Teleidoscope

Wed, Oct 31, 2007

Tech Notes

Posted at 9:38 pm MDT to Technology

Either VMWare or Centos 4.5 doesn't like the DVD reader (maybe I'm connecting to the SATA interface wrong). The install of the guest OS kept dying with a bogus message about being out of disk space. After some googling and after many re-tries tweaking various parameters, I finally was able to get Centos to load from an ISO image on the hard drive.

So I now have two machines running on the server: quadriga itself is Fedora 7 and q-centos is Centos 4.5. Unfortunately, ClearCase (even the latest version, 7.0.1) will still not load its mvfs piece on Centos 4.5. It seems to want actual 4.0, which is archaic by Linux standards: 5.0 is current for Centos, and still old compared to the Fedora (which admittedly leans toward the bleeding-edge).

There are no DVD images of 4.0 left on the web, only sets of four CD images. I'll try loading from those from the hard drive, once they download. If that doesn't work, I have found instructions for building a DVD image out of the 4 smaller ones.

I think I am going to load a 32-bit guest image instead of the 64 bit one, just in case that is part of what clearcase is whining about. This has gotten very old.

I think I won't nuke the q-centos image right away. It took so much trouble to get it installed. And I think I should get VNC working on q-centos and whatever I call the new image: at the moment I'm working from the laptop through a VNC connection to quadriga and using the vmware console to access q-centos, which makes the screen real estate available for q-centos a bit limited.

On another front, DB2 has finally consented to install into sophia2, the Windows image on my laptop. And I have it licensed, too. I'm not sure I have it configured right, and ClearQuest is being cranky about connecting to it. But yesterday DB2 was refusing to install at all, so this counts as progress. I'm not sure what changed, but this is a Windows image, so shutting the laptop down over night (to give it a chance to cool down) and rebooting it this morning, may have slapped some sense into it.

(The spell checker thinks VMWare should maybe be Vampire: seems appropriate for Halloween.)

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Halloween Snow

Posted at 6:49 am MDT to Weather

Halloween in Colorado. There is a dusting of snow on the truck and a few other smooth surfaces. Not enough to show anywhere else especially as dark as it is this morning.

The radio says there is a little scattered snow still falling in some parts of the area, but the high should be near 50, so it shouldn't stick. They are predicting cold, damp, drizzly weather but not actual snow for the rest of the day. Just enough to make the trick-or-treaters miserable.

It is very dark in the mornings this week because daylight savings time has not yet ended this year (unlike previous years when it ended the weekend before Halloween, this year they moved the change out a week).

It is possible for gadgets to be too smart for their own good, but not quite smart enough. I overslept on Monday because my clock radio thought daylight savings time had started. This is annoying: the clock syncs to the Bureau of Standards and is supposed to never need setting. But since they changed the law and it is programmed for the old time change dates, I need to change it 4 times a year -- undo the time changes at the old time change dates and make the change at the new time change dates -- instead of just two.

The alarm clock was not an expensive one. I may decide to replace it with one with up-to-date programming or no programming. It was a good thing on Monday that my commute consists of walking to the livingroom.

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Tue, Oct 30, 2007

World Business

Posted at 9:55 pm MDT to Travel

My current customer is talking about a follow-on project to integrate a lot of their subsidiaries into their standard methods and procedures. This will involve analyzing and mentoring their remote sites in Europe and the Pacific Rim, and may include putting me on-site for a week or two in various places.

Places on the Pacific Rim like Australia, Hong Kong, Bei Jing. Possibly Japan.

Places in Europe like London and Moscow and Ireland. And Belgium... or is it France.

This could be an exciting year. Much better than getting stuck in Boston or wherever for 6 months.

I'll need to shop for new business clothes. Yuck. And shoes.

And probably immunizations. (That reminds me, I haven't had my flu shot yet this year.)

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Mon, Oct 29, 2007

VPN Down

Posted at 11:14 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The VPN that lets me connects to my coustomer's computers went down Friday. It turned out my account had been deleted due to some confusion about th eend date of my contract.

It was handy on Friday: it gave me a good reason to leave work a little early so I missed the rush hour traffic through Denver when I drove to the convention. But today was frustrating because I am not really getting things done.

I'm loading software onto my laptop and the new server, but I'm going to need licenses before I can actually do anything with it.

There is a chance that the VPN [a[erwork will be sorted out by tomorrow, which will be quicker than I can get the rather complicated environment I need built up, configured and working on my own systems.

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Sun, Oct 28, 2007

MileHiCon 39

Posted at 7:56 pm MDT to Travel

The convention was a lot of fun. I spent two days away from computers, ate some very good food, and saw people I hadn't seen in years (because I only ever saw them at cons).

