So The Nick is complaining that I don't talk about him enough and his sweet ride. He says because we have lunch together almost every day I should talk about him more. This good Nick? :) Today was an OK day. I got an a coding kick and started doing a bunch of stuff in the IncidentBase. Got Next/Previous buttons working for detailed views, as well as this crazy out-of-office thing Dave thought up. Basically it shows Incidents assigned to you to other people when you are out of the office. That part isn't that odd and is actually pretty straightforward - the crazy part is where it gets the data. It logs onto the switches and analyses the traffic patterns for your machine, and when it finds a deviation from the normal...no, it actually just goes and looks at the calendar on the exchange server every hour (grabs the web page version), and parses it out. Turns out our office administrative assistant is consistent enough that I was able to parse the data with only a handful of regular expressions. Basically it pulls out a mapping of name abbreviations and nicknames and maps them to the person's identity. Then it takes keywords such as "out" or "on vacation" and changes the status. It also looks for context for timing such as "until x" or "after x" or "at x". Then it adds a row to a table for each occurance of a person being not in the office. All that data about people being gone is actually taken by another script which looks at preferences of who should see what when a person is gone and actually changes what everyone sees to match. Eventually I should probably add a manual override to it I guess. Then it makes it easier to abuse though - right now you have to do it a round-about way so I doubt anyone will even bother. Plus there's that mess with the department calendar and the admin assistant will have a talk with you, and the fact that you have to be either important or a server admin to modify the calendar, and she's basically doing the data entry for me... :) Anyways, after work Dave came over and we watched Spider-Man. I still like that movie, although I can see why a lot of people don't. No cool geek toys arrived today, hopefully some stuff will start showing up tomorrow though - I want to play with cool stuff...

Nothing too interesting at work. Spent way too long poking with a kiosk image since the drive was acting like it was bad. Once it was up and running right though it worked fine. As long as it stays that way long enough to image it onto the other machines I guess. Didn't watch any movies, and no new toys came today. Did get the shipping confirmation on one though. After work I spent time working with transcode encoding video. It's not very well documented and I had to do an annoying amount of poking and calculating to get what it wants. BTW, if you want to make an anamorphic 16x9 DVD from 2.35:1 input the correct scaling is 720x408 and add a 36 pixel black border to the top and bottom. I think... Now to get the input to decode properly realtime...

Today was a pretty average day, with the highlight being lunch at Chipotle. My dad and 2 siblings decided to watch a movie tonight so we decided to watch Extreme Limits. For quality of the movie, it was pretty bad, for humor good only in that you laughed at it. It started off looking a lot like Cliffhanger. Then they pulled footage from cliffhanger, and not little pieces either - think a few minutes with different closeup shots cut in... One of those movies that's just good for a laugh...

I guess I made up for my slacking on movies a bit. Saturday after I finally got up and decided to do something other than just read about electronics stuff I edited some video and watched TV. Ended up cleaning up a couple dozen GB on my pvr box which is cool. Saturday night I watched The Recruit. Hasn't changed since last time I watched it - I still think that's a good movie. Then I stayed up way too late reading more geek stuff. Ended up ordering some tactile transducers, so that should be fun when those come. As if the place doesn't rattle enough already... Sunday I woke up later than I should have, and barely got ready in time. After church it was basically sit around the house day, mainly reading geek material again (lately been mostly home theater forums). Ended up spending some time on the Columbia House site, and discovered everything's "on sale" and free shipping with at least 3 DVDs. Turns out they had a lot of interesting stuff for $9.99, so ended up getting 10 of them. Oops - gotta work on that impulse buy thing. Then I watched The Fellowship of the Ring, which is much better than I remember it. Probably because I watched it on a smaller setup before. That movie is mixed hot and with lots of bass - I think I found new resonances to fix in this room. After that I won an auction for an AXB-IRS4 - about time. I've already paid and the seller confirmed my shipping address and said she'd ship it either tomorrow or Tuesday. That should be fun when that comes. Sorta related is last Friday my box with robotics control cable and geardrive motors arrived. I've thought of a few more ideas for mounting the projector since the original, but we'll see what happens there. For a good chunk of the rest of the night I tried to avoid online shopping sites, since my track record for the weekend wasn't that great. Talked to a few friends online, some whom I rarely talk to. I finally decided to watch The Animatrix. It's surprisingly good quality of animation (although admittedly I don't really watch anime), although they paid attention to some odd details at points while skipping others. I watched the main clips, maybe I'll watch the rest tomorrow night. I'd say it was a good weekend - not exactly looking forward to going to work in the morning...

