Three-Letter Acronyms & Four-Letter Words

In preparatioin for the final cutover to the new server I will not be posting for probably about 48 hours give or take 12.

I am going to be heading to Dallas tomorrow, probably early morning. Spending Friday in Dallas is starting to be common.

Oh yeah, they are dropping off the new dryer this morning. I will snap some pics of the old one and the new one and post them after the cut over.

Ok, well maybe not 100% free after you factor in the taxes paid on the land and the fractional portion in the cost of the house for the clothes line poles, but as a whole it still counts as free energy.

"Discovering Free Energy" was the running joke this weekend between Gina and I. Here is why, the new dryer isn't due to be delivered until sometime on Wednesday. And since the old dryer has been out of comission since like last Wednesday that meant that laundry was about to happen down at the laundry mat.

I think I have used the clothesline outside once in the entire time that I have lived at the house. As a matter of fact, I even contemplated removing the poles from the yard. Luckily I tend to have ideas about being industrious and not always follow through.

Reminding Gina that we have the clothesline was step 1, in "discovering free energy". Step 2 was obviously putting clothes out on the line. She had done a set of sheets and was expecting them to take a while to dry I guess. In about 30 minutes she came inside and informed me that they were completely dry, I have to say that I was a little suprised. I had guessed more like 45 minutes or so.

I mean our neighbor uses her clothesline all the time, not to mention that is what folks did before there was a machine dryer. The temperature high was 103 yesterday, I am sure that helped dry it out in no time flat.

I need to cap off the gas outlet @ the wall. Gina's ex-coworker, John, says that he can help out with that. However, I might have to take on the job before then, the Home Depot paperwork was pretty specific about the fact that they want the area to be ready to go, so I would rather have it capped off before they get here to avoid any conflict.

To wrap up the story around the clothesline, Gina did around 4 loads of laundry. The last load was hung on the line after the sun had started to set and was 97% dry by the time she took it off the line, another 10 minutes and I am sure it would have been done.

I am sure that we will continue to use the clothesline regularly now and the new dryer will probably only get used when it is raining or when I'm too lazy to walk outside and hang up my laundry.

Well, not completely. But being a homeowner is quite a tiresome bore and hassle sometimes.

Roof repair, new floors, plumbing repairs, air conditioners, etc.

Well this time around, the Dryer has died. Well not completely but it definitely has reached a point where you question on whether or not to try to get it repaired. I got the Dryer with the house, which I think really means that they decided it wasn't worth taking it with them. It is a gas dryer, which I can see is not something I would normally ahve bought. The price of natural gas honeslty isn't very effective down here in the Tejas. The price of natural gas has basically doubled in the last year, while the price of electricity here has only increased in about 25%.

Well, the last week or so it has been making a lot of noise. I mean a lot of noise. Thinking it was starting to die, Gina and I started pricing dryers. However, the last two days of it's life the dryer was getting louder. The death rattle I guess. We originally determined that the noise was related to the drum and that the bearings or the rollers it sits on.

It died while I was running the dryer last night. The load I had run wasn't quite dry, so I started it back up. Almost instantly I smelled gas. This meant that the repair was no longer a simple repalcement of bearings or rollers, it meant that something related to the "blower wheel" was now broken. So I unplugged the dryer and washer and turned off the gas at the wall. It was a little after 11:00 at this point, I stayed up for another 30 minutes or so to make sure that there wasn't a leak. (Didn't want to not wake up, since the AC intake it right outside the laundry room.)

All of this means that the Dryer that I got with the house about 6 years ago has served it's purpose quite well. I need to find the actual age of the dryer, but I believe it to be circa 1988-1992. In any case, it has definitely had a good long run and it is time for a new one.

I am currently at Casa De Rynes (my boss' house) and we have been watching the HBO special about Katrina, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, it is pretty moving. To a certain point I feel sort of whiny about the issues with my AC, or my roof, or leaky plumbing, or my dryer.

