Recent blog entries for voldure

Been a long while since I posted here. I forgot about this place. I remembered it last night, but fell asleep before ever sending anything. Seems like nothing has changed except my users seem to be calling me for seemingly stupid nit picky stuff.

IE: I lost my "New Office Document" icon, I really need it. It saves me 2 steps on creating a template.

I normally woulnd't care however it seems that little things like this are happening all the time and they demand that it be done now, becuase if not it extremely hinders there time. Yet again, I normally wouldn't complain except for the fact that someone's machien is down due to hard drive failure... but you know that the icon is really hurting there time...

*smacks people* . Esecially sicne we got a new superviser is one of our departments he thinks that everythign he does is an extremely high prio.
Thats enough of the daily rant :-)
I've been thinking about asking my superviser if I can work on the floor / shop so I can learn some electrical wiring stuff. I've been getting curious lately, just been too busy to ask. Oh well, I'm off to do "work".

I finally fixxed the plotter issue that I mentioned a while back. It turned out that the files missing were made by Microsoft, so the company that bought out CalComp (CalGraph I believe) is not allowed to re-distribute the drivers required for the files. PSCRIPT.DLL PSCRIPT.HLP PSCRPTUI.DLL were the files needed. Luckily I found a place on the web (via google search) that had those files and I was able to download them. It's said that these files are on a NT4 install cd however being tha tI only have 2K & XP, those files are not on that cd. I sent an email to CalGraph, but got a bounceback... I do not know if they are out of buisness as well. I'm somewhat dissappointed that this was that much hassle.

I just now realized I haven't type anything here in a few days. I remember thinking about it yesterday, but shortly thereafter went unconcious due to lack of sleep. My birthday is in a few days (01/22)... It seems this year that it came by much quicker than the years before. I still kinda feel like a kid, thinking "What am I gunna get?" and a 19?!?! It's 4:00PM, I gotta find an hours worth of work to do... I guess I'm gonna mozy on over somewhere and fix something.

The previous posting I had was actually yesterdays... I felt like I had to say that for some reason... Now I'm tired, I think I'm gonna go find some wasy to do work for a while then get to work on the tougher-thinking stuff.

I feel much better than before, although still a little weak, work is much more bearable now. The general manger told me that he has big plans for me. Everyone seems to think I could be better than my father, and my father is pretty close to top. I kinda like being an SA, except for one drawback of having to tell the GM where everyone went as far as the webn is concerned. Hell I'm almost a good 5 years yonger than everyone in the department! I'm only 19, about to be twenty in a week. There is a big part of me that doesn't think I can do it and another part that says that I have to be better than everyone who thinks I am not... jsut to prove them wrong. Given the chance (and the money increase :-)) I'll do it. Programming robots doesn't seem too bad, especially huge robots like our gantry type, but then again there are times I feel a bit lonely being an SA. What I talk about is over there head and what they talk about is over my head, well there are some pretty smart people that understand what I'm doing.

I've been sick the past couple days. Seems like the flu is going around. I got the SCSI hard drive and SCSI tape drive working today. Also got a really cool NIC card too. It's supposed to do adaptive load balancing. From what I have read, it seems to be able to do something like this:
Machine A.) Server w/ 2 NIC capable of ADB.
Machine B.) Work station w/ 1 NIC
Machine C.) Workstation w/ 1 NIC

Machine A is supposed to be able to handle full bandwidth (from a LAN) to both of those machines, essentially doubling bandwidth.
This costs $117 from an IT company who got it from Compaq. I'm hoping this does what I think it does, it might buy another one and place it in my (hopefully) soon to be Linux Data Server, so it can easily handle everyone (50-60 people). The new server (under theory) is going to be a data server w/ tape backups done twice a week, backup SMTP server for incoming mail [incase main server dies or fails for any reason], and misc Linux usages. Yesterday we had to use Linux to mount a macintosh cd and decompression via stuffit/unstuffit. No other machine was able to do this.

I'm thinking about writting another hournal program for personal usage and have it upload itself here everynight at midnight or something.

I'm writting a program designed for SA's. It uses MySQL/PHP to keep track of an SA's environment (users, their accounts, software usage, software licenses, hardware, etc). I'm hoping to get it done into great detail. Perhaps as detailed as knowing what version of the BIOS a user runs. Of course, the capability to not having that entered will be available but sometimes it's nice to know for known possible bugs. This program will be GPL'ed, source be given, documentation be made. I think I will write the documentation first, so I can have a very specific goal. If I follow that method, then I am going to learn docbook first so I can hand out different forms of documentation to fit the different classes of IT's. PDF/HTML/TXT...etc.

heh, I'm having fun explaining to my boss the technicalities of P2P and the legal'ness (or should I say lack of). I hope that he understand how much bandwidth he will suck down if he does it here, it's not like we have an fiber optic drop in here or something.

