Today was staff appreciation day. That meant I got to go in to work at the normal time (or the option of showing up 30 minutes early to get free omelets), sit on a boat for the day, get free lunch, and go home at 3. Can't argue with that much. After I got home I decided I may as well break out the tools and find the rattle in the driver's door of my car that happens with certain music. I pulled the door apart to have the tweeter fall out on me. It appears that the vibration was probably due to it being held in place by a little friction and the door panel, probably due to the speaker grill having effectively no clearance with the frame around the tweeter and the panel being kicked on vehicle exit. Unfortunately the door panel being gone meant it got to hang from the wires which it didn't do so well and pulled out. Surprisingly with the other speakers going it wasn't very noticeable, and even just that speaker sounded better than factory. So the door is reassembled without a tweeter on that speaker for now until I decide what to do. Since the stock location results in the sound being muffled by things such as having a person with normal length legs in the passenger seat, the option I'm seriously considering is mounting it in the sail panel and running it there. The crossovers on these speakers are external, so that makes it quite a bit easier as I'd just have to run wire inside the door down to where I mounted them crossovers. Maybe this weekend I'll get ambitious about testing that. While my hands were greasy I decided to do the usual check stuff under the hood, and even finally got around to fixing my window controls which have been sticky and hard to use for the past couple years. I ended up breaking the switches while popping the tops off to clean them, so the process resulted in completely disassembling and reassembling the module to rebuild the switches. I'm surprised those things last, although considering I think the last time I heard of someone wanting it replaced it was close to $300 from the dealer, so maybe they like it that way. Anyways, whoever puts recessed switches on a horizontal surface adjacent to a cup holder in a car is an idiot...

The previous few days at work have gone reasonably well. Wednesday was a bit stressful though. I talked with the electricians and their supplier to figure out what we're going to do for some of our server room stuff. Then I tried to get exact specs on the ERP system. We were told stuff by the equipment vendor, and then they called back right as I was planning it out and thinking "this won't be too bad" to tell us that with the processor configuration we'll have there will be special power requirements. Now if I can just find out what kind of power cable they want to ship... The same day our main file server decided it wanted a break as well (possibly due to NTFS issues which I think may have been happening for a bit over a month). It worked once I pulled the load off, but unfortunately when rebooting it due to the logs indicating that it was resource exhaustion and wanting to be safe, it decided chkdisk was necessary. After waiting about 30 minutes to see about status and seeing we were looking at about 12 hours (yea, it's a very fast array, but also a *big* array), a hard reset and canceling it got the system up. Hopefully it'll last through load tomorrow and until the planned outage Saturday. It was sorta funny since multiple people had the same questions for me (other than the "is it fixed yet" ones). First was "Isn't NTFS journaled", to which the answer at least from Microsoft is "Yes ". The second is "Then why does it run chkdisk?", to which I answered "good question". Microsoft's answer is in that previous link but basically avoids the question while insulting other OSes, but a good summary of the real answer is in the second paragraph here. Since WinFS is all but indefinitely postponed right now, who knows how long it'll be until that's really fixed.

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.

Today was a good day. This morning it didn't seem all that fun. I started off by figuring out a problem with a machine sending mail (or at least talking to the mail server) a few minutes after I got holes punched in the firewall to get a good look at the thing. Apparently McAfee blocks outgoing SMTP to stop mass mailing worms, which is great. Given that nobody should be sending mail using port 25 but rather 465 or 587 it makes sense too, except for the fact that most ISPs are too brain dead to support anything but 25 yet. After that I reconfigured the software distribution DFS which involved making a GPO .adm to make sure the domain controllers had the right registry changes stick, and then manually removing and reimporting all the data. Also reconfigure replication, and it was all stable pretty quickly. That covered the morning. Lunch was Dinos which was good. Then was back for a meeting with printing people.

This involved the same server mentioned above. After a few minutes it seems almost everyone left except Ross and I, apparently with us supposed to resolve everything left. Then eventually Ross left, and I got handed the phone to talk to tech support to resolve integration issues. Figured out the email problem was using defaults on the testing that don't work with any properly configured email server. Apparently they were only used to dealing with Exchange (that's what they said). In the process I ended up configuring a local SMTP queue and set up all the proper routing and ACLs rather than it relying on talking directly to the smtp servers, which is probably good considering the software wanted the IP address. Second was LDAP, which in their software apparently is Active Directory. After going through options and telling them a lot of ideas were just not practical, it was agreed that they really should support it and they're gonna recode it to go off a standard unix LDAP tree with a specified BindDN and eduPerson records. I'm supposedly gonna get a call about that "tomorrow", but I'm thinking Monday is more likely. It's nice both getting to talk to people who know their stuff, and have the ability to do stuff like that. I'm still surprised that a company that has like 80% of the printing market and OEMs the equipment for pretty much every major printing company hasn't had to deal with unix stuff before. Apparently even the universities just use the Windows side. If only the other outside vendor I'm dealing with had ever heard of stuff besides ASP... Like having an idea of what ssh is used for would probably be a good idea if you're a web development company.

Anyways, while going to play with the new printer drivers I ran into the startup scripts issue that people have been complaining about for the past month or so. It annoyed me so I pulled out the sniffer, tracked it down, and corrected the script that was causing it, and the lab machines are down from like 10 minutes booting to around 30 seconds. When I tell people that something should be done a certain way, but other ways seem to work and require a little less typing... Anyways, so that was my day and I feel like I both got a ton done and got nothing done at the same time. I could have weeks worth of days like that and still not be caught up. :( Normally I have absolutely nothing on my calendar and can just work on projects all day and hope they don't get piled on faster than I can get through them, and I like it that way. As of now Monday is booked solid on the calendar though, and I have this sinking feeling that other days may end up the same.

ChoicePoint, Bank of America/Chase, PayMaxx, LexisNexis, UC Berkeley, Boston College, Nevada DMV, Northwestern University, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, UC Chico, UC San Francisco, Georgia DMV, MCI, University of Mississippi, San Jose Medical Group, Tufts University, LexisNexis (last one found bigger), Ralph Lauren/Polo, FasTrack (sorry, no link), California Health Services (PDF Link), DSW, Ameritrade, CMU, Michigan State Wharton Center, Christus St. Joseph Hospital, Georgia Southern University, BoA (Chase), Wachovia, Commerce Bancorp and PNC, Oklahoma State University (gotta say they seem to be helping people the best so far), Time Warner, Colorado Department of Public Health, Purdue University (when will the big companies learn from the Universities how to do this right?), US DOJ, Stanford University, Hinsdale High School, Westborough Bank, Jackson Community College, Valdosta State University (making this somewhat funny, and sad because by news coverage it looks like they're trying to ignore it happened), Merlin Information Systems, and now Citigroup (note, they helped some previous ones notify customers, so they should be good at it by now).

So where is your personal data tonight?

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.

This weekend was my brother's graduation, along with that of quite a few of my friends. So I was there, and took some pics of graduation and some of the Baccalaureate. Some of you know of other pics I have up. If you don't ask brooke or Betsy. :)

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.

No, nothing useful right now. There's this which most of you have probably seen (I think it was on /. or k5 a couple years ago) but is funny. Link borrowed from Erik.