Saturday, April 4, 2009

Dear WordPress,

There were another 7 or 8 paragraphs to this post which disappeared. I’ll fix it later. I’m not happy.

Zeke.

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Dear Diary,

I didn’t really do a whole lot today, but this has become the norm over the last few months. Last night I set my alarm for 9:30am, and snoozed it twice, awakening at around 9:45ish to turn it off through it’s second 9-minute round.

———–

Let’s try this again..

———–

Dear Diary,

I didn’t really do a whole lot today, but this has become the norm over recent months. Last night I set my alarm for 9:30am and snoozed it twice, waking at around 9:45am to turn if off half way through its 9-minute round.

Upon awakening, I was able to log in and check my emails, and began the conversion from DV tape to PC the footage from last nights Battle of the Bands concert, where my brother-in-law did play.

I apologize, dear Diary, as the internet connection is particularly slow, owing to the upload of aforementioned video footage to YouTube. I’m sure it will be available for viewing shortly. I must say, my dearest Diary, that I was not pleased when two of the band members berated me at midnight (with a headache, no less!) with regards to my recording of their performance and its availability for their viewing! I was very pleased when my brother-in-law ushered them out of my room and out of the house shortly afterward!

I was also able to accomplish some small programming work today, and Diary, you’ll be glad to know, it was entirely successful. Primarily bug fixes on my Support Ticket system, I also fixed the remote panel for UCCN’s dynamic remote include (which wasn’t giving link blocks to the client servers!).

I found great amusement, my dear Diary, from sitting in the IRC channel for Data center and server-host Sharktech. It seems they failed to adequately configure or test their new routing equipment before placing it in a live environment, much to the dismay of their clients and customers! Many a complaint has been laid as their customers servers have consistently dropped over the last 18 hours (and counting).

I am certain that you, dearest Diary, will also be as disgusted as I when you learn that at least two data centers were raided by the FBI with no warning, little evidence and less investigation. The tale of those are here and here. While I agree that raids should be conducted in conjunction with an investigation, my dear Diary, I must believe that investigations should have valid and usable evidence and be run by people with knowledge and qualification with regard to what they are investigating!

After lunch (a Strawberry and Banana flavored Low-fat yoghurt), I went with my wife and her brother and mother to the Salvation Army store, where we looked at clothes and such, as well as to a local hardware store to collect an additional two strawberry plants for their garden. I also learned that my sister-in-law is likely getting a beagle to live with them also, and it shall certainly be an interesting time at their house. I understand I shall be able to meet the puppy tomorrow when the family gathers for a cookout. I’m uncertain of the cause or occasion, although I will also be losing the majority of my hair also. I hear my wife has several ideas for photographs to be taken of my hair as it is removed, and I shall ensure they are available for you to view at a later date, my dear Diary.

I just remembered, I applied for another Information Technology job today, a local university is looking for a User Support Specialist, for which I placed a formal application upon returning from the stores. My father-in-law found it in the newspaper while we were venturing, and presented it upon our arrival home. I also await a return phone contact from the camp to which I applied to be a counselor during the summer. Another possibility to consider later in the year, is one Ethan suggested on Thursday evening, whereby he helps another camp by providing high-ropes assistance, and asked if I would be interested in joining him in the Fall. It is certainly an adventure I would enjoy, I shall have to reconsider it closer to the time with regards to my schedule.

I believe that is all, dearest Diary, although I have probably forgotten something during the second-round posting of this entry, the first forever lost in the emptiness that is the Internet. So my dear Diary, I shall close a second time today, and leave you to your quiet mulling of my pointless words. Until I write again, be safe, my dear Diary, and await my return with further uselessness.

Yours,

Zekey.

April Fools

Nearly 2 months ago I posted about what I had planned to do to my brother-in-law (see http://bananabiter.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/miley-miley-miley/). Now I’m going to run through briefly what happened.

At Kelly’s suggestion I changed his desktop background to one of the pictures used, this worked amazingly well to lure him in, as the first thing he did (after yelling my name in annoyance ;-)) was open firefox to google images to find something to replace it with.

This was met with “what the…”‘s from Matt, and laughter and high-fives all around from me, Kelly, and Matt’s friend Gary who was in the room also. Matt quickly saw the funny side and started laughing, pulling up Youtube and MySpace to see how they looked as well. I think the best quote from the evening was “That is probably the best April Fools prank I’ve ever seen. I’m calling Will!”

I was also credited as having “Probably the most creative” joke he’d ever observed. All around a good 15 minutes of fun, and I lived to go to choir practice (remind me not to agree to singing with them again..).

