If you have some time, take a look at this Twenty-Questions game - it utilizes AI capabilities, and is very hard to stump. Fun!
posted by MikeM at 9:07 AM    

 
Good day so far - managed to get all three major type of computers fully ready-to-build, then made ghost images of all three, copied them to the net, and now I am nearly finished putting the image on the four Precision 650 units! I am multi-tasking as well, and have been working on getting the image installed on the D800 Latitudes as well. THese have been problem after problem. First, Knoppix has no NIC driver for the onboard 1gb NIC on the D800. The USB-NIC is 10/100, but limited to USB 1.1 speeds. Took over an hour and a half to copy the 1.3gb image onto the box from the network.
At Brian's suggestion, I used split to make two halves, and then burned two CDs - barely fit! Now I have booted to a DOS diskette, copied the two halves onto the FAT32 partition, and will next boot Knoppix and join them together, then boot ghost and burn the image to the NTFS partition. Whew! Many steps. But FAR better than building up each one from scratch!
posted by MikeM at 2:37 PM    

 
Today we packed a lot of the server room 'stuff', as well as consolidated several dozens of empty software boxes. Basically keeping the media and license for the stuff we needed to keep, and tossing the rest. I even tossed several dozen Win95 and Win98 CDs out, along with the manual - after tearing off the front cover (with the license on it).

I also implemented the new, consolidated and corrected, absolutely perfect and all-inclusive DNS and YP settings I worked out a few weeks ago. Basically I took the existing hosts file from NIStuff and domains, and then made them look more or less the same, and added all the new boxes and names we needed to add, and deleted the outdated and dead stuff from both. Then today I implemented them.

A few hours later, we noticed that email from the servers themselves were being killed as spam by outlook, due to the unfortunate oversight I made of calling the firewall by the wrong name in DNS. oops. heh heh. My bad. Quickly fixing this problem, I also noticed that I had used # to comment out several entries, which resulted in many many errors and such in the messages file on the server. *sigh* I changed them all to ; symbols, as they should have been in the first place, and restarted things - no errors this time!

So far so good!
posted by MikeM at 5:50 PM    

 
Monday - WORK! Got a lot of the planning part done for the rest of the computers that need installing, worked on licensing and such, making sure we had enough licenses for the software we needed to install. At home, watched the rest of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. (Treguna Macoites Trecorum Satis Dee)
posted by MikeM at 5:44 PM    

 
Sunday - Gaming day, Patty went to see Pirates of the Carribean with Sara. Seems like I miss all the good movies. :) I'll get to see the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen next Sat!

Watched the Transporter again - just because it was so good.
posted by MikeM at 5:42 PM    

 
Back home again! What should have been a 4 hour trip home turned into a 5 hour one when a bad accident held up traffic for what turned out to be a 10 mile backup, then that 10 miles of packed cars affected the rest of the trip south on 78 from exit 33 to where it turns into 81, then on 81 for over 60 miles! Thats a 90+ mile section of major road that was severely impacted, dropping average speeds quite a bit. It should have taken us about 1.5 hrs, and it took over 2.5 for just that piece of road. argh! When we passed the accident site, it appeared that a semi had a LOT of damage to its front end, having plowed into another semi and knocked it through the guard rail and over the edge. Sheesh! (On rt 78 S, near exit 23 or so.)

Anyway, back home and glad to be here!

I'm almost done with Hacker's Challenge 2, and will be starting "Stealing the Network: How to Own the Box" next.

Watched about half of "Bedknobs and Broomsticks", then we turned it off as we were just too tired to continue. Perhaps tomorrow night we'll catch the rest of it.
posted by MikeM at 10:24 PM    

 
Yesterday I completely configured the last two dual Xeon workstations (from ghost images). My best time was just under 30 min! Then the rest of the day was spent installing/configuring a Dell D800 Latitude from base. I still have a few things to install, but I have the basic stuff done. All that is left is to find out what other software the users need, licensing and such, and try to come up with one or two basic configs, and we can customize them from there once we ghost the new units with the basic images.