I bought some books, all by authors who were at the convention, so they are autographed. I got a free book too: A hard-cover copy of Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber (the guest of honor) was given to each attendee... but I didn't get that one autographed because it was too big and clunky to carry around.

Some of the books I bought were from very small presses/POD publishers. There was a meet-and-greet Friday evening with about 30 writers, some of whom were selling their books directly. I bought a few books then, and others in the dealers' room. I will review the small press books here as I read them, to put more mentions of them onto the internet.

Besides the books, I bought a couple of T-shirts by artists I like, and two sessions of chair-massage. My left arm and shoulder feel better than they have in ages. I really need to schedule a session with my regular massage therapist. I need to start doing yoga stretches again, too, to help keep things unlocked. My range of motion sucks, these days.

I spent a lot of time in the anime room, with Mike Odell and Barb Edmunds, one of the people who first got me hooked on anime in the old days. The other person who did most to get me hooked and was a good friend of Barb, was Patricia Munson-Siter. Neither of us has heard from Pat for years: she moved to New Jersey after her husband retired from the Air Force back around the turn of the millennium and dropped out of touch. She seems not to be on-line, when I've googled, which is worrying: she had been active in fandom for years, though generally in print fandom, not on-line. (I just tried googling once more: no sign of a web-site, but she seems to be currently active in the New Jersey DAR.)

Panels I attended included:

"Memories of DonnerCon": DonnerCon is the nickname of the 1997 MileHiCon, when the blizzard happened (more than a foot of snow on the Friday and Saturday) and people were snowed into the con, or snowed away from the con, and by Sunday the hotel was serving strange buffets made of leftovers. Ten years ago already. Wow.

"Greek Mythology and the Constellations" I could probably give this one myself. I was mostly waiting for:

"The Anthropology of Lord of the Rings": but the scheduled speaker did not appear (possibly stuck in California: flights from SanDiego are iffy due to the wildfires) so there was a general discussion led by a few longtime Denver-area fans.

"Role of the Modern Day Vampire" This was excellent. A review of the changing portrayal of the vampire in books and films since 1643, by an author, Tony Ruggiero, who did his masters thesis on Frankenstein and Dracula. A version of the talk was previously given at the Library of Congress. I later bought all three of his books that were available in the dealers' room, just as he happened to be at the booth, so I got them autographed. I'm about halfway through Operation: Immortal Servitude, about vampires and Navy SEALs. (Mr. Ruggiero is an ex-SEAL.)

"Kitty Carrie and the Midnight Hour" this was also wonderful: live improv theater. Carrie Vaughn is the author of a series about a werewolf radio talk-show host beginning with Kitty and the Midnight Hour. She played the role of the talk-show host and took 'calls' about the supernatural from various people. It was very, very well done and funny.

And a panel on "Tech and other Geeky Delights" (what can I say...)

The convention was in the Tech Center Hyatt-Regency: fancier than the places I stay when travelling on business and with the food -- while excellent -- priced accordingly. Though they could do with a few more items on their dinner menu without chile peppers in them. Note to self: ask about lettuce in things -- people don't bother mentioning it on menus.

The bed was amazing: nearly as tall as my waterbed with the double underdresser, but just all mattress. I suspect it was a Tempurpedic or something similar. It was a kingsize, with 6 bed pillows and a couple of big, square occasional pillows, and a sort of long cylindrical pillow.

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Thu, Oct 25, 2007

Reorganizing

Posted at 11:50 pm MDT to Technology

I reorganized the study and the server today. The two old desktop machines and some associated equipment are now disconnected and stored in the closet. I should gather up the spare keyboards and mice and shove them in there, too, along with the extra speakers.

The rats' nest of power cords under the desk has been sorted out for the first time in ages. There was one power cord for a piece of equipment that no longer exists still plugged into a surge protector because the cables were too tangled to remove it. Now the server, router and DSL modem are all plugged into the UPS, so they should all survive brief power glitches better. Both printers and their network servers are plugged into one surge protector,(which still has available sockets) and the other surge suppressor is mostly empty.

Note: there is also a big, honking whole-house surge suppressor attached to the new breaker box. This is lightning country. (I once had half my A/V stack, a couple of phones, and a Kitchenaid mixer fried by a near miss. Since then, I plug everything into surge suppressors, including the phone and tv lines: I think it was comms rather than power that lett in the surge that fried things.)

I have a serial cable between the UPS and the server, and I've downloaded the latest version of the power management software, which isn't wanting to install at the moment. Once I get the software package working, the UPS will be able to tell the server that it is running out of power and needs to shut itself down.

The server itself has been reinstalled with LVM over RAID for the root partition, a RAIDed /boot partition and an amount of swap space that matches documented recommendations (the default install I had before was kind of skimpy). It also has a fixed IP address on my internal network, so with a little tweaking of my modem and router settings I should be able to admin it from outside.