Babies

I got to hang out with two cool young boys today. Aiden, 2, and his brother Devon were hanging out with my sister-in-law Katie today, and Kelly and I went to help her out with them. Devon spent most of the time drooling, drinking, bouncing or crying, with a few bursts of hair pulling thrown into the mix. Aiden, on the other hand, liked to follow people around, throw things, and otherwise be generally cute. I might put up some photos somewhere at some point.

I haven’t had any complaints about the new UCCN sites which is excellent, I was a little worried about that. I’m thinking I might just build a support site from scratch and dump wordpress altogether. It works well, but I’m not sure if it will do everything I want/need it to do. Will have to see. I’m thinking it’d be really cool to have a fault resolution system tied in with a HelpServ bot (ticket opened on joining the help channel, as well as monitoring the network and opening tickets when things split etc), as well as web-integration etc.

Tonight is NCIS, after we’ve been out to eat at Chick-Fil-A to support Big Brothers Big Sisters (CFA in Harrisonburg is donating 15% of all profits between 5 and 7 to BBBS). Kelly’s best friend Anna works there, so as well as supporting the awesome work they do in general, we’ll be supporting her too! And I like chicken. And fast-food. Sounds good.

Maintenance

Today was the go-live for the new Christian-IRC.com and UnitedChristianChat.net sites. Everything seemed to go fine, and the old UCCN site was re-themed as a support site. In the next few weeks I’ll be writing a bunch of new stuff in PHP/JavaScript to help out with webmasters and such.

I also did a bunch of .htaccess redirect rules, and I was able to delete a bunch of direcories and clean up the public_html folders too!

So, check out the new sites:

And now ends my shameless plugging 😉

Web Design

I reminded myself yesterday and today how much I enjoy, and how much I hate webdesign.

I guess thats why all my site designs are simple as poop, make it work and then plug it with PHP, and then make it work with the PHP.

This weekend saw two new sites for the United Christian Chat network – one for unitedchristianchat.net, and one for christian-irc.com (a subsidiary).

I did one entirely on my own, and Ed helped us out by doing the C-IRC one, though it was graphiced for UCCN and I’ve updated/changed the wording on the images.

I played around with Gimp doing them, and was pleasantly surprised compared with my previous experiences with anything photoshop-like. In fact, most of my problems were CSS side rather than graphic design.

They aren’t live as yet, we still have a few minor changes to make, but here are some screenshots to wet your appetites:

uccn
circ1

UCCN on the top, obviously, and C-IRC on the bottom

I Want One!

So, I was wondering what I was going to blog about next, and how soon or late the event would happen. Turns out it wasn’t that late at all.

ThinkGeek have just announced a new product: The Back to the Future Die-Cast DeLorean model.

To quote ThinkGeek:

Have you been hunting for old DeLorean’s on eBay and telling everyone to call you McFly? Well then we have a tasty little nugget to satiate the 80’s lovin’ Back to the Future fanboy in you. This 1:18 scale Back to the Future Die-Cast DeLorean is like a sci-fi obsessed geek’s wet dream. Nope, it doesn’t travel through time… but it does feature a real brushed metal body and intricate details from the movie.

Look inside by raising one of the gullwing doors and you’ll see all the time-travel controls from the movie including a tiny flux capacitor. There’s even a Mr. Fusion on the back to avoid the hassle of stealing plutonium from terrorists. A lever on the bottom makes the wheels fold up for when you run out of road trying to hit 88.

Product Features

  • Detailed die-cast DeLorean model perfectly re-creates the time travel vehicle from Back to the Future
  • Real brushed metal body
  • Intricate detail including a detailed cockpit with flux capacitor
  • Mr. Fusion and exhaust jets on the back
  • Lever on bottom allows wheels to fold up
  • Fully assembled and painted
  • Comes with display base
  • 1:18 scale – 9.5″ in length


Back to the Future Die-Cast DeLorean for sale

When the Government asks for Suggestions, Help Them Out

Yesterday I skim-read an article about the Federal Government asking for suggestions regarding how internet in the United States can be improved, both in speed and in cost. While I don’t have any suggestions myself, I’m putting this out to try and increase the publicity of the idea of offering suggestions to the lawmakers regarding how the country can improve things.

The Wired article can be found here, and it contains links to over relevant information.

Amusing Sermon Notes

I’m listening to sermons from my old church, I helped Dad put up a podcast for them and was testing it out.

