shell scripting some automatic maintenance, trouble shooting sendmail problems, fighting SPAM, testing out a new Horde Stable release with Kolab, and redoing my entire year of accounting (Damn the BC PST!). Time just rolls on past.

I embarked recently on a web project. We needed to take a web site, and change a few things around, maybe add some content, menus etc. We needed to maintain a style that was agreed upon in the past. So make it look the same, but change it all around too. Simple enough right? Once I got a copy of what had been done, my toes dipped into the frigid cold water referred to as imaging websites. I couldn't believe what I found. Sure it looked alright, but there was absolutely no textual content. 0. -%. Everything was images. From the pictures of people, to links, to actual web content ... just png or gif files painted over top of each other. Seems to be done in front page or something ... messy. But hey ... it looked alright. *rolls eyes*.

I spent about 12 hours chopping up images, playing with layouts, and CSS. I hate playing with CSS. There's nothing really challenging to it ... it's simply frustrating. There's nothing really creative to it, you just have to figure out all of the odd ball ways to make it paint your pretty picture that way you want. Next throw in IE being braindamaged, and having to add a set of properties to work around IE. Lets move things around by the pixel to line them up, lets try and figure out why each browser positions them different, and how to handle that ... bah. I understand the benefits, and you can do some really cool things with CSS, but the frustrating development time is just not my cup of ginger root tea. At least with tables it was quick and simple to develop.

I also recently rediscovered a like for 3 Muskateers chocolate bars. I haven't had one in _ages_, since I was a kid probably. I saw them at the 7/11 a few nights ago and grabbed one. yummy. Does anyone remember Malted Milks? They were really similar ... like a cross between 2M and Mars bars. It was like the perfect intermediate. Good thing chocolate is O.K. for vegetarians (well I'm _mostly_ vegetarian ... I still consume the odd chunk of animal flesh ... but those Burgers the other night after a few pints of beer didn't feel the greatest the next morning).

SPAM, Maintenance, & Migrations

2006-02-20T04:43:00.000-07:00

So meanwhile on the career ranch. It's been busy. I wouldn't say I've been doing a bunch of things I really love. I am however doing things that are beneficial, and greatly appreciated. It's nice to be needed, I just wish I could be doing some more coding. When I actually get to it, I am usually to tired to get my head into it, or I just never get to it period.

There was a rash of complaints about the amounts of SPAM coming into several clients. So off I go into the foray of fighting SPAM. There are lots of different ways to tackle SPAM, and let me say I end up using all of them. Good thing I get to test out spamassassin on my own mail server, and then propagate onto the fortress servers before we move onto the client servers. First things first, pump in the SBL lists directly into the kolab/templates/main.cf.template. Apparently the spamassassin module doesn't use them correctly. Besides that, I'd prefer to have them dumped by the mail server as opposed to processed by the mail scanner to find out they are bad.

For some clients not running spamassassin (yet), I ended up using postfix header_checks options to use a set of rules I created myself (with some help on the internet to dump certain bad things. It has apparently helped somewhat, and no one has complained in the weeks since I put that in place.

For those of us running spamassassin in Kolab, I really had to experiment and tweak things. First things first, amavis runs spamassassin on it's own, and has it's own configurations to control SPAM. This overrides the user_prefs file. Took me a bit to find that out, but it's all good. I am wondering why the amavis default level is 6.3, yet the spamassassin default is 5.0? I had to crunch that down ... normal I use a 3.0 for clients. There's just so much spam out there. I prefer to lower the level, and customize the rules for their system, and opposed to leave a higher level. I've had no complaints thus far.

The last thing I went on to do was search for some more intense SA rule sets. There are a few sites that offer rule sets for people, and you can even automate the update. I'm not worried about that. I found some really inventive rules by some people. I created an SVN module, and a script to install and check the syntax after installation. this makes my updates much easier. Plus it's easy for all the clients to benefit at the same time from my SPAM fighting efforts. Update and run the script, and you are good to go.

I've been dealing with the issue of client maintenance. We have some clients who are signed up for bi-weekly maintenance. What do we deliver for the reports. I wrote a step by step procedure (commands, expected output, comments) on what do do for maintenance. Performing the maintenance is not supposed to be my job. We're working on that as well. The colleague who was supposed to do that actual maintenance is pretty green. He's also new to linux, so I spent some time doing "type this ... now this" kinda help. He missed the mark on what needed to get done. I ended up re-doing the report myself.

When I realized I was redoing all this work, I decided it would be nice to automate this. the time invested in this would payoff huge in the end. I wrote an entire suite of scripts that can be run to gather system information needed for the maintenance report. This is configurable for each client, and all stored in SVN modules. Just check out the SVN module you need for the client, and run their scripts for each server. I spent quite a few hours writing the original scripts. So I decided to time myself on the second server for fortress. Start to finish, with a checkout, running, and debugging the scripts and config, committing, and creating the report from a template took all of 16 minutes. That's pretty awesome. We can now condense the maintenance reports for someone at the company all at once. That's really really awesome. I told Gregg about it, and he was super excited, as he should be because I just saved him a ton of hours, and money. Good on me. :D

I also spent last weekend mostly not sleeping, and installing and migrating the L&Y office onto a redundant Kolab system. I ended up running into a system problem, with the PHP modules, and realized that the apt-get repositories were #@$%!. Some mix up between 64/32 bit, not using universe. I decided it would be easier to just re-install correctly, than try to fix it. I was right, but it encroached upon my sleepy time. The next day Andy H and I started the transition of client workstations. From about 1-7 we finished the entire south office (~35 desktops). That's account setup, and mail exports. This still left 5 satellite offices. I said I'd go to south bend, get Rich to let me in, I haven't seen him in forever anyways. It's only 5 computers ... should be quick right?

I got there about 9 P.M. Was still in the office when Dan came in @ 8:30. Dans computer was slow as molasses is the Yukon, 10 MB network. Plus his computer was having memory issues, and I ended up getting a blue screen of death on windows 2000 reboot. Wow. Rich's network card died after I upgrade him to Office 2003. That office install took over 3 hours. We had some really really unhealthy computers. Jim's import took 7.5 hours for his 1 Gig of email. That's what you get for remote upload over a VPN I guess. Tara' computer I ended up doing manually because she had like 100+ folders all with special characters not allowed like slashes etc. It took forever running the round robin from PC to PC. I was slightly tired after the 30+ hours of work in 2 days. But they are up and running. End users bitch and complain of course because it is not the same as before ... what else is new.

Bitching & Complaining

2006-02-20T02:50:00.000-07:00

I know it's been forever since I posted something. I usually talk mostly about work, but I'm going to cover that in another post. I've got to write about some things of recent times that may be amusing, but it's mostly just me bitching and complaining.

One of my first blogs I ever wrote was called "stupid people" ... something, something. I believe I wrote about an experience where I was at the grocery store and some lady boxed my car in, so I could not get in and drive away. Well the God's of payback must have read that because it happened to me again tonight. This time it was at blockbuster. That's the premise of the story, but I have to give you some background.

A few days ago I threw out my back. Just doing the laundry and I got a horrible twinge. Well it was slightly painful that day, and Dayle's massage chair didn't help any. They next day I was in excruciating pain. I haven't worked, or really done anything other than sleep, and watch the Olympics for 2.5 days. Today I must say I am felling slightly better, with some increased mobility. I only took 2 painkillers when I got up, for the entire day. That's opposed to the 10 the day before. It's not quite as twangy, and I'm not quite as grumpy.

I ventured out tonight to the store to get smokes and whatnot. In the parking lot I was approached by a young lady eating pizza. She very sheepishly asked if I could give her a ride to the French Maid for $10, even $20. I said just hop in, it's not a problem. I was in a generous mood. Mostly I think because I've been feeling shitty, that doing something nice for someone else would boost my spirits. Lets just say that she was not the most prim and proper of girls I have met in my life. But she looked interesting. And I was right.

Her name was Jody. We made idle chit chat along the short drive about the temperature being warmer than last week and some other local "talk about the weather". Then as I guessed it correctly and it got interesting. She had a fistful of cash she was counting, and proceeded to share some personal details with me. Jody had been stabbed by her husband three weeks ago. Yes ... she just blurted that out. So since he is currently sitting in jail, she took it upon herself to sell some of his things. I started to laugh and congratulated her ... what else could I do? She sold his porn for $400. That's allot of porn I must say. Then she took the proceeds and won big playing roulette at the casino. She was on her way to play the VLTs down at the strip club. So she said.

She had just finished inhaling some pizza and was complaining about still being hungry. All she does is eat all the time craving Vietnamese food, and was thinking about going for some after her still at the bar. Well the French Maid is in the right area of town, and I told her about the soup hut, but it was probably closed. She decided to do her make up in the car before getting out. She asked for my number. Here was the decision time for me ... I decided that she seemed nice, but there was just something about her that said "RUN ... RUN AWAY!". ;-) I mean she seems to have a tendency to get stabbed, and by tendency ... I mean once in your lifetime. I told her my usual out for avoiding people, that I don't use phones. I'm a computer programmer, and I communicate strictly by email. It's a good thing I left my cell phone at home, and it was not ringing in my pocket. She said that was really cool. "Thanks sweetie". Then she turned her head and looked at me. I knew right there ... I passed up a chance to bang some trashy girl. Oh well ... there's more than one slutty girl who just got stabbed and sold her husband's porn ... I'm sure of it. ;-) I'm fairly confident that she didn't "work" at the french maid, but as I drove away she wasn't going inside ... it kinda looked like she "works" outside the French Maid. I left ... alone.

I then stopped at a local pub to gamble in the VLTs myself. It was super busy being a long weekend, with only one girl working. I waited for 15 minutes to get some change. Only to discover the only open VLT was not accepting money. The next funny event of this night involved seeing a girl I kind of know. A friend of mine ... um ... "dated" her for a short time about 1.5 years ago. Let's just call her L. He'll know who I'm talking about. She was a waitress, and young, and we used to joke about how she was adept at getting things for free from men. She'd get hammered while out on the town, and never buy a drink. Typical girl. We made eye contact a few times like we knew either other, but couldn't remember from where. I made the connection, but didn't say anything. I knew exactly who she was when she was talking to some young punk, and said "You wanna go play some pool" ... he was like "Yah sure, let's go". The she says "It's like $1.50, and I don't have any change on me". Right there I knew who she was. I chuckled a little under my breath. They walked across the bar. OH MY GOD DID SHE GET FAT! I mean she always had big boobs, but now she has the ass and the gunt to go with them. I'm not fearful of her ever reading this anyways. She'd probably take 3 weeks to figure out why the little arrow moves on the screen when the mouse jiggles. I just shook my head and left.

I ended up gambling elsewhere for a while to no avail. Then gentlemen next to me hit big a couple of times, and was up around $600. Good for him. At least I didn't spin my money in about 3 minutes. I got to play for a while. Don't get me wrong ... I would have rather won, but I can't complain for not getting out when I was ahead a little bit.

I decided to head around the corner and pick up some movies. By this point in the night, I had been out and mobile for a couple of hours, and my back was starting to strain a bit. The line up was _HUGE_ at blockbuster, and the longer I stood in line the worse my back felt, and the more stupid people got. I mean ... you know you're holding up the line, when they say due back on Tuesday, do you really have to ask "You mean in 2 days?". Come on ... Video stores normally rent out movies in odd time frames like 9 days. Not to mention the GREAT BIG FUCKING STICKER on the front of your movies saying "2 day rental". It seemed like every person had some kind of problem, and the clerk would have to leave and go replace something on the shelf. The other thing that bothers me is the 6 people in front of me ... you've been standing there for 15 minutes ... that was ample time to ... I don't know ... get your video card out, or your money. Jesus Christ people are dumb sometimes.

So I finally get out of the blockbuster, and some jeep had back angle parked to box me in. I admit due to the parking arrangements before, that I was a little close to the divider, but this was so close I could only open my door to not even provide a foot of space to squeeze through. With my back all fucked, there was absolutely no way I could ever twist my fat ass into my car. Looking at the jeep, I was trying to guess who it belonged too in the store. Again, I guessed right for the night. My spidey senses were just tingling today. Young girl about 24ish, driving a small model SUV. Unaware of what's going on in the world that doesn't directly involve her. She didn't even notice me standing by my car, hunched over to release the pressure on my back. In fact ... she almost backed over me driving out. What could I do but shake my head. I was kind enough to not bang the shit out of her vehicle with my door, she could have at least acknowledged me. Bitch.

So after my fantastically bizarre night, and shitty weekend, I was so pissed off I went to McDonald's. I haven't eaten meat in over 2 weeks. It's been interesting, but I was shitty, and lazy, and hungry. So not I feel like shit again. Immediately feel asleep after eating. And I haven't watched my movies yet. At least I have them for a week. So that's like next Sunday right? ;-)

P.S. Canada lost the last two hockey games at the Olympics. 2-0 shutouts twice in a row. Not so happy about that.

Firewalls, Luma & Kids

2006-01-08T08:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was upgrading the Fortress network. Before I traveled to the co-location I decided to get the new server ready to go. Kolab had _just_ released a new version of the server, so I decided to do a clean install that morning with the latest version. I left the configuration, and Horde installation as was already done. The box was ready to go. On my way to the fortress ranch.

