Older blog entries for jkeating (starting at number 26)

Ugh, today == suck. Work was nuts, machines failing left and right, right and left, up and down, and well you get the idea. Vendors can't reproduce our issues, can't help, customers are screaming for the systems, and oh yeah, gotta prepare a presentation to the sales department for tomorrow. joy. Also found out that our office can't use ADSL. Something about our fax line being fibre switched and our voice line being a "hunting" line. Bottom ..er line.. is that we can't do ADSL. So now I have to look into something else for our backup Internet solution. joy.

I had hoped to get some Legacy stuff done tonight, but a monster stress headache is driving me to bed, very early. I just had time to submit two of my last 3 chapters for tech-editing. joy.

Long time, no blog.

Getting busy with Fedora Legacy again, pushed OpenSSL. Finished up enough tech-editing tonight to be able to spend tomorrow night doing Legacy work.

FC2 Test releases are looking VERY nice on my ibook. The PPC folks have been doing a great job. Very soon I plan on doing a complete writeup on doing an OS X/FC2 dual boot from scratch.

Work is extremely busy. Maybe some day they'll hire somebody to help me, but *shrug* I can only do so much during the day.

Watched Bad Boys II the other night (thanks netflix). it wasn't too bad, a little worse than the first one, but still watchable. Johnny English was slightly less watchable. Over 150 more titles on my netflix queue, what fun! What would be really neat is a "shuffle" function for your queue, so that what you get next is a total suprise.

Oh, if any of you catch the Saturn "Pac-Man" commercial, it's very funny (:

What a fun monday</sarcasm>.

Ran into a rather odd bug in Fedora Core 1 x86_64. Seems that when doing a kickstart, grabbing the ks file over http, anaconda will fail to retrieve a kickstart config file with a ".rm" somewhere in it, like "fc164.cfg.rm" or "fc164.rm.cfg". Very bizarre. Change the name to "fc164.cfg.small" or something else and it works. Will investigate this more.

Had a good weekend, went to a go-karting place to celebrate my birthday, and a coworker's. Then went out to a couple bars, wound up at a very cool Irish bar, listening to live Irish music. It was very fun.

Preparing my Fedora Core 2 presentation for Indiana University's Linux fest thing. Should be pretty cool.

Been a while....

Pushed out another Legacy update, and a couple packages into updates-testing. Rolling right along. Should be able to ship out the master mirror server soon, FC1 64 installed nicely on it.

Been reading up on Bacula, seems like some decent software. Put in a project request at work to start playing with it on larger hardware sets and possible do a package deal with Bacula on our big storage boxes. If nothing else, I want to use it internally to back our stuff up.

Playing a bit with dspam. Very cool spam filter. I set it up for my account on my mail server. After feeding it 20~ spams I had in my trash, it caught 99% of the spam I got for the rest of the day, with no false positive. I'm pretty impressed. Install is a bit freaky, perhaps I should package it up and toss it at fedora.us for future inclusion in Extras. Of course, then I'd have to figure out how to use it correctly with sendmail/postfix/procmail. Wheee! Currently I'm using it with Courier-mta and my mysql based virtual users.

Getting closer to my Athlon64 system. Picked out system board, cpu, ram, video card, 19" LCD, second (third?) harddrive, and a PVR card. I just need the check from the publisher for the work I've done on a couple books and it will be mine. Oh yes, it will be mine. Muahahahaha!

Went out to dinner with our Western Digital rep last night. They really want to push the Raptor drives. I have one in my personal system ( a pre-engineering sample ), but I'm going to hit them up for another one that I can buy at a reduced rate for more home testing. We went to a seafood place called "Seastar" in Bellevue. It was OK, but I didn't really like it. Too croweded, too expensive, and the crab pasta thing I ordered tasted like brine. I couldn't even eat half of it. At least I wasn't buying (;

Oh, think twice about every buying from Directron. I ordered a 9800SE video card from there, a very specific one, but they sent me the wrong one. When I complained to my sales guy, he proceeded to call me stupid and that I didn't know what video card I ordered. After my next nasty-gram, their customer service people contacted me to quiet me down, and long story short, they don't have the card they advertise, and I'm getting a full refund, no restocking fee, and they're paying shipping. Regardless, I'll never buy from them again.

Wheee! More packages into updates-testing. This time it's pwlib and mutt. Legacy to-do list is shorter by 2 items.

Slowish day at work today. Managed to get a Radeon 9800XT to work with ATI's drivers in 32bit FC1. That is one FAST card. I'm going to try and buy it for my personal system. It would be nice though if there were 64bit Linux drivers, and if the 32bit drivers would build on Fedora Core 2's 2.6 kernel nicely. Oh well, one can dream can't they?