Note: this weekend is MileHiCon. I will not post again until Sunday evening or Monday. Now I need to pack.

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Wed, Oct 24, 2007

Inspector

Posted at 9:35 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The inspector finally came today. This time they sent someone who found the house without difficulty. He found a couple of things that needed to be tweaked, so the electricians will come out early next week to fix them. Then we need to set up a followup inspection (I wonder how long that will take), and some time after that the overhead lines go away and the underground power lines become active. At this rate, the project may finally be done by Thanksgiving.

The inspector asked about the house that is scheduled to be openspace. Everyone asks about the house that is going to be openspace. If they are going to tear it down I wish they would get it over with, so people would stop asking me about it.

I also received a notice in the mail that another of the neighboring houses is going to be remodeled. It was built in the 70s as a solar house with a long slanted roof for the solar collectors (which stopped working properly long ago). The interior spaces are interesting, but not particularly practical: a lot of the floor space isn't really usable. From the looks of the paperwork, they are replacing the slant with an actual, usable second floor area, with full height ceilings on the whole first floor beneath it.

I don't envy them having to deal with the Land Use department.

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Tue, Oct 23, 2007

Liars

Posted at 10:22 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

There is a reason the Boulder county authorities are widely despised by the people who here. Especially anyone who needs to deal with permits and inspections.

This morning I called the electricians to inquire about yesterday's non-inspection. The answer I eventually got contained some interesting bits.

1. They were going to bring the permit with them, They had repeatedly told us that it was mailed, but that story seems to have changed now. It was never sent. So if I had waited until it arrived to set up the inspection, I would still be waiting.

2. "The house isn't marked." In fact, there have been 4-inch tall numbers nailed to the house since the house number was changed in 1999. (And the old house number was nailed up before then.) And there is an (admittedly faded) number sign on the fencepost at the foot of the driveway as well. The problem is, you have to know how to find my cul-de-sac to see them. Which I can't really do much about: I used to have signs nailed to some of the telephone poles on the way in, but the county or the power company took them down.

And one would think that employees of a division of the county land use department would have access to... you know... those things ... what are they called? Oh, yes... maps?

Mapquest and company know where my house is, oddly enough... And there is a property-values website Shawn showed me, where if you type in my address it will show you an aerial photo of my house and land, with information about estimated property sale values and tax assessments and such.

Google Earth doesn't work on 64-bit Linux, last time I checked, but it knows exactly where I am located, too. (I should check into that again, actually: there are some areas in Eastern Europe where I should look at the terrain for the Techlands stories. Maybe it will work on Firefox (or Iceweasel if Fedora relabelled it due to the trademark thing) even if it doesn't work with Konqueror, my usual browser.)

3. "They called and left a message." That is an outright lie. They had both of my phone numbers -- cell and landline -- and I spent all of Monday within arm's reach of both phones. Neither phone rang, and neither voicemail had a message or evidence of a missed call.

They are supposed to come tomorrow. I'll believe that when I see it.

May those who provide these bureaucrats with needed services, when the time comes, be as diligent and effective as the bureaucrats are themselves.

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Mon, Oct 22, 2007

Non-Inspection

Posted at 5:50 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The inspection of the electrical work that was supposed to happen today, didn't. And I'm sure it was supposed to be today, because I checked my blog about when it was scheduled... (Actually, I checked the development copy of the blog, which lives on my laptop, not the live blog.)

I wonder if the inspector went to wherever they sent the paperwork to? He certainly didn't come here.

This is very annoying. I really want to get the hole in the roof that the overhead lines go through filled in before the weather turns soggy. I'll call the electricians again in the morning: they were the ones who were supposed to set up the appointment. I want stable power.

Quadriga the server is downloading a bunch of files from the server at work. Once that finishes, I'm going to need to power down for a while so that I can hook the server to the UPS. I should attach the router and DSL-modem to the UPS, too. Power glitches tend to lock up one or both of them, and modern computers are crippled if they can't talk to the net.

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Sun, Oct 21, 2007

It's Alive

Posted at 5:09 pm MDT to Technology

(Cue maniacal laughter, mad scientist style.) The server lives. It's very quiet.

It actually has 4 processor cores (2 in each package). I think its name will be Quadriga.

Now I need to look up RAID configuration, so that I can finish loading Linux in the configuration I want..

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Thunder-Snow

Posted at 10:41 am MDT to Weather

I awakened this morning to snow, and the sound of thunder. Followed by sirens out on thehighway: people were apparently being stupid.

Things settled down pretty quickly, and for the past few hours we've just had snow and wind. This is a day for staying in, baking (I have an apple upside-down cake in the oven and may do a poundcake later) and getting the server working.

