It has been a nice relaxing weekend. Yesterday my sister arrived back in the state, and decided to continue traveling for a few more weeks, so it was time with the family for a bit. Today was movies. First was The Incredibles. It was a really good movie, although the intros reminded me exactly why Disney is such a horrible company again (and not by the fact that the intros existed). Think "first time in..." and try to think up a good customer-friendly reason for that. Second movie was Total Recall, which is decent too, if a little odd. Sorta expect that with PKD though. And the Johnnycab voice now seems a lot more appropriate than it did when I first saw the movie (before Voyager came out). Anyways, the conference calendar today says this week is invasion of the arrogant high school girls. Whoever planned the staff appreciation day so we get to miss a day of that is awesome. At least they're not the worst group Bethel has ever seen.

Movie night was a success, although it managed to clash with the PC Tech group's party that they didn't bother to tell people about until a few days after I sent out the email. First movie was Maria Full of Grace, which was OK but not great. They had some good ideas, but it seemed a bit rushed and some stuff not thought out really well. To get the impact it seemed to be trying to have, it should have focused more on different parts of the story. Second movie was Ocean's Twelve, which seemed somewhat promising coming from the last one, and actually started off decently. They glossed over the details so much that it removed any last shred of believability though, so I'd have to say the first one is much better. Something about it technically too - it seemed dark and uneven in places, and even in lighter areas the lighting was off. Maybe I was just tired though, and should watch it again some other times. Enjoyable for a one time watch at least.

Saturday was my cousin's grad party. I pretty much woke up a couple hours before it, and didn't get home until around midnight, so that was the day. Today was church and my mom and sister joined me, and then sitting around with a bit of grocery shopping thrown in. As for last week, it was work. Blah. Anyways, I'm tired.

Weekend was nice and long - I needed to just sit around and do nothing for a long time straight. As usual, it involved movies. First was Final Destination 2, which was better than I expected. Next was Hollow Man, which was OK. Third was The Haunting, which I thought was good up until the ending which pretty much sucked. Mainly because the plot started going crazy and they went overboard with special effects.

I also had a trip and family stuff on Sunday. I have a bunch of pictures, but I haven't bothered to do much with them yet. I'll have to get them together and post them sometime soon. Any of you get distracted easily in church? There's now a solution, or maybe more accurately making the problem worse. In other words, you probably have heard about a movie night on Friday. If not you're not on the mailing list for some reason and should ask me about it if you want to come.

I need to post stuff more often. It gets long and boring this way. I'll compensate by keeping this one short. Movies since the last post include 21 Grams, Sum of All Fears, Runaway Jury, Traffic and Bad Boys. They're all good in one way or another. Work's been busy. I think I need to go into project mode and stop doing small stuff and just get a bunch of stuff out of the way. There's too much in the planning stages right now or needing feedback from others. Apparently everyone else is in the same boat since they don't respond to emails about what they need for power in the server rooms. Even after I send out a followup asking if everyone's keeping them in their offices since nobody needs power in the server rooms. Anyways, due to comments and requests I'll probably be having a movie night sometime soon. I'll send something out to the list when I have a better idea. For those complaining about there not being one, you should really offer suggestions for a movie though. In other news I bought a new toy which I like so far. I was taking pictures in the normal lighting of my office today (no flash), which was fun but my coworkers didn't like it too much. I'm too lazy to post any pictures though. There's only a couple good ones since I think I took a grand total of 5 of them due to actually doing work most of the time while I'm there... Anyways, tomorrow is free photo editing class. We'll see how that goes.

Sober sucks. I created a "backscatter" folder and have been building a collection of procmail rules to handle it. It's bad enough having to parse the body. Then some people think it's a good idea to base64 encode an HTML version of the notication. At least =5F is easy to handle with (_|=5F). I may be willing to have certain complex perl scripts parse and take action on my mail, but base64 decoding to check content is ridiculous. We'll see how bad those get. And then yahoo just truncates them... I wish people kept their networks under control. We've had 2 machines. It took about 10 seconds from first message for network services to be notified. If it wasn't for an upgrade that broke it and us not fixing it yet, they would have automatically been yanked off the network and notified within a few more seconds. Oh yea, and not even the first message actually makes it out. It's not that hard people...