Helped a co-worker do up a quote for a company that wants 100~500 TB of storage, consolidated. Pretty badass setup they could get. I really hope we get the bid, it'd be good for the company, and it'd be great for me to be able to play with it while we put it together. 500TB is a LOT of space to store.... stuff.

For my next PC, I still haven't decided on getting the Athlon64 shuttle, or just buying an Athlon64 board/proc and putting it in one of my existing towers. Both options have their pros/cons, I just have to sit down and decide.

Coming up on my birthday soon, couple weeks. I should figure out what I want, and what I want to do that night.

Oh yeah! I went to TacLUG on Saturday for some great fun. Showed off an Athlon64 system we have at work, played some ut2k4 on it, in 64bit mode. LUG did a kernel day, talking all about the 2.6 kernel and such. Was a very good talk, learned some things I didn't know, and wrote down some things that I need to learn more about.

Pushed out mailman and mc to Fedora Legacy updates-testing. Testing would be good. Now there are two less items on my to-do list. YaY!

So, I need to talk to somebody about a refund for my weekend. It was entirely way too short. ):

Spent some quality time with my wife on Sunday, went to a place in Bellevue called "Seagarden" for Dim Sum. It was actually very good. I was quite pleased.

Seems the latest kernel flaw has directed a lot of attention on Fedora Legacy. Put a fixed kernel in updates-testing, should be ready to move to updates with one more test or so.

Finished up the appendix I was writing for a book. I'm not done coming up with original content, YaY! Just waiting for my chapter and appendix to come back from editors.

Learning more python. Almost done w/ my learning python book. Started playing with pygtk and Glade2. Built myself a nifty little app for choosing my network profile on my laptop. Seems really cool. Going to use this to write some software we need at work.

Put together a long list of to-do items for Fedora Legacy. Started working on them tonight now that I have more free time. (Hah! Free time, much like dry land, is a myth.) Parts are in route for the dedicated mirror server. Will put that together sometime soon. Must finish work on the build server. It's a shame to have a dual Opteron system and not be able to use it.

Oh yeah, gnome-blog really needs a spell-check plugin....

Fun weekend. Couldn't get into any nice place for Dinner on Sat, so I bought some really nice steaks from the butcher and grilled them up on the BBQ. They were to die for!

Fixed my Father-in-law's POS HP system. It was running win98SE w/ only 64megs of ram, and a good year or so worth of software crap that most people pile on it. Removed about 3lbs of dust, upgraded the ram, and installed a CDRW drive. System works a bit better now.

Had a brunch meeting for work to go over some R&D stuff. Lots going on, but most of it is coming to a end real soon, so lots of new products to launch and worry about. YaY!

New video card is on it's way, as well as a new keyboard and mouse surface for work. When I was at the PC store for the ram and CDRW I saw the new Logitech MX 900 mice, it's just like the MX700 I have at home (wireless,rechargeable , very very nice) but it's bluetooth! VERY cool. I'll probably buy one for home, and take my MX700 to work.

Dug some more into learning python. Studying up on pygtk now. This is very neat stuff, very easy to make simple graphical applications. I can make use of this at work very easily. I need a pdf of the pygtk stuff, I hate reading manuals on computer monitors, and the html stuff just isn't fun to print a page at a time. Anybody got anything?

Time to do some more legacy stuff before the weekend is over. *sigh*. They just don't make them long enough anymore.

Slowish day at work today. Did some benchmarks of one of our 3ware systems, FC1 vs RHEL3. Even with dledford's test kernels, there is still a 50% slower sequential read speed in RHEL3. This is somewhat bothersome, I should file a bug on it, or poke some of the kernel fellers about this.

Went to my brother's place tonight and played a couple hours of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Very addicting game, although it's really annoying to have to use the GameBoy Advanced to control your character. Fingers get cramped after a while.

Got farther along with the Fedora Build system. Enrico Scholz did some work with it and got a kernel working with vserver and djinni. Found out there are some issues with apt and amd64... greaaat. Hopefully it's not back to the drawing board, as that would suck. Maybe we'll just have to setarch the entire thing. What a bummer.

Got paid for the last half of a project, going to buy myself a new video card and some other misc junk. Going after a Radeon 9800SE by Power Color as I hear there are wintendo drivers that will unlock it's 4 extra graphic pipelines and turn it into a 9800 full. Will be fun to play with, although mostly it'll be used for 2d in Linux.

More fun with Orkut. Damn thats good crack!