Today I have the day off, and we will be taking Patty's mom back home again. She enjoyed her trip to Maryland, but I'm sure she misses her home. Last night we started watching Jurassic Park III, but stopped it near the beginning and put in II instead. JR II is just a better movie, I think. :)
posted by MikeM at 9:23 AM    

 
On the book front, I am now reading "Hacker's Challenge 2" and "The Hacker Crackdown". In the Challenge, I'm about halfway through it, and enjoying it quite a bit. It contains almost two dozen stories of hacking (intrusion on computer networks) and presents the evidence as collected, then you are supposed to figure out what happened and what you need to do to fix it and make sure it doesn't happen again. In the back of the book are the solutions, so I am reading the book with two bookmarkers...

"The Hacker Crackdown" is an older book about the phone hackers of the 80's, describing a lot of the legal activities and jackbooted thugs kicking in doors and confiscating kid's computers. A good read, I'm about halfway through it as well. This book is in html format, one of the many that I got on that cd of books. I reformatted it and converted it to html, and I am reading it on my Zaurus.
posted by MikeM at 7:45 AM    

 
Yesterday was nice - lunch was spent taking a trip to a nice restaurant in a stretch limo with my co-workers, celebrating a new 3-year contract for the company!

After lunch, we smoke-tested a hot format and ghost restore of a new computer, it worked beautifully! We now have a good image on the network, and can repartition a new hard drive, boot to Knoppix (great cd-bootable linux distribution), use a great app called FISH (which Brian showed us) to securely connect to the storage server and download a file to the local backup partition (usually 1/3 of the whole drive, fat32. The rest is NTFS). Once the file is on the local drive, we ghost restore the image to the NTFS partition, then boot the system and change the system name and IP. Everything else just works! Then once we assign the unit to a user, we change the default username to the user's username and reduce permissions from administrator to power user. Takes about an hour to completely configure a new computer out of the box this way.

When I got home from work, Patty, her mother and I all went to Charles Town Racetrack to bet on the horses. About a 45 miin drive turned into a 1.5 hr drive due to the incredibly bad signage in Frederick, MD along rt 355. We took 355 (the back way) due to traffic on I270 (the main way), and even though there was a single sign pointing straight ahead to rt 340 (the way to the track), we never saw a turning that was marked for it, and had to ask directions of a nice police officer in order to find the road. *sigh*

We got there in time for the 3rd race, and left after the 9th. Then we played the slots and lost ALL of our winnings to that point and $30-$40 additional. Such is life.

I won several races, the most I won was the 9th, when I took a long shot to show, and it came in 3rd. WOO! $13 in my pocket! Overall, I made $2 profit on the horses, after bets totalling $24 and winnings of $26. Then I dropped $17 on the slots. Patty did better than I on the horses, but lost more on the slots. Those machines are truly bandits. Patty's mom enjoyed herself and although she never won a race, she made $7 on the lotto scratch-offs she got there. ;)

So we got home at around 12:30 and I crawled into bed, completely exhausted.

I got around 5-6 hrs of sleep, but I feel OK so far. Mt. Dew to the rescue!
posted by MikeM at 7:40 AM    

 
"Transporter" - what a great film! Great action scenes, great car chases, a good plot and decent acting all come together! Some of the events require a bit of 'suspended disbelief', but that is to be expected of an action film. I had never heard of any of the actors before, but I think they have great futures in the biz. Definitely a good rental - well worth the money!

The idea of changing a username in windows to retain the original permissions for the new name and permission level works, to a point. As long as you are not talking about user accounts on a domain, this works great. I think there is a way to make it work for domain users as well - still experimenting.
posted by MikeM at 7:36 AM    

 
Yesterday we watched "Shanghai Knights" - the Jackie Chan / Owen Wilson buddy-flick set way back in western days. This was a great movie - lots of action, lots of cameos of historically famous people and tangents to many other works of fiction and factual events. Like Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, and Charlie Chaplin.