It's been busy. Right now there is a server migration happening at work. Finally got sick of doing these manual migrations and working the weekends and scheduling outages. So each user's migration is now effectively atomic to them, verifying the account isn't in use beforehand and disabling for the duration, and notifying them afterwards. That means it's dump a bunch into the script, come back the next day and rerun the ones that were in use. Much better than the old way. It's also time for students to leave and after the last round of "I have important files I need before you delete my account", we decided to be proactive and sent a "get your crap off the servers" email. Well, not quite worded that way, but... I'm amazed it made it past most of ITS and the Alumni office on the first try. I think everyone must be just wanting to get the whole rush over. Unfortunately there's 2 more weeks and it doesn't look like the load is gonna get any lighter for quite a while.

Been doing a bit of groupware stuff a bit. Knowing both the unix and Windows side means I got stuck with the task of building the SJES connector setups and figuring a distribution. I'm not so impressed so far, but we'll see. SJS Messenger Express is just bad, the mail server doesn't seem so bad (and while the outlook integration isn't great, hopefully it'll be better than IMAP). I think it's gonna be a couple more versions down the road before Sun really gets the mail and calendaring apps integrated - it's still pretty obvious they weren't designed together. At least it's possible to make them run under the same LDAP structure even if they don't by default. Now if the pab LDAP structure just made more sense, and they put the right ACEs in by default so you could read your own... I think the outlook profile packager is the most stable part of it. Especially rolling it out through AD so it's just a click for people to install, and then enter their specific data. Why can't any of the big providers just use vCalendar? It'd save lots of hastle, and the format is simple. Plus there's tons of clients. I'm thinking OWA->vCalendar proxy...

Seen a few decent movies lately. Watched Man on Fire last weekend, which was good as expected. Also saw The Virgin Suicides. Definitely can tell its a Sofia Coppola film from the beginning. While the plot is different, the style reminds me so much of Lost in Translation... Cold Mountain wasn't really my favorite style, but it was still pretty decent. A few hours ago some people came over and we watched Catch Me If You Can. Seemed slower than last time I saw it, but still entertaining. Less fun after the first time though.

Then there's really good news. Half of you probably have no clue what that is, the other half have been pissed since you first heard about it. Suffice it to say, that headline is good news for consumers, producers with a decent business model (other than screwing the customers), and anyone who cares about being not tied to corporate whims (like being able to have stuff available even once the copyright expires if that ever happens). There's probably more but I should probably stop typing now if I want anyone to read this.

People start complaining about lack of updates. I say update your site then. It also has come to my attention that people are coming to this site looking for music downloads or porn. If that's you, you may as well go elsewhere now. And it's probably best to not look for porn from your high school...

Anyways, life has been busy. It's spring and starting to get nice out. I can leave the windows open at home all the time now, which is about the only time they ever get opened because I'm too lazy to open and close them all the time for no good reason. Some people just get antsy and want to do crazy stuff. Like Ross wanted to walk to Wendy's for lunch last week. We drove instead but since we got back in a half hour rather than 3, we ended up walking up to Seminary and stuff. He was still jumping around the hallways in his usual manner after that too - crazy kid. He also comments about how it's nice outside but doesn't want to work outside because it'd degrade the outside. :)

With work I have had more and more projects appear and just go on the stack. Spring also means planning for summer, which brings about its own issues. Then there's routine issues, already planned upgrades, checking on/fixing stuff that's breaking, figuring out why stuff breaks for users, and trying to keep everyone on the same page with things. We've gotten into the mode where every non-trivial decision is getting looked at in a more general sense and either has been or is on the list to be documented. Hopefully we can start getting people to look at more, and other people will add stuff too. If all that wasn't enough we just got approval yesterday for a project to replace the infrastructure at a campus which had been put on hold indefinitely a couple months ago due to budget issues. The catch is it has to be done this fiscal year, which means everything has to arrive in the next three weeks, and we want to get most of it in a PO by tomorrow. I'm glad I'm not working today. Should be an interesting next few weeks. Tomorrow night I get to watch a fileserver chkdsk (well, more watch and make sure it comes up OK afterwards), maybe I can catch up some work without people around to make more of it for me.