The most surprising thing about this weather is that this is the first real hard frost we have had this year. Most years we start getting overnight freezes in September. Late October snow is fairly normal -- because of the moisture patterns we get more white Halloweens than white Christmases.

One year in the late 90s we had a blizzard the weekend before Halloween that dumped a couple of feet of snow on the Denver area. MileHiCon is always the weekend before Halloween, and I remember being snowed in at the hotel and looking out to see huge earth-moving machines piling snow in a nearby field because there was no place else to put it. The hotel fed us strange buffets made of whatever leftovers were in the kitchen because there was no way for supplies or staff to get in.

MileHiCon (in a different hotel) is next weekend. I hope the weather will get this out of its system, and driving, at least will be OK next weekend.

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Sat, Oct 20, 2007

CPU Coolers

Posted at 9:39 pm MDT to Technology

Shawn came over for a little while this evening with his son Shane He got the cooler clip unjammed in the server, which took a while: I'm feeling a ltiile less empabraased about not being able to do it my self.

Then the two of us, with Shane occasionally helping out by aiming flashlights and passing tools, eventually managed to get the two coolers installed. It was definitely a three-handed task, or a task designed for people whose hands are thin but strong, or both.

I will say, I don't think I need to worry about those coolers ever coming loose. I really hope I don't need to replace those processors before I replace the whole motherboard.

I haven't plugged in the server yet. I still need to route and anchor some of the wires before the fans can be turned on safely, and that will require more time standing than I really want to engage in this evening. Farmer's Market wears me out, and leaves me very stiff and makes standing kind of painful.

We had rubber mats to stand on at market today, not just concrete, so my feet don't hurt as much as they did a few weeks ago, when we forget to use the mats. But my feet are still not happy with me. Seven hours standing and walking on concrete and rubber mats (and lifting squash) left my legs and back stiff and my feet very sore. I don't wear shoes in the house (and I've spent most of the past 11 months in the house), and do wear shoes at market, which doesn't help.

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Fri, Oct 19, 2007

State of the Blog

Posted at 11:10 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

This blog was first published October 13, 2006, so it has been running for a little over a year now. I have posted 397 articles so far (this will be 398) so the 400th article should be posted by Sunday, the 21st.

The blog originally had two main purposes: to get me into the habit of writing again, and to provide me with at least a notional audience, since I can't seem to write without readers.

I think it has succeeded fairly well at both tasks: writing 398 articles in 361 days is not bad (even if some of them were a bit short). I've posted regularly enough that after one weekend when I left the computer turned off, Shawn sent an email asking if I was all right.

As far as the audience goes, I seem to average at least a dozen or so readers who are probably not bots. And even some of the multitude of bots who crawl through might have an occasional reader behind them... from the access logs I can safely say that this blog is very thoroughly indexed.

The blog gets few comments, but that's only fair: I read a bunch of blogs regularly and very rarely post comments on them.

The experiment seems to be working, so it might as well continue.

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Thu, Oct 18, 2007

Permit

Posted at 11:47 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I still haven't received the permit that was supposed to be mailed to me by the county. I called th eelectricians again a couple of days ago and they finally got back to me today.

Since the permit was officially issued, they are setting up the inspection for Monday. I hope that the inspector will actually show up, and that there are no more weird delays. I'd like to get the overhead power lines out of here before the weather gets much worse: the weather is turning cold and windy and I had a strange power outage yesterday.

I'm not sure if the power outage was is related to the powerlines being in a strange, temporary state, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was a contributing factor.

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Wed, Oct 17, 2007

Kernel Makefiles

Posted at 10:58 pm MDT to Code

I'm looking at the makefiles and tools that are used to build the Linux kernel. Lovely stuff.

There's a small tweak to the format of the generated config files that was mentioned on the kernel mailing list. I'm going to try to implement it.

Even if someone else ends up doing it first, exploring the change gives me a goal in exploring the files. I find that new software is opaque unless I have something in particular that I'm looking for

And if no one else makes the change before I figure things out, maybe I'll be able to make my first contribution to Linux development.

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Tue, Oct 16, 2007

Dr. Who

Posted at 10:22 pm MDT to Media

I have been watching the new season of the new 'Dr. Who' on BBC America, along with 'Torchwood', but this weekend I decided I wanted to see what happens next in the second half of the season ( which I had picked up on DVD a few weeks ago).

It's very well done, both the show and the DVD's. They have commentaries on every episode and other extras, so I have ended up re-watching the episodes I have already seen. I will probably watch the extras on the season 1 DVDs next.

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Sun, Oct 14, 2007

CPU Coolers

Posted at 3:23 pm MDT to Technology

Arg.