The actual installation went fairly smooth. The box came up no problems. I configured all of the virtual interfaces with ease. The servers were all running and operating properly. I thought we would have no issues. Then we came to the point in time when we needed to actually set up the network routing, and firewalling. Routing comes very simple in guidedog. Just click a couple of options and bingo ... you have working NAT. We discovered a not so nice bug in the user interface. When you are entering new port forwarding rules, and you type the port number directly into the spin boxes, the value is not held by the program. It's there on screen O.K., but we started having routing problems with errors like "forwarding to port 0 fails". Upon closer (and slower) inspection while entering information, I noticed the rules displayed were not updated when you manually enter a value. The value is updated when you use the spin box arrows for increasing and decreasing the port value. So as a work around you can just enter the port number, click up and down quickly, and then all is good. That's way easier than clicking up 3389 times to forward MS Terminal Services.

[time passes ...]

Wow ... I've been so busy I forgot all about this draft. I guess I should finish it off.

I want to pump up an open source project I stumbled upon from a recommendation off the kolab-users mail list. It is an LDAP editor called luma. It can be found here : http://luma.sf.net. Since I had been doing so much work with LDAP inside Kolab, and writing up a bunch of kolab utility scripts to dump the LDAP data, and restore. I checked it out.

I was way impressed. The app is so simple, yet so powerful. You have an interface to add your servers you want to connect to. Just have your bind dn handy and whatnot. The main interface you can flip between an address book, object browser, admin utilities (for creating passwords and such), schema browser, search functions. You have all of your LDAP data right at your fingertips. This has come in so handy. I can not even count the number of times I have used it in the last few weeks.

Trying to debug LDAP replication in Kolab, and with Horde prefs stored in LDAP. Buggy user interfaces for deleting users. It's nice to have a super fast and simple way to see what the LDAP server thinks is going on. Not to mention the easy ability to modify or remove data. It is a fantastic tool, and I highly recommend trying it out.

On a slightly funny note, when I was at Gregg's doing the install, I ended up staying for diner. His wife Kerry had made a stirfry. I'm not a big shellfish eater. But the stirfry was very good, I just avoided the shrimp. Actually his children referred to the shrimp as "mushrooms". Just a few more mushrooms. I got a real kick out of his daughter ... just a few more mushrooms. I watched as mom looked rather unimpressed as her baby was taking all of the shrimp and skipping the veggies. Just one more? take one ... O.K. just one more mom? I got a charge out of it. Just one more mushroom. Kids make me laugh sometimes.

Projects, Shell Scripts & Fast Food

2006-01-07T09:17:00.000-07:00

The new year is upon us, and work is upon me! It has been a crazy busy year and we are only a week into it. It's been the good kind of crazy, but I'm pretty tired already. Things are rolling along, and I've pretty much wrapped up a couple of projects and about to get into a few new ones.

I had a meeting with a client this past week. It was basically a PR visit to go over all of the little changes made with Kolab + Horde in the last month. We set up SSL certificates for all domains, and we went through changes needed on the client applications. We did some testing on the Quota limits in Kolab, and what actually happens in Outlook, and Horde when your limit is breached. It was quite informative. I am always humoured by windows. I actually witnessed one of the most bizarre settings in my mind. On the laptop we were using, I unplugged the network cable from the wall. A few seconds later back in ... but no network. Travis fixed a wonky setting which basically tells windows "if the network is unplugged, then just shut down the card, but don't bring it back up when you have network again". It is beyond me why anyone would ever want that, but some do I guess.

Ray and myself were at Polaris last night to put the last features of the project into motion. We were to shut off the routing, and DHCP services from the windows 2003 server, and start them on the Atrium server. My routing and DHCP setup was all of about 15 minutes. (Thanks to guidedog, and ISC doing things right). We did spend a few hours getting things to work properly on the windows side. Granted the previous setup was just farked from the start. We found a few problems like having your domains at Netsol direct all other traffic (crap.domain.com, anything.domain.com) to an IP ... which happened to be the mail server. No wonder people were complaining about slow access. We finally got everything sorted out with the DHCP, and the DNS settings. Also set up internal Samba shares for access to the web servers. It's a nice warm fuzzy to be done with something.

Today I am heading back out to Gregg's to install a new Atrium server. I upgraded to Kubuntu (5.10). I had my own disc I burned ... not from Aaron Seigo (read here) hahaha. I upgraded the Kolab server to official release (I should really grab the latest 2.0.2 which was recently released). The Horde installation from current CVS seems to work with no problems. It's the latest and greatest. I'm ready to rock and roll on this one. It was a lot of prep work (of which I still have some final prepping to go through). Another project almost finished.

During my testing of upgrading an Atrium installation (with a Kolab installation + Horde). I ended up writing a suite of shell scripts that do some handy little things for you with the Kolab back end. I already had mass user import scripts, so I added those in as well. I wrote some scripts to do on line and offline LDAP backups, and reload the LDIF data back into a new server. I also wrote a script to import the IMAP data (providing a path to it on the local machine) so all of the users email is still there. I did some testing, and more testing, and debugging, and more testing. I finally got it to work from a fresh Kolab installation, bootstrap, dump the old Installation, tar up the data, copy to new server, and run the scripts. Everything installed and is working. From the admin interface with account manipulation to IMAP mail read through Horde. I was impressed.

The actual code for the scripts is not overly special. Basically an include to set out binaries and paths to use. Variables for LDAP binding and whatnot. I was quite proud of myself because for the first time in my life I actually used awk in a shell script. That's right I used awk. I was quite impressed with myself. I was showing them to Aaron and he had some ideas on how to use them withing the Front end for Atrium. So I started adding getopts functionality to the scripts so we can add command line args as needed. It's pretty sweet.

With all that has been going on lately, I have no time for friends, no time for fun, I barely even get to relax. I don't even have time to cook. You know you are busy when I look forward to getting Subway, and eating in front of my computer while I am writing emails (work related). My treat was fast food that I got to eat during work. I am looking forward to getting some McDonalds tonight and watching the late Hockey Night In Canada Game. *sigh* ... I'm not complaining ... I planned on focusing on work right now ... but a little break tonight would be nice.

Christmas, Bugs & Shortbread

2005-12-28T14:59:00.000-07:00

So Christmas has come and gone once again. I had lots of time to sit down and write about things going on lately, but I just wasn't in the mood. In the reader's digest version of work : things have been very busy, but not as productive as I would like. I went to some potential client meetings, and I went to do work at some clients, and after arriving and setting up it was decided to push things back until the new year. I am building some new Mail servers for L&Y (Kubuntu + Kolab). We ordered dual opterons, big HDs, lots of RAM ... fun boxes to play with, but they have not arrived yet. Suppliers are always slow around Christmas, but I know they will come through for us.

Christmas was low key. I stayed in Calgary this year. I ate Christmas eve dinner with Mary Ann & Dayle. Mary Ann cooked up a fabulous meal. Old style Saskatchewan for us so we were not homesick. She even got us the Life Saver books (which are total old school Saskatchewan things). Craig came over later. We had some port and conversation. Dayle took off to head over to the house for the kids that night. I went home around 11 and opened my gifts from my mom. Christmas day I slept in. I went for dinner at Dayle's house with the family. Jan cooked another amazing spread. Two nights back to back where I got stuffed. We proceeded to have the gingerbread house contest. Dayle and his daughter Maegan versus Katy and me. It was a long fought battle, but the first set of judges split the decision. I'm thinking we got hoodwinked because the judges were Katy's boyfriend, and Maegan's boyfriend. Funny how they were all downstairs together before the judging. The tie-breakers came back from the airport later, and the best house (mine and Katy's) was triumphant. Dayle and I sat in the hot tub for a couple of hours. It was a great Christmas.

In between the regular Xmas activities, I finally got fed up with SuSE messing with my hardware. I've had sound issues since upgrading, and lately I could not run at 1280x1024 without the monitor "screeching" at me. I have the synch and everything set to the manufacturers specs. I finally decided it was time to move on. I installed Kubuntu 5.10, and updated the repositories with Jonathan Riddell's KDE 3.5 packages. I must say I am quite happier now. I have a great resolution, and the sound has never functioned better that it is now. (Goodbye to FC, and SuSE problems).

I continue to have problems with the custom menu features in KDE. I actually found a bug, and just a few short minutes after I took some screen shots, and explained things to Aaron, he had already changed the code, and sent me an SVN diff. That's why I love Aaron, and the rest of the planet should love him too. He's AWESOME! It's too bad I'm not running KDE from SVN, or I would have the fix. I do have a work around, and I guess I'll just have to live with it until the next release of packages. I also love Aaron because he added dragging windows across the pager ala bbpager style. I've been waiting for that for quite some time now. I thought I had found another bug with the font installer. It completely messed with my xorg.conf. Lots of unprintable characters included around the sections it edited. I can not seem to reproduce this. Guess I don't get to file a bug report.

Everything seems to be running much smoother in 3.5. I'm sure running a much more stable distribution is helping that as well. Everything works exactly as I expect. I even have MIDI support via Timidity now, and I modified the file associations accordingly. I did try out Amarok for playing MP3s. I found the shortcuts to change the track to be much too slow for my liking. It does have some neat eye candy. I reverted to juk though. It's still my fave. My re-installation of Apollon did not work completely. I had to get Aaron's node files in order to search the Gnutella network, the Ares plug in is still not working. I can not seem to find a nodes list to bootstrap the plug in. Oh well. I tried out KMldonkey. It connected (sort of). I couldn't stand using the interface though. I gave up on that quite quickly. I'm settled back into a working system. I still need to load my databases and configure apache for development, we I _need_ to.

I have to get my house in order for work shortly. I need to go back over the last couple of weeks and find out what I still have to do, and make my list. I just let it get away from me right before the holidays (understandably so). I've been so unmotivated to work lately, but I need to get moving again. It's time.

On the brightest note of the past few weeks Hammy's wife Hannah sent me home with a package of shortbread last night. Everyone wants Hannah's tablet (smashed tablet is like a flaky sweet fudge ... sort of). It's too sweet for my liking, but her short bread is to die for. yummmy yummmy!

Happy holidays, and Happy New Year.

Parachutes, New Hardware & Parking

2005-12-10T15:27:00.000-07:00

So it's been a crazy couple of days. I was plugging away on rebuilding the server for Fortress internally, and Gregg phoned me up and asked me about doing a quick Atrium job. He said "It's kind of a parachute mission". The clients had hit disaster, with complete loss of email, web, DNS and who knows what else. Their computer tech is a nice guy, but he is in _way_ over his head. It's clear when several of us worked with him that he just really does not know enough about computer systems. Gregg mentioned when he first got there that they had 2 DHCP servers running on the same network, and that was causing IP conflict problems. They had moved DNS to network solutions, and I found on the old server named files. I was not informed the new systems were to be public name servers. I just left handling the routing, DHCP services, and everything else for the time being. I wanted to get the mail servers running, and ASAP.

Let me backtrack for a bit. Gregg confirmed we were going ahead on Tuesday afternoon. I was delivered the new servers and hardware Wednesday morning, and I began the process. The first problem I encountered was the pain of installing a second hard drive into the cage. The cables (with some re-arranging) were just barely long enough to provide access and power. After I had the boxes assembled I attempted to install Kubuntu 5.10. The first installation was underway and I started on the second server. When the reboot happened it booted directly to console. I was surprised and figured something was incorrect. It happened on the second computer as well. I could login without problems, yet starting X would crash horribly. To cut the story short, after a couple of hours of investigation, the kubuntu installation does not properly detect the on board ATI RADEON EXPRESS 200 IGP cards. It configures the xdriver "ati". The x driver "radeon" does not work either. It turns out I needed to install the xorg-driver-fglrx package and manually configure xorg.conf to load the module, and use that display driver. After the hardware issues were resolved, the Kolab installations were a breeze, and the servers were ready to go. I also imported the users with some scripts I have written.

I installed and setup the mail servers on site. We waited until after hours to turn on the DNS MX records, and switch everything over. Everything was working properly from my side. I know when I left we had switched accounts and tested them. They were having internally network issues though. Ray helped them out the next morning. There was a small issue on the new servers where the system clock was running 2-3 faster than normal. THis meant the email times would be all out of whack. I tried a fix which didn't work, and then I hacked a cron job to restart ntpdate every minute until I figured things out. It turns out to be a bug with some motherboards and the ubunutu 2.6.10 kernel. I hade to add some kernel options (noapic nolapic noapictimer) to the kernel boot line in /boot/grub/menu.lst. I did this remotely, and rebooted a few times. The CPU was no longer double clocked, and top registered 90% and over idle, instead of the 50% auto use as before. That was a tricky bug, and has apparently bitten others.

During all of this mass rush to get things working, I have really come to dislike the parking situation in downtown Calgary. When I went to do the initial on site setup, I went to 5 different lots and they were all full. Signs up, attendants turn me away. I drove past the client building 6 times, and finally parked by the band room, and jumped the C-Train. It's funny how there was a write up in the paper about parking that same day. Everyone seems to agree it's a mess. It won't get any better I don't think. That's why I don't go out in the day much.