For those of you who like me don't get a lot of art, you'll probably find this amusing. And more gas sign antics. I've been not doing much outside work other than sitting around and relaxing. It's been nice. I watched Bad Boys II last weekend, which I liked better than the first. For those of you who insist that a movie has to have a good plot, avoid this one - it's just for the action. The weekend before the bonfire at Nick's turned into watching Closer. It's good, but pretty much in the opposite way. Monday was moving TV night. Have you ever tried carrying a 40" direct view TV? 270lbs. Basically you get one person on each side. The catch is that it's barely narrow enough to go through a doorway, so the people on the front and back have to let go. Bulky heavy stuff is no fun. There's a reason it's the biggest ever made and there's only one production model that big - 50+ inch rear-projections weigh under 200... Sunday was a day with the family. After church on Sunday Ang and I met them over at Qdoba before heading to the parents' place. I really like that place, and it's been forever since I've had to actually pay for food there. I think a year and 3 months or so. And next time I go I get a free burrito and free chips and salsa. I think I'm gonna go get some good food tonight. Hopefully all that will make you people wanting updates happy. :)

The beginning of the month is a pain. There are bills to pay, which means too much paperwork. Not enough of them have decent online systems yet. Some bills change monthly (at least for now), and others are harder to automate. I'm working on stabilizing everything and scheduling payments out long in advance, but unfortunately some of them cut off and won't let stuff be scheduled more than 90 days in advance. Others I just don't trust the companies. Then there's always fun stuff thrown in like car insurance which only gets paid a couple times a year and is completely manual. Too bad it's not like the house stuff - everything goes in through escrow and it's all automatic. :) I finally went and got together my w-2s and 1098s and stuff. Now I just have to actually print off the papers and fill them out and mail them in. Yet another hastle - it'd be nice if I could have telefiled at least one year, but there's always been something preventing me from doing so. Now with the house I guess that's probably out for good. Back to the old 1040 I guess. Today was nice, as I was again able to open up the house to warm it up. It looks like I should leave the Windows open tomorrow too. I had to close up half the house so I could watch a movie though. Movie was The Terminal which I thought was actually pretty good. Tomorrow is work again.

Last week wasn't all that fun. Just too much stuff going on. I did finally get a new version of knoppix downloaded though. Hopefully I won't end up running fileservers off this one (servers that need to be set up from scratch again after every reboot are annoying), but I am going to try and make kiosks out of it. That'd be a lot easier than trying to build my own system to try and handle every hardware config. Don't have to worry about them getting messed up either (although it hasn't happened with my current setup yet), since a reboot would completely reset them. Anyways, maybe I'll have to actually close the door to get some stuff done. Headphones and my handy away message sorta worked, but sorta is not quite enough sometimes... This time of year is no fun.

Movies for the weekend were The Chronicles of Riddick and The Day After Tomorrow. I'd say both were good but neither is great. Just good entertainment I guess. Work has been OK, nothing too interesting other than weird network slowness packet loss. It's almost like it's suddenly overloaded. Now that I think of it this happened the last time all the students left too. It's like less traffic causes problems for a while until the system figures it out. Oh well. I'm currently jumping between a few projects. Account eligibility, planning for the summer, cleaning up some of the San Diego stuff (their virtual DC had gotten slow. It was fast at first, but now I realise why they complained), figuring out what to do with other things... I started working on quotas today. I made up a nice SQL command that took 44 minutes and 37.29 seconds to run. It returned 579 rows. It was one of those things I started it figured it'd take a couple minutes and if it was pulling what looked like the right data I'd optimize it. I came back 5 minutes later and it was still running so decided to see how it'd go. Apparently MySQL has issues with joins on unindexed columns and deciding whether to pull stuff out before or after joining the tables. After tweaking some data and taking advantage of temporary tables and indexes, I got it down to 0.71 seconds. SQL is fun.

On Saturday my brother came home with an iPod Mini. I played with it for a few hours, attempting to see if I could get it working with his Windows 98 machine (pending replacement but on hold for now as different schools have different requirements). I could mount it fine, but only with formatting. I tried to load the Windows formatting and software. Unfortunately while I have a few virtual 2000 and XP machines on my Mac, the USB hooks bind to the Mac and the iPod triggers way too many automount hooks in the OS. It simultaneously starts iTunes and starts mounting the drive. Given it attempts a hard mount it then deciding after a delay to give the device to the virtual machine with predictable results. That's all usable if the iPod didn't like to reboot on dismount causing the virtual machine to lose the connection and the process to repeat. And if the OS doesn't grab it within a certain time from connection of the USB connection the iPod will no longer accept an attempt until the connection is removed and added again. For all the plug and play they claim... You also can't just reformat and restore the directory structure - apparently the iPod system is either embedded in the filesystem or differs based on the filesystem. So no HFS+ to FAT32 conversion works either. I finally ended up just setting it up on my mac and telling him to copy his music over and I'd add it. In the process with a couple CDs I got to learn the annoyances of iTunes CD importing (such as renaming tracks while importing won't affect ones that have already started ripping - that one's really annoying). I like just dropping the music player on an ethernet port, looking at its IP, and saying "add these files" and it works.

