I guess a good day has to be followed by a bad day. It was going pretty decent, and then the network problems got bad enough it was a pain to do stuff. So Nick and I spent a lot of time sniffing traffic, analysing the resulting data, yanking machines off the network, and tracing cables. All fun while ssh sessions to different monitoring points randomly freeze up as there's some random connection glitch. Sometimes I wonder if it's time to yank everything out, reset it, and put it back together from known configs while testing every piece. At this point the guess is that something is occationally reflecting a few packets randomly (just long enough to cause a glitch, not long enough or predictable enough for a profile of what's happening to actually show up). That and the switches randomly dropping connections for no reason and the vendor still scratching their heads at it (worked fine up until this year). Oh well, we'll see what happens.
Today was a good day. I killed a bunch of processes on homer, and removed it from Netsaint. Only a couple more decisions about DNS and it's ceremony at Lake Valentine time. Yes, I was the last one who needed to get stuff off there. I was waiting to push some stuff at another school, but got motivated by some spammer joe-jobbing a mailing list of all things. So now it's done. I hope we get those DNS decisions done soon. I'm getting enough crap bounceback from this thing...
I'm glad the election turned out the way it did. No contesting of popular vote vs electors, enough margin everyone isn't screaming, and conceeding the election rather than being a big baby and whining about it for months. Now I just hope the real election goes as well. Did you vote?.
Ended up going down to the Registrar's office and spent a couple hours with Ross and Nick troubleshooting some problems. Those are the fun ones - where it takes 3 of us a long time to figure it out. Thankfully once we figured out the first one the others were easy to fix. We're still not sure why it suddenly happened since what we changed should have broken it since early summer if it was really a bad thing, but whatever... Lunch was the gate, which was good as usual. Even better since we didn't leave until like 2 so it was all fresh. After that was a bunch of mailing list stuff, and then after Dave talking about rearranging offices decided to rearrange mine. I had the hall effectively blocked for a while. My office was a mess, with layers of dust all over along the back of the desk, and tons of stuff behind it. It's probably gonna be a day or so until everything is sorted out. Once it's semi-clean I'll probably take a few pictures or something.
And brooke, I just got an email from the domain registrar about your domain expiring soon. You should take care that so it doesn't become like Dave's.
The fun part about weekends is just sitting around. Saturday I ended up taking pictures at the game again. Got some good ones since the players ran down the sidelines a few times and at one point actually ended up coming out of bounds and stopping about 4 feet in front of me. Luckily the lens I had zoomed out a reasonable amount for that. Sunday was church followed by a run to Chipotle to get my receipt good for one free burrito on Tuesday. That should be good... Listened to the CD that came with the latest Wired. It's one of those that's best loud. It's creative commons licenses and they all allow non-commercial sharing so if you don't have a copy and want one (and know me), let me know. Watched Foolproof, which was an interesting movie. Not pushed to as fast of a pace as some, but had some good twists. In other news, I bought my house a year ago today. True fact, although I didn't really think much about it other than my mom mentioned it to me. I think I need to call my insurance guy to ask if they want the money for insurance too. That reminded me that I got the description of the insurance and changes and amount but never anything saying where to send money or when they wanted it. I'm pretty sure they want something though...
Last night it rained a lot. It was really interesting this morning when I got up and there was enough fog in the air that everything which wasn't actually warm had a solid layer of condensation on it. Then it got nice out. This afternoon I decided to be a code monkey and recoded parts of IncidentBase. Mainly incidentdetail, startupdateincident, and myincidents, although some shared areas end up across the site. Andy convinced me to put some CSS with rounded borders around the User Info area, and that turned into me rewriting almost all the layout tables into divs. The menu bar up top is now a rounded thing that butts up against the top edge rather than being a square thing down a bit. And people can't post comments that make the page wide anymore either (it'll cause their comment to scroll within the normal space). incidentdetail is actually down to around 350 lines now, although a bunch of that was replaced with calls to 3 different IncidentBase library collections now. That was enough work though, I can't imagine how much of a hastle the rest will be to get to the point we can consider a real redesign (hopefully all in css). Quick glance says over 20k lines - most of which is hack upon hack from people asking for new stuff all the time. At it's all my code and will hopefully make sense the second time around.