I really enjoyed this movie - laughed all the way through it!

At work, I'm working on taking a generic install, ghosting it, then restoring it to several identical computers and customizing each one for the future owner. One thing we are testing out is the theory that if you install everything as one user with admin rights, for instance OWNER, then once you change the name OWNER to MIKE or whatever, and change the permissions down to Power User, then you may still run everything that was installed and configured as OWNER. It keeps the settings and permissions, as well as the icons and start list entries. So far so good! I'll know for sure sometime soon, as I'm working on the restore process right now.
posted by MikeM at 12:17 PM    

 
Oh dear. This actually appears to be a real site. United Nuclear - Scientific Supplies Anyone need a huge Tesla Coil? How about a homemade jet engine? A bit of Uranium? A homemade particle accelerator? Check out the 'Dangerous Experiments' link.
posted by MikeM at 11:22 AM    

 
This fellow has invented a true, working Gauss gun . Science fiction coming true!
posted by MikeM at 7:42 AM    

 
Saturday morning Patty and I left for Jersey, spent the night there at her mother's, and brought her back with us for a week! Should make for a nice vacation for her and some family time for us. I have Friday off so that we can drive her back home Friday evening and get back home sometime Saturday.

We finally got the fiber link working, and fully tested across the actual distance, 7 miles. The self-healing redundant fiber cards work fine, we were just having problems with bad jumper cables, wrong ends, and incompatible hardware. Fiber should be easier than this - you would think that something so fundamentally simple should be easy to get working. The multitude of standards make it difficult to get even a simple link working.

Ah well, it seems to be OK now.

And just in time, as we got word a few days ago that we need to be completely moved out of out old office space and into our new building by the 15th of Aug. Gonna be some fun at work for a few weeks!
posted by MikeM at 10:27 PM    

 
"Monster" was good - but a bit too intense for the younger set. Some of the language wasn't suitable for those under 15 or so, and there were some extremely violent and physical scenes. Overall, very good. This story is not of the poor misunderstood monster that only wants to be friends, rather this monster wants revenge, and kills everyone around Victor until finally Victor pursues him to the ends of the earth. This monster is evil, although not through any fault of his own. A nice bit of philosophy there.

Of course, any child who went around killing and vivisecting animals and family pets would be put through intense psychotherapy these days, and discovered to be a nut rather early.
posted by MikeM at 8:17 AM    

 
Tonight we go see"Monster" at the Olney Theatre. An adaptation of "Frankenstein" - should be good.

The tree limb is finally gone, Anderson Tree for $150. Cheapest price in town for a 10" diameter limb around 20' long. Ouch.

One place wanted $400 just to take the limb, $895 to take the rest of the tree as well, $365 to grind the stump down below grade, and $2500 to replace it with a 15' maple.

Sheesh. We'll take our chances with the rest of the tree. We like it. :)

The heat pump is in, and works well! We took the temp from 80 to 71 in under 3 hours. Not too shabby! Looks good, even though the outside unit is easily 4x the size of the old one. Truly awe-inspiring. The thing is massive.
posted by MikeM at 5:41 PM    

 
Well, today is the big Heat Pump install! A 3.5 ton unit, 12 seer. Supposed to barely fit into the available space, and will require custom ductwork to make the existing ducts work with the new unit. This is what you get when you replace a 28 yr old unit, I suppose.

For most of this week so far I have been working on configuring a Dell GX260 unit to be my new desktop here at work, replacing the Inspiron 8000 I will be surrendering at some point in the near future. As I posted recently, the Blue Screen of Death visited me - forcing a reinstall of the entire unit. This was determined to be caused by GoBack. I have not installed GoBack again, and everything else that was on the box when it died, as well as a LOT more, is currently installed and no problems.

