Recent blog entries for mrbill

Ow.

Got four wisdom 
teeth yanked this morning.  I had been
scheduled to have it done on Jan. 17th, but someone 
cancelled so they moved it up.  I was okay until the 
painkillers (nitrous and novocaine for the procedure, 
Lortab for afterwards) wore off.  Now I'm a grumpy 
bastard until the Tylenol kicks in (I only took the Lortab
two hours ago, so I cant take any more for a while).
Ow ow ow.

First day of work after the Christmas holiday today. I trudged on in. Got to the office, and found that about 75% of the company had taken today off! There were only about 3 people in my entire building (we have 3 buildings in Austin). I worked until 5:45, went home... Got lots done, however.

Holy crap, batman!

Went with Amy to a hotel tonight, we thought we'd spend christmas eve at a nice hotel with a jacuzzi tub and soak and relax, etc.

We were there two hours, and I have a bad asthsma attack, so we decide to go home; screw the $102 for the room, I wanna be somewhere comfortable.

Got downstairs to check out, and apparently the place had been robbed five minutes before. I'm glad we didnt decide to leave five minutes earlier...

Bill

Havent updated in a while.  Been BUSY.

 
New home system: (for Linux testing and games)
Athlon (Thunderbird) 700Mhz, Chrome Orb heatsink/fan
ABit KT7 motherboard
256mb RAM
20Gig Maxtor IDE HD (5400RPM)
3Com 3C905 10/100base-T ethernet (PCI)
3dfx Voodoo 3/3000 2D/3D graphics (PCI)
Plextor 8/4/32 IDE CD-RW drive
VisionTech MVCast MPEG-2 realtime encoder card (for
digitizing movies and shows off my TiVo, onto VCDs that
I can play in the DVD player)
Cheap ALS400-based sound card (PCI)

 I'd kill for a GeForce 256 MX-based 32mb AGP video card,
but I cant justify replacing the V3/3000 just yet, since
it really does everything I need it to do, and I havent
found a game that *doesent* work with it yet (most problems
have been due to Win2K more than anything else), so I
guess I'll wait for them to stop updating the drivers before
I upgrade to a better card.  Compared to the Celeron 300/
Riva TNT-based system I had a year ago, I cant complain
about this setup at *all*.

 
New home system: (for REAL WORK!)
Sun Ultra 60
dual 360Mhz/4Mb-cache CPUs
dual 9Gig F/W/Ultra-SCSI HDs
Creator 3D/FFB2+ framebuffer
1Gig RAM (yes, 1024 megabytes!)
This is the system I do all the SunHELP development/testing
on, before I move things to the actual colocated server.

 So far, Christmas is boring and depressing.  

 Currently evaluating  
Miester Code versus the upcoming new release of
PHPWebLog for the
next reincarnation of the SunHELP web site, which will
happen between now and the first week of January (when
I'm taking a week off of work for vacation).

 Wasnt able to actually do much *work* this week - had to
work 16 hours over last weekend on a HP-UX 11.0 upgrade
project, then took Monday off as comp time.  Tuesday I
had to take off at 4pm for an emergency dentist's 
appointment, and then had some work done on Thursday,
causing me to take Thursday and Friday off due to being
doped up real good.  Vicodin is good stuff.

 

Oh yeah, picked up Amy from the airport tonight as well, she got back from a week away visiting friends and family. I'm glad she's home.

Busy day. Last night, I switched my home PC (PPro200 overclocked to 233, 128mb RAM, 6.4gig HD, cheap PCI sound card, Intel eepro100 PCI ethernet, Matrox Millenium 4mb video card) to Windows 2000, and upgraded the video card to a Voodoo 3/3000 PCI (16mb) while I was at it. No AGP slot on this beast, so PCI will have to do for now.

After optimization, Win2K runs satisfactorily, although I dont expect to be playing many 3D games just yet. I've got an AMD Thunderbird 700Mhz CPU and an ABit KT7 motherboard, along with 128mb of Kingston SDRAM, on the way, so by this time next week I should have a semi-decent gaming system on my hands. Debating which GeForce video card to get, now.

The new SunHELP server has been up for about a week now, with no problems whatsoever as long as I dont use the second hard drive...

Its been a busy week or so - upgraded the SunHELP server to a 1U rackmount 300Mhz AXe-based SPARC server, Solaris 8, and rebuilt all the servers/utilities from scratch. Things are running much faster now. Will write more later; its turkey day and time for a nap.

woot, new equipment!

This morning, FedEx arrived with one brand new 21" Sun flatscreen monitor, one slightly used 21" flatscreen monitor, and the new SunPCi II card (Celeron 600 complete PC system, on a PCI card, goes in a Sun box - shares the Sun's keyboard, mouse, and display, or can have its own as well). Will be testing out the monitors tomorrow, and will eventually use the SunPCi card.

I also should have a SPARCstation Voyager (portable SS5 with LCD screen) on Monday, courtesy of a friend at a company who makes portable SPARC workstations.

Tonight: Setting up a pair of E250 servers and prepping the new SunHELP machine.

Strange problems afoot in casa de Bill tonight. Amy has a Windows machine (celeron 300, abit bh6, netgear fa310tx). I have a PPro 200 box running RH7 with an Intel EEPro100 10/100 ethernet card (PCI).

Both connected via 100baseT-full-duplex to a NetGear (bay networks) FS108 8-port 100baseT switch.

Both systems forced to 100BT full duplex.

When she sends files to me, its 12-15K/sec. When I send files to her, 115K+/sec (at 10bT)

I tried a 10base-T PCI-bus DEC Tulip-chipset-based ethernet card in the linux box. Same problem.

I hope its not the switch, I cant afford a new switch. however, both of us can download from the net off the ADSL (also plugged into the switch, at 10baseT half duplex) at 150K/sec+.

Strange.

Any ideas?

Busy day today; dealt with HP OpenView stuff at work, then ended up coming home sick. At least I finished the Solaris system setup guideline docs I'd been working on, though. Now if the VPN stuff would only work so I could connect to the office from home....