Sometimes I make myself too tired, but I guess it's usually worth it. That's what Saturday is for anyways though - sleep day, right? The last few days have just been weird at work. Lots of not to exciting stuff, but busy with way too much of it. It's the kind of thing where you feel like you haven't done anything because you haven't gotten anything big done, but realise it only if you think about it for a second. Sorta depressing since it's sorta a "I made no progress" feeling. After work Thursday night though I went home and finished building the frame for my screen. Then I went through a few hundred staples attaching the fabric to the frame. After mounting I realised how bad it needs the rest since what the frame is attached to is crooked, but I knew that and that's why the pile of wood is in the garage... Of course once it was finished I couldn't just let it sit even though I was tired and it was already 11:30, so had to watch a movie. Ended up watching AntiTrust which is one of those movies that isn't that great and yet is good at the same time. Picking was hard since I knew it'd be hard to stay awake so didn't want something I cared much about, or that I had to pay attention to, but wanted good quality technically and at least reasonable plot. Friday was more of the same at work, but with a little more worrying about the Avalon issue. I got to patch a lot of Windows machines, which was of course the usual level of great fun... After work I helped Meghan resize her XP NTFS partition and install linux. The whole NTFS partition thing was interesting but not that bad. I guess this is linux bootcamp week or something (although both of them have been bugging me about it for a couple weeks). After that and more finishing up the Windows patching, it was time to head over to Dave's place for a bonfire. People ditched early but Dave, Betsy and I just talked for a few hours. Then at like 12:30 JoeBuck and Nick came back and hung out for a while too. Gotta love sitting around a bonfire poking at it and burning random things... I realise I've been slacking in the movie department lately. I still have a bunch of those new ones to watch and evaluate. Maybe if I decide to wake up tomorrow I'll get some of those done...

Today wasn't bad. Had to get up in the morning, which is never a good way to start the day... Got to have a meeting about Avalon, and decided to swap out a bunch of hardware, possibly changing stuff around if that doesn't work out well. Then got to poke with Blackboard stuff for a while. It's a lot more annoying when you can't just go look in the source code and fix the problems rather than try to figure out what it's doing different from the API documentation and work around it. Then got to teach The Nick some perl stuff. Afternoon was sorta relaxing since I've been working a bunch for the Avalon it was sorta do whatever time. I chatted with a lot of people and went for an afternoon snack at the standup meeting. Late afternoon and evening was spent helping Betsy reinstall her computer. It was Windows ME, but is now Windows 98 and RedHat 9 dual-boot. She's excited about the linux part, so hopefully that'll continue to be a good thing. :) Also went and picked up what should hopefully be the rest of the hardware for my screen, and while I was out picked up a 48X CD-RW drive for what will be $20 after the rebate. OfficeMax seems to have good deals like that more often than most places. At 10pm the fun of the night started. Told Avalon to reboot so we could swap out hardware. It took about an hour again. :( We replaced the RAID card, the cable to the drive, and the one drive it was complaining about. Reboots after it's been up for a while unfortunately still take way too long writing to disk. Apparently the write cache for windows is already "disabled", and the ones on the RAID controllers are now disabled to see what will happen. Everything seems to be working and the array is rebuilding on the replaced drive now. Didn't get out of there until after midnight though, and Mike had an funny little runin with the phys plant people. :) Hopefully we can make more progress tomorrow and we won't have to do anything big, but that's not looking good at this point. Haven't heard any complaints about Jericho yet though, so that's at least one summer project which has gone smoothly so far...