This is a 2.6gb P4 CPU with a 40gb HD and 1gb ram. Nice. :) I got a CD-RW from another new Dell (Precision 650) and it just slotted right in, no problems at all! Now I am trying each of the utilities and applications that I used to use and re-registering them or copying them from the old system. So far so good!
posted by MikeM at 2:29 PM    

 
Hard to believe how much stuff accumulates in a utility closet. We just had to clean ours out - got two large bags of trash, four multiply-nested bunches of boxes, six cans of paint, two dozen or so cans of spray paint, a couple dozen puzzles, a dozen or so games, three bags of foam and assorted other packing materials we wanted to keep, plus a huge load of assorted stuff that gets shuffled to the garage for long-term storage. We also now have two large boxes of cardboard and other paper items for recycle. Whew!

We need to clean it out because that room is where the AC/Heat is at - and it will all be ripped out and replaced with a shiny new heat pump tomorrow. We also get to clear off several walls and make sure there is a clear path from the AC room to the exterior wall, which means more cleaning and moving stuff tonight.

Hopefully we will have the branch out of the yard today or tomorrow. Looks like $200 is the lowest bid. Sheesh. Why is it so hard to find a bonded, licensed contractor to cut up and take away a large tree branch? Out of five people we contacted, only three ever got back to us - and the bids were $200, $300, and $400. Some spread, eh?

I was tempted to just get a chainsaw and do it myself, but the way it is wedged into the tree and the sheer weight of it makes me not want to touch it - it is a dangerous hunk of wood as it lies right now.

At work yesterday I installed and configured a new computer with Windows 2000, applied the 38 patches and security fixes, installed Norton and a few other gewgaws, and it booted fine several times before I left. This morning, I get the dreaded blue screen of death. STOP 0x00000040 BAD_POOL_CALLER, etc. Basically something in the software is hosing the kernel memory pool right at the beginning of memory. Lovely. The last thing I did was install Norton and GoBack. Disabled GoBack, then installed a few utility apps, like Freemem and a few others.

Reinstall begins now.
posted by MikeM at 8:10 AM    

 
Too funny... This popular computer game review website presents a review of Real Life. Great review, as well!
posted by MikeM at 9:40 AM    

 
VillainSupply.com is a site I found long ago, and just checked again - still hilarious! Check out the Customer of the Month for Sept 2002.
posted by MikeM at 6:28 PM    

 
This is a really cool submarine page I found a few years ago. They will custom build a sub for you. Check out the Phoenix under 'personal luxury submarines'.
posted by MikeM at 3:50 PM    

 
Friday! Sorry it's been so long since I posted anything, but we've been busy.

Wednesday we contacted five companies about getting the tree limb removed, and of the two that replied to voicemail/emails, neither can even come out to see the problem until Monday. Seems that the storms of late have kept them quite busy! The AC fellow charged the freon in the system, and we once again have cool air inside the house! That done, we debated having the 28 yrs old all-electric heat/ac system replaced with a modern heat pump, and last night signed the contract. 3.5 ton, 12 seer unit. :)

I recently finished reading Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, which was a difficult read at parts, but overall pretty good. I just started reading another Laurell K. Hamilton book - Caress of Twilight, the second book in the Merry Gentry series. Imagine a modern day sidhe princess (unseelie court) who has run from the courts and is hiding among humans. Pretty good! The first book (Kiss of Shadows) was really great, and I have high hopes for this one as well.

Last weekend we rented 'Murder by Numbers', and haven't watched it yet! Hopefully tonight we will have time.
posted by MikeM at 8:01 AM    

 
The other day I took a great shot of the puppies



The tan one on the left is Maggie, the black one on the right is Toby.

---

Here are some pictures of the tree branch that fell yesterday

      


posted by MikeM at 6:55 PM    

 
At work, we configured and tested one of the very nice 4-head Xeon systems we just purchased, and it well and truly rocks. With four 19" flat panel monitors, it can do everything but jump through hoops. We had one screen maximized across two screens, with the other two screens containing two other applications and a host of smaller informational windows. Nice.

