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GRAFFITI -- April 25, 2005 thru May 01, 2005>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message. |
 
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April 25, 2005
0619 - Good morning. Marcia's home, Lucy can go back to sleeping at the foot of the bed (you can see, right and left, where she chooses to sleep when Marcia's out of town). Since we only have a queen mattress, there's just never been any room for Molly while we sleep. So I don't encourage her while Marcia's travelling, because it might get her in the habit, and we just aren't going to fight for space to sleep.
Today also marks six months for me at NFR. I've learned enough to be dangerous (regarding our products), but not enough to be useful (helping with our products). That's okay, as it appears that the systems and network admin gig (combined with occasional facilities and telco engagements) is more than enough to keep me busy in the short and middle term.
I completed the planter-side watering setup. As you can see below, I've got a little battery-powered timer valve that feeds the system. Then at the planters, I've used multi-outlet hose adapters to build a set of manifolds to send water to the weeper hoses in each of the planter beds. Yesterday, I got the angle adapter to easily setup the crossing feed, tightened all the connections, and live-tested the system, then programmed it for twice-daily ten minute waterings. I may find that's too much or too little as the season progresses. But it's a good starting point. In the next week or two, I'll pick up some PVC piping and the appropriate adapters, then I'll trench in the feed for the main planter beds. I also need to find two more 50' weeper hoses, and a drip-watering kit that I can setup in front to take care of the front beds and porch pots. I may do another one for the back deck, too. Yeah, that sounds like a month of Sundays.
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I suppose I'd best stroll on into work. Ciao!
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April 26, 2005
0748 - Good morning. Past the commute already, although it was a slow, slow ride. Last night Marcia and I went out for supper, taking our friend Linda Rose with us, to Ruby Tuesday's. THe ladies had just the Salad Bar, while I did both that and a Chicken Parmesan Alfredo entree. Yummy. Linda Rose was over visiting to gander at all the pretty fabrics and whatnot that Marcia picked up at the Quilt Show last week. Okay, not all the fabrics, just the ones that came home in her suitcase. Shipments will be trickling in over the next week or so.
I'm reviewing assorted policy documents, writing a replacement firewall in PF, and preparing to purchase and configure systems for a couple of new people. That should happily fill the rest of my week, not counting unplanned excursions into taskland. I'll be about it now, have a great day!
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April 27, 2005
0618 - Good morning. Yesterday turned out to be a pretty long day, I was in the office by 0730, and didn't get out until about 1830. That's okay, I learned some interesting things, and got some stuff prepared for today's likely-to-be-overlong day, too. We're getting even busier, and that's a great problem to have for just about any business. One of the things I haven't done in a while here is to clear out my bookmarks folder, showing you (and reminding me) about some of the links that I've found interesting enough to save over the last few months...
The first one is the most recent, and pretty deeply geek, to boot. Jason Dixon, a local (to Maryland) bloody genius, admin, consultant and Perl Monk, wrote an article for SysAdmin magazine. He's convinced them to put it online, so if you're into Failover Firewalls with OpenBSD and CARP, then that's the link for you! This next link, to a little story about the Last Person without Windows 95, got me laughing out loud, a couple of days ago, although clearly it's a little long in the tooth.
Nikon's been taking a lot of heat for encoding some of the information about the pictures you take (with the camera that you paid for) in a proprietary format that they were pretty clear about only licensing to "legitimate software companies", which seemingly leaves FOSS developers, projects, and users out in the cold. A fair number of people are letting Nikon's proprietary asperations guide them towards other vendors of high-end SLR digital camera systems. Here's one post on PhotographyBlog that talks about the hula-balu!