Open Source, Crossovers & Reunions

2005-12-06T02:31:00.000-07:00

In my experiences, every so often I'm asked the typical "So what do you do?" question. I usually end up giving an explanation of my activities. Since I have so many varied so called jobs, I usually hit the major points, and it usually comes down to me saying "I'm a computer programmer". I don't like, because I do so much more than that. I'm a system administrator, a Database admin, developer. I'm and analyst, a technician. I provide support. I do do programming. But I'm also a designer, tester, implementor, how about a mentor period. I was on site to do some systems "problem solving", and I was asked to sit on a meeting with a potential client. There was a process of getting me some business cards, and I was asked "So what's your title?". I replied ... "I don't know ... what did the contract you gave me say?". There was something in there ... I just can not remember. I offered to be called "Linux God", but I think they were looking for something a tad more professional. The end result was a small set of business cards that read "Andrew Kopciuch - Open Source Systems Analyst". I like that because it does cover a great deal of things I do with pigeonholing me into something. The most important part is it states "Open Source". Since one of the duties I pride myself on is being an Open Source advocate, I get the warm fuzzies from my new business cards.

I had to setup the backup procedure between two server. We decided not to bog down the public network with such activities. Since there was a plethora of network cards in the servers (alright ... 3 ... but it I like the word plethora), we just plugged in some cables, and an available switch to avoid finding a crossover cable. This way we have a direct Ethernet connection between to cards. I had free reign to assign some private IP addresses to the cards. This was the fun step because I was doing this all remotely and had no idea with cards were plugged in. I just set them all up, added static routes for all of them, nd started pinging on specified interfaces to find out which ones were hooked in. I wrote a couple of little scripts to bring up these private connections and manually add the routes. The rsync of over 22 Gigs of data took around 2 hours. I love cool things like that. :D

Coming up in the new year marks the 10th anniversary of my high school graduation. My best friend John emailed me today and asked if I would be interested in organizing with him. I don't know what my time will be like with all this work coming up, but I threw out some ideas to make it as little work, and organization as possible. He mentioned a day time one day gig, people can come and go as they please, or not come at all. He mentioned a BBQ, and I suggested to have the high schools entrepreneur class run the BBQ, or the charity group do it as a fundraiser. Then he and I won't be flipping burgers all day long. This all just happened a few hours ago, so I'm sure plans will change, but I'm looking forward to it. I even offered to make a web site for it all.

Busy Work, Sleep Schedules & Christmas

2005-11-30T07:48:00.000-07:00

I know it's been forever since I wrote something. I've started about 3 different times in the last month or so, and have never gotten around to finishing it. There's too much to list off, and I've forgotten some of the things that have happened I'm sure.

Work has been very very busy. With the new things I am doing for Fortress it's been allot. Not too much, just really busy. With Aaron out of the country half of the time I think they really appreciate linux gurus. For about 2 weeks straight one of my phones woke me up. I usually had an average of 4 messages on each phone throughout the day as well. It was just too much. I was working on 2 major projects were both came to a deployment on the same weekend. I really didn't sleep for about 3 days, and I am just now recovering from the "work lag" so to speak 2 weeks later.

I am very happy to say the both went fairly well. Of course there have been several little things after the fact, and some little fixes. It's not we took down an entire wireless ISP network when reconfiguring IP address this time. (I can't actually take the credit for that, I was logged into another machine at the time ... was writing shell scripts and the router went insane). Needles to say the connection is no longer on that bridge. The mail and web hosting deployment was more of a custom setup, and learning all of the little tricks from the old system has been interesting. They seem to be very very happy with the new servers though. The other installation was a simple mail server replacement. My work was done fairly quickly, the bulk of the migration time was spent on the client computers.

I've learned, and experienced some things along the way with these projects. I found a solution to my earlier installation problem. Certain RAID setups are not done properly. I needed to edit mdadm.conf and set auto=yes on the device. Turns out the init scripts run in the background have not waited for the device to be brought up, and then they use things on the partition that is not mounted on a device not active yet. Got it? ;-). Kolab is very very cool (www.kolab.org) I set up my first master slave kolab system. I was simple after I overcame a problem in the slave bootstrap. I even submitted a patch, and a version of some sorts was applied. It is my hope that eventually I can become more involved directly with the project. As for right now ... I'm just a happy user. I spent hours installing Horde for use with Kolab. It's not the simplest thing in the world to do. If you do something wrong ... lookout. I finally got it working. Mind you this was a simple Horde installation without kronolith for calendars and the other group ware modules. They just wanted email. Outlook sucks. Thank God Gregg has a good memory and mentioned Aaron's blog complaining about how Lookout sucks, and specifically in respect to changing the ports to use SSL. They're broken little interface was really no help. Nothing but problems. KDE 3.5 is out as of yesterday, hopefully the project will gain some more momentum.

I missed Thanksgiving diner (Canadian), so Mary Ann had a diner for way word souls a few weeks ago. I was uber sick. I drank 4 neo-citrons that night. The gang (Mack, Dayle, Steph and Mary Ann) drank 8 bottle of Red Wine. I guess it was a fair trade. It was a really really fun night though. We have plans to do it again. American Thanksgiving was this past week. Which brings me to my complaint about television. If thanksgiving has not even occurred. Why was "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" on TBS 3 weeks ago? That's just wrong. It's not December, nor past Thanksgiving ... why is there Christmas television? That bugs me. This weekend is the L&Y Christmas party in Canmore. I'm looking forward to it. I need a weekend off.

Blogging, Installations & Blockbuster

2005-10-24T01:39:00.000-06:00

I just ripped out a repetitious chunk from my last blog. This has happened to me before where I see several paragraphs from my post repeated. Like a whole section was copied and pasted. It's not a big deal really. I only noticed it because I was reading my last post to see what I had mentioned. I'll be careful this time to make sure that doesn't happen. Maybe it's a finicky problem with this editor ... in fire fox ... on linux ... SuSE 9.3 to be exact. It could be anything.

This past week was eventfully ... but sad to say I was not apparently productive. I mean I got tons done in my head. I feel exhausted, and the new week is almost upon me, but I can't say I have a great deal of tangible results to brag about. In my defense we have had some timing issues connecting with other people, and collecting parts.

I finally got the two new servers on a Friday to install. To my dismay they had only 1 network card (they are both firewalls). It's not a problem ... just let Ray know and they'll get me some more. I can continue with the installation with one network card. Wrong again. It appears that both servers are USB only. No PS/2 ports for the keyboard and mouse. That's alright if you have USB keyboard and mice. I have one USB mouse, and a KVM for two servers which happens to be PS/2. So I phoned Ray Fri eve and toke a drive down to compusmart for some parts. So a single USB to PS/2 adapter is $11.99. I know what you are thinking ... "But they come with every $8 mouse?!?!?!". I need the adapter going in the opposite conversion that the ones that come with a mouse. To top it all off ... they only had 1 in stock. I wasn't about to spend $50 on adapters (I needed 4), and drive all over the city checking other locations for some tiny little adapters that in reality cost about $0.67 to make.

I let Ray know ... he made a call and no dice from Gord either. I decided I was screwed for doing some work last weekend and went to loose my money playing poker. Early last week Ray said he had a USB KVM for me. Well it was a nifty looking toy, too bad it didn't come with any cables! That's all I really needed ... the USB cables. I asked AJ if he had some ... sure we got tons at the office ... "Not the ones that come with mice ... the opposite way". Talked to Andy the tech guy ... no luck. I finally stopped at Computer Rack on the way back downtown. Found double keyboard and mouse into a single USB adapter for 10 bucks each. Sweet! ... I'm in business again. No I can do my installations!

The first Kubuntu installation was finished. Too bad the server wouldn't boot up. :( So I tried on the second server and it worked like a charm. I figured I just messed something up and tried again. Exact same setup and it won't boot. Upon some investigation it is not mounting the /var directory on the RAID device ... which means it can't find any boot information so it just hangs. Lovely! I changed the partitioning to a different order and sizes ... this time the installation hangs in the middle of loading packages. I'm going to try installation on each hard drive separately to see if one of them is a problem. If not ... the it's probably a controller fault, and I'll have to make a service call.

Last weekend I went to rent a new movie from Blockbuster. "The Interpreter" was a guaranteed rental, yet no copies were in so I get a free raincheck. I went back a week later to get my free rental and it's all gone again. The clerk says to me "we never have the new releases in". I though to myself ... maybe you should get some more copies? Looks like I might not be getting a free rental as it expires in a week. Bah ... big corporations! Maybe I can reserve it for some night ... that would take effort though ... which I am not willing to dispense on Blockbuster.

Weekend

2005-10-11T04:37:00.000-06:00

I forgot to mention that this past weekend was thanksgiving in Canada. So happing Thanksgiving everyone. Thoughts were for victims of the Hurricanes, and more recently the eaqrthquakes in Pakistan. We do have a great deal to be thankful for. I was thankful AJ kept me up playing poker until 3:30 A.M. That way I am awake right now writing my blog. ;-)

Peace,

Webmail, Innobase & Passion

2005-10-11T03:43:00.000-06:00

So I have almost wrapped up the installations I was working on last week. They went rather smoothly, and with a few lucky surprises. I had a requirement to setup web mail. _Simple_ web mail. Horde/IMP was overkill. I had invested a great deal of time working with the virtual setup so I was armed with the knowledge of what I had to work with to make my decisions.

I started searching out web mail packages. I won't get into all of the details. I finally settled on Squirrelmail. One of the reasons was simple IMAP configuration of Squirrelmail. Since this virtual mail system was originally running on qmail, it was working with Maildir folders. We had originally thought this would pose a small import task. Thanks to the Postfix developers for being uber smart and adding config options to handle Maildir formats. Yippee!. SO I made the smart decision to just keep all of their data in the same format and support it through postfix. The problem with that is the IMAP support.

IMAP support was not a requirement, and specifically stated to not support IMAP to their clients. Webmail runs through IMAP though. I don't even know of any webmail packages that do not. :S Finding an IMAP server that supports Maildir format proved to be more challenging than I expected. cyrus apparently does not support it, so I settled on the courier packages from the kunbuntu repository. The installation and MySQL configuration was a breeze. I fully tested the IMAP was working before I shut off the public access and just ran it locally to suit their needs. Squirrelmail has a nifty perl config script that will setup the proper configuration for several IMAP packages ... just run the script and pick courier and I'm done. Sweet! This went way smoother than I thought. I actually can't wait to do it again ... I'll be way ahead of the game next time. :D

In recent news Oracle has bought Innobase. You can read about it here : http://www.oracle.com/innodb/index.html. There was some buzz about it on the postgreSQL camp. The big question is what this is going to mean for MySQL. Since MySQL basically relies on the InnoDB storage for cool things (Like ACID compliance) this could mean things are going to change for them once their contract is up within the year. The problem comes down to the non-GPL version of MySQL (read $$$ from commercial licenses). If the InnoDB support (Oracle) becomes too pricey they'll have to drop support for it from the commercial (and most likely the GPL too) version. That's not very good considering dropping that would turn the database into an access comparable toy.

I'm of the mind set that hitching yourself onto someone else's work is not going to help you in the long run (like this case). If you really want to create something good ... then you need to _create_ it. The PG community will never have issues like this. The code is always available. The code is also homegrown and solid. They know how to do it right (IMO). I also believe the _want_ to do it right. The developer community takes pride in creating, and are not there to get to the bottom price line. They are there to make the best product they can. I guess that's what has always bugged me about MySQL ... it was about $$$ not the actual product. Business decisions ... shows why money talks. What is it saying to MySQL now?

That got to me thinking about passion. People I know tend to describe me as passionate. I tend to agree. I'm a 110% or nothing kind of guy. With anything I do I usually live and breathe what it is I am involved with. Tonight I'm listening to Neil Young. I think I have a connection to his music because I find it so passionate. You can actually "feel" what he is feeling. It's not too often you find that in artists anymore. I recently watched a not so recent concert of Neil Young (circa 1970s). It was him in the center of a circular setting with just his guitar, harmonica and a microphone. It was amazing to say the least. I was memorized by the performances. Especially "Old Man" which has always been a favorite of mine. He gave a little explanation of some songs and it was quite intriguing the history behind some of his works. I hope my work shows my passion, and hope my life will tell the tales of my many passions too.
So I have almost wrapped up the installations I was working on last week. They went rather smoothly, and with a few lucky surprises.

MySQL, Postfix & Hockey

2005-10-05T12:09:00.000-06:00

I've spent a great deal of my time working with some new systems. Basically upgrading some systems, which also means moving away from Apache 1.3, and qmail. That's not such a big deal. I just had to dig into a hodge-podge server to figure out how several admins over time had set things up. There were copies upon copies of everything ... everywhere. I can say that I have somewhat of a clue as to what is going on now. Actually the transition is almost complete. A few more things need to get done.

first things first was to install Kubuntu on the new servers (YAY!). The next step was to run through the apache configuration. Not a whole bunch of changes here. Just a better layout of configuration files. Virtual host mapping seems to work. Made some additions for default hosts into the virtual maps, so _everything_ is just virtual. Then I set up the ftp daemon. It's the typical problems. login doesn't work, login doesn't work, login doesn't work. Finally ask for help .... Aaron tries ... login success! Whatever ... FTP working.

Part of getting all this stuff to work is finding all of the data inside the existing MySQL database. First thing of course was to trie and dump the database, and then play with my own copy. that was a no go :

mysqldump: relocation error: /usr/lib/libmysqlclient.so.10: symbol errno, versio n GLIBC_2.0 not defined in file libc.so.6 with link time reference

Wow. That's all Aaron and I had to say. So Aaron mentions a suggestion to me ... I tar up the files in the mysql data directory, and untar them on my computer. Seems I now have the database. Apparently MySQL keeps each database file structure separately and the flat file system can simply be moved at random to another location, and MySQL will read new files it finds ... interesting. The move from MySQL 3 to MySQL 4 had no effect either. I was surprised ... pleasantly surprised.

