Well, Avalon started acting up again. Was able to sorta trace it to the RPC service getting too many requests and basically overloading. The Mac services don't like this and just pile up as they retry, and everything else just waits forever and looks like it's hanging. And authentications act really weird too. So started looking at WebDAV more, and that looks like it's doable in the semi-near future. Lunch today was sorta funny. There was a huge discussion on the i-want-lunch list about where to go for lunch, and then we ended up going somewhere not even mentioned. Oh well. After work hung out with friends for a bit, and then got home and realized there's a very good reason my data cable didn't arrive today - something related to the mailbox also being empty. Oh well, maybe tomorrow.

Started off the day with church at Salem again. After that met up with the family for lunch at TGI Friday's, which was good. On the way to that my brother discovered that Google's WAP interface doesn't do phonebook lookups like their regular site. We both poked around a bit, and discovered no easy interface to do so anywhere. So I spent part of the afternoon learning wml, and using a a cgi and fun regular expressions take a phone number or name query, access google's regular phonebook search, parse the results, and hand the phone back a deck with a card for each result. Spent a bit of time debuging it, and now has caching so it doesn't annoy google either (shouldn't do more than one query per search). Seems to work very well, although I had to start limiting to 15 results as full name and address details for places like Bethel tend to get too big for the phone quick. One odd thing is during testing I noticed my phone would disconnect from the network during periods of inactivity, so it'll be interesting to see how it actually interacted in a few days when I have itemized billing records. Neither the phone's minute count or the web page list any noticable amount of minutes used today, so I'm sorta curious how that worked out. Anyways, I also rearranged stuff in my office at home a bit. Got the computer stuff from a big 5ftx5ft pile to along one wall, which was good. Also dragged the decent speakers from my bedroom into the office along with the receiver and mp3 player dock and just ran speaker wires to some cheap speakers in my bedroom. At night I just want background music and don't really spend any other time in the room, so it's nice to be able to listen to music with a full range system (and as loud as I want) while hacking away. Other than that spent some time reading a magazine (yes, a geeky one - my favorite part was the review of the new JVC GR-HD1 High-Def camcorder, but no, I'm not dropping $3,500 on a video camera). That's pretty much it for the day, although I will say that Where in the world is Dave? needs to show up on some searches.

Gotta love saturdays. Got to sleep in really late, and then get up and do nothing. Spent some time talking to people, looking at cell phone licenses and frequency allocations, and more tech discussion boards. Spent most of the day coding though. Basically built a image gallery thing up from scratch. Part of the reason was it's not designed to be a quick and dirty thing - it's actually a few scripts calling a lot of shared library functions which actually do stuff, and a consistent UI with grouped navigation, breadcrumbs, nested albums, etc. Way too much planning involved... Gallery is a cool app, but unfortunately is leashed to the server. I basically have one that's split into two nearly identical parts - one on my laptop which allows me to preview and move things around and stuff, and one on the server which implements (or will implement) most of the things in gallery. This allows much quicker access while editing, not killing my shared server (which can get slow enough already), and editing while offline (or on a slow connection). It will also allow me to easily integrate a system to sell images I wish to sell. The other thing is gallery tries to be a little too flexible for my tastes and has ended up with some security problems - and I don't want to have to patch it all the time, especially since I've never bothered to get into php since it doesn't fit my styles (and is not suited for standalone apps and sharing libraries). Those who know me well and have programmed stuff with me know I can get rather paranoid about checking input, I don't like using code from random projects on public stuff and usually others don't like to get their code "tested" by me either. :) So yea, I'll post a link to that once some people pound on it and make sure the UI is consistent and stuff (and I get some photos in it and don't change the schema anymore).

It was nice to be able to sleep in. Went into work not tired at all. Meeting went OK, probably better than I expected, but about right. After that got some other things sorted out, rebooted a server, checked some others, and that was about it. Finished off the night by watching The Green Mile. Good movie, with some rather funny quotes.