I should have posted earlier about this, but I have been busy with work and with the new server. But the new server is online, yup online. As it turns out the port they had plugged it into on the ethernet switch was bad. So I had configured it as required, I was begining to doubt my technical prowess for a minute.

I best wrap up this blog entry as the tequilla is hitting me hard. Before I go, I will throw out that we are planning to get an electric dryer and yes we have a 220 plug there in the laundr room. I might need to get a gas technician to cap off the wall plug, just to ensure that there isn't an issue, maybe in the future natural gas will be cheaper.

Till this blog is running on the new server. I can't wait.

I was in Dallas today and met with Shawn Devlin of Sprocket Data, a Dallas hosting company. I had spoken with them previously for work, but the decision to host with them was made based upon their pricing and the look of their corporate culture on their website.

And I must say that their website didn't lie. They are very open and friendly. Last week Mr. Devlin gave me and Brent a tour of their data center. Quite the dog & pony for a simple colocation customer.

Today I stopped into their office, it turns out NetworkIP & SprocketData are officing in the same building, they are up on the 6th, NetIP is on the second floor. In talking with Mr. Devlin I learned a few new things about page ranking.

At the end of my visit I verified "visiting" hours for the data center, 5:30pm. We were having an afternoon meeting that was going to run longer than that. Which is why I brought an overnight bag, just in case I had to take care of the server Saturday morning. To my wife's delight Mr. Devlin offered to have the server taken down to the data center for me. Gina had been in Longview all week for training and was excited to see me, so staying away one more night wasn't acceptible.

I joked with Mr. Devlin that they "saved my marriage", playing along he said that "marriage counseling" is just one of their many services.

Well, my concerns about my inexperience in configuring ethernet card manually (after install) were correct.

I got a voicemail from their head data center system admnistrator, Shane, informing me that the server is powered up and plugged in but that they are unable to ping it. I had missed his call (T-Mobile service in Dallas isn't great.) and already shutdown my laptop, this means that I will have to get with the techs early in the morning to get the server online.

Especially since I am now back in Austin and don't want to drive up there.

Well, pretty tired from the early morning start. Time to sleep and dream of nerd stuff.

Laterz

I wanted to make a quick post before passing out.

I have gotten the new server to a point where the OS, apache, mysql and php are ready to go.

I did a test restore of my blog, and it worked pretty well. I am going to need to restore the filesystem structure for a perfect restore, but the partial worked pretty darn well.

I also did a test install of dotProject, since the gd library is primarily used for that.

Well I have a few last clean up items for the server before bedtime.

I bought some expansion slot covers and a couple of new fans.

I think I need to be in bed in about 30 minutes so...

Laterz

Just a quick note before I go and pass out for the night.

I got home and the temp on the thermostat was 78 of a requested 74.

I just about freaked, fearful that the AC was on the fritz again. (I just changed the air filter a couple of days ago, approx 30 days since last time, trying to be good about it now.)

Well I went out and looked at the outside unit, there was a little condensation on the coil, so I went inside and shut off the AC and ran just the fan for like 40 minutes. (I really need to shut it down for like 3 hours, from what I read on the net.) Maybe I will do that while I sleep.

So today it was a high of like 104. I am going to chalk the high temp when I got home up to the fact that it was just unbelievably hot outside.

I also put the remote thermometer into the vent in the living room, same as last time. (entry)

I let it get up to about 85 degrees before turning the AC back on. In about 10 minutes it was blowing a chilly 68.

I remembered that the last time the AC guys were here they clocked it at blowing 56, so that had me a little concerned. But on that same note, the outside temp that night was in the 80s, it was like 97 outside (97 @ 7:30 at night).

So then I hit the internet to answer the question of:
"How cold should my central air be blowing?"

Apparently the answer is that it should be blowing about 18-22 degrees lower than the outside temp. So 97 degrees outside and 68 inside, that would mean that my AC is blowing ok.