Then I got a call from home - a tree fell on the house. To be more exact, a huge branch (nearly half a tree) glanced off the breezeway roof and came to rest nearly blocking the front door. Nice. So now we have a very lopsided tree and a huge limb to have removed.
posted by MikeM at 7:50 AM    

 
This morning bright and early I put oil in the car - and Sunday as well. I added a qt Sunday, checked the dipstick, then left it until this morning to get a more accurate reading. This morning since the oil was barely registering on the stick, I added another quart. *sigh* I had the oil changed about 1200 miles ago. Looks like I get to start checking the oil every 2 weeks or so, unless I want to risk the engine getting more damaged than it is. Not bad for 122k though.
posted by MikeM at 7:46 AM    

 
Wow - nasty lightning storm last night. And I was out in the beginnings of it still working on the ditch. Had to lower the spot where the existing pipe exits, or the water would pool and actually flow backwards into the area I wanted to drain! After 10 min of frenzied digging, past rocks and gravel and landscaping fabric, I had a more or less even drop from the end of the pipe to the fence, and then a generally downward-trending slope along the fence. It looks like I need two more 10' sections of pipe to get the water to go properly and not flood the neighbor's side-yard. Nothing I can do with the backyard, however.
posted by MikeM at 7:44 AM    

 
Well, My Computer Page is finally updated. I separated out each system, and made a fourth page for the extra parts. This is they way they are now, and may change if I get a few hours to tinker. I particularly want to transplant the 80gb drive from Rasputin to Trotsky, and then install as many of the old drives as possible into Rasputin, along with a reinstall of RH 9.0.
posted by MikeM at 4:14 PM    

 
I must be insane - I just cleaned out the guest room. All my computer stuff is neatly organized in a closet, and I was even able to leave half a hanger-rack worth of space for clothes, if needed. I have accumulated a BUNCH of older hardware.

Hopefully I will be updating my system pages today, giving a separate page to each system and one for excess stuff. Basically, everything that isn't in my main system is for sale - anyone want a huge lot of computer parts and chassis? Even Rasputin, the Dell 500SC is up for sale. I'll likely make some changes to the configuration before I let it go... That 80gb ide drive is sweet, I'll likely swap it out for an 8gb ide and a 2gb ide, maybe with a little 340mb ide for swap space. I could put the AHA2940W in there and add the three scsi drives as well. 9gb, 2gb and 1gb. Hmmm....
posted by MikeM at 12:39 PM    

 
...Just finished watching 'Treasure Planet' - yet another adaptation of the classic Robert Louis Stephenson "Treasure Island". Not bad, some funny bits, overall watchable, but SO wrong. I mean, the things they dismissed as unimportant blew me away - they just... ignored something that would have made them all rich beyond their wildest dreams. Can't tell you what without spoiling it. The 'secret' of the pirate captain - his method was far more valuable than all the treasure he accumulated. *sigh* Oh well.

Of course the pirates go for the treasure, etc etc etc and it all ends badly etc etc etc except for Jim and the other good guys. Well, mostly.
posted by MikeM at 12:05 AM    

 
Yesterday evening we played badminton in the pool for several hours, then watched Animatrix - not bad the 2nd time around. Animatrix is nine short animated films that are either prequel to or run parallel to the Matrix Reloaded. The first one is the best - animation on par with the Final Fantasy movie, if not better. The next two fill in the history of the planet, and exactly what happened to result in the 'current' world. Number four explains where that hero-worshipping kid comes from - the one in Zion that is always wanting to hang with Neo, join his crew, etc. Five is a very well done 'life in the world as it really is' short. Six I disliked intensely - really crappy animation, over the top style, silly story. Athletes can sense the matrix and 'wake themselves up'. Sure they can. NEXT! Seven is a great one - several kids find a glitch in the matrix, a haunted house where they have superpowers. Eight is in the style of the old black and white detective stories, and involves Trinity - not bad. Nine is just depresssing. Good story, well done, but depressing just the same.

