Monday, 26 March, 2007. 02:22:12 AMAlex had some trouble printing out a Power Point slide. Her version of MS Office is Office 2000,
and the Power Point slide was created on Office 2003. Office 2003 printed out the slide
properly, and so did Open Office 2.1. That's a great indication of the quality and capability
of the Open Office suite.
Friday, 23 March, 2007. 01:08:51 PMAll my podcasts are disappearing! First Al Franken was gone, then Penn
Jillette. Now the CBC Radio 3 Podcast is ending on March 30th.
Wednesday, 14 March, 2007. 11:16:05 AMhttp://kpwr.org/Welcome
Tuesday, 13 March, 2007. 05:23:17 PMI finally figured out what was causing the permissions on my serial port to
be changed every time I booted. The normal permissions and ownership for the
serial port are 660 root.dialout. A few years ago I was using a laptop
with a null modem as a server console, so inittab was spawning a login
on the serial port. It was also changing the permissions of the ttyS0
device to 600 root.root and that would prevent my X10 transmitter from
receiving commands from user space.
Wednesday, 07 March, 2007. 02:17:50 AMHoly crap, Starbuck is dead. That character had better come back or I'm
going to be really angry.
Tuesday, 06 March, 2007. 11:46:22 AMMy server at home worked perfectly all weekend, but now that I'm at work
away from the house, it's down again.
Monday, 05 March, 2007. 01:47:11 PMI fired up my podcast of Penn Jillette's radio show which I've been listening
to since the beginning. Penn announced that the show is ending, which is
too bad, because it was one of my favorites. Between Penn and Al Franken
cancelling their shows, I
have been searching for more podcasts to fill 3 hours a day.
Friday, 02 March, 2007. 11:51:19 PMI'm still hanging out at the (customer's) offices here in Chicago,
finishing up the documentation of my work. This has been one of the longest
and biggest projects that I've ever worked on, and certainly one of the
most difficult. All the people are starting to roll off of it now, and
just a few support people will be left behind. I'm going to be moving to
a new project starting on Tuesday. It's going to be a daily drive to
Taylor Texas, which is almost 30 miles from my house. I haven't had such
a long commute since I lived in South Phoenix (Ahwatukee) working at
American Express on the North side almost 10 years ago. It's going to
keep me home for 6 months, which will be nice.
Friday, 02 March, 2007. 06:02:12 PMMy flight back to Austin tonight did get cancelled, so I'm going to
work all night until my rescheduled flight at 8:45 tomorrow morning.
Friday, 02 March, 2007. 12:06:34 PMMy computer turned itself on by itself about 2 AM last night. That's good
because it can receive all the mail other servers were queuing for it.
It also isn't looking good for the weather tonight so that delay won't
cause me additional e-mail problems.
Thursday, 01 March, 2007. 07:24:21 PMAlex returned home and checked on my server. It's failing to start at
all which seems to me to indicate a power supply problem. That's three
power supplies which I've killed in a couple weeks. It's not power surges
either, since two of those power supplies are on separate uninterruptable
power supplies.
When I get home tomorrow night I'll have to get my old little laptop
running with the server hard drive.
Thursday, 01 March, 2007. 03:07:59 PMMy server at home has suddenly become unreliable. It could be a heat problem
that's showing up because of server load, or it could be something worse.
Something strange is that it's rebooting all by itself, and even stranger, it's taking some hours to reboot. The server logs are showing crashes, and then boot
sequences which happen some hours later. I don't think that I have any
wake on LAN option set in the BIOS, so it's a mystery. The only thing I've
changed recently is I keep a Folding at Home client running all the time. This
is why I suspect some kind of heat problem.
I think I'm going to ditch the machine entirely, or at least ditch the
motherboard and CPU. It's a small form factor case, so a new motherboard
made for it is probably not available. But, I have a Mini-ITX board which
also has (probably solvable) reliability issues which would fit.
In the meantime, I may just run my server in a VMWare virtual machine on
my main desktop computer, or on an old laptop with the big disk connected
to the USB port.