Now for my list of things I do not like about MySQL. "show tables". That's 9 characters more to type than the equivalent '\d' in PostgreSQL. That may seem like nit picking to you, but the amount of time a day I list the tables to highlight and X-paste a table name multiplies into 900+ extra characters I have typed. "show columns from table ", or slightly better "describe ". At best that is 7 extra characters on this often used command for me. Now I'm up to 1600+ extra characters in a day. Alright ... so maybe I exaggerated on the amount of times I do that sort of thing ... but that's what it seems like. I don't like the vague error messages when something goes wrong. I don't like the privileges system. I don't like the user administration (granting privileges to a non-existent user in order to create that user seems wrong to me). At least "CREATE USER" is available in MySQL 5. I don't like the name either. There ... I'm finished dumping all over MySQL. It's not _that_ bad ... I would choose PostgeSQL over MySQL any day and twice on Sunday. I can still get around the DB in a fairly efficient manner though.

I now got to delve into setting up postfix with MySQL support for virtual mail. Seems like a big task if you have never done that sort of thing before. The postfix configuration for setting that up turned into 7 lines in the configurations. 5 lines were directives to a database cf file. The database config files were stupidly simple to write. There are great examples on the interweb to follow. I started playing and tweaking, sending mail from the laptop to the new server as the relay. tailing the mail logs to see what happens. porting from the old qmail Maildir styles is not a problem at all. Cheers to the postfix developers for being cool and supporting qmail style Maildir setups. I need to make sure the paths have a '/' on the end to specify a directory and not a spool file. Instead of modifying the data in the database (and then having to modify a custom application as well), I just modified the select field options in the postfix config. Making use of CONCAT_WS('/', path, 'Maildir/'). I was quite impressed at how powerful this could be. I did my happy dance and hi-fixes were in order. I had a working virtual mail server, and not mail porting needed to be done, as everything can be set up without mods to the current setup.

Postfix aliases are another story. I had to build a new table, and write a PHP script to shift data into a proper format for it to work. Small changes for email aliases are minor though. I'm happy no major changes to the bulk email would have to be done. I'm going to go back and make sure that as little changes to the DB, and custom application are needed, then try the setup again on the second server. Still need to configure MySQL replication, install clamav, and setup rsync for the home directories ... little things ... but I'm feeling good today.

I guess I'm feeling good because I know that hockey is starting tonight. My Flyers are at home hosting the New York Rangers. It's gonna be a good season. Picked up Forsberg, got some monster de-fence, rock em sock em hockey! Double header on TSN tonight. Calgary vs Minnesota, and Edmonton vs Colorado(?). Should be good times.

The kernel, Kubuntu & Dawson's Creek

2005-09-29T09:45:00.000-06:00

Over coffee and munchies yesterday I had a great conversation with Aaron about fishing and our migrations took us all the way around to the linux kernel. I made the observation that the kernel itself has become less exciting in the last few years. Lets think our way back to the linux world in the late nineties. Paying attention to what was happening in the kernel was so important. Aaron and I questioned "how many people recently have ever compiled a kernel from source?". I used to always compile my own kernels. It was a must. You grabbed some kind of distribution to install _just_ to get a system running. Then you went to work and built your system as you needed it.

We thought back over all of the major features and issues with the kernel along the way. USB support (Aaron remembers even applying a patch to get it to work), pcmcia, IDE SCSI emulation, and the mess of drivers and driver support (remember when loadable modules came into play). I remember absolutely loathing a new installation because it was always a hit and miss whether or not your Internet would work. The days of trying to get pump to work, and eventually moving to dhclient and crossing my fingers allot are gone. With the new age of distributions everything just simply works. The cards are all detected, software is installed, and installing a linux system is quite the breeze. The days of just making your computer work and take whatever applications are available are gone. The community has come to expect a working system in short time, and the focus has shifted to the applications that we use on those systems.

I am excited and fully support the growth of linux, and appreciate the growing new user base. I do feel that linux users of the past 4 years or so have missed out on the history and growth linux. I am not saying that I am one of the oldest cowboys on the ranch by any means, but I can still install a kernel from source if I need to. Apparently Linus agrees that the kernel is boring right now, and that the excitement in linux is on the desktop for the future.

What prompted all of this thought was the fact I did my first Kubuntu installation this week. I did take me a couple of times to run through the partition manager (don't press the esc key from the main screen, all of you work just *poof* disappears). I also misunderstood the wording on one section and mistakenly set 1 active and one backup on a 2 disk RAID1 setup. So I can start it all over once again. Other than the partitioning (which I'm always slow at anyways), the install was a breeze. Synaptic is great, and the default KDE 3.4 is super quick and exactly as I expected. I went right into installing packages that I need, and diving into work.

The Kunbuntu system is similar to OSX where there is no root account (unless you set the password and then actually login to root). You are just added into the admin group, and use sudo all day long in the command line. I felt right at home in Kunbuntu. I have never been a Debian user, as I had a horrible time with installations (at a time when installing was a nightmare). I can't really think of any complaints at the moment. Give it a week, but the outlook is good.

On the lighter side of life, my sleep schedule is that of a normal (relatively) person these days. I am up early enough to watch Dawson's Creek on TBS for a couple of hours before my day really gets rolling. Today Pacey and Joey were having the "sex in the relationship .... are we ready" episode. It was mildly amusing. Jack and Jen made out when they were drunk though, which was mildly amusing. I guess it's time to turn the television off and get more seriously into the days activities.

Sleep, New Jobs & Phones

2005-09-25T22:14:00.000-06:00

So I've been trying to find time to write about a few things for more than a week now. I guess it really doesn't take all that much time I just seem to get sidetracked. I've been on a horrible sleeping schedule for the last month. Mostly I have taken to vampire ways and been up through the night. I found it more convenient to get up in the early evening and code for 4-5 hours, then go play poker until 6 A.M. then I could get home and do some more work while Dawson's Creek is on TBS, then I can pass out while the rest of the daily hustle and bustle happens in the real world.

Tonight I am forcing myself to kick that around as I have to be up during the day tomorrow. An opportunity fell into my lap last week, and I am sharing a workspace that is newly setup at my friends house. Aaron seems excited about it as well. I've worked with him for years now on and off, and we have a whole work area setup. It basically came down to people need work done, I can do work, lets get it set up so I can do work. It's really wonderful when people just make things happen. Within a 12 hour period there were computers, monitors, KVM, switches, network cables, a new desk. I went and picked out my own fancy shmansy chair the other day. It is being delivered tomorrow. I am excited to be doing something new, and especially because it is linux work. Yippee. New jobs are always exciting aren't they?

The L&Y side of things is going quite smoothly. There was a major overhaul of the toolkit. it's funny how programmers are usually thought of as mind readers. "Well it should just be able to ...". Developers normally have a large amount of common sense, and we can usually make an educated guess at how most things _should_ work. When we are misinformed, or not provided with all of the unique information relating to a certain issue then "It's not able to ...". The does not mean it will _never_ be able to. I spent a few days complete taking apart and rebuilding the imaginary lego castle known as the toolkit so as to better fit the company work flows. There are quite a few things left to do still. Aaron and I have had a design discussion regarding the DMS work flow issues. (Actions, rules, and work flows. Work flows for creation, modification and removal). It's going to be suh-wheet! I just need to find the time to actually do it.

To anyone who has tried to phone, or will try to phone me in the next day or so you are out of luck. I had noticed my phone acting strangely a few days ago. Fully charged it would not properly work. The battery is not the problem, the phone just does not seem to connect to the line anymore. Some things wrong, but what can you expect for a $35 phone. After I came into some money early this afternoon I went phone shopping. I realized that I am kind of picky about my phones. You never really think about that ... well how often does one go phone shopping? As it turns out the first three phones that I like were "out of stock". I almost left, but then I noticed something I had not originally intended to look at. I purchased a Uniden dual set of cordless phones. I thought it was cool that I got 2 phones for not even the price of some other phones. Both are 2.4 GHz cordless with their own base. This way I can leave the main phone on the stand, and keep the second phone on my desk right beside me. I tend to forget about putting the phone back onto the charger, so a double dose will cover my bases.

Things are exciting lately. I'm going to get some sleep. I have lots of work to do, and new work to start on (plus I get to hang with that KDE hacker dude more), I have new telephones. Things are going great. I finished writing the side music for Mrs. MacPherson Of Inveran for the CPS Pipe Band. I dropped of copies with Hammy last week ... he gets the jump over everyone else. I think I'm due for a tea time on Tuesday again. See tea is exciting too!

SuSE 9.3, BBS & Comedy

2005-09-13T17:17:00.000-06:00

So I finally bit the bullet and decided I needed to upgrade my system from SuSE 9.1 to SuSE 9.3. I had updated 9.1 to KDE 3.4 through a supplemental YaST repository. It took some doing, but I had done it to make use of a working Kopete. I had been noticing lately that I was having some media problems. Most notable were sound problems. I was hoping a total upgrade would fix things.

The upgrade process itself was quite painless. In place updating of all things good. It took about an hour to run the 5 CDs for the professional addition. I believe there was an update of 561 packages, 92 new packages, and 97 removed packages. That's allot of packages.

My next step forward was to finally after 6+ great years of service from the blackbox window manager to fully move into KDE 3.4. I'm not really sure why I did that, but it's done. I can always move back if I become completely fed up. My mission was to get basically the same interaction from KDE that I was used to in blackbox. It proves to be slightly harder than I thought. It took me about 15 minutes to move the kicker panel up top, and configure the Kpager to operate like bbpager did, along with the global shortcuts. I decided to leave the clock, and a Kmenu in the upper left hand corner, because I just don't know when I'll need that. ;-)

The right click menus that I customized for blackbox are not so simple to implement in KDE. I have become more familiar with the Control Center. Under the desktop behavior settings you can actually specify what action from a left, middle or right click on the mouse. I need a custom menu, as opposed to the standard menus KDE offers. My issue with KDE is that the custom menu creation interface completely sucks. I mentioned this to Aaron, and he sheepishly agreed. You can create a list of "Applications" that you can add to a monolithic list (if you happen to have a monolithic list of things you want in the menu). I mean blackbox has had the ability for submenus for ... I don't know ... years and years and years? Surely a project of KDE maturity level should allow an end user to create custom menus with sub menus available to them? Regardless I have a small menu of the applications I commonly use, and it seems to be working out for now. The only small problem is that Kontact does not launch properly from this submenu. It will launch from the Kmenu, and from the kicker panel, but will _not_ launch properly from my custom menu. It launches the Configure panel for Kontact, and that is as far as it ever gets.

The last annoyance was the fact that I had no sound! Thats right ... no sound at all. Aaron mentioned he had heard several problems with SuSE 9.3. "Things like that ..." he said ... "I didn't want to mention it on the phone while you were already half way into it". Well I did some online reading, and found a few things. I had already checked the mixer levels through kmix, and the ncurses alsamixer. Nothing seemed to work. I did completely uninstall, and re-install the alsa package. I also updated (*touched*) several KDE packages because I seemed to have newer versions than were available ... something was wrong. I altered the hardware sound volume levels through YaST. I actually had to alter them through the KDE YaST2 GUI in order for them to take hold. Magically I had sound again. A small tweaking here and there, and I was back in working order. So I am pleased, and have a working system in which I can do everything I need to on a daily basis.

I had recently had the task of adding forums into the L&Y toolkit. I didn't just jump in and start coding. I had been thinking about this for some time. I decided to do some research first. I invested (ie. wasted) around an hour looking into pre-existing solutions for BBS. I found what ones were available and compatible to be over complicated, poorly designed, or way to complex for my needs. I decided I could write my own much easier, and would do exactly what I wanted. I looked at several messages boards to see how they flowed, and to compare look and feel, features, and friendliness. I came up with a simple design and after 2 days I had integrated a full BBS system into the toolkit. It's simple, sharp looking (IMO), and light. The additions to our framework of code (which does handle the user accounts, DB abstraction, and HTML interfaces) was only 3 files. 2 PHP source files with the include library being around 500 lines, and the implementation being about 100 lines. Plus a css style sheet, and a few images. AJ is super pleased with it, and some of the users who have looked at it are impressed as well. Now we just have to completely re organize the toolkit to match their internal work flows better.

Comedy ... last night Aaron enticed me to come out with him to Dickens pub because he landed into a couple of tickets to the comedy night there. I used to go to yuk yuks at Watts On Main in Moose Jaw during my SIAST years. It was usually a great time. I've been to yuk yuks here in Calgary at the Blackfoot Inn and again it is good times. So I wasn't really in the state of going out (ie no $$), but I agreed anyways. It was a chance to get out so I took it. Let me throw something out to you ... isn't a requirement of being a comedian that you are at least semi-funny to a number of people. I'm not saying every comedian needs to be genius of funny like Robin Williams, Bill Cosby, Sam Kinnison (dec.) or any other great comedian. The comedians they had were just plain old not funny. The first comedian had a joke I laughed at. The last comedian was semi-funny. The 8 comedians in between them were not however. I am not saying that no one was laughing during their routines. The pub was full of 400 Telus Employees who are currently locked out. So I guess being unemployed, and hammered made these comedians pretty funny. I however was sober, and not impressed at all by the mostly unintelligent attempt at humor. Aaron and I agreed the night was completely a bust, and that he and I can get more laughs from our day to day conversations that those people got paid for. It's sad, but I guess everyone has to start somewhere. Aaron and I started out on his porch ... soon we'll be the famous computer comedians.