Back on the geek side of the bar, one of the big transitions in Linux systems recently is that udev is making a lot of inroads. That deserves one or seven sentences of explanation. In *NIX systems, all "possible* devices are represented in a directory called dev. These file-like representations are actually something like device-driver entry points to communicate with the hardware. As peripherals multiply beyond all reason and bounds, the /dev tree was growing out of control correspondingly. The first solution was called devfs, familiar especially to Gentoo adherents - it is a suite of kernel and userspace tools to dynamically create required /dev entries when they are required, either at boot or as part of a hotplug routine (think USB). A competing, but originally less mature alternative, udev, has taken over as top dog in this space, and devfs is now deprecated, that quickly. Do you care? Only if you're trying to do trick things with udev that you'd finally figured out with devfs, and now you're starting all over again. Here's one page about udev and Palm devices that I found useful. And there's good Gentoo documentation on udev, as well.
ThinkGeek, one of my favorite online toy stores, has Valentine's Day gifts as well. I'm too lazy to see if I posted this back in February, so here we go anyway - theGeek Love Poem T-shirt. Did you ever build a house of cards as a child? Did you ever try again as an adult? Do you think you can top Bryan Berg? I didn't think so... Back to moderate geek, how do you pronounce GIF (as in my_little_image_file.gif)? A hard "g", like I do? Nope. Soft "g" (think "j") according to Bob Berry, who "made the standard."
Do you need to run Apache, PHP4 and PHP5, all on one machine? Why, you ask? Well, if you're migrating PHP4 code to the new version, it'd sure be handy, eh? Here's the page to get you there with Debian: Hurring.com // HOWTO // Apache // PHP4 and PHP5 on a single install. Whew. Now I've unloaded a screen-height's worth of links in here, I can find them again, and you can get a different impression of my deeply warped mind. I suppose I ought to toddle off to work now. Have a great day!
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April 28, 2005
1904 - Good evening. After two 14 hour days (counting commute), I just didn't have any energy for a post this morning. I've not much to say now, either. I worked through, sans lunch, to finish a couple of projects up that are needed for next Monday. Now I'm going to go have some supper. Ciao!
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April 29, 2005
0651 - Huzzah! It's Friday, and it is release day for H2G2. I think I'll be attending an afternoon offsite meeting ...
The Daynotes.net site got my attention yesterday evening - I moved some names back and forth, reflecting who's actively posting, and who isn't, cleaning up links for those that have dropped off the face of the planet, and whatnot... You know, I suspect that Mat Lemmings is a friend of Ford Prefect. I mean, really, they're both perfectly normal names, right? Right? Now I'd best get to work, so that I can get something done before the probable offsite meeting.
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April 30, 2005
0946 - Good morning. I'm awake-ish. Didn't go see H2G2, just got the work done, came home, mowed before the rains came, and collapsed in a corner. Today, it's still raining, thank the gods, and I'll not be doing anything if I can help it, until we go out to supper tonight. It never works out that way, but I can dream, can't I? Happy Saturday!
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. I'd not noticed that Chris Ward-Johnson had moved again, so he looked pretty inactive to me. Don Armstrong pointed out the error of my ways, and I put Chris where he belongs on the two Daynotes sites. My bad; thanks, Don!
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May 1, 2005
0919 - Good morning. Utterly lazy day yesterday. Only went out to dinner and watched Office Space. Now going shopping, more later.
1144 - Still morning. The household shopping is done, now I'm laying out the rest of the material I need for watering the back planters. Soon I'll be setting up drip watering for the front yard, too. Back later...
1727 - Good afternoon. I trenched about a 50 foot run and laid 1/2 inch PVC piping to get water out to the new planters. It's tested and working -- now I don't need to trail a hose across the yard to feed the garden, nor pick that hose up when I want to mow. There's more to be done for automated watering in other parts of the yard, but that's enough for today. And while I've been working and lazing about and puttering in the yard, young Americans are dying in the service of our country...
My thoughts are with their comrades and their families - these soldiers died in the effort to bring our brand of freedom to places that have seen little. May their sacrifice not be in vain.
Linda Rose and Marcia have been sewing all afternoon, other than a quick outing to JoAnn's for a couple of small items. Soon we're going to barbecue some chicken for supper. I'm looking forward to that. Happy Sunday, have a lovely evening.
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
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