These fancy Zalman CPU coolers have clips that are very stiff, too stiff for my fingers to operate. At this point I have one latched in place, but without the cooler. I was trying to see how it needed to line up without the fan in the way... Now I can't get it to unhook so I can add the cooler to the installation. I don't want to flex the motherborad too much

And when the cooler is in place, I can not get the clip to bend far enough to latch into place.

It doesn't help that my fingers and thumbs have joints that hyper-extend. When I try to put pressure on things, my thumbs bend back.

I'm going back to working on the Customer Portal.

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Sat, Oct 13, 2007

Concert

Posted at 10:53 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Tonight's concert was the first in the Boulder Philharmonic's 50th Anniversary season. It was a theme concert: music about pictures and pictures about music. The guest artist was an artist: a painter who created a painting while Strauss' "Death and Transfiguration" was performed. The piece after the intermission was a new orchectration of "Pictures at an Exhibition" by Mussorgsky, and the first piece of the evening was "Tritych" by Respighi, which is inspired by three pictures by Botticelli.

I've had season tickets at the Phil for years, but in recent years my attendence has been pretty sporadic because of all the business travel. Between travel and the weather I missed the entire 2006-2007 season.

Attending tonight feels like rebuilding a piece of my life. Attending MileHiCon the weekend after next will bring back another piece, I hope. I've gotten too disconnected from anything outside of work and Nannette's farm.

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Fri, Oct 12, 2007

Al Gore and the Nobel

Posted at 10:40 pm MDT to Current Events

Someone pointed out that Al Gore is the first person to get an Oscar and a Nobel Prize, in the same year and for roughly the same body of work. Also an Emmy, and a David Attenborough Award for Excellence in Nature Filmmaking, and a Spanish award.

I think he is running out of different awards to win.

There is satiric article online about the Supreme Court awarding the Nobel to Shrub instead. (Molly Irvin would have loved this.)

There is one other person who won both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize: George Bernard Shaw won the Nobel for Literature in 1925. But he did not win his Oscar until 1938.

People are speculating that the Nobel committee were sending messages this year: the Medical Nobel was for stem-cell research, and the Peace Prize is for global warming.

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Thu, Oct 11, 2007

Patent Trolls

Posted at 10:27 pm MDT to Current Events

Patent trolls are companies that buy up old patents for the purpose of using them for extortion, not creation or manufacturing. According to the latest article at Groklaw, a patent troll has filed suit against Redhat and Novell.

Funny thing, that. Last week Steve Ballmer, head of Microsoft (a company that averages payments of a billion dollars a year for violating other peoples patents) stated that someone would sue "Linux" over patents. People pointed out that there had never been a patent suit against Linux or FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).

And now, lo and behold, it happens.

The problem with patents is that they are mostly used these days as weapons of mutually assured destruction for each others' product lines, and patent trolls have no products except litigation. Things could get expensive before this is over.

But they seem to have picked a bad patent for their opening bid: people are already mentioning prior art. And there is also the question of why they sued Redhat and Novell, neither of whom were major players in the development of the software that supposedly infringes. Both companies are mostly distributors.

Groklaw is going to be busy... and I hope the MoFos of Morrison & Foerster have a strong patent division. It seems that SCO has just been a warm-up.

May they all be judged.
May their actions be publicly weighed against truth and fairness.

May those who act out of greed watch the treasures they reach for turn to dust and ash as they grasp for them. (Earth)
May those who scheme to twist justice and equity be drowned in their own corruption. (Water)
May those who act out of arrogance be driven forth into a blaze of public scorn. (Flame)
May those who seek to profit without recompense from the ideas of others find their hopes swept away as by hurricanes. (Storm)
May those who deal falsely see the fruits of their own actions turn to rend them like wolves. (The Wood)

May they be judged in their acts and in their words and in their hearts, in their going out and their coming in. May they be judged.

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Wed, Oct 10, 2007

Pratchett

Posted at 8:25 pm MDT to Media

The new Terry Pratchett arrived today. Making Money", involves banks and economics and is a sequel to Going Postal -- bbout postal and communications systems and techies -- which involved the same nominal main character.

However, as the book itself states "It's all about the city."

I can't review this. I have two thirds of this book to go, and I can't remember encountering a bad Pratchett book: the thirty or so of his books that I have read range from good through excellent to astounding. This is one of the ones I like: as much about ideas as people and jokes.

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Tue, Oct 09, 2007

TV Fly

Posted at 9:17 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

For the past couple of days there has been a small fly wandering around inside the screen of my big projection TV. It is very distracting and I wish it would either come out of there or wander into some place where it is not visible when the TV is on. One advantage of the newer flatscreen technologies is that they are solid: there is no way for insects to get inside the screen (bugs may be another matter...), but I got this TV in 2002, just before I started being sent out of town all the time.