JRP's Wedding In Calgary

2005-09-03T00:58:00.000-06:00

Again I find myself breaking the norm of blogging I have established. I happen to be very comfortable dedicating an entire blog to my best friend's wedding. John Pantazopolous and Stacey Pantazopolous were married at approx 2:00 P.M. on Saturday afternoon, August 27, 2005.

There was a lot that happened before and after so lets have a walk through for old memories sake. Heath Flew in around 12:30 from Vancouver. I picked him up and we headed over to the Greenwood Inn to help with the decorating of the banquet hall. There were quite a few helpers, but it didn't matter how many were there. They had everything planned out to the finest details. Table lists are fairly standard, but I have never seen the table decorations not only personalized, but grouped, and bagged and boxed. We basically lined up, grabbed a sheet and a bag of stuff and went to work.

The decorating, and design was actually quite interesting. Instead of numbered tables the tables were personalized with a picture of John And Stacey together in various places they had traveled. Some people sat at the "Paros" table, some at the "London" table, some at the "Saskatoon" table and so on. Every person had a personalized magnet keepsake, along with flowers, doily, candles in this weird ice gel. It was really really cool. I'm glad I helped out.

John's parents George and Patsy were there. It was good to see them after a few years. I also met Stacey's parents Sonia and Larry. They were several other family and bridal party members providing help. With all of the bodies it didn't take very long. I was out of there in a couple of hours and I had to head down south to pick up the jacket for my tuxedo. The original jacket didn't fit right and they had to rush one up from Toronto. Apparently the average joe tuxes (40 reg) have about 10,000 in the warehouse. I was one of the lucky gentlemen who have only 1 of 30 tuxes in Canada. Sometimes it's cool to be large. ;-)

Later that evening we headed over to John and Stacey's place for some eats and drinks. People did the meet and greet thing for a couple of hours, ate some Greek food and chilled the night before the wedding. John gave his groomsmen a couple of tokens of appreciation. We received personalized cufflinks, and money clips. they were extremely cool, and made sure we were stylin' for the wedding. It was off to bed because the wedding day would be a long one for sure.

I awoke around 6:30. The plan was to meet with John @ 8:00 and go for breakfast. We met up at the hotel he was staying at downtown and headed to the Husky House (Gerry's). It was strange being in there while in a sober state of mind ... but the breakfast, and copious amounts of coffee were needed. It was a quick eat, and back to the hotel to change up into the tuxes. It's amazing how a few suits can make a bunch of bums look rather sexy. We were stylin' in the best way for Johnny P.

By this time the videographer, and photographer had arrived and it was time for the gentlemen to get some shots taken. We did some poses, and impromptu shots around the hotel, and then moved outside and across the street to the old school. We had some casual, and professional scenes, fun and serious, dark and light. It was actually quite stressful. I could never imagine a model doing that for 12 hours a day. I almost went nuts after 1 hour! The *ographers were off to find the women of the day, so the gentlemen were off to pick up the rental vehicles. We got a whacked out Yukon, and another SUV.

We had some time to kill, so we spent a few minutes to decorate the SUVs with the wedding swag. then it was time to cruise for a bit. Lets just say Danphy drives a _GINORMOUS_ SUV in no different manner than his motorcycle. Just ask about his reckless driving ticket ... it's kind of a sore spot. ;-) We stopped at the 7/11 for waters and Stelios inhaled a hot dog (he missed breakfast because he slept in). By the old sun dial we could tell it was time to head over to the church for the big show.

1:30 P.M. the service was at Knox United Church in Calgary. Stacey's aunt was performing most of the service. We found this out last minute. It was a pleasant surprise. The gents were in the back room while guests were seated by Gord and Shaun. John was solid like a rock. He did ask Stelios about 47 times if he had the rings ... but other than that ... a rock. I think Danphy was the most nervous of all of us. I led the guys out of the back and we took our places near the altar. I never expected to be overcome, but when Stacey started to walk down the aisle I just didn't know what to think. She was _beautiful_, and I was so overcome it was hard to keep still. The service was perfect. It was short and amazing. In about 40 minutes my best friend had been married. The bridal party left the church and we awaited out front.

They did family pictures at the side courtyard of the church. The rest of us played three card monte will the vehicles. Not too long afterwards the guests went for cocktails, and the bridal party went on the picture journey. Our first stop was down Stephen Ave. We had some photos taken by a vintage automobile, and underneath the Bay. Amidst several bottles of water the girls managed to indulge in some gellato. Go figure the bride wearing all white would jump into the mini bucket of chocolate Italian ice cream. We journeyed around through a back alley, and down the other side of Stephen Ave as well. It was amazing at how many people ... just random strangers ... would stop to take our pictures. It was non-stop the entire time we were down there. It started to freak us out a little bit. People would stop and take to Stacey, and almost jump into the pictures with us. We couldn't believe that these perfect strangers wanted some random picture of other strangers who had gotten married. "Hey who's wedding was this?". "I don't know ... it was just some wedding when we were out last Saturday afternoon downtown". People amaze me sometimes.

Our last stop was Centennial park for some outdoors pics. One thing I learned is that modeling is not for fat people. After very short consideration it was determined that I would be standing ... and not crouched down in the pictures. Crouching for big people == (hard && !fun). I did manage to get a nice shot of me with all of the girls though. :D Stacey's parents met us there with more water and snacks to keep us from falling over. It was greatly appreciated. John and Stacey continued some discrete photographs by themselves while the rest of us left for the Greenwood Inn.

The hotel was packed with guests. It was a fairly large crowd. I don't know the exact numbers but I would guess around 250. We had an extraordinary meal, and the bar was flowing nicely. The MC did a wonderful job. The bios of the wedding party were fantastic. The toast to the bride and groom were bang up. Curtis, Danphy and myself had been discussing the fact the John never asked any of us to give the toast. He decided to keep it in the family with his brother. Probably a good move. The "hooligans" as Stelios put is so eloquently just know too much. ;-) This was all in good fun, and Stel's speech was magnificent. There was a slide show provided by Larry and Sonia. The surprise of the night was that John sang a song for Stacey. He used to listen to country music when traveled to see her when she was in Saskatoon, and he still lived in Calgary. John definitely has some marbles as I don't know many guys who will get up and sing to their new wife in front of 300 friends and family. It was a moment to remember for sure. Damphy accompanied him on guitar. It was definitely one of the highlights. Patsy's welcome to the bride was also very heart felt and amazing for those of us who know her. Well done to everyone on the night.

The "after party" was a great great time. I proceeded to indulge in some rye for the remainder of the evening. Along with the rest of the "hooligans". It had been ages since I had seen some of these friends. Meeting wives, and girlfriends. Catching up on experiences, and having just a generally happy happy night. Later on I was talking with John, and he was amazed how perfect things had went. Thank the lord for Stacey's lists. ;-)

John and Stacey had retired for the night. John had retired with the keys to the SUV which had my bag in it, along with my wallet, cell phone, clothes etc. It's a good thing Heth had the spare set of key to my apartment or they might have been interrupted. :( Nubby definitely took home the inebriation award. Curtis took a clod of dirt and plant in the eye, and after chasing someone, spilling out in the parking lot he is the proud owner of a ripped pair of tuxedo pants. It was starting to get out of control. We ended the night at Brent's place downtown. The party had continued. Some other friends had shown up. At 3:30 A.M. I was fading and Heath and I ventured out to find a cab. We got home and I crashed into my bed for a nice sleep. The party apparently continued onto Curtis' apartment. He was moving the next day, and decided to have a farewell bash.

This was just the re-cap. the highlight reel if you will. I am sure there are some other happenings that I didn't touch on. The bottom line is that John and Stacey had one of the most perfect weddings I have ever had the pleasure of being to. I wish them all the best in the future, and a long and happy life together. Hopefully Stacey will let John come over and play sometime. I love you guys.

JRP's Stag In Calgary!

2005-08-17T13:01:00.000-06:00

I have decided to break my usual 3 topic form for a blog post. I think that my best friend's stag party is deserving of it's very own section! I think there will be enough information to fill an entire blog. Just imagine if I could remember everything that actually happened that night! ;)

Saturday morning we dropped John off with Danphy. The boys were going paint balling in Cochrane. Heath has a torn MCL / ACL so no paint ball for him. We went shopping and tooled around Calgary for a while. I picked up a few things I needed to get and we killed some time. Everyone was heading back to Danphy's for the BBQ. We had some burgers and a keg to get through. It was a show and go party, and about 16 in total for the Stag. It was great to see some friends from Saskatoon, John's family, friends from work. It was a crowd for all parts of John's life. It was the makings of a great night.

Apparently the paint ball was a blast. Jaman had a huge red welt very visible on his head. It looked ouch. John had to run the gauntlet, he said his body just collapsed and the rest of the crew had their way with him. Sudzy didn't appreciate getting shot in the nuts by Curtis ... but we laughed at him anyways. It was an accident ... so says the man.

So we were all well fed, well thirsted, and entertained (*wink wink to the boys on that one*). Kudos to Danphy, Scott, and Curtis for organizing and leading the charge for the bachelor party! The party machine mobile picked us up and it was off to the Yardhouse. We had shirts made with a _GREAT_ picture of Johnny P. on the front. People were really digging the shirts at the bar. We had a bunch of drinks, sang a little song at the Yardhouse and it was already time to go again. There was an old style Texas showdown on the buss between Danphy and Alexis ... "No chicks on the bus ... but you can stay if you take your shirt off!". na na naaaaaaa na ... na na naaaaaaaa na .... hey hey hey ... good by! The next stop was the Mynt admist the wrestle mania that occurred on the bus. This is where the night really starts to get crazy. There were a few stagettes at the Mynt already, and when our crew showed up it got pretty insane. The rounds of shooters started coming out. We consumed an extreme amount of alcohol, danced with the ladies and hung with the boys. It was right before we left that I realized I did not have my cell phone anymore. I was worried.

Kristy the bus driver helped me find my phone on the bus when no one was there. She is a life saver. We were chillin on the bus and all of a sudden there were hot girls there too. Whomever managed that ... well done. As Scott said to me "All these girls that just got on the bus just bit off _way_ more than they can chew!". I would agree with that statement for one group as we really didn't see them after we got to the Whiskey. But the other group of girls I spent some time with. I promised them I would write about them and as promised :

Jesma : Jesma was one of the first girls I was talking too. Jesma is a rather unique name and we discussed that for some time. Apparently it is "James ... just all mixed up". Jesma is a geomatic engineer? The girls knew each other from school in Kingston (?) and they were just out for a girls nite reunion. Jesma and I were cutting it up on the dance floor, and she seems to be all about the hip hop and fiddy cent. Gorgeous, super smart (geomatic engineer remember?), funny and easy going. Plus the cool name is a bonus.

Rhonda : Rhonda and I got along absolutely fantastic. Of course we did ... we are both computer geeks. It turns out she is an Oracle DBA for Nexen. She works in UNIX all day long. I was in shock! It's not often I run into a girl uber geek ... who knows UNIX to boot!. Her favorite command is the "kill" command. Kill -9 Kill -9 she said. People just don't understand that you don't _kill_ the user ... you kill the process! Lets just say the we got ignored a few times when we got into the techy stuff. The groups eyes just rolled and we happily ignored them back. She is apparently quitting soon and moving to Italy. She's been taking Italian for 4 years and is heading over to find the next adventure in her life. I'd say that night was an adventure ... only here second time drinking so they tell me? Sexy DBAs are _awesome_!

Eleanor : Eleanor is a sexy sweet girl who flew in from L.A. Thank goodness for that because the night would have been incomplete without her there. I told here that her name is very elegant. And elegant is the word for Eleanor. It turns out she works for a record company in L.A. She is the "Director Of New Media". I personally think that is a SUPER COOL THING! How often do I get the chance to meet someone like that. James seemed to think she was pretty cool too. She was only in town for the weekend, and I think she may have moved her flight to later on Sunday (Saturday was a good time). She is a true blue Canadian though. She's been missing her poutine down in the states that's for sure! I promised here I would write about the night, and Eleanor is too awesome a girl to not follow through on your word.

Courtney : I fell in love with Courtney at the bar. Not the stalker kind of love ... the drunk smitten kind of love. She is a landscape designer who works for her dad in Edmonton. She is with BF which is too bad ... because she is the woman of my dreams. Totally sweet! Super Sexy! Smart, Easy Going. That seems to be the theme with all 4 of these close friends. Gee ... I wonder how lucky us guys were? We hit the jackpot with these ladies!!! Courtney also plays div 1 soccer, and was showing off her bruises ... which looked as ouch as Jaman's head from paint ball! She was very certain that her long trip back to Edmonton the next day would surely be interrupted while she was on the side of the road puking. Apparently this has happened before? It doesn't matter what she did ... nothing is knocking her off the pedestal.

By the end of the night this stag was completely de-railed. People were out of commission. Some managed to escape without telling anyone else. Some simply disappeared. Some exploded inside the bar, some outside, some both. We traveled to the Husky House (Gerry's) for some late night grub. Poutine was in order. We did have a few rowdy's ... high light's include : Danphy and Blair choking each other, Jaman arguing with the girls, Sudzy almost throwing a ketchup bottle at Curtis, Danphy climbing over the balcony and wandering around naked, Jaman braking the flower pot, people getting kicked out like 3 times. I've never seen an entire group's order canceled after it was in, and then kicked out ... but it happened to us!

