ramblings of an id10T

Working from Starbucks

2005-08-31T07:54:00.000-04:00

Ok, so I finally had to do the geek-thing and take my laptop into starbucks last night.
I had nothing else to do while I waited for traffic to die down.

I always thought starbucks had open accesspoints, but I guessed wrong. As soon as I booted up my machine, I was welcomed by a login screen and internet usage packages, etc.

No worries, I'll find my way around that soon enought, but in the mean time I might as well do something productive. Lets just say that was on the of the most productive hours of work I've had in weeks. It was nice, no driveby conversations in my cube, no annoying IM messages with people asking me how to do their jobs.. very nice indeed.

It's a Beautiful day, so why am I blogging?

2005-08-20T15:56:00.000-04:00

Well, only because it's 100 freakin' degrees outside. So I've made uses of my time inside this weekend. I've already installed solaris 10 on this laptop (I'm using now), and I'm in the process of installing solaris 11 (aka Nevada build 18) on my desktop.

Thought what the heck, I can roll back easy enough, why not see what new features are in some of the latest builds. While I'm at it, set up a better partitioning scheme so that I can take advantage of live upgrades. I can't wait till full Janus support is incorporated into some of these releases.

So you may be asking, why am I such a solaris freak?
To be honest, I have been a very devout Linux user for years. First Slackware, later Gentoo, but after getting my hands on solaris 10, I have really grown to like many of the new features. SMF makes starting and stop services a breeze, RBAC I would equate to sudo on roids, Dtrace, and Zones ..wow, I actually felt butter flies just typing that.

What Weekend?

2005-08-07T21:32:00.000-04:00

Had a production database server crash on Saturday. :( 2 bad disks on 1 RAID array = bad news.
Spent the majority of Saturday diagnosing, then failing over to the back up systems (12+ hours just FYI).

Sunday, slept in (till 8am) my internal clock is off... But that's another story.
Spent most of the morning trouble shooting some issues on my desktop. Gnome just did not want to start and I couldn't figure out what the problem was. Turns out, I had some conflicting libraries installed and higher up on the PATH then the ones I wanted.

Oh well . .un installed the offending packages.. . Then well . .All of the packages from pkg-get.
Pkg-get is a nice tool, but I wish it gave the user more control over dependency installs and a few other things. As support for Solaris x64 grow, it's becoming easier to recompile things for 64bit support. Yeah so, I know that xmms doesn't run any faster. . and probably has larger binaries. . . but it's 64bit. (yeah I'm a loser) A few hours wasted compiling all my favorite tools like grep, lsof, pcre, xine, mplayer, xmms, openssl, rdesktop . . and I'm back where I need to be.

I have a love hate relationship with eBay. I love window shopping, but I hate the disappointment after someone snipes something right out from under you. Oh, well. . Two can play that game. I am now the prod owner of a Sun Netra X1.

Wow, it's been a long couple of weeks.

2005-08-01T22:52:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to come down after almost a month straight of solid WORK.
70+ hour weeks really start to take a toll. Long story short, the
software vendor of our CRM app posted a wee hour alert of Biblical
proportions. We're talking total meltdown, nuclear disaster stuff .
..ok well really just the fact that JCE will
expire in a few days rendering all our our applications useless. So
in addition to moving 60+ production servers over 4 days (yes i did
some of the labor), and patching ~100 servers, I found time to go to
the snack machine for nourishment.

I kinda of miss blogging, I just hate that I have to sacrifice sleep
do surf now-a-days . . oh well, I'll leave you with a new toy I'm
playing with.
Use the account demo/demo

Nothing like a Hot Cup of Insomnia to get your morning going

2005-02-24T03:40:00.000-05:00

It's ohhh. . 3:30am right now. I'm looking forward to my alarm going
off at 5:30am for work.

I don't know what happened, I was having this hot dream (to explicit
to type here), next thing I know I'm back at CompUsa. I see some guy
stealing the camcorders so I walk over and confront him ....then I
wake up in a cold sweat with 11 bullets in my chest.

Am I nuts or does everyone have this dream?

Well anyhow . .this was at 2:30 and I don't see any sleep in site.

Now the ever weighing question . . . .to call in sick, or suck it up
and go into work........to be continued.

....well. . it's moving time. ..

2005-02-22T14:53:00.000-05:00

I was informed late last week that my group would be movning cubes,
floors, ohh yeah. .and in the other building.

. . . .well atleast I'm not at the end of a hallway anymore . . .i'm
sure I can think of a few other things to say . .but my brain feels
like a scattered mess.

ps. I'm posting this via email. . . i wonder if it works. -guess I'll find out.
pss. This is my second attempt, I'm an idiot and sent the first one to
the wrong address.

Did I ever tell you about road rage?

2005-02-21T07:45:00.000-05:00

About a week ago 2 friends and I were care pooling to work. The friend that was driving is a bit aggressive in traffic but nothing too horribly insane.... .

We stop to get some gas, and a few minutes later pull out of the parking lot. We pulled out right in front of a Mini Cooper. . It wasn't anything to bad, and probably would have been avenged with a simple flicker of the high beams (as is Atlanta custom).

However.. .the guy in the Mini Cooper was out for blood. He starts riding right on our bumper, and aggressively swerving around us like an idiot. At one point he pulls along side and began screaming like a moron.