Things to do @ home: 1.) Program for software/hardware/user tracking. 2.) Add Pandalib (pdf support) to ruby for Lunar. 3.) Write either curses/ncurses/gtk frontend for lunar 4.) Write diary/journal program.

Things to do @ work: 1.) Evil Plotter problem. 2.) Figure out accountings printer problem (damn printers are breaking everywhere!) 3.) Figure out why Samsung printer keeps on asking about page overlay and then craps out.

I just created this account. Feels kinda weird, but I'll get used to it. I've been working on an evil plotter to get to print. After that I gotta work on the backup policy. Using Lunar-Linux, it should shave at lest 45% of the time versus using our 2K Server PDC (which has Exchange, NAV, and ISA) which takes about 12 hours to backup 40GB from 4 seperate machines. I'm thinking about making a quick network calculator to calculate what a theoritical (spelled right?) speed would be on a LAN. I realize that there are different types of network media, but it would be nice. I've googled around for about 5 minutes. I found an intersting site http://www.visiongraphics-inc.com/visionlink/tutorial.html which has allot of different ypes of connections, but those are for internet not intranet. I could always do the math by hand, but I'm not in the mood right now. Perhaps later tonight I'll write a quick java script.

Still having troubles with plotter. *sigh* The paper also seems to be jamming up occasionally as well. I hope that we aren't going to have to buy a new one soon. That's another thing on my massive list of todo's I really don't want to add. After lunch, I'm lazy and sleepy for about an hour. I'm going to give up on the plotter for now and work on the linux box.

I think I'm going to get some more samba configs going. Perhaps when I do my proposal to goto Linux for our file servers, I will be able to get some other special things done as well. Printing a PDF file would be nice, I saw it on the Samba maillist. I'm gonna go investigate that for a while.

*** 30 minutes before end of work *** I've been chatting a good amount today and have ran across some interesting facts. 1.) There are smart people in this world. 2.) There are stupid people in this world. 3.) Channel bonding is not what I want.

My goals are as follows: A computer named datasrv. This computer will fullfill the following goals: Print PDF files. Backup to tape every other night. Host roughly 40-85 gb of data. 2 (or more) NIC's for increased bandwidth. (although other PC's will have only one QoS may be my best bet). 50-60 users. samba for file sharing and pdf support. MySQL/PHP for storage of codekeys, software info etc.

For some reason I feel obligate to talk about only Linux here. heh, even though 70% of my work is Windows xx. (9x, ME, 2K, XP... why doesn't management want to be unifed and get a stable os. I would much rather everyone be on 2K/XP than ME/9X anything.)

I am still wondering how managment became management. They don't even realize where they are wasting there money at but only assume where it is. If they see one thing go wrong, that must be where it's all happening. IE: Internet Usage. I am pretty much the police on it. I hate that. I found a really nice guy looking for a new job, now I gotta report him. If I don't, there is a chance I am being setup. If I do, he may loose his job. Then again, I'm not supposed to be his guardian angel. What to do? heh, management bought a $20,000 computer using Windows... about 75-80% of the costs is only software. This saddens me to see this. I wonder if Linux will be desktop capable in the next year or eyar and a half. If so, then I might have a fighting chance. Otherwise, MS may release something that may (although unlikely) sell my boss. My boss believes the Gates is god becuase he made a universial OS. I believe that while Bill Gates did do an excellent job and getting everyone to buy their software, they are failing to make standards. Linux still lacks one thing, ease of use. I know that there are many distro's out there, like Red Hat, that claim to be extremly easy. However, to install and configure things is very difficult to the average user versus clickety click click. If Linux wants to make it, they must change thier target audience from guru's to grannies, until then, MS will run. Linux must also offer a way to use both MS software and Linux software easily (I'm well aware of WINE, but get WINE running AutoCad easily) and must also offer a war to transition between MS and Linux. Duel boot. Not many people like sudden change.

grr, I got a headache now. My keyboard is too loud. *whack* *whack* *tap* *tap*. 4:38PM... anytime now.. almost time to bail. I may enter more later on tonight. Maybe...