I had sworn that my next TV would be one that bolted to the wall, not sat in the room, but the older TV was losing the color blue, and the newer flat panels were still too expensive.

The old TV got moved to the bedroom. I very rarely watch it there, only occasionally when I am sick, so it will probably last for years before it dies completely. I am very prone to insomnia, and I have heard that it can be harmful to get into the habit of doing things like reading or watching TV in bed: you need to train yourself that beds are for falling asleep in.

I have a lot of old electronic stuff around here: partly because you aren't supposed to put it in the trash: it counts at toxic waste because of the heavy metals and other nasty chemicals in the circuit boards and tubes.

There is a free electronic dropoff day at the trash company on Saturday. I need to do some sorting in the computer room this week, clear out some defunct equipment and free up some space..

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Mon, Oct 08, 2007

Fedora 7

Posted at 9:44 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

'Heroes' was on this evening. Star Trek Classic remains an influence. They killed off George Takei's character a couple of weeks ago, but have now added a character played by Nichelle Nicholls. And they continue the pattern of using non-English dialog, subtitled. It was mostly Spanish and Japanese in this episode: both languages I can follow along side the subtitles.

I burned a Fedora 7 DVD, a rescue CD and the F7 KDE Live Disk (which I could do while watching TV) and made sure they all boot on my laptop. The laptop is a single, single-core 64-bit AMD processor and the server will have dual, dual-core 64-bit AMD processors, but they use the same installation disks. The Fedora KDE spin is very pretty.

I did not disturb the Kubuntu Linux installation on the laptop hard-drive. I need it for work to much to risk messing around with it. Especially on a week night. One of these weekends, I really need to upgrade VMWare to the current patch level, but I can't risk doing that on a week night either: it took me a couple of hours of work and googling to get things working again after the last patch. I should probably upgrade to version 6, which officially supports Kubuntu.

Tomorrow I will install the server processors, memory and graphics card and start trying to decipher the instructions for the cpu coolers (I wonder if the Korean instructions are as ... terse ... as the English ones are.) I suspect the directions will make a bit more sense when I can compare the installed processors in their sockets with the sketches. I think I'm going to do some Googling...

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Squash Soup

Posted at 4:36 pm MDT to Technology

The squash I cooked last week produced much more puree as I needed for the pies. I had to run it through the food processor in 3 batches. The kabocha squash was so sweet all by itself that I ate some of the extra puree plain: just nuked it to heat it up and sprinkled it with a little salt.

Today I made the last of it into soup: about a cup and a half of the squash, two cups of chicken broth (from a box -- Costco carries cases of organic chicken broth these days), 1/4 teaspoon each of curry powder and kosher salt. It made enough for two bowls of soup: I had one today for lunch, and I'll finish it tomorrow.

The curry powder isn't really noticeable as such: it just brightens the flavor of the squash and chicken.

Then it will be time to bake another squash. I have three assorted small squashes to play with: a small Kabocha, a white acorn, and a tiny butternut. I should look up some recipes for things to do with them other than pies, soup and a plain side dish.

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Sun, Oct 07, 2007

Insomnia

Posted at 8:37 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I have been going to bed at reasonable times, but it hasn't done much good. Last night, for example, I went to bed before 11, but I was awake most of the time between 1:30 am and 6. Dinah Kitty was very annoyed at how much thrashing around I did.

Then I finally fell asleep for most of the time between 6 and 10. So I'm not quite totally exhausted today. But I can't do that on work days.

I actually got a bit accomplished today.

I tidied up the porch, and took some bottles, pop cans, and about four years of phone books to the recycle center. Some old newspapers remain neatly stacked in the recycle bins on the porch: I no longer subscribe, so I need to save these papers for starting fires in the woodstove. I did a little tidying in the basement, too, and changed the furnace filter and replaced the battery in the smoke detector.

I stopped at Computer City: they sell my model of power supply, and their technician said I can just use a molex connector on one of the other power lines with the 4 pin connector on the mother board. The model of CPU cooler I bought from Newegg is also the one they sell for use with my processors' model, so I guess they should fit, after all.

I stopped at McGuckins Hardware and bought a good 8-inch chef's knife for the kitchen, a case of furnace filters and some daylight-spectrum lightbulbs and 9-volt batteries for some of my smoke detectors for the house, and a package of bungee cords, an emergency tool and a couple of emergency flashers for the truck.

I reorganized the power cables in the server based on the advice from the Computer City guy, but I dropped tools three times doing that much, and decided to wait before handling the processors and memory. (The Xacto knife just barely missed my foot: this is a sign.)