After I finally just went for the mac exclusive approach on the thing, I decided to test it out and copied a few hundred songs over to test the interface and quality. Sound quality seemed rather good, although the output seemed a little weak. I didn't do any real comparisons and it's been a while but nothing really sticks out in my mind as problematic there. The one thing that really annoyed me was the scroll wheel. It doesn't like me. I could drag my finger around in circles sometimes and it wouldn't detect me. Get away from it and come back and it'd usually work. I think it may be a capacitive style touchpad, which could possibly explain it given the combination of humidity and temperature of the room and my fingers. The multifunction aspect of it annoyed me as well. It has to require a bit of movement so it doesn't sense movement when you're pushing a button. Yet it has to be sensitive enough that large motions don't require many times around to get it. They actually seem to have done a very good job of balancing that, but it still bugs me. I like things that respond instantly and consistently, not with a slight variation. Speaking of which, how do people deal with the slow UI? I pretty much have the same rant with it as with Windows and OS X. I guess people are just used to it and think that's how computers are supposed to act or something. I did have a little fun with the Music Quiz game, although it seemed that game is mainly hard because it's hard to select the right song with that crazy scroll wheel. It'd take two or three attempts to get the cursor over the right song, and hope it didn't move when I took my finger off to hit the select. I got a score of 69060 after 160 songs, but that's probably not that good.

First movie of the weekend was Tangled. It's a rather messed up but interesting story. They explain everything until it makes sense, and then start ripping it apart again. Second movie was Simone. It had good parts and bad parts. It seemed to describe our culture rather well. In other news, Shatner quote of the week - "Let 'em move to Canada. Freeze his balls off." Also an awesome quote from Slashdot. "Wetware too is vulnerable to buffer overflow exploits. Annoy a person for long enough and they'll do what you say just to get you to stop talking." As far as TV goes, this is probably better for them in the long run anyways.

In the work world it's been busy. I sent out notices to a bit over 3500 people on Friday that I am going to delete their account in a couple weeks. I've gotten a decent number of replies, and had the registrar's office fix some dates on courses or sent people to get thesis extensions properly recorded in the system. Most of them are people wanting exceptions though - what else is new. I've also been tracking down load on one of my systems. Some stuff late night was seriously spiking the load. Turns out it was the building collection of requests some of our computers do when they boot, some of them up to a dozen or so http calls to report different things, request data, etc. With them all being database driven, and a few hundred machines rebooting simultaneously... I ended up optimizing a bunch and think I may change how some of the stuff that doesn't need to be as real-time is done. Other than that I've been adding more features elsewhere, which may or may not have adverse effects on system load. It should be interesting to see. Huh. I wrote a lot again.

My house shakes when I hit the off button. It's actually sorta freaky. Tonight I decided to get a little motivated and maybe save some money even. I realized that not only were the fans when the system was off annoying, but they were probably wasting power. Then there's the matter of the other devices in the system which have no or only very short term state information which was powered up all the time. So I plugged a small power supply into the receiver's switched power outlet, ran it to a relay box, and started moving power cables of stateless equipment from always live power strips over to to ones fed by the relay box. Half the equipment in my rack now turns off about a second after the receiver turns off now. The only catch is apparently the compressor the sub is plugged into releases a little spike on the line when it loses power, which ends up being loud enough to cause the house to make creaking noises. I already have a relay box over by the sub, now it's just a matter of running some control lines so it turns on after the rest of the system is on and off before the rest of the system shuts down. I wonder if the power saving will be worth the hastle...

Work today went well but busy. The boss is gone so I had to catch up on a couple things, and was woken up by a phone call at 8am. Such is life I guess. I also got computers communicating, and am working on getting a rate-limited network connection going so I can simulate WAN links to verify before shipping the equipment out. Actually it may not be shipped but carried (although not by me), which is another fun thing to try and work out. Then there's all the other stuff wanting time...

Weekend was nice as I just sat around most of the time. It was nice enough Sunday that I was able to open up the house and let it warm up a bit. I tried to reboot one of schdav's servers that died but it didn't come back up for very long. I rebooted it by sticking my hand behind it where I couldn't see and flipping the power switch. I found out today that the power supply was sparking and stuff when he tried to start it, so I'm glad I didn't find that out the not-so-fun way when I was attempting to fix it. I watched Memento over the weekend. People said it was confusing, but I didn't think so at all. Yea it's backwards, but it's so consistent the pieces just naturally line up without trying. It was one that actually kept me interested through the whole thing, which has become somewhat uncommon lately. I should really get some sleep now...