This leads us to TODAY. Went to home depot, bought a 10' long 4" wide corrugated black drainpipe. Got home, dug a ditch. Sounds easy, but this involved moving a bush, removing a few dozen paving bricks, carefully moving the 2" sand base - keeping as much as possible, then moving the 4" gravel base below that. Ugh. Only then did I get to real clay dirt, which also needed moving. This was just under the sidewalk... Past the sidewalk is a multi-level gravel/landscaping fabric/gravel/fabric/gravel/clay with BIG rocks area. So - after digging before, under, and past the sidewalk, I threaded the pipe under and through the plastic guides for the sidewalk and the long long nails that secure the guides, and then filled it all back in. Once done, I stood back and admired my handiwork, and Patty had the words of wisdom "The Sidewalk Seems To Be A Little Sunken".

Sure enough, there was like a 1" depression, and while the bricks lined up nicely and made a smooth transition, the center was indeed too low. *sigh*

Pull up the bricks, added some more dirt (I know I should have used sand, but I was all out). Leveled it off and fit the bricks one by one until they were almost even across the ditch area, then tapped them all into place. So - it is in, looks OK, but I need another 10' section because the ending is not where I wanted the water to go. With one more section I can dig out from under the end piece and have the new end be exactly where it needs to be, along the fence and not ending in the middle of the gravelly patch.

I'm done for today - exhausted and blistered fingers - sunburnt a bit, and just overall ready to relax. Later!
posted by MikeM at 7:29 PM    

 
Happy 4th of July!

Just got back from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines - great flick! There are a lot of logical holes in the plot, but overall its a great movie. The action scenes are great, and there really aren't many other scenes in the movie! Definitely a guy movie. Guns, explosions, car chases, unstoppable robots, nukes, chicks with guns - need I say more? Go see it!

The theater was about half full - no lines, very nice! We caught the 12:50 showing, and apparently nobody gets up that early on a holiday!

In going through some papers I found some old computer stuff I had been working on. I'll update my computer system page and the other computer pages when I get the chance. For instance, the new UPS, the printer, scanner, USB hub, KVM switch, Ext USB hard drive and a few other items aren't listed. Also, the spare parts listing is outdated, and Stalin (P240mmx) is as well. Rasputin (the dell SC500 Celeron 1.2) is pretty much the same, but I'm considering making some changes to it as well.
posted by MikeM at 3:41 PM    

 
Tuesday - AC seemed to be OK - I had been checking it often last night... Got home today and it had frozen again, but luckily it wasn't so hot outside.

Wednesday - Changed the thermostat to not come on until 75, was 73 before, this seems to help the freezing situation. Again, not a hot day, so no real problems.

Thursday - calling for more rain and storms - might be outside digging an impromptu ditch if we get too much rain. :(

Last night I watched 'Commando' - great flick, even though the logistics of one man taking on over 100 well-armed revolutionaries is a bit contrived... Arnie is sneaking around the base planting claymores - then when he detonates them, entire barracks buildings explode in huge fireballs and even the tops of the sentry towers explode. Hmmmm...

Still, a fun movie.

Finished reading "Donovan's Brain" - a sci-fi book from the 50s. Good book - I first read it in 4th grade, and enjoyed it then as well.

Still working on 'Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson - and after that I'll likely get back into the technical books that I have accumulated over the last few weeks.

We are just starting on the third season of Buffy, Faith just made her appearance and is charming everyone she meets. :) Willow is experimenting with her witchly powers, and Xander and Cordelia are still dating. Willow and Oz as well. Xander and Oz - is it just me or do people in Sunnydale name their kids wierd things?
posted by MikeM at 8:02 AM