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.

———–

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.

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

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.

IPv6: The Way Of The Future

Tonight I set up IPv6 on my home network. While it feeds a house of 5, only 1 will notice any difference whatsoever!

Basically I loaded the IPv6 HomeBrew customization for SmoothWall (See the forums at community.smoothwall.org), and got myself an IPv6 block (/64) assigned and a tunnel to use it through (see Hurricane Electric, or TunnelBroker). I’ve set up Yoda (smoothwall), Telly (Debian) and Big Bird (macbook) to use IPv6 addresses and so far everything works wonderfully. It still relies on my router as a SPOF, but they have their own world-accessable IP(v6) addresses. I guess I should work on firewalls etc..

If anyone is interested in testing my IPv6 IRC server, it’s linked to the United Christian Chat Network and is accessible at ipv6.i-al.net! (6667 for standard, 6697 for SSL)

I Am Amused.

I don’t know why, I found this in the logs from while I was sleeping last night, and I found it amusing. Not hilarious, but enough to warrant a large smile.

[06:16:37] * Guest (~NewJava@uccn-DA3CFDAF.dyn.iinet.net.au) has joined #uccn
[06:16:42] <Guest> hi
[06:17:10] * Midorikawa|Psychosis has quit (Ping timeout)
[06:18:22] <Guest> anyone can they tell me how the bible is proven to not be another story like media
[06:19:14] * Mid0rikawa|Psychosis has quit (Ping timeout)
[06:20:10] * Mid0rikawa|Psychosis (~Midor1kaw@staff.unitedchristianchat.net) has joined #uccn
[06:20:22] <Guest> hi psychosis
[06:20:24] * M1dorikawa|Psychosis has quit (Ping timeout)
[06:21:49] <Guest> Anyone talk here
[06:33:40] <Guest> hey
[06:34:07] <Guest> satin has been created by the jews
[06:34:43] <Guest> jesus was a story created by the romans. The vatican must know
[06:40:44] <Mid0rikawa|Psychosis> …right. you keep believing that.
[06:42:33] <Mid0rikawa|Psychosis> By the way, if you want to troll, at least learn basic spelling.
[06:42:52] <Mid0rikawa|Psychosis> http://www.thefreedictionary.com/satin
[06:43:03] * Guest has quit (Quit: :: For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. (Matt. 18:20) :: United Christian Chat Network ::)

Far too many stupid trolls nowdays. Nothing interesting anymore. Most of them don’t even argue their points very well..

thePortal

I started work late last night on my 4th concurrent coding project, something I’ve been thinking about for a loong time and it was brought up by Ninex on chat again, confirming that it isn’t a bad idea.

It needs a lot more integration with things, ideally it’ll probably work a lot better once Anope supports real-time SQL. For now it just feeds of the statistics database.

So, check out http://chat.i-al.net/portal/. and tell me what you think!

The final product is intended to have configurable colors, background images, header images, as well as channel-owner-configured ‘about us’ information. There’ll also be a few statistics blocks available, and possibly logging on request? Unsure at this point how to make it integrate!

Infinitely-aLive Project has Returned

After a long downtime, the Infinitely-aLive project has returned in a once-again reincarnated form. This time we are back as a small web-host, providing basic shell accounts and http hosting.

Because we are small (we have capacity for 20 clients max at this point) we can provide a more dedicated service, tailoring solutions for your individual needs.

At this stage we have no vHosts available for use as BNC hosts, so any eggdrop or BNC’s hosted will all appear to come from an IP address – this is also why our prices are so low. If you just want an eggdrop or a bouncer without the frills, I-aL is the place for you.

In the near future we hope to have an online-ordering system, and we’re still working through the finer details of how this will work out in reality. We’re also finalizing our prices for each package, although it will likely be $1/process (BNC = 1 process, eggdrop = 1 process, services = 1 process) with allowances granted based on a pre-agreed monthly charge, and IRCd or VoIP services being considered as 2 or more processes.

Watch this space!

Triumph and Tragedy

Triumph: Mostly installed qmail on Mack’s newly reinstalled server, rhapsody. A few things to finish off today.

Triumph: Installed and configured a second private hub for UCCN, hub02. Will install backup services at a later date.

Triumph: Kelly put in a job application yesterday, and another will go in tomorrow.

Triumph: The package of stuff from New Zealand arrived today, albeit slightly beaten up from its travels.

Triumph: Shaved.

Triumph: Received most of the outstanding eBay items purchased up until last week.

Triumph: Got the new router installed and running smoothly. Could use a RAM upgrade, but that will come in time.

Tragedy: A bump while drinking water last night resulted in a spill occuring directly above the macbook. It was quickly shut down, but after being left 24 hours or so, it won’t turn on. Leaving it beside the heater for another 48 or so to see if this changes anything, but my hopes are not high.