A few of us sweet talked that staff with some coinage, and we stayed with the ladies. We got Eleanor's poutine ... We all got the grub, and now at 4:00 in the morning it was time to crash. After a whole weekend of like 3 hours sleep my body was shutting off. It has taken me until today to semi-recover from the best weekend I have had in many many years. As I said to John ... thank God you best friend only gets married once ... well 2-3 times tops ... cuz I don't think we would survive another one of your bachelor parties!

The next day was hangover central ... a group went to Joey Tomatoes ... we were the saddest looking crew you ever laid eyes on. Basically an embarrassment to all. We did not care however. Curtis apparently has some rather humorous 5 A.M. video. He injured himself while filming. After lunch John went to face the music with the new wife, the rest of us settled in for a day of poker, and cracking into the remaining keg. Some minor appearances from some crew, but after 9:00 on Sunday I had to shut it down. Heath made his flight, and he'll be back in 2 weeks for the wedding. I can't wait for that party.

Johnny P ... you are a good man! To Jesma, Rhonda, Eleanor & Courtney ... you are the most awesome girls ever! Jaman, Danphy, Scott ... best party in years. Heath ... buddy thanks for flyin in ... and to everyone else there ... see you in two weeks!

Completeness, Travel & Best friends

2005-08-17T12:00:00.000-06:00

After the first week of August things were almost to a complete state for the COM object. I know Chris had been doing some work, and I had been providing him with any help I could offer. Samples of my XML, ways I would do things. It helps just talking about nothing at all sometimes ... just yak about work and the solution sometimes presents itself.

I had already walked through the COM object deployment some months ago. It was a new thing for Chris and somewhat for Mik. Chris did shed some light on the DLL deployment though. It's not that the COM must be compiled on the other machine, you just need to be an administrator and register the DLL manually with regsvr32. I realize we should have know this. I don't know windows technology at all. I have never claimed too. I have learned a tremendous amount over the course of this year.

The final testing setup is to build on your machine. Have TS open to the dev server. Shut down IIS. Copy the DLL and web services files across. Register the DLL manually. Restart IIS. This does seem to be a simple procedure, yet it is very time consuming. There is some waiting involved, and if you miss a step, or in the wrong order ... *boom* the web service fails.

Just ask Chris about recompiling because he forgot about some junk variables named 'QQQ'. Or some other variables were unused. Or the case sensitivity of the DLL is not patrolled by case-insensitive VFP? Since VFP is basically a free for all on the code syntax (even more so than PHP ever could be ... which is hard to believe). When you compile the DLL in VFP ... no warnings or errors. It's just when you deploy it that case and variables cause you problems. It was funny for me because I am used to all sorts of linking, and C style problems like that. The FoxPRo experts out on the Island were not however. Made for some good times.

Needless to say we made great headway this time. On my last night there I even wrote a utility page to parse the old style data files into valid XML requests, and then another utility to send the XML requests. Just for testing purposes really. Rudy can make it all pretty ... I just wanted it to work. It was good to leave on a high this time. We actually hit a huge milestone. I was quite pleased and I think they all were too. I had to rush out of the office to catch the ferry back to the mainland. It was a great trip!

I stayed in Vancouver with Heath for a night. I ripped down to the English Bay Boathouse where I had a few drinks waiting for him to finish work. Two rather intoxicated girls came in. Sometimes you can just tell that trouble is brewing. They pulled up next to me, and we shared a table for a while. 15 minutes there and they already spilled drinks. Evelyn apparently works there, but was on her night off. The other girl was dressed in pink. Mini skirt and ball cap. She apparently took a liking to my Flyers hat and wanted to trade. So there I was with too hot girls, spilling their drinks, pinky telling me she loves me and wants to know if I love her, all the while wearing a too small pink cap. Heath just shook his head.

Things started to escalate on the unsoberness scale. The other staff were trying desperately hard to get her out of there. It got really bad when pinky almost told of the manager. I was sitting right there, and if looks could kill. That girls was almost a little pink stain on the Boathouse deck. I just shook my head. Talking with the sous chef later about the incident I found out that pinky's nick name is "nightmare" ... becuase she is one? She is a little bit trashy and has a rather large liking to needles. Not very surprising for Ganville Island I guess.

I had breki with Heath the next day after a great sleep at his new apartment. I wanted to hit the road as early as I could. I was flying back. I left downtown Vancouver @ 10:30. I was back in Calgary @ 10:00. The roads were great. I stopped as little as possible, and I left Golden while it was still much daylight out. That was way better than hitting Kamloops at dusk last time. I must say the trip is quite boring when you do not have someone to play cards with. ;-)

I recovered for a day, and did the usually mail / laundry / cleanup (I actually vacuumed!) / shopping thing. Heath flew in on Friday and I picked him up. I dropped him with John down at Ceasars for steak. I bolted up north to see Rene for a haircut (she was a doll for squeezing me in ... I love you too). She gave me a totally nee wicked style since my hair was super uber long. I hadn't had a cut since like February! I met H&J at Original Joes for a few drinks and talks of old times. There is nothing like your buddies stories, and growing up with these guys ... it was a good feeling.

We hooked up with Danphy later, and headed down 17th. We worked our way into Melrose right where the red mile is. It was crazy packed in there. We spent a couple of hours there having drinks and whatnot. John was pretty hammered. I was driving so I had to keep it easy. We left Melrose around 1:00. It was off to the casino. We went into the poker room. got on the list and eventually sat down. Heath bailed on poker and went to play slots. I cleaned up at the poker table. The other locals were not liking me at all. I had trips 3 times, flushes, two pair on the flop. I was the kill for like 4 hands in a row. People don't like it when you raise to 16 pre-flop on a 4-8 table. I walked out up $300 after a couple of hours. I played a heads up with John ... and we were both like ... "why bet ... it's all the same money?".

So after a late night Denny's run we got back to my place at 5:00 A.M. I crashed ... the boys watched Tombstone. And Johns wife phoned at 9:00 A.M. Who phones at 9:00 A.M.?!!!!! It was a long day ahead of us. John's stag party was Saturday night. This is going to be a treat. What kind of night will 3 best friends have?

DLLs, IDEs & flowers

2005-07-27T14:56:00.000-06:00

Microsoft Ho!

I managed to be sailing along through development of many things quite nicely. My ship had no alternative but to crash directly into the land of Microsoft. I wouldn't mind so much if the natives were friendly, or even if they were unfriendly but made use of common sense.

After a few days of frustrating experiments trying to get a VFP XML webservice COM object to run on a server, we realized a few things. We should have known that DLLs built on one version of an MS Operating System would _not_ work on another platform. It makes sense now that we think about it. It is not obvious in the documentation.

The COM server generation just places the DLL wherever you state. The mapped drives are on different machines, and it turns out that is a bad thing to do. It's not a problem ... we'll just build DLLs for every platform and run an MSI installer to choose which version of the dll to use. Pain in the ass ... and of course there is no documentation to help out the VFP developers.

I then decided to venture further inland and start climbing the VFP 9 development tree. It's very similar to .NET / VB development. If you have done one ... you have done them all. It was very frustrating to build my simple hello world program, and run things until I was shown a few tricks, and realized a very startling fact. VFP does not allow you to build a project while your code is open. That is _so_ inefficient! I only had one form, and one code window open. What happens when you are coding multiple objects, and events at the same time. Did someone at Microsoft really think it would be desired to close 10 windows, and build to find a compile error, and then open 8 windows again to get back into coding? What an enormous waste of time!

It makes me love the *NIX style of development. Just code away, open 20 files if you want. Just hit another terminal and run make. You get some errors, just flip a window with SHIFT+Right and go to you file line number. It just "MAKES SENSE"! Every time I am forced to dabble into the IDE that supposed to be "The Best Programming Tool _Ever_". I find so many glaring deficiencies that just fires me right back into my Konsole code. If windows had efficient programming tools it might not be so bad ... but they don't. Let the cannibals eat themselves on that island my friends.

Flowers. A couple of days ago at the office one of the employees was celebrating an anniversary with his girlfriend. She sent him a lovely bouquet of flowers to the office. Needless to say he was ridiculed for this. Much to his chagrin. Since I am an endless practical joker, this happening set into to motion my next victim. The "boss" had recently experienced a visit from a cross country old acquaintance. It was a surprise visit, that simply could not be avoided. Although avoidance may have been desired. His surprise continued when I set in motion the plan, with the support of many other employees, to send him a bouquet of his very own. "Great to see you after all these years, Love Jim". I think it's time to let him of the hook. Let the retaliation begin.

I gotta be me!

FC4, Stampeded & Getting Fired

2005-07-15T19:50:00.000-06:00

BUSY BUSY BUSY!!

I've been so busy lately, I have not even had time to write for a while. I had made the trek out to Victoria once again. Powersoft has moved into a new office. The renovations are spectacular. I have my own office on the second floor. There is a balcony with a barbecue, and the foozeball table seems to attract a great deal of attention.

I was given a computer to install Linux on. :D A P2 350, but thankfully it was loaded with 392 RAM. I ended up installing FC4 on it. Mostly to try it out, and because I forgot how slow the machine actually was and got tired of waiting for SuSE to get going. I had left my office during the FC4 install. I'm quite happy with it. I have a basic KDE setup, and configured. There seem to be no problems running my development. I do however spend most of day inside Konsole, and use Konqueror, and Firefox for testing. So a fairly minimalist use. I do seem to remember some issues making use of PostgreSQL ... which is surprising considering RHDB is PG. It installed no problems from source though. Back to my days of compiling. I was quite impressed with the speed increase to using yum. It seemed faster on a 350mHz box than FC2 running on my AMD 2400+. I was happy.

The productivity was good for myself. Mik and I had an entire development environment in Mac OSX created. Development, and pre-production machines. I had written several startup, and installation scripts to aid in setup. I created a test website for all new products. I also fixed some bugs, and streamlined the web site file structures. We did run into an IIS incompatibility issue right before Mik left, but we'll sort that out next time.

Completely exhausted, I flew back to Calgary to find my sister who was in town for the Calgary Stampede. We went to the L&Y pancake breakfast, and hung out for a while. We went shopping for cowboy boots ... no dice though. We ate a great supper, and came back to my apt to chill for the evening. Thursday we went down to the Stampede grounds. We got tickets for the grandstand and watched the afternoon rodeo. It was quite entertaining. We had some really good balcony seats. Our day continued eating corn dogs and playing the carny side show games. I won a GIANT spongebob squarepants prize, and Diana totally kicked my ass at the watergun game. She took home a very large Oscar The Grouch. We won some other smaller prizes, but those two were the show.

Today I had a lunch / business meeting at 11:00. Prior to that I had to fire one of my clients. Continually they are an extremely annoying client. Always demanding immediate attention, and their problems are of course more important that anything else I could possibly be doing. I had had enough of begging to get my invoices paid by them. With two outstanding bills, and returning home to no cheques, I gave them until the end of the week. I sent a notification, asking very bluntly for my money, and stated my company was no longer interested in their business. It sucks getting fired. I am severely less stressed out now. When will people learn. The rest of business is very good. The outlook for me is quite pleasant. We'll get into that some other day though.

Supposed to be going out tonight. Don't know if I feel like it though. It's kind of nice to camp out at home. My sister is at the Stampede again with Rich and A.J. and his family. She is not alone, but I suppose I should venture out and find them eventually. Oh deer ... the night is young.

Time, New Features & Poker

2005-06-20T03:53:00.000-06:00

It has been ages since I last wrote. I found myself feeling very unmotivated for quite some time. I arrived back in Calgary after my last stint on the coast. There were some progression issues with the project, but nothing that is earth shattering if you have ever worked in the industry before. :( I found myself really burned out when I arrived home. I basically took 10 days off to try and find my energy again. It didn't go so well. I did manage to watch almost all of the 40+ DVDs that I had replaced from my break-in a few months ago. I truly was a couch potato for a couple of weeks. I honestly was not feeling that good. All I wanted to do was sleep. I didn't go out, I didn't talk to anyone. I became quite reclusive. It was just that time where I needed a break from _everything_.

I took a short hiatus back in Saskatchewan. The pipe band went down for the competitions. The band got 3 seconds, and a third overall. My drum corps had the same results. It was a great, and tiring weekend. The band returned to Calgary for performances in front of the queen. I had stayed in SK to visit family and what not. I got back and it was time to pull the socks up and get to work. Enough of just doing the bare minimum to get by!

Recently I have been bombarded with "new features" for the L&Y Toolkit. It has actually been exciting to see this system finally growing into a very useful product for them. It has been a long time coming. It's pretty impressive that it is all my baby. Well cudos to Aaron Seigo for his part in the phpfwk2, but it's still my baby! When some of the staff make comments to AJ like "I couldn't even do my job anymore without the toolkit", it brings some satisfaction to my heart.

Just tonight I completely redid the user interface. I decided to make it stupid-friendly. I used the KDE 128x128 icons for a lot of things. It actually looks really cool, and fun to use. My hope is that it makes the learning curve, and training go much smoother than before. Jordan is excited, AJ is excited, and I'm really excited. I love it when a plan comes together.

I'm pushing to get a few more features in there before I leave again. I'm planning to do a double band contest on the 25, 26 of June and then drive to Victoria on the 27. Stay for 2 weeks, fly back to Calgary for Stampede. My sister (Diana) is coming into town so I want to see her, and then fly back a week later for a few more weeks. Things are going to get really crazy for a while!