Anyway, we had a guest speaker, Pastor Tuks, who I haven’t heard of for a long time! Anyway, he had an awesome quote in the first 10 minutes:

I’m a school teacher, I’ve dealt a lot with teenagers. I wanna tell teenagers this morning, you know some teenagers think that without a girlfriend they’ll perish. Get real guys, girlfriends will come and go. You won’t perish without one. I’ve known guys who lived their whole teenage life without one. They’re fine! They never died! They’re still alive today! You know we have girls walking around thinking “If I don’t get a boyfriend I’m gonna perish.” Absolute rubbish! I was standing in a schoolyard one day, these two girls came up to me, one was crying and the other was all sympathetic and stuff, and came up to me and said “Mister, my boyfriend is being mean to me.” So I said “Well, what did he do?” and she said “He ignored me when I wanted to talk with him, he was playing table tennis. Can you go and talk to him?” and I said “I’ve got better news for you. Drop him. If he thinks a game of table tennis is more important than you, kick him into touch, girl!” And she started crying even more! I thought that was wise counsel. And she sad “Mister, you’re mean!” and I said “No, I’m not mean girl, drop him!” and she says “No I can’t!” I said “Why?” she said “Because I love him!” I said “Bollocks, girl! You don’t know what love is!” That was the end of the counseling session..

A New Theme

Yesterday I applied for a summer job at a Christian camp a few miles away, I’m hoping to be a counselor (leader) for the summer, should be about 10-12 weeks of having fun with kids. I’ll be staying there overnight the whole time, though Kelly will be able to come and visit when she gets off babysitting and we can have Saturdays together too. Initially she didn’t like the idea, but just kinda realized that it’ll probably be good for us and we’ll appreciate the time we do get together rather than spending every other minute in the same house.

It’ll also be nice to actually do some real work and earn some real money. Against my will, though there was nothing I could do about it, I’ve spent nearly a year in the US and not been able to work, so while it has been nice to do nothing at all, I also feel as though I’m letting down the team and taking advantage of people and their generosity. While that is the case, and to a large degree I have been, it’s not by choice, and given the chance I would have been doing a lot more to earn my keep. Also, while it is hardly IT related, I’m glad to have another stateside work reference with a real organization with standards etc. While I try to work to high standards when working with friends and family doing computer repair etc, there is hardly a gauge to measure by how well I did something.

I was also getting bored with the old theme on my blog, and felt it was time for a change here too. The photo in the header may change some until I find something I like that fits and works, but for now it is a crop of this image:

dscf06801

I took this during the Assemblies of God New Zealand National Conference in October 2007, the week I had my interview with Gen-i. A couple of the guys in the music team are jamming, in the immediate foreground are the power, video signal and communication cables for the stage roaming camera, resting on the base for one of the front speaker towers. I think Mike was programming lights, or he may have just been playing. I know I was the photographer and only touched the lighting board if it was absolutely necessary (mostly “TURN OFF NUMBER 11, TURN ON NUMBER 12” while he was wandering the stage checking things).

In other news I have successfully installed Xen on Debian, so I have a Debian Dom0. I also have a Debian DomU that I’m playing with LDAP with, in an attempt to setup a prototype for web/shell hosting. I’m trying to figure out how to create DomU’s from ISO’s under the Debian Dom0, I have some FreeBSD CD’s that I’d like to build a VM from if possible. Otherwise I can install QEMU back on the Mac and create QEMU images for Xen that way.

Also trying to debug a regex in my logcheck system on Telly. Ever since I installed IPv6 I’m getting annoying messages in the logs every hour that I’m trying to make logcheck ignore (they’re not important, thus I don’t want to see them – unlike people trying to bruteforce my SSH or Mail servers). I have one more thing to try before I go looking for help, as soon as my apt-get dist-upgrade is done (because opening a new tab and SSH’ing a new session is *so* difficult!)

{Last Minute Update!} Just had a phone call from the camp director, he’s put out all my references and is waiting to hear back, then will set up an interview next week perhaps.

3 Almost Completely Unrelated Things…

The first two are both geeky..

Firstly I got my control panel system past the first stumbling block: user login/out. I imagine this is a hard problem for a number of programmers as it is almost always the first step in a secure system. Now that it’s in place I can build everything else around the existing security system (rather than having to build everything else with the prospect of applying security to it later and probably rewriting it all etc).

My second achievement of the day was IPv6 vhosts. I assigned 20-odd IPv6 addresses to Telly for my BNC (ZNC is good so far if anyone is looking for an IPv6/SSL aware IRC Bouncer). Over the last 24 hours or so I assigned 10 of those vHosts. The list is available here. I will be looking into IPv6 hosts for Rizzo next week (IE, seeing if it is workable), so will work on coming up with some more vHosts then.

The third accomplishment, and completely unrelated to the other two in any way, I got my VA Learners permit. If I’d been aware that Kelly’s car actually was insured I could have taken the road skills test and got a full license, but I also think I should take some time to practice first.

That is all, good readers, that is all.