Of course we return the greetings with waving fingers (oIoo), and sarcastic smiles.

Only the fun didn't stop there . . .he kept screaming, and riding in the Emergency lane next to us for several miles . . ..at some point all fun was gone . .and we began to wonder how long it's been since this poor sap was laid.

Well. .long story short . . . beware who you pull out in front of . . . they may be crazy psychos with an appetite for blood.

How much Blogging to too much?

2005-02-18T15:16:00.000-05:00

Well . ..blogging is not something that I feel I have a problem with. 1 or 2 posts every few months. ..i'm good to go.

However . .'some people' who will remain nameless *cough..Daniel..*cough feel that I don't blog enough.

So what's the deal with blogging? . .I believe that some of us are producers while others are consumers. Some choose to upload and share, while others download and horde for them selves. Some put content on the internet for the other . .slackasses (i'm in this group) to take in.

I have finally come to the conclusion.
I am an internet slackass.

Perhaps mankind would be better off if I never blogged again. . . . :'(

To IPOD or Not to IPOD

2004-12-13T08:36:00.000-05:00

I've laid the hints pretty heavy for this Xmas. I hope to be the new owner of some X gb sized IPOD this year.. . . If not then i'll be purchasing it myself... My only concern is Linux compatability. I'm currently running the Gentoo Distribution, and am investgating possible ebuild that may exist for such a program. I'll post my findings here later.

Who Wrote SoBig

2004-11-01T13:27:00.000-05:00

Just doing my part to spread this informative document.

Slashdot Article

Posted by Hemos on Monday November 01, @11:00AM
from the i'm-SO-BIG dept.
An anonymous reader writes "F-Secure's Virus Blog posted links to a 48-page technical study on who wrote the infamous Sobig worm which went around the world last year. The study is done by anonymous authors. The study concludes that author of this worm is a Russian programmer and goes out all the way to name him. This file has now been posted publicly but on Geocities and and Tripod. So you can have a look by yourself and make your own conclusions."

Here is my local copy share
Click on this link to download the document: WhoWroteSobig.pdf
SIZE: 304386 bytes
MD5: 18de5fee31a553c4695f233a3da558c9
SHA1: e56b1ff66b38016de71cbf1376207f2453aa5c4c

What I wanted to Post last time .. but didn't feel like it

2004-10-20T14:41:00.000-04:00

So, it’s been a little while since my last post . .here’s what has happened in my life

Friday 10/15 – Wera National Endurance Series Final (Honk Bo Bo racing finished 10^th in Class)

With approximately 1 lap left in the race, I decided to get up close and personal with a tire wall in turn 5.

-Busted chin, bruised hip, possible broken finger, possible broken collor bone

FYI, Xrays came back AOK, better safe then sorry.

Saturday 10/16 – John Shank’s wedding. (Congrats)

Missed the Friday rehearsal (getting xrays of my collor bone); and basically had to wing it.

Sunday 10/17 – Took my bruised and exhausted ass back to the race track to support my friends, and see some good ‘ol racin’.

Daniel got his Imac

2004-10-18T15:37:00.000-04:00

Yeah . .so umm..I was out on friday when it came in . . .(i had a race, to be blogged later)
http://yeahnotreally.blogspot.com/2004/10/my-imac.html

Frustration

2004-10-13T10:05:00.000-04:00

My morning is just underway and already I feel like a runaway Bus going off a cliff.
1. I over slept about 1.5hrs this morning . .i just could Not get out of bed.
2. Once I finally came to, I releized. .ohh yeah, I forgot to wash clothes last night
3. I reliezed that the clothes I washed a few days ago where still in the washer = Mildew "YAY"
4. Lovely 30 mile commute in Atlanta traffic.
5. Once I get to work I found out that I am being shuffled to a new cube
6. This new cube is at the end of a hightraffic walkway!!
7. I never ate breakfast this morning, and am $.10 shy of anything decent in the snackmachine.

Which Windows Manager??

2004-10-12T06:30:00.000-04:00

So, I'm the type of person that gets bored with the same 'ol same 'ol all the time. I've been an avid use of FVWM for quite some time now. I've spend endless hours on my .fvwmrc files and customized my desktops until nothing remained untouched.

Why after all that. .would I possibly start using Gnome again? Your guess is as good as mine, but it happend.

Might it be possible that using gnome on my solaris laptop helped ease the migration, or could it be the ease in which i can emerge new apps in Gentoo . ?. ?...

Anywho, It has been a long long time since I have really, seriously, honestly used Gnome, and they have made leaps and bounds.

Wow. .. .that's all I've got. I'm completly spent, I can think of nothing else to talk about.... . .so .. ummm . . .

if (Solaris 10 == 2nd Coming of Jesus) {printf("Amen!");}

2004-10-08T06:56:00.001-04:00

Wow, is about all I can say.

I have been a hardcore Linux user for 8+ years, and have dabbled in an out with Solaris as my jobs have required. A few months ago I grabbed a copy of Solaris 9 x86 and started playing around.. . .not a few weeks after that I thought "what the hell" and put a copy of Solaris 10 beta on my laptop.

I am not one of those people that preach one way or the other for BSD, Solaris, Linux, etc, etc. . I see all of their strengths, and weaknesses. They are all Great OS's and