On a cool personal note. I've really been getting into playing poker. Iactually placed 6th in an online tournament. $5 + $0.50 buy-in. I went out in 6th place of 278 entrants. that's pretty impressive I'd say. I won $70 so it was pretty cool! I did spend it all back in other tournaments over the next few days. I'm keeping myself busy working instead of playing poker all day / night now. I miss those days ;)

PHP Graphs, True Type & New Stuff

2005-05-12T22:30:00.000-06:00

Wow have things ever been busy the last few weeks. I made it back to Calgary with Marshall quite nicely. We missed the early ferry due to it being full. We knew we were so screwed to make good time, so we took it slow. This also gave us a reason to make many stops and play some heads up holdem poker. I'm into Marsh for $50 after the entire trip. It was worth sitting at a truck stop in the dark, outside on some wobely table playing poker, and some trucker goes ... hey cool ... who's winning? What a trip. We did get home just adfter 4:00 A.M. Not bad for leaving victoria at 8:00 A.M the day before. What a _long_ trip!

Of course I needed a few days to recover from the trip, travel, and everything else. Days just seemed to rip on by and I'll never get them back now. I did roll up my sleeves and get back into the toolkit code for L&Y. I'd been looking forward to it because I had not really gotten any chance to really sink into some things I wanted to do. Now is my chance. I've been on a good roll. I just compelted a major improvement adding a tracking level of arbitrary terms to each prospect.

After a conversation with AJ, I was motivated to look into graphing out statistics on the commercial activity. I did some searchiong for PHP graphing tools, and came accross a fabulous library JPGraph found here : http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/index.php. It is a collection of classes that make use of the GD library to dynamically create images of every kind of graph and chart you could imagine. The examples has 297 differnet images, complete with source code examples of how to do it. I must say it is written quite well, and the documentation is quite good. I installed it on my machine, and made my first statistical graph in under 1 hour. I was super impressed and pleased. My clients are absolutely thrilled about this. They are compilling a list of all the different stats they might want.

Installing this package on the server was another story. When I built the server, I made the choice of having it headless. No X server, no desktop environment. Simple console with ssh access. For 3 years that's been perfect. When I attempted to use theJPGraph libray I realized some errors were due to missing True Type fonts in the X11 directories. After some playing around, and compiling ttmkfdir for SuSE, installing some noarch rpms, and then installing X11 through yast it worked like a champ. The fonts are great, and within 2 hours from start I had the library figured out, and multiple statistics are being used. I especially like the 3-D pie chart. The possibilities for the usefulness of this are endless.

On the personal side of things. this is the wekk for "New Stuff". My cell phone contract was up this week, and I went and got a new phone. I had been wanting one for quite a long time, and my new kyocera is fabulous. I have had it on for 2 days straight, and the battery still registers completley full! I also switched my residental phone to the new Shaw Digital Phone (VOIP) so I got a new phone number. The plan was too good to refuse. Unlimited anytime calling in North America. I get 6 phone features for free. Flat rate will never change. It's insanely good.

Today I started to receive the insurance settlement from my break in a few months ago. I chose to wait becuase I was out of town again. I got a new DVD player, and CD player, plus I got some new DVDs. I still have tons left on the credit to get CDs, and more movies. I'm happy for now, and I do have 2 years to use up the store credit. So all this new stuff is overloading my brain. Good thing I've started to make use of Kontact's TODO list, and calendar appointments. I'd never get anything done without it

Vim, Remote Work & Ice Cream Cake

2005-04-24T21:13:00.000-06:00

Recently I found myself doing a large amount of tedious coding. This came out from the specification analysis I had been doing. Large amounts of data elements mapped to IDs, and different column names in different databases. Somehow I had to make the code work. Instead of just jumping in and writing all of the code I decided to think about a smart way to do it first (which is always a good idea). I must say I love VIM. Many others can not stand it, it's so old school. There are all these nice graphical tools available. Bah I say. I had a column of 60 odd variable names, which also needed to be used as associative array indexes, and in many other spots to reference form objects and on and on. I just created a text file listing the names which made it simple to wholesale insert them in VIM

:r <filename>

But who do you make use of the columns now? I also love VIM because of recordable macros. Record the steps you go through, and you can access those steps easily by typing

@ <macroname>

So I prefixed, and suffixed the list of names with the same calls. Then to run through a process like ... go to the first dollar sign in the line ($), take the entire text between the dollar sign and the comma, move to the empty quotes (''), paste the text you copied in between them, and make it all lower case. the move to the next line, and the next dollar sign. I simply hit "q" to start recording, and gave it a name. Did my process and ran that macro until my code was complete. lets see dream weaver pull that one off. ;-)

I found myself in the office doing some remote work for a client. Let's jsut say I was bailing them out again. they have had some other people looking after things, and I must say it was not pretty. I found all sorts of things that were simply broken. I couldn't even do what they asked until I first fixed the broken features. I consider myself a nice guy, so I was going to do a couple of things gratis. When I realized I would have to fix things back to my original code, there was no way I could let that go for free. That's a bad move to make. It all worked out, and I ended up making all of the changes live on the production server. The second group of programmers decided to remove the original product from version control, so I had no other choice when I was no where near my usual set up. It's Sunday evening, so I wasn't worried at all.

It was also my birthday on Friday. The big 27. People bought lots of ice cream cake. Twice in one day. Karen Kneier also got me a fancy cigarette package. Way cool! We went out Friday to the Knockanback, then to the Lucy bar, and Hush. There were lots of interesting people out in Victoria. It's the end of exams, and the weather is beautiful. Sometime I'd like to just go sit downtown ... it was more fun watching the show on the streets than actually going to a bar.

Maybe next year.

SOAP, Data Definitions & Port

2005-04-15T13:12:00.000-06:00

SOAP ... Simple Object Access Protocol. Web services are becoming a very important part of any business today. Amazon.com for example. Where would they be without there web services? SOAP is the communication protocol from one application to a web service provided on a server somewhere. My recent forray into web services involved my investigation, and implementation of a web service using the MS SOAP toolkit.

The basic run down is like this. We need to build a web service. We have the brains of things in VFP applications. A new system in PHP that needs to make use of this web service. One would think it would be easy to do this. I would say it's easy now that I have it figured out. I spent most of three days making all of the parts work properly to allow the PHP site to execute 3 lines of code.


$client = new SoapClient($wsdl_url);
$which = "BYE";
$rv = $client->hello($which);

That may seem like a whole lot of work to do that. But it's pretty slick in the end. It's actually cool when you think about what really happens in there. A VFP application is built as a multi-threaded dll. You then publish your com object as a webservice to an IIS server. You even get to select what methods are made public by this web service. All of the needed files are generated for you, and VFP even offers a testing application for web services to make sure it works. In this simple case I create a SOAP client object in PHP based on the WSDL file published by my web service. This creates an new class and provides methods that match the public methods of the web service. I can simply call these methods from my new object, and pass any parameters as needed.

The entire SOAP protocol is hidden underneath the scenes. I do not have to worry about the XML creation. The wsdl is taken care of by VFP. I do not have to worry about the SOAP envelopes. Connections are handled. I simply create and call. Getting this to work was no small feat however. When you think about it there are so many different parts at work here. SOAP is a very complex idea. Where do you start when something goes wrong?

Is the problem in the PHP code? Is the problem in the PHP library code used, or the PEAR module used? Is the problem on the client web server? Is the problem on the receiving IIS server? Is the problem in the connection bewteen the two? Is there a problem with access restrictions? Is the problem in the VFP code? Is the problem with windows not releasing the dll once it has been loaded and recompiled? Is the problem with the generated web service files? As you can see there are lots of areas to look into. I looked into all of these and more.

I have very little experience with VFP. However if you have written code once it's pretty much the same all over. Subclass from an OLE session, create a simple procedure and compile the prg as a dll. VFP provides a tool kit for working with and publishing XML services. You need access to a working IIS server. You create a virtual directory, and use the VFP publisher to generate your WSDL, and web service files for your com object into the virtual directory. That is a task that needs careful attention to details, and making sure every setting is exactly correct. You also need to be careful that the IIS directories, and the on disk directories have proper access and sharing set up. I needed to allow access on the directory with the generated files, and the directory with the dll with read, write, and execute appropriately for the web service to work.

I would suggest testing the web service in VFP before going to test it out from server to server. At least you would know that the web services is functional, and would know that any problems would arise from your client code. PHP has built in SOAP functions. I thought I couldn't use them, then realized I was trying on a windows machine. I switched over to the Mac OSX server where SOAP is enabled. I tried both the built in module, and the PEAR module for SOAP. I found the PEAR module just as easy to use, and underlying calls actually made use of the built in SOAP client anyways (IIRC). I went with the built in module. One less thing to worry about.

It's all working now with a basic service taking a string parameter. We are going to send the data accross in XML as well. It does seem rather funny to me to use XML to set up communication to a com object just to pass it some XML. Why not just make a simple listener that takes a variable containing XML in a POST var? Then one side would have to handle things. I think this makes it easier in the VFP world, but it does seem like a great deal of overhead to me.

Now that the SOAP communication was working I moved on to some new tasks of mapping data we collect into the proper format. I have a spec to work off of, and map my data names to 7 digit codes in the spec. There are about 250 or so fields. I tell you it sucks going cross eyed flipping between pages, and screens. Looking from a document to a PGSQL table definition, and trying to figure out the this column named "foobar" is really supposed to be data ID 8000100. Working with a numbered spec like this brought back memories of my earlier career days working at SED Systems in Saskatoon. This current spec is rather small. I remember spec documents for the Space Station project where it was over 100 pages of tables defining codes, ranges, signals, changes and all sorts of other fun things on the test beds. I loved going through them, and comparing to the previous version, and seeing what had changed. ;-)

On the lighter side of things, I have really gotten into drinking port. Marshall likes to drink port with me right? He doesn't like the hangovers though. He started to get scared when the third day in a row I brought a new bottle home with me and said "Wnat some port Marsh?". All he said "Oh God". He had some all the same. It's Friday, I may have to pick up a new bottle on the way home today.

On another drunken Marshal note. We decided to BBQ awesome hamburgers from Thrifty's rolled in peppercorns. He was cooking, and moving cheese burgers from hot grill to plate. Lets just say there is a big splotch of cheese on the patio now. "Andy ... I need more cheese" Needless to say that was his burger. ;-)

Now I'm hungry.

Burglary, Time & Latin Words

2005-03-28T21:40:00.000-07:00

Well it has been over a month since I last wrote. There have been some fairly major happenings in my life recently. I have been in Calgary for the month of March, and will be traveling back to Victoria sometime in April. It was really hectic when I was first back. I was doing all of my paperwork for my company's year end, and I went to see my accountant. All was good with the accountants.

Later that same night I arrived home to realize my apartment had been broken into. the police filled out the report, and there was pretty much nothing they could do. The insurance claim is going through just fine. Basically they must have jimmied the lock. I had not even completely unpacked from travels yet, and so I provided an excellent way for thieves to transport stolen property. they took my DVD player, CD player, gym bags, $125 in change, and foreign currency, some personal gifts, over 40 DVDs, 125 CDs, some computer CDs, briefcase, and about $500 worth of clothes still in my duffle bag. I guess it's just stuff, and I'll get new stuff. They didn't take my TV, or my computer. If they had I would probably be institutionalized right now. As my good friend Dayle said "At least you are alright ... you didn't surprise them and get knifed, and you'll get more CDs". Try to keep in good spirits.

I had had enough of life for a while. Still trying to catch a break. I decided (sort of a forced holiday) to take some time off. So for about 10 days I really did absolutely nothing. I didn't talk to people, other than necessary. I didn't work. I wrote no code whatsoever. I did not discuss work with anyone. I only dealt with critical problems (which were zero BTW). I can not even say what happened during those days. It all seems kind of a blur. But I think I needed to shut off for a while. I am now slowly starting to get the engines going again.

I did completely build a new web site for BDDF DEVELOPMENTS INC. http://www.bddf.ca. Please tell your friends about it. I was really proud of the banner image which I did myself. I normally hate image work. But I was determined to create something simple, and stylish, and have it all my own. The web site it really straightforward. Simple information about what the company does, what tools we use, and a little bit about me. Also a contact form. I did submit the URL to dmoz.org. I have not seen any listing yet, but it can take several weeks. I'll check out the forums in a few weeks if nothing happens.

I have been doing some work again for another client. They had someone else maintaining, and doing some new development on their web sites. they needed some low level guts of the system work done, and figured I was the best candidate to do it properly, and quickly. Not to speak poorly of colleagues in the industry, but some people just get in _way_ over their heads. I had to figure out some massively broken code, and complaints about things not working. I did realize the path that the new developers had gone down. I simply commented out their work, and fixed things. I told the client I typically do not do things like that, but the problems seemed urgent, so I made an exception. All the new developers have to do is ask me something ... I'll gladly share my knowledge.

Last week seemed to be the week for Tsearch2 questions on the PostgreSQL lists. I helped out several people with installation issues, and general questions. I'm excited that people are using this module more and more. I am also excited that people seem to be using my documentation http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/tsearch/V2/docs/tsearch-V2-intro.html
One guy had some problems with different results from the tables ts_vector column, as opposed to the to_tsvector function. After some investigation I figured out that his table was using a default locale of en_US, and not the same configuration as the calls to to_tsvector. In addition to that the configuration used by the tsearch2 triggers were missing configuration mappings for lword, lhwords, and lpart_hword. That meant he was not parsing out Latin words, Latin hyphenated words, or partial hyphenated words. He has since fixed his problems, and Andy gets a gold star by his name.