Just when I thought it couldn't get worse. Woke up to news that Usonia2 decided to pull the same trick as Avalon to get attention. Started poking with WebDAV stuff to see about getting stuff working. Went down to the lab to test from an OS 9 box after setting some stuff up, and discover it won't connect. Yep, Avalon rebooted again. The unencrypted WebDAV stuff did work pretty well while it was up though. Poked around a bit and the machine was sluggish so turned of Services for Macintosh. It got better again so I decided to turn them back on. Yep, sluggish again. And Microsoft has plans that I know about to fix them. About then it was lunch time, which was at Jake's. They have good burgers. After lunch was more poking with WebDAV, and routing through SSL. Seems to work OK, although loose transparency on OS X. Goliath still works fine though, so OS 9 should work. Very fast too - don't let your first WebDAV experience be on a slow server. It's too bad there isn't a really good client for Windows. The afternoon also got some fun stuff, like the stupid windows worm doing an effective DDOS on our network by sending so many queries at it from the outside. I'll be glad when those die down a bit, since it seems like there's random problems all over the net. I wonder if that's what's caused the insane delays and craziness with verizon's text messaging system and voicemail alerts the last couple days. Then there may be problems with screensaver locking again, and get to deal with quotas in a meeting tomorrow. At least I get to sleep in for the morning. After work hung out bugging the Help Desk people for a bit, and poked at some WINS settings to see about all the suddenly not logging in Win 9x machines, and then brought JoeBuck home. Got home and decided to take care of some dealings with SprintPCS. Their customer service is horrible by the way - can't even talk to anyone without a current phone number through them. Managed to get in through an order line but the guy couldn't do much other than confirm the amounts on my bills. He tried transfering me to a department that could help, but the phone system stopped me with a prompt for the phone number again. He was able to confirm that sprintpcs won't prorate a canceled account, which sucks but is sorta the norm. Anyways, decided at this point it was time to pull out the bag of tricks and think outside the box. I pulled out the old sprint phone and dialed *2. This is customer service, but on an unactivated phone promptly connects you to the activation department with pretty much no wait. For some reason the people who activate phones seem to be able to do stuff with accounts. :) Luckily the rep was able to fill out some paper request forms to get stuff done, since the department which actually needed to do stuff is only open 7-4. She needed some info though about how the payment was made which luckily I kept close enough records to have, although I could see how most people wouldn't have any idea at that point. What a mess. Wanted to pay off the balance of the account after the transfer would occur but then she informed me that if she did that the system would add on $5 for doing it through a person, so it'd be cheaper to mail a check. Of course can't use the automated phone credit card thingy without a phone number again (even tried the *3 from the phone, but it didn't seem to allow options). Talk about crazy. Decided to fix up the phone after that too - cleared out all the call and phonebook data in it, reset timers, and for the heck of it changed the provider banner to "911 Only". I'll probably keep it reasonably charged and around the house somewhere since I don't have a landline... Also I had two other companies upset me today. MBNA decided to call and try and sell me stuff. I'm cancelling them in a month or so anyways since they decided to stop giving money to the school they did before, so will have to remind them at that point to never call me again. Then Columbia House pulled the same thing, trying to give me DVDs if I commit to buying more. I think I confused the guy when he asked "Don't you want to save money" and I said "nope". Took care of that one on their web site. Managed to crash a few web access sessions pretty good, but they now have all zeros in their system for my phone number. I somehow have a mangled address too (different depending on how you look at it), but oh well. If they insist on not letting me opt out of all marketing calls... Between that and getting other things together I think I'm done with bills for a while too (at least once this stack of envelopes gets in the mail). Hopefully tomorrow will go better.

More miscellaneous stuff to start the morning. Actually the whole day sorta turned into that. Went to Willow Gate for lunch, which is always a good time. In the afternoon we had a department meeting and all got to sign papers saying we won't talk about stuff. Gotta love those. After work I started poking around with ssh tunnels and iptables. I now have a script that loads up secure tunnels and adds in iptables rules so any outgoing traffic to certain hosts and ports go through the tunnels. Got pop3, smtp, www, news, lots of vncs. Basically my laptop has a sorta vpn that's just through SSH, but also has some other funky rules. The biggest benefit for me is I don't have to worry about getting smtp out, but even more important I can hit any wireless AP I want and things I care about are encrypted. I suppose I should probably include IM in the mix at some point, but that's not exactly secure anyways... The evening actually was going pretty well, and then Avalon decided it needed a reboot. Took 15 minutes to come up too, which wasn't fun. I think I'm gonna seriously start looking at forcing OS 9 users to use WebDAV to access their files. This is just crazy...

Morning started off with miscellaneous restores and stuff, and getting things set up on avalon. Then I started deleting files from home directories that people didn't need anymore, and cleaned up 14GB of space. That script took forever to run though... In the afternoon got Virus scan up and running, which was nice. Then there was that crazy security vulnerability and the funny rap. Patching a bunch of servers is never fun. I think they should have recorded the rap so we could listen to it while patching servers. After work did nothing for a bit, and then poked with hosting stuff. I'm gonna try offloading my email to another VDS and see if the rest of the server becomes more responsive. Should be interesting to find out. Anyways, a couple of interesting links today. There's What the Internet Is, which talks about the history and purpose of the Internet. How it isn't a thing, but more of a concept. The other link is GSM 3G. Basically how the current GSM protocol is messed up and while IS-95 CDMA may not be the answer, the answer is definitely CDMA rather than TDMA and all the companies admit it.