I tried three times, unsuccessfully, carefully following the directions on the side of the unit, to re-light the pilot on the water heater. Then I decided that it can wait until the HVAC guy comes tomorrow to reconnect the airconditioner. I think it went out because of all the faffing around with the power overt he past several days. The heater has probably been out since Friday, if not Thursday when the electricity was turned off for hours, but the tank is large enough that the water wasn't noticeably cold until this morning.

I don't think I like these new-fangled electronic pilot starters: I have terrible luck getting them to start once the flame goes out. The propane furnace that was in this house when I bought it had the kind of pilot you light by sticking in a long-nosed butane lighter, and I was always able to get that started. The gas furnace I replaced it with lasted about 10 years then started eating electronic starters. The current furnace has done a good job of staying lit.

I should probably get the HVAC guy to show me how to restart the furnace pilot, too, for future reference. And maybe I should reconsider my thoughts about switching to a gas stove...

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Sat, Oct 06, 2007

Server Building

Posted at 9:14 pm MDT to Technology

In between dealing with the house construction stuff, I started putting the server together today. I've got the case up, which is lovely and beautifully made. The power supply and drives and motherboard are installed, and the drives are hooked to the power suppply and motherboard.

I haven't installed the CPUS, memory, graphics card or coolers yet, or hooked the power supply to the motherboard yet. I'll do the cpus, memory and graphics card tomorrow, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do about the coolers and motherboard power.

The motherboard wants three power connections: 24 pin, 8 pin and 4 pin. The power supply provides a 24 pin cable, an 8 pin cable and a 4 pin cable. However. The 24 pin and 8 pin connectors match. But the 4 pin connector has 4 pins in a line on the motherboard, and the pins are in a two by two square with a different style of connector on the power supply cable. I need to find an adapter. I'll try McGuckins and Computer City tomorrow.

I may need to look for different CPU coolers, too. The ones I bought are HUGE -- much larger than I expected -- and I'm not sure they will fit in the case along with everything else. I'll see how it goes after the processors, memory and graphics card are installed.

On the construction front: the porch is rebuilt, the driveway is done, the pile of trash has been hauled away (in a dumptruck that was practically antique), and the power lines are waiting for the power company to condescend to make the actual change. There are a few final bits that need to be finished on Monday besides the power line switchover (which may not happen until later in the week): mostly the replacement for the broken porch post and reconnecting the airconditioner in its new spot. The house will be quiet tomorrow.

Things cost a bit more than originally bid: Ross and his assistant worked all day today, when there were only two days in the original plan, and they kept the backhoe longer than they expected. And there was the dumptruck, and the extra two load of roadbase. But some of this work has been needed for a long time.

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Fri, Oct 05, 2007

Porch and Driveway

Posted at 9:30 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Yesterday I made the mistake of telling Beth, at work, that I was impressed that Ross had been able to use the backhoe under the porch roof without damaging it. I think I jinxed him. Today he kind of mangled one of the posts that holds up the roof. He was yanking out the rotten wooden posts that made up the original retaining wall around the basement door well when the damage happened: there was a crosspiece or something that he didn't notice that got hung up on the support post. (Ross has promised to replace the post.)

There's a huge pile of stuff that Ross has demolished for me because it was adjacent to the front porch where they needed to work, and he had the backhoe, anyway. In the next couple of weeks I'll have to get someone to haul it away. We didn't expect such a huge pile of crap, so I didn't order a big dumpster. I'm really glad I have never done any ambitious landscaping in my front yard -- I always knew I was going to need heavy equipment to deal with that stupid wooden retaining wall. I'm thinking buffalo grass in the yard, once the pile of crap is removed, and some low shrubs, or raised planter beds out of materials that match the new stairs and retaining walls, just outside the line of the porch roof.

Next spring I'll get the basement steps and retaining walls replaced in rock, or cement paver stones and blocks. I haven't used those steps in several years because of the failing retaining walls (and I've been out of town so much). And I 'll get a railing put on the bedroom balcony to match the one that is now on the front porch: the balcony railing is long dead, and on the same side of the house, so it needs to visually match the front porch rail.

I just hope the washer and dryer hang in there until I get the basement steps replaced: having appliances hauled in the front door through the house and down the inside basement stairs would be a pain.

Ross and his helpers finished the new part of the porch, and the railing at 7 PM (they did the last couple of planks of the railing with very little light). The porch is now about half again as big as it was a couple of days ago, and there is a kick plate around the edge so the wind will be less likely to blow things down into the basement door well. I'm impressed.

I've ordered another couple of truckloads of roadbase. Aside from Volkswagen-eating potholes swallowing so much of the roadbase that the first two loads weren't enough, the driveway is starting to look pretty good. The roadbase I've bought is recycled asphalt: the dealer recommended it. He said it helps melt the snow in the winter because it is black, and tends to stick together and make potholes less than the dirt and gravel kind of roadbase. And I like the Idea of using a recycled material.