And if it was 104 outside that means the AC would be blowing like 75. But that would assume a constant cooling factor, with the sun blaring down that would heat up the house more than after the sun went down, which would account for the house reaching 78.

So I am not as freaked out.

Well I am almost done configuring the server that will soon host this blog and many others.

Laterz

So the movie Pulse came out last Friday. The trailers on TV made the movie look very, very scary. Ghosts coming out of computers and printers, that has to be bound to scare me, I am on a computer about 12 hours a day (should I be proud or sad?).

Jeremy and I had talked about scary movies recently. I mean I have been watching scary movies for as long as I can remember, the first one to really scare the fsck out of me was Poltergeist. I was frightened for years to come, at the house we lived in I had a room that had a tree branch that hit the window at night. The street light would come in through the window casting scary shadows. (Mind you I was about 5 or 6 when i saw the movie on TV.)

Point being I am no stranger to horror movies. But there are a few movies that make me not want to watch them, usually these contain lots of realistic gore, take Hostel. The stuff they show on TV make me twinge, I don't like watching surgery shows on TV, so a movie where they apparently take of people's toes doesn't really interest me, unless it is on HBO at like 2 in the morning. Let's get back to Pulse.

It SUCKED. And to do it justice, here is why I feel it sucked.

1. Not enough suspense. Not enough scenes that pop out and frighten you. The ghosts that did pop out at you looked like a bad tv broadcast (black and white and out of focus.), mind you I believe that is the effect they were going for.

2. Not enough gore. I don't need to see a person's toe getting cut off, but some gore helps, makes you squirm a litttle. There was some ghost, zombie type stuff going on. But it just isn't the same unless it bleeds red.

[Spoiler part a head]
3. It was preachy. The 'ghosts' which is what they effectively are, but never truly outright declared as such, drawn to our word because of technology. The computers, cell phones, PDAs, WiFi, 3G, the have doomed us all. Some colleged kid was working on "a telecom project" he was trying to make "Ultra Wide Band" but tapped into this set of frequencies that man was just not meant to enter into. The world was forever changed (in a bad way) due to man's need to be connected.

4. Plot flaws. So the 'ghosts' apparently require some form of wireless broadcast system (WiFi, cellular, etc) to 'invade' our world. But somehow a hacker "let them loose". He hacked the 'telecom project' guy's server and downloaded the ghosts, i guess. So he figured out that something bad was happening to him, and he had to use his haxxor skillz to fix it. Unfortunately his virus only causes the 'telecom project' server to crash, it then reboots, and the ghosts are back.

Ummm, so couple of issues, #1. If they travel via the wireless network, how did they stay contained until he haxxor, Josh let them out? Then there is the issue about the virus he programmed to crash the telecom project, yeah ok good, why not code it to break it more permantly. Not to mention the character, Dexter who was miraculousy saved by the virus (it crashed the server just as a ghost was about to reap him). Umm, he had a good minute or so there to pull out the god damn power cord. This has to be one of the HUGE issues that I had with the movie, this Dexter cat has the skillset necessary to reclaim data off a "fried" harddrive but doesn't think to unplug the god damn server after finally making it to the server room alive #1 fsck up. #2, after it 'crashed' and saved his life, he still didn't pull the plug.

Sure they may be dead, and stealing people's will to live (ie soul) but they obviously need the wireless infrastructure, which is powered by electricity. Not souls, electricity.

Then there is that red tape. Apparently the red tape 'blocks a part of the spectrum that they need to transmit'. Ummm, its fscking tape. So do they travel via wirless network, or via light waves? Because the whole 'spectrum' thing is portrayed as more of a visual spectrum and not a radio frequency when it comes to the tape. The red utility tape would need to have metal in it to disrupt the radio waves the ghosts are hitch hiking with.

So regardless of that, what about red light. If they can't 'transmit' through the red tape, shouldn't red light be somewhat fatal to these guys? The fscking army is called out in the movie, and apparently can only setup refuggee camps. Come on, someone somewhere must have said "Red tape = no ghosts, so red light = dead ghosts". And what about nukes. No freaking movie President is going to just sit there while ghosts take over all the towns, nuke them bastards.