Lots of little things started off the morning. Got Avalon moved over to the correct physical area of the network, which went amazingly smooth. Backups for everything finished off really early so got some other restores out of the way. Got announcements sent out to everyone about avalon and the temp files going away. Sorta figured out some goofiness with the new AC unit in the server room. What happens when you put 8 tons of cooling in a 15x20ft room? Yea, we turned off the old 3 ton unit and it seems to be doing a bit better. Still cooling fast enough that it cycles pretty fast though (12 minutes or so for a cycle). Hopefully adding more equipment will help. After work I went over to Ross' place and of course took some more pictures. Dave brought his tripod so was able to get some better shots. I should have taken a few a bit later though, as while I was finishing up snow was coming in so it was a eerie looking fog over the city. You can sorta see it in some of the pictures there. After that came home and poked on usenet a bit. Then Paul told me about some spam coming through, so I dropped blacklist entries in on all the mail servers, figured out they had been sending from a whole netblock over the past hour or so, and blocked the whole thing. Spammers really bug me. They just make things a pain in the butt for everyone else.

Sunday started off with heading over to Salem Baptist again. Of course right as church finishes I get a page about avalon being up, which unfortunately has a corresponding "down" page that came in while my phone was being quiet during church. Turns out it actually did reboot so the full backup didn't really finished. Since at this point we pretty much had to redo the partial fulls from earlier in the day, I figured out how to create a new client from scratch and set that up and kicked off fulls. A short time later the web server went down, although at this point I wasn't going to go in to fix that. So I watched Hannibal, which was very disappointing. He's way too predictable, and the movie doesn't really seem to have a plot other than maybe to scare people. If they wanted to do that I'd say to put some scary stuff in there or at least some suspense. After that movie the web server was still down, and since I needed to reconnect network cables to a machine anyways I headed in to work. Turns out the web server didn't just crash, it was bad. One of the CPUs was 58C with the fan spinning at a 1600RPM, and the other was 73C with the fan spinning at 5800RPM. Neither all that great. It wouldn't even boot in SMP, so I booted it with a UP kernel and it seems sorta stable. Hopefully it'll stay up until it's yanked out of the rack and looked at. Plugged the ResNet and AcadLabs interfaces into Avalon which was nice. While I was there the full backups of it finished as well so I kicked off backups on everything else as well. It'll be nice to have recent backups again. Went home and finished off the night by watching The Fifth Element. Definitely worse than Hannibal, but not quite as boring since it was funny. And then there's Bilbo flying around in a space ship... Finished off the night dealing with some other unfortunate work stuff. Sometimes users just don't deserve being treated half as nice as we treat them even when we tell them to go away.

Friday was decent. Went to Qdoba for lunch. More miscellaneous stuff at work, I seem to remember doing something big, but apparently it wasn't since i don't remember offhand. Friday night I sat around and did nothing for a bit. Ended up figuring out how to get the web browser on my phone to work for free rather than paying Verizon $7/month or whatever for it. Should be interesting to see how useful that actually is though. I have a feeling it'll be one of those never-use features. Also found the voicemail direct-access number, which is a useful number to have. Saturday I got up and spent a few minutes cleaning up files. Turns out I was a bit over quota on one of the file servers at work, so had to clean some of that up. I'm under quota now. And given how much transient data from the system junk bin is part of the stuff that's left, nobody else has an excuse to be over either. :) After a few minutes of cleanup it was time to get ready and drive out to Meghan's place in the middle of nowhere. Since she's leaving for the National Guard on Sunday and will be gone for almost 6 months, she had a going away party. Most of the non-relatives were Bethel people, so there wasn't too much meeting new people, mainly just hanging out. Turns out that one of her uncles knows some of my extended family through his work, so that was a bit of an unexpected twist in the day. After that I went to my parents' house and got the CD burner working, and also visited Sam's Club to pick out a printer for my sister. It was free samples day which is always fun. Picked up a bunch of dew to stock up my office and bring my average cost back down to just about $.50/bottle. Sams always has it for a couple bucks less per 24 pack than the other places, which is nice. After that spent some time poking at Avalon. Homes finished restoring at like 18:50, and Apps went quick and was done by shortly after 23:00. Now all the public stuff should be available, so just have to get the ITS internal stuff restored. I did bring up all the shares though, so we'll see if it's stable before I send out something about it being up tomorrow. Then we can run a full backup on it too and be done with this whole thing. It's just too bad I had to turn the Mac services back on. AFP really sucks, but unfortunatly people are still running stuff older than 10.2. Hopefully the indexes for it will rebuild quick so performance goes back to reasonable.