October 29, 2005
Worth a fortune........... cookie.
Bad hardware does not play by the rules.
Don't walk too close to an unused server rack. Your new shirt will snag on it and you'll get a hole in it.
This has been a long week. It was a slow week at work due to a lack of tasks. Note not a lack of things to do. I had plenty of things to do but I had to hunt them down. I took an old computer and put in some hard drives and some extra RAM from other out of warranty computers. I plan to use it as a file server for various things that I need to do on the job. Sure we allready have a file server for stuff but It'll be nice to have one just for help desk type stuff... like sed scripts, documentation, ghost images, and batch files that are in progress. I spent much more time than I would have liked, and it's still quirky for some reason, but it is working now. The biggest problem that I ran into was that one of the hard drives is bad. Nearly drove me insane. I learned several things though, for example, if you're pulling previously used hard drives from other computers, Fdisk them BEFORE you try to do anything with them (and before installing an OS if possible).
I started a new job this weekend. It's a night/weekend job. So far so good. Without going into too much detail, I'm kind of a baby-sitter / night watchman. It pays very well for the work that I do, and there is downtime with which I will be able to work on my projects. I'll actually have a chance to update my blog, as well as some other websites. Oh and money.. It'll be nice to have some extra money. I've not had that for a while.
Lately I've felt like I never have enough time. As if I'm not able to sit and just relax or anything anymore. I suppose getting a weekend job isn't going to help that, but, I will have more money, and I should get more work done.
--
I made a valliant attempt to switch to Linux about 3 weeks ago. (I installed Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) ) Because so much of what I do on a day to day basis on my home computer is web based, There is really very little change. I've tried getting some things to run in Wine, but .. ugh it's not great. After talking to a few people It was recomended to me to look at running a virtual machine and running windows inside of that, rather than a dual boot. I think that's a good idea, but I'm not sure if my 550Mhz PIII will run something like that adequately. The gnome desktop environment is a bit more resource hungry than I'd like, but it's useable. One thing is certian, Linux is not ready for the masses. It's not ready for joe schmoe, even with services like Apt, and the plethora of documentation out there. That's not to say that the masses can't benifit from open source and Linux as well.
One of the things that has me bummed is the lack of shockwave support in Linux. I tried a lot of different things but there seems to be just no way. The only known way that I've found online is to shell out $50 for that Crossover software. However, according to it's own website, shockwave works, but not perfectly. There's no way I'm going to pay that kind of money for something that only sort-of works.
The other thing that irked me was not the fault of the Linux community, but Microsoft. (Though Microsoft can't take all of the blame.. that would be like holding the owners of a turnpike 100% accountable for ass-hat truckdrivers that cause accidents..) Anyway, I was reading an oline forum and some one mentioned that they havn't used an online relay service lately because they just switched to Linux and havn't gotten the Sun Jave Runtime Engine to install/work. I thought what a coinsidence because I had been reading up on how to get it to work myself. Anyway, I found some good documentation online for not only downloading the JRE in Ubuntu, but also "linking" the appropriate file to the right folder so that the plugin works in Firefox. So... After I got all that working I went to HIPrelay.com and loaded the java applet. it seemed to work but I was unable to type into the box. I tried it again after restarting my browser and the results were consistant. I sent an e-mail to their support, but they weren't helpful. They recomended that I download and install the microsoft virtual macine. Ugh. I sent another e-mail to politely reiterate my situation, and havn't heard back from them.
ok.. tune in next week when FJ writes "I love Vernie, she's so cute."
Don't walk too close to an unused server rack. Your new shirt will snag on it and you'll get a hole in it.
This has been a long week. It was a slow week at work due to a lack of tasks. Note not a lack of things to do. I had plenty of things to do but I had to hunt them down. I took an old computer and put in some hard drives and some extra RAM from other out of warranty computers. I plan to use it as a file server for various things that I need to do on the job. Sure we allready have a file server for stuff but It'll be nice to have one just for help desk type stuff... like sed scripts, documentation, ghost images, and batch files that are in progress. I spent much more time than I would have liked, and it's still quirky for some reason, but it is working now. The biggest problem that I ran into was that one of the hard drives is bad. Nearly drove me insane. I learned several things though, for example, if you're pulling previously used hard drives from other computers, Fdisk them BEFORE you try to do anything with them (and before installing an OS if possible).
I started a new job this weekend. It's a night/weekend job. So far so good. Without going into too much detail, I'm kind of a baby-sitter / night watchman. It pays very well for the work that I do, and there is downtime with which I will be able to work on my projects. I'll actually have a chance to update my blog, as well as some other websites. Oh and money.. It'll be nice to have some extra money. I've not had that for a while.
Lately I've felt like I never have enough time. As if I'm not able to sit and just relax or anything anymore. I suppose getting a weekend job isn't going to help that, but, I will have more money, and I should get more work done.
--
I made a valliant attempt to switch to Linux about 3 weeks ago. (I installed Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) ) Because so much of what I do on a day to day basis on my home computer is web based, There is really very little change. I've tried getting some things to run in Wine, but .. ugh it's not great. After talking to a few people It was recomended to me to look at running a virtual machine and running windows inside of that, rather than a dual boot. I think that's a good idea, but I'm not sure if my 550Mhz PIII will run something like that adequately. The gnome desktop environment is a bit more resource hungry than I'd like, but it's useable. One thing is certian, Linux is not ready for the masses. It's not ready for joe schmoe, even with services like Apt, and the plethora of documentation out there. That's not to say that the masses can't benifit from open source and Linux as well.
One of the things that has me bummed is the lack of shockwave support in Linux. I tried a lot of different things but there seems to be just no way. The only known way that I've found online is to shell out $50 for that Crossover software. However, according to it's own website, shockwave works, but not perfectly. There's no way I'm going to pay that kind of money for something that only sort-of works.
The other thing that irked me was not the fault of the Linux community, but Microsoft. (Though Microsoft can't take all of the blame.. that would be like holding the owners of a turnpike 100% accountable for ass-hat truckdrivers that cause accidents..) Anyway, I was reading an oline forum and some one mentioned that they havn't used an online relay service lately because they just switched to Linux and havn't gotten the Sun Jave Runtime Engine to install/work. I thought what a coinsidence because I had been reading up on how to get it to work myself. Anyway, I found some good documentation online for not only downloading the JRE in Ubuntu, but also "linking" the appropriate file to the right folder so that the plugin works in Firefox. So... After I got all that working I went to HIPrelay.com and loaded the java applet. it seemed to work but I was unable to type into the box. I tried it again after restarting my browser and the results were consistant. I sent an e-mail to their support, but they weren't helpful. They recomended that I download and install the microsoft virtual macine. Ugh. I sent another e-mail to politely reiterate my situation, and havn't heard back from them.
ok.. tune in next week when FJ writes "I love Vernie, she's so cute."