Oops. I think it was an OOM condition. Firefox had just died after it and Thunderbird started the hard drive rattling like crazy. I've handled those under linux no problem (gotten loads over 600 on my laptop and recovered without even affecting any other apps than the troublemakers), but apparently the darwin kernel doesn't handle it as well and the GUI starts seriously lagging when the Disk IO goes crazy. Something doesn't seem right about that - it's actually one of my biggest complaints about OS X. Any time the CPU is pegged and there's much IO (and the load is above 5 or so) or the disk, the machine starts beachballing whenever you click stuff until it recovers. Huh. scp claims I uploaded that image at 9.1MB/sec. I wouldn't mind it if that was true.
Work as usual. Just tedious, although I think we're making good progress towards automating identifying bustificated lab machines, which should help everyone out a bit. And should be much better than having some poor student go around and attempt to log in to every one...
I got a New Camera today. Yea, it's not top of the line, but it also was dirt cheap (like $100 cheap). That's a good solid camera though. The goal was something I can actually leave in my bag rather and have with me rather than having to make a special point of carrying my camera or miss stuff because I don't have it. It's small enough I can slip it in my pocket and it's not that noticable either. I also managed to install the software and properly tag both my cameras with my name and stuff (which also gets embedded in all the pictures they take), which is a good thing.
I finally finished testing the domain stuff. Looks like we need to roll out more Domain Controllers to properly handle stuff. Oh well, I guess you do what's necessary. At least I don't have a domain controller and 4 desktop windows systems running on my powerbook anymore. Hmm. I think there's a total lunar eclipse coming up Wednesday night. I'll have to try and remember that or see if I can dig up info about it. Missed the one in the spring, and the next one is 2007...
Sometimes I feel like as soon as I start to get things off my list of things to do, people just come up with more things to ask for. But whatever I guess, they'll get done as time permits.
Saturday was getting up too early and going to the Bethel Football game at Concordia. I wasn't driving though, so I got to just relax in the car. Got breakfast and dinner for free too. Didn't get many good pictures, although maybe I'll look into cropping and posting some of them. On the way back the team and everyone stopped at some parents' house for deserts and stuff which was fun. Then I put in my headphones so I couldn't hear anyone else and slept for most of the rest of the way home. I still think it's odd I wake up every time we get to the exit coming back down 94. Doesn't happen on any other exit, but it seems to happen about there every time. Pretty much just enough time before getting to my parents' house to get everything ready to just get out car (at least for me, everyone else seems to spend 10 minutes getting out). At least I got a decent amount of sleep.
Sunday was Salem as usual, although the service was a bit different than usual. And I was really tired. Odd how that happens when you get a lot more sleep than usual. Got home and my brother wanted to watch the Vikings so that was on for a bit. They had something funky going on with the audio today though. It'd jump to what seemed like a different feed and the audio would repeat like a second or so but souding like it came from different microphones. Really odd. After that sat around for a bit and eventually watched Saved!. It's a sorta funny movie, but I think most of the good parts were in the trailer (what else is new these days). They seemed to do a pretty decent job of reflecting reality, but watching the deleted scenes and bloopers explains a lot about why things happened the way they did. It also seems they did a bit of rewriting between takes. The most annoying technical thing was probably what looked like an issue with the telecine - the objects in the frame would move a bit relative to the entire frame. It almost seemed to be an issue with audio vibration messing up frame alignment in places causing it to be pushed to one side or the other every other frame. It seems odd they'd have it playing where it could have an effect, maybe just only noticed it more there (which would make sense given how the soundtrack had more bass in long slow shots than in quicker shots with more motion). Anyways, worth seeing at least once. After that watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That's a good movie, although there were things they probably could have left out or find better things to put in where they needed to break up the memories. It was almost like they were trying to push the fact there were issues with the process, but they don't really go that way and then show how well it's worked otherwise. It did seem like they did a bit too much tying up at the end and flashing back to the beginning. Like the knocking on the car window thing. That's what annoys me about most movies that have jumps like this one. But whatever, still a good one to see.
OK, those of you who haven't seen Shaolin Soccer are missing a really funny movie. You should have come to movie night. Now you'll have to rent it or buy it.
Quote of the day - "Adobe Photoshop: When you want the truth, really bad." Unfortunately I didn't see the original skit, does anyone have a copy of it though? It sounds really funny.
The powerbook is a workhorse today. Running a copy of Windows XP, installing a copy of Server 2003, installing a copy of Windows XP, installing a copy of Windows 2000, rendering a couple postscript files at ~16 megapixel resolution, and running email and web browsing. Still pretty usable too. OK, so maybe I work my computers hard. Is running 4 copies of Windows on a mac considered torturing the machine?
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