Today went OK. Had a little interesting experience with one of the servers though. One of the domain controllers was complaining about replication to the other controller for the domain, which does nothing but serve as a DC so isn't in NetSaint. Turns out it's not responding on the network at all. I figure it's probably crashed and just head to the server room to go check the network cable and probably reboot it. The problem is it wasn't where I had put it in the server room, and I couldn't find it anywhere. It was apparently still sending out broadcasts occationally so I knew it had to be somewhere, so tracked it down to the switch port and then followed the patch cable to the machine. Turns out it had been moved to another rack at some point and the label pointed at the wall... Oh well, after the normal work hours I managed to get myself scheduled to do two outages in the same night. One involved the "maintenance" of a certain server. In other words we moved it between sites without telling anyone we were doing it (there's plenty of bandwidth between sites, but any and all slowness for the next year will be blamed on moving it if we had said what was happening). The fun part of that one was I couldn't find any of the collapsable carts anywhere and none of the other ones would even close to fit in my car (actually I'm pretty sure Dave and I fit the green one in there once - we also brought 3 17" monitors on that trip as well, that was fun...). So I just figured I'd carry the server. The problem is it's rather bulky and awkward so I had to carry it by about the first inch of my fingers. It also is pretty solid and lots of metal compartments because everything's hot-swap. In other words there's not much air space in there so it's really heavy (empty weight is listed as 80lbs, and we have drives in it - not sure exactly but it's definitely quite a bit heavier than some audio power amps I have that weigh 80 pounds)... So the trip to my car wasn't bad at all, only like 50ft and slide it into the back seat. Of course once I got to the main campus I had to carry it from the west lot in to the AC building. That's quite a bit farther, and my fingers were rather sore by the end of it, but for some reason to top it all off I had to put it on the top shelf of a rack which involved lifting it over my head. Probably should have been questioning my sanity there... After that one was all settled in I got to deal with Avalon. Apparently sometime while I was doing that it managed to recover and the console was usable, but I decided to reboot to try and fix the Mac problem anyways. It took pretty much exactly an hour to flush the disk caches and reboot. I'm still not sure what's going on there. It still doesn't show up either, but at least it's rebuilding the RAID of the "bad" drive now. It's sorta acting like another server, and even giving SMART errors. Seeing as we only see these errors with this controller config and it's happening on multiple machines though, I'm still guessing firmware. We'll see what happens there. Tomorrow night I think I'm gonna try and and actually finish my screen. Maybe I can finish up before Home Depot is closed and can actually get parts. Maybe even see about getting a cheap burner while I'm out shopping...

Pretty ordinary day at work, but had C1 for lunch which is always good. Apparently Avalon's console is confused a bit, as it won't let me do a lot of things. Probably just needs a reboot but since that has a recent history of taking out the mac indexs that doesn't seem like a great idea yet. It's not a profile problem, as I've tried resetting it and tried profiles that work fine elsewhere. Oh well, it should be solved eventually. Then there were the usual little things that were somewhat annoying. After work I sorta finalized my screen plans and went to home depot to pick up stuff. I didn't leave for there until like 9 and had to pick up stuff for my sister too so was a bit rushed. Got a pile of 2x4s, some mending plates, hinges, a better staple gun (if I'm gonna be doing probably around 1000 staples I want something decent) and staples. I cut and assembled the screen tonight, although the mending plates pull the top and bottom back a bit I don't want to attach stuff to the front to counteract as that'd put a ridge on the screen, but I think I can fix that with plates on the sides pretty easily. It also turns out that I grabbed the wrong staples (the package for the stapler only listed the width on the back in small type, so I was guestimating). Tomorrow I'll go grab some more plates and staples and then can hopefully put this thing together some more. it'll be nice to have a perfectly smooth screen again... Oh, and this weekend Paul is coming down so we're probably gonna have some sort of party... Should be lots of fun...