From a distance, the driveway almost looks paved, but it seems strange to look out of my house and see the dark expanse. I may add a layer of gravel on top at some point as camouflage.

The new breaker box is in place, waiting for the guy from the power company to show up and make the switch from the overhead lines to the underground ones. The airconditioner is waiting to be reattached now that it has a new corner of the porch to live in... that should happen tomorrow morning.

I've been taking before and during pictures. I'll put up some before, during, and after images once the driveway is done and the overhead line is gone.

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Thu, Oct 04, 2007

Gas Line

Posted at 6:31 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I spent half the day at the office while they were moving the wires from the old breaker box to the new breaker box. So I missed the big excitement for the day. This is probably just as well. I am not quite as prone to anxiety attacks as my Aunt Irma, but I do tend to get stressed out... and this week is already stressful.

Yesterday a man came out to mark the underground gas and phone lines so the backhoe would know where NOT to dig. But Ross hit it anyway. (The hissing was not a good sign.) They sent away a truck that was bringing roadbase for the driveway.

Ross said that at the place where he ran into trouble, there was only six inches of dirt above the gas line. I suspect the power company did not bother to bury it as deeply as it should have. But there is also a huge deep puddle that always forms there at the end of my driveway when things are wet, and cars and trucks going through the puddle have probably splashed away a lot of the dirt over the years.

By the time I arrived home at 4:30, the power company had reset the gasline, and there was a huge deep trench the front of my house to the pole with the transformer. The new breaker box is in place (though still attached to the overhead lines at this point). The deck has not been modified yet, and the airconditioner is still disconnected.

Ross says he should still finish tomorrow easily. This is good. There is nasty weather predicted for Saturday afternoon, and there are already some clouds beginning to move in.

I hope there are no more surprises or delays.

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'Heirloom' Pie Tins

Posted at 6:31 pm MDT to Technology

The pans I used when I baked the squash pies earlier in the week are actual pie tins made of tinned steel. They have "New England Pie Company 5 ¢ Deposit" molded into their bottoms. They are quite shallow, like the modern disposable aluminum foil pie pans that have replaced them in commercial use. But unlike other pie pans I've seen, they have some small holes in the bottoms so that a little steam can escape.

I am fairly certain my Grandma had a pile of these stashed in her basement and I acquired them when I got my first apartment. She must have had a lot of them. I've tossed out a few over the years that got scraped and rusty (or disgustingly mouse-contaminated) and I still have half a dozen or so of the tins. And I don't think I got the full stash.

Turning them in for the deposit must have been a real nuisance. And the New England Pie Company must have made really yummy pies.

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Tue, Oct 02, 2007

Electricity

Posted at 7:34 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

On Thursday and Friday, people and equipment are going to arrive here. By Saturday, I should have a new breaker panel, my power lines will be underground, half of my front porch will be rebuilt and a guardrail added, and my driveway will be filled in with stone chips and road base and re-graded.

This should leave me in pretty good shape for the winter.

In other news, the CustomerPortal was turned over late last night for the users to review.

And I have two pies in the oven. Sort of. It's a good thing I am the only one who will see them: I really can't do decent pie crusts. Though I suspect part of the problem is that my Mom's pie crust recipe was made for a much more humid climate. If I made pies every week for a couple of months, I might figure out the proportion of liquid needed to get a rollable crust. Not going to happen unless I go on a pot-pie diet with pie for desert...

I will probably look at the manuals for the server components later, or maybe read some of the admin manual I bought last week. I need to get to be early tonight for a change, and if I start building the server tonight I will probably a. stay up too late and b. make mistakes. Possibly expensive mistakes. Besides, building computers always involves a blood sacrifice, but there's no sense volunteering for anything worse than skinned knuckles or a sheet metal papercut. I'll start assembly tomorrow -- after the cleaning ladies have been through -- and leave everything safely in their packages until then.

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Mon, Oct 01, 2007

Boxes

Posted at 5:57 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The rest of the server parts arrived about 3:30pm today. Everything arrived apparently intact, though I had to search through the packing peanuts in one large box for a while to find the tube of silver heat-transfer gunk. The tube is about 2 inches long and a third of an inch in diameter and was not attached to a card or anything that would make it easier to find.

Schedule for this evening: make the squash pie, and finish the admin mode of the CustomerPortal so that I can hand it off to the users for review. If I get started assembling the server before the pie and software are done, I'll never finish them. (Maybe I'll just pull out the manuals for the case and motherboard .... No. No, that is the thin edge of the wedge.)

I need to dig out my list of electrical problems and upgrades for the house, too. The electrical contractor is coming over tomorrow to give me a bid on changing out the breaker box for something up to current specs. There are a few quirks in the wiring that should probably be addressed at the same time the box is upgraded.

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