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. :)

I went to Arby's for lunch today. An excerpt from the ordering process:

Cashier: "Um, I screwed up." *Places this on counter next to register, and looks like she's waiting for a response.*
Me: *wonders what she expects me to do about it*
Cashier: "What's 83 minus 53?" Me: "Um, 30." *more confused I look at object on counter*
Cashier: *shows me receipt. I'm still wondering what I'm supposed to do about it. Long pause of her sorta staring off into the distance.* "Yea, that makes sense." *reaches over to credit card machine to run the rest.*

So yes, I now have two receipts for my meal. The credit card company probably loves it, I wonder what the manager will say...

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.

So Monday night I decided that I was sick of the 600 some spam messages I had received over the weekend and decided to do something about it. Unfortunately the frontend mail host for qux is a RH7.3 box that I can't rebuild, so it's an old sendmail and no updated sendmail packages were available. I decided to just go for it, shut down and uninstalled sendmail, and started compiling. After solving some dependencies and after a bit of waiting, I now have a decently modern sendmail with milter support and milter-greylist installed. I think I've had 3 spam messages make it through since, and all were detected and filtered as spam. I'm amazed at how well it works. It's funny since I didn't notice much at work when it was implented there due as my addresses don't get much (mostly to some aliases like the old ssl cert ones). The ones that do get through still come, meaning most of the junk there comes from compliant mail servers. Apparently my personal spam comes from zombies though. Oh, if stuff bounces wait until later that day and send again. I'm too lazy to say more, other than point you here and say it's pretty much the same other than I'm not gonna whitelist people with broken mail servers (manually resend the first time and/or bug your mail provider). Ah, it feels like I'm back in '99 with the lack of junk...

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.

Friday was fun. A machine was spoofing and attacking another machine, and it took out a couple routers and the internet link. After that was done there were still problems. We ended up finally tracking down the problem with high latency lately. Suffice it to say the HP Procurve 4000s suck for certain tasks. Like mirroring ports under any load. It was losing about 40% of the traffic on a mirrored port. It wasn't noticed, because it was clamped on both sides to about 9Mbps (physical link on one side, packetshaper on other). When sending through floods that the packetshaper was instructed to ignore, it'd be 35-40% loss. Other traffic 0% loss, but a couple hundred ms longer rtt than there should be. Apparently the issue was being handled at layer 2 so nothing on either side ever saw it. Even VoIP traffic worked great - it's amazing how much delay people have become accustomed to on the phone. Anyways, after turning off the packetshaper (last device before the packet loss), physically bypassing it, replacing the ethernet cable, and getting ready to swap out that vlan's ports on the switch with a cheap one to see if it was acting wrong (last step since the traffic already went through that switch in another vlan with no problems), we tried turning off the mirroring. After further analysis of the port counters, the port it was mirrored to had over 10mil tx errors in the time the switch had been up (recently rebooted due to the other issues). Fun, huh? At least it's fixed now.

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...

Apparently I've been busy or something. In the past week or so I've finished Alias Season 3, watched The Faculty, done a lot of coding and documentation review, ordered some servers, had a birthday, been dragged into too many meetings, set up software distribution plans, ordered more servers, fixed stupid appletalk stuff that broke, attempted to track down other broken stuff, planned more infrastructure, worked around comcast breaking their DNS, set up mailing lists, evaluated another semi-federated distributed authentication system, attempted to implement some dynamic windows lockdown systems, investigated quota systems, patched utilities from Windows Server 2003 into Windows 2000 Server, attempted to convince people that greylisting is not the cause of all lost email, speculated at site bandwidth requirements for very loosely defined groups of people, investigated Windows policy application, attempted to work around weird network glitches, investigated disk IO problems, lost a bunch of data, drank way too much Mountain Dew, and tried to forget about work when I get home. Yea, other than the first two, that data stuff and that one other thing, that's been work for the past couple weeks. Actually that seems like not enough explanation now that I look at it. Going home has involved sitting around doing nothing and reading random stuff to try and relax. It's been made easier by horrible network latency to work, but harder by the phone beeping with random pages. Right now I'm sitting on the couch at home, every couple minutes resisting the natural urge every couple minutes to move so the lights will turn back on. Mainly that's because the lights here don't turn on if I move (well, unless I walk over to the switch), so it's pointless. I think that means I either need to move more at work so the lights stay on there, or I need to tweak the motion detector timing. I'm thinking it's probably approaching time to find something to do and take a week off. Of course at work I sorta work time off around 3 people. One of those took a bit over two weeks coming back Monday (but sick the last two days). Another is gone this week. The third is gone next week. Maybe I should claim the week after before it's gone? :) If only I wasn't in the middle of so much I could actually take vacation without having to find something to continously occupy my time and distract me.

So today I walked by as someone was unpacking a new toy. This toy was a nice new fast multi-CPU Sun box. I asked the question "what OS are you going to run on that?" with the two obvious choices the only thing in my mind. He looked at me and somewhat hesitantly said "actually, it'll probably be Windows 2000". What has this world come to? I guess I should have realized. It seems lately we've been buying Sun stuff to run linux on, and other gear to run Solaris on. It just never really hit me before...

I'm an idiot. I decided it'd be nice to get my Pocket PC synced to my Mac, so start the install/setup process. I end up hard locking up my Pocket PC. I think that's the second time it's done that with heavy bluetooth traffic (the first was when I was setting it up initially). Of course the Mac has issues with bluetooth transfers too. That's definitely not a good thing, as I haven't synced it in a while. I also haven't done an image of it in a while (like since January 20th). That's just stupid of me since it takes like 30 seconds and is a complete image that will restore even faster than the backup and puts everything back into place (even the screen calibration I forgot I fixed until it was back to slightly off). So I've been going over Department Calendars and other Bethel lists and typing stuff in to sync back to it. I think everything's in place now, but if you're expecting me to be somewhere in the near future and I'm not there, that could explain it. I like that excuse actually... "It's not my fault - my Mac deleted it from my Pocket PC" Now to see if I can get it to sync over bluetooth again. I only have like 25MB of data so far, and it still takes forever over that link...