Wow, lots of time with no posts. Friday and the weekend went well. Friday was a typical day at work, with no big problems for once (at least not big enough that I remember them offhand). After work I went to see X2 with Dave, Brie, Ryan, JoeBuck, and Travis at the cheapseats. The sound sucked, the film was scratched and missing frames in places, the projector was jittery around reel changes, the image overscanned (or whatever the film equivalent for that term is) about 3ft on one side, and there was a big blotch of white shiny spots on the screen, but it was fun anyways and only $2 too. Afterwards we went over to Dave's place for a bonfire. Dave, Brie, Ryan and I talked for a long time, and then Brie and Ryan ditched and Dave and I talked for another long time. That conversation was lots of geeky/techie stuff... Then Saturday I taught myself Qt and was playing around with graphics overlaid with text, and pulling data out of a database to determine what to display on screen and stuff. It was fun, although I discovered the annoying way that none of the GUI parts are thread-safe at all. Luckily they provide a nice mutex I could use to get around that. It doesn't really make sense to not be able to manipulate graphics independently if you're not writing to the screen, and those should have no reason to try to talk to X, but oh well... I also spent way too much time on avsforum and ebay, and that continued for most of the day Sunday as well. I now remember why trying to buy things on ebay on the weekend is a bad idea. No new toys yet, but watching a few auctions that close later... Tonight one of my cousins who I normally see relatively often but hadn't seen all year called since he was driving and gonna be going through the cities in couple hours and figured he could stop. Went to Davanni's and caught up a lot - that's always great fun. Although since I also went to Chipotle for lunch, I feel like I've eaten enough for a few days now... I almost got motivated enough to go get lumber for my screen, so maybe tomorrow. Seems I mention that I may go around here and everyone wants some sort of board for this or that. Maybe I can get my sister to come along and help carry stuff as a condition for picking it up. Too much time on avsforum has be thinking though, which is scary... Like how cool would it be to have a 18x24ft screen in the backyard and watch some movies on it? :) Might have a movie night later this week (the indoor kind), but that depends on whether Paul gets his mind off the powerbook and schedules it. :) Seems he has told at least one person though, and interest is building...

I dislike Windows - about the best debugging info you get is "it's slow". Then you get to monkey poke while watching different performance counters and try to guess which thing is causing the problem. Today I got to reschedule my lunch on short notice since Avalon decided to be a little lethargic around noon. I went to reboot it, and it took around 45 minutes to finish flushing disk caches. Then it got really bad almost right away. I turned off SFM to reduce the load and it stayed up until 6 when I took it down to apply firmware updates. I updated the firmware on the drives themselves, the RAID controller, and updated the driver too. The drives were the one that we really wanted to try though - apparently even though the docs say the update is for the 180 and 200GB drives, my boss was told by them to apply it to smaller drives too. It seems stable now, even with SFM enabled, so here's hoping. After I got home a bit later than usual, for some reason I went over to ebay and started browsing. That's usually a bad thing for me. Tonight I only bid on 3 things though, and got good deals. One was an AXB-232++ AXlink bus controller, and the other is an ABX-IRS4 IR/Serial controller. I have a few other things on watch pending the results of those auctions. I love mislabeled auctions... In case you haven't figured it out by now, yea, I'm planning to have a bit of fun, automate most of my theater, and learn how to program in Axcess in the process. Not exactly the way the company intended it to be done (you're supposed to buy the hardware and setup through a dealer), but if you're a geek... :) You sorta have to have played with an existing system and poked enough to know how it works in order to know what things you need though - that's the one type of doc they don't have as you're supposed to go through the dealer who's supposed to have gone through some training. The cool thing about systems like this is it's totally modular with a backend bus (in this case AXlink). If I get ambitious I can eventually add stuff like lighting controllers, and relay outputs. I don't know about the lights, but I'd probably do relays in the semi-near future for screen mask and projector lift control. Yea, I got a bit of construction to do too... :) Well, looks like C1 for lunch tomorrow. That should be good.