I have some work to do, and mostly some design work to get done. Our PHPFWK code has some big plans, we just need time to implement all of our magic right Aaron?

good nite folks,

Andy

OLE DB Providers, CVS & VCRs

2005-02-19T22:04:00.000-07:00

What a joy it is to work with software that not only does exactly what you expect it to do, but is also easy to work with. My latest activities have been relating to the convergence of a system for MS-SQL to PostgeSQL.

I am not completely free of the ball and chain of SQL Server, but the closer I get to that bright light of a real RDBMS, the more excited I get. I had never experienced importing / exporting to and from MS-SQL prior to this week. I wasn't worried per se, but it was unfamiliar to me. I am quite familiar with the workings of this now.

I have installed PostgreSQL 8.0.1 on my Windows machine. This happens to install the OLE DB provider as well (nice). So now I have the option of exporting directly to a PG database. It was quite easy to setup the DSN for my local machine and start chugging away. There are a couple of tricks to the DSN. By default bools are represented as char fields, you can simply uncheck this option. You can also set some other configuration options regarding bigints, text datatypes etc.

The ODBC provider is not the problem area. Once again due to the non standard MS way of doing things it causes problems. "uniqueidentifier" columns. You may as well forget about it. You can transform them into text datatypes, but you'll be pooched after that. There is apparently a package kicking around that adds "uniqueidentifier" as a type to postgres. It relies on the libuuid library, which isn't available on windows. Why one would want that datatype, other than for a slow conversion is beyond me. Sequences are available and 10^23142341 better than a global unique binary value.

Another pitfall when exporting is the fact the MS-SQL handles case sensitivity in a non standard way. According to the standards SQL is case insensitive. PG handles fields, and tables inside of double quotes to be case sensitive, but the basic useage converts to all lower case. I believe the spec states to handle all uppercase. I'm not sure about that. Regardless ... this causes problems on the table data movement because a column named someID would have been created as someid. But when the data is moved from SQL it's coming from someID and into someID ... which isn't available. You basically have to go slow, and transform all of your column names to be lowercase for table creation.

The other option is to re-create the schema first, and then just append the data into an existing table. From what I have read on the internet this provides much greater results. You can transform data, and shift columns as needed. This may be the way to go when you are moving more critical data. Since my schemas are rather small, and the system is in develeopment, I just dumped the SQL scripts, and removed all of the MS-SQL crap in them (like square brackets [], and dbo designations, and specifying COLLATE blah blah, Latin1_ blah blah for var chars etc.). I think this helps you realize how lacking in features, and datatypes other DBs are compared to PostgreSQL. Not Boolean, numerous date / time types, Text, and a heap of others.

<time days="6" / >

That was me being funny with XML. Alright ... not so funny. I wrote the first half of this in a draft six days ago. Since I'm leaving Sooke to head back to Calgary tomorrow or the next, I decided to sum up my week here before I check out.

I continued on with my PostgeSQL fun this week. I must say that my research was indeed correct, in that loading your schemas prior to data export yielded a much greater success ratio. It was so much easier to just append some conformed data onto an existing table. You could drop out coplumns as needed, and things seem to go smoothly.

Everyone else seems to be really getting on board with the PG niftyness. It just goes to show you how much people who have worked with bad tools, appreciate the good ones. They'll never go back now. buwhahahahahaha!

We have the developers set up with Apache, PHP & PostgeSQL all running on windows, and the Mac OS X 10.3 server setup and running the same. It took a few different packages, and a server re-install, but we are chuggin along like the old chicago line all the same. This setup is so much cleaner, and nicer to work with than before. IMHO. It also means I could do development in Linux if I wanted, as the tools are all OS and freely available. I did notice that apache released a windows installer for 2.0.53 this last week. When I went it was still unavailable, therefore I still have Apache 1.3.33 on my machine. Not to worry ... it works just fine and danady.

Mik and I spent some considerable time setting up a CVS repository. Every seems to be clicking into how it works, and everything is going smoothly. We even tried out Tortoise CVS for windows ... which is pretty cool BTW. http://www.tortoisecvs.org. I still install the win32 binary from http://cvshome.org myself. I'm an old school command line junkie. :-D I configured CVSSPam which is a set of ruby scripts to send out retty CVS commit log emails. I works quite well, and Chris Lang just asked me to take him off the list, as he got 44 CVS commit emails today. That's what you get for having busy developers I guess. ;-)

As for my time in Victoria this round ... it was wonderful. Beautiful weather and I got a lot of cool things done. Marshall and the girls have had the misfortune recently of having _two_ VCRs and a DVD player that all do not work. That makes it kind of hard to watch the taped episode of 24 from Monday night. I went out and the good soul that I am bought them a Phillips DVD / VCR combo player. Needless to say it is a _HUGE_ hit. They love me. Marshall has almost finished building the new room in the basement. He did a smashing job on it. Owen helped with the Dry Wall, and Johnny is painting today. So it was a group effort. I even mudded a little bit last night. Lets just say I should stick to programming. drywalling really isn;'t my forte. ;-)

Cheers,

See you back in Calgary!

XML, Mac OS X &Neo Citron

2005-02-17T15:35:00.000-07:00

I recently found a PEAR module for PHP called XML_Serializer, and XML_Unserialiser. What a fantastic module. These classes utilize PHP native type calls to build and format XML strings for you. It's highly configurable (what to use for indents, line feeds, headings, type hints etc.). The XML is spot on exactly what I expect. The object just takes your data object (simple array, class, array of objects) and spits out XML. It's neat, clean, and simple. It also provides the unserializer in which you pass it XML and will return to you native PHP objects containing data. Pretty slick stuff.

I also did some limited investigation into foxpro web services through SOAP. What an attrocity that is! It looks like a ton of work to set it up, and the XML sent is "whacky". I think we'll just end up building a custom com object that will handle the parsing of simple XML. It's way easier than a SOAP setup. Should do the trick nicely.

This week I've been introduced to Mac OS X 10.3. It's pretty slick I must say. I'll also admit that I've been using windows much to much for my liking, so anything with a built in ls command scores huge points. ;-) We have a working CVS pserver, and a working installation of PostgreSQL. We just need to set up Apache, and PHP properly. 10.3 comes with a stock apache 1.3.33 (I think), so an upgrade to apache 2 is in order. Overall the system is fine to work on. If you have worked on one *NIX system, you can pretty much make your way around any other system. I thought it was based on Debian, turns out to be the Mach Kernel. It's a _HUGE_ step up from windows any which way you dice the turkey gizzards.

Getting the data transformation to work from MS_SQL might be a little more tricky. I've got the ODBC connection working, and some things are moved accross. I should have known it would completely barf all over the MS "uniqueidentifier" datatypes. It attempts to create them as "date" types. hahaha. I think I'll have to re-create the schema first, and then just copy the data over separately. That will be my task tomorrow I believe. Fun Fun Fun.

The OS X packaging community seems rather sporadic to me. Several unique packages are available, that may or may not coincide with the stock apple packages, or whatever other package you have installed. This coming from a guy who a year ago still installed everything from source. I guess I have just become to accustomed to a system with nice packaging layouts (like SuSE). I'm too spoiled and now to compile apache from source, and have one GINORMOUS httpd.conf file just seems wrong. I suppose I could make it work smartly, but I'm also lazy. ;-)

I've been feeling under the weather for a couple of days. Actually I feel like ASS! But my new favorite friend is Neo-Citron with Rye. It's totally wicked! you can't even taste the whiskey in it. I prefer the lemon and rye over the cherry flavoured Neo-Citron. But that's just me.

Interfaces, Tech Support & Hair Dressers

2005-02-05T01:42:00.000-07:00

It's been ages since I added a new entry here. I've been in Calgary for almost 3 weeks now. It has blown past fairly quickly. I haven't had any creative burst of new and nifty things work wise. That's not to say that I have not done any work, it's just been a consistent level of average work.

I completely re-worked the entire interface for the L&Y toolkit. Chris Lang has been a huge influence on my artisitc web skills since I have been working with him. It's not that I was unaware of user interface techniques, or that I couldn't accomplish what I wanted. Coder's (especially in the OSS world) tend to work on what interests them. Playing with CSS, and picky little user interface issues like changing the font one size smaller, or the font family to something different, and the background shading, and borders, and positioning etc. etc. etc. is not interesting to me. To me it is menial task. My time is better spent doing what I am good at, which is writing code.

I know that all of those things I mentioned are very, very important. Greatly important on a public website. I am a low level coder however, and what interests me is making the web site functional. It's the microsoft vs linux console scenario. I don't care if it looks pretty, the crappy software doesn't do what I need it to. Hey ... over here is something that _works_, its not the greatest looking thing, but maybe that will improve on a future revision? Since Chris is so look and feel oriented, as well as a technically gifted person, I have become accustomed to being bombarded with interface changes. I have learned a few tricks along the way, and since I was doing some work in the toolkit anyways, I decided to make a wholesale change. I must say it is for the better. I have had nothing but compliments, and I found that I have become so used to thinking about fonts, borders, and shading that I tend to notice all of that stuff more and more. Functionality still comes first, lets not forget our priorities.

I also added the WYSIWYG editor HTMArea into my code base. It's not hooked into the CMS as of yet, but I did make use of it in the toolkit. I did have to chase down a few bugs (relating to IE of course). The editor works great in Mozilla (Firefox), yet on certain versions of IE (windows 2000 version 6.0.28 or something), the actual textarea, to type in, was non existent. This was apparently not a problem on Windows XP with SP1. Apparently the problems on certain versions of IE are when the editor is within nested tables. IE does not handle the size coordinates properly within nested table cells (resets to 0), so the end result is a textarea created within an iframe of 0 pixels. :-( A simple code hack in the htmlarea.js to set the width and height to 100%, and a border around the textarea, and everything seems to be no problems.

There was a slight issue with mozilla based browsers. You could not copy and paste into the broswer. It violates the security settings, as mozilla does not allow scripts on web pages access to your computers clipboard. GAY! But I understand the reasoning, and potential security problems behind that. In order to fix it, you can install a firefox extension to edit your user files, and place some settings in the user.js tab to allow specific web sites clipboard access. Nifty! And everyone is happy again.

Yesterday was an interesting day for me. Since I re-worked the entire L&Y network to run the VPN using Linksys routers, there have been absolutely no problems that I have heard of. That makes me very happy, considering the problematic VPN setup they used to be running under. That's 5 months and not a peep from anyone. Speed seems to be up, and connections are not flaky, no more faulty hardware to deal with etc.

Telus' entire network in the province went down yesterday apparently. The two outlet offices not in the city both happen to be running on Telus. Oh the joys. I was on my way to the office, and I got the phone call from Andy Henderson about problems with the Lethbridge office, and he informed me about Telus. After quite a few minutes on the phone with John at the remote office I realized what had happened. The wonderful tech support that John had been talking to on the phone about their problems, when they first realized the lack of internet, had him reset the modem, and the router. Standard stupid techy help desk fix all for any problems you can't fix. Reset everything and start all over. John did just what he was told, he held that little reset buton in with a pen for 30 secs and reset the VPN router.

It's not really anyone's fault per se. How was the Telus guy supposed to know it's a specially configured VPN router (how many telus clients make use of that?), and John didn't realize what it really does. Now the router is set to factory defaults, and I have no information I need to reconfigure one to courier down. I can't remotely login because it's not even online anymore without the proper settings. Telus does not have true static IPs, they are all assigned by DHCP and held for your MAC address. This particualr router had a cloned MAC address to make installation easier, and like I know the MAC address of the OpenBSD firewall from 6 months ago? With the patience of John and his ability to play around and relay to me what was happening over the phone, we eventually managed to set up the correct MAC address, and configuration so I could get to it remotely and configure the VPN networks. woot! They were all back and running. No trips to Lethbridge for either Andy, and everyone is happy. John won't ever reset the router in the future. The second office didn't touch a thing, and I just logged into the main VPN router, hit the connect button on that tunnel, and bango, they were all connected again. This network is going to be the death of me I'm sure ;-)

I'm flying out to Victoria for one last trip. Well probably not the last trip, but the last major one for a while (I hope). I had some shirts made for Marshall and the girls.

Karen's shirt is bright YELLOW and it says "MARGARITA PRINCESS"
Melissa's shirt is GREEN with a white collar and it says "Victoria's Next top Model".
Marshall's is a white NAVY sleaved shirt saying "FEED ME WHEN I FORGET TO EAT"

I wanted to do some cool, and personal for them. They've been so awesome letting me crash in their place when I'm out in Victoria. Instant friends ... they are so awesome! :-D

Since I'm flying out on Sunday I've been organizing things before I go. I finished my company year and, and dropped everything off at the accountants. Thanks to Aaron Seigo for killing a few trees printing out my number crunching for me. Thanks Dude! I've cleaned up the clutter and band uniform parts lying around from Robbie Burns night, and now all I have to do is the dishes, laundry, and maybe run the vacuum over the place.

I got some new threads while I was here this time (like $250 I can't really afford ... but oh well). So I decided to go all out before I left and went back to see Renee at Diva Hair. I got highlights, and a smokin' haircut. Renee is totally awesome and always does a superb job on the hair. I get the "friend discount", and I always make it worth her while. Thanks babe! So I'm stylin', and ready to go again. The wheather is turning cold, so It's a good time to hit the west coast again.