But here is really my big issue. At the end the Army is using the emergancy broadcast system to inform survivors that they must ditch their cell phone and any form of wireless tech. So let's see the Army knows that the 'invasion' is powered by the wireless network.

So maybe the movie President said "We can't nuke every major city, because there are ghosts living there", but some movie General had to say "So let's shutdown the eletric grid."

Take some tanks and fighter planes and start knocking out the electric power. Because, while the nuclear plants might be able to keep producing eletricity with little to no human intervention (until it starts to meltdown), the coal and oil plants need people to ship in the coal, and operate the machines to move the coal.

Which means the invasion couldn't last longer than the power does. And if the surviving humans go and say "Let's see, electricity = ghosts, ghosts = death. let's keep the lights off for a few months guys. Good for the environment too I guess."

It was just crap. I mean Houst of 1000 Corpses was fscked up, way fscked up. Suspense and Gore.

Pulse was a lot of hype but in the end was just crap.

After this, I might just have to rent Hostel.

Wait, wait, what is that noise.

Oh no their here, nope not ghosts. The dogs, they are telling me it is time to go to bed.

Laterz.

Ok, ok. Bad "Hackers" reference, but one of my favorites lately.

"I hacked your gibson." Has become something I say to Jeremy often.

Well the PDA is pretty badass, I have enjoyed getting it sync'd up.

I found a Pocket PC version of Putty.

I however, am bummed that there is not yet a version of Google Talk that does the speech thing rather than just chat on the Pocket PC.

I am sure it will show up soon.

Well time to get going.

More, Laterz.

I worked through lunch, so just a quick entry.

Today I learned that not I need more Linux hoodoo-voodoo knowledge.

I really want to use this RLIB report writer on a project at work. However, I can't get it to compile. I know it isn't the RLIB software, because lots of people are using it.

Which means it is Me, well not me personally but the stuff already installed on the server. In part, I think it is related to the MySQL 5.0 install on the box, which we had the hosting company do, and they used a RPM. I know that there are some folks out there that would SWEAR by RPMS, never want to install stuff from source. Yadda, yadda.

I have had to compile, apache, php, and mysql manually, because the RPM didn't have the options I wanted.

Now, it appears that I have a problem with a source install, because the libraries installed with the RPM aren't necessarily correct. The level of linux library, libgcc glibc and what not is definitely way above my head.

But the basic jist is, there are two functions defined in the libr-mysql.so (dynamic object I believe) that are not defined in the libgcc. I think this because all the stuff I can find when I google ' __pure_virtual ' and a variety of other things comes back with something being funked up with libgcc and the gcc compiler.

Again, stuff that is beyond me, and I am not sure I want to learn.

But fear not, I called in reinforcements. Gene Oden, more on him later. But frankly he is a one man linux army.

Time to go tour the Sprocket facility.

Laterz

I arrived at the La Quinta in Dallas on schedule, approx 11:00 pm. I took a wrong turn at first and headed east instead of west, but that only cost me about 5 minutes.

After checking into the hotel, I was informed that the boiler just went out. So I might be enjoying a nice cold shower in the morning, as when I asked if it would be fixed by 8am, I was informed that they didn't know.

I think I read that the hotel was recently renovated, I want to say May. I would have to double check that. But the paint flakes in my tub should say something.

I started the downloads of Fedora Core 4 ISOs. Should finish up around like 3 or 4 am. Course, I will be asleep by then.

So I guess La Quinta also means free internet. I have stayed at probably about 10 or 12 different La Quinta locations in about 5 different states. This has to honestly be one of the nice ones. Nice big desk, the breakfast area looked good when I walked in.

I am going to TRY to hit the fitness center in the morning for like 30 minutes of Bike or something low impact.

I also have to ask them about a TV remote, because the one in my room appears to be missing.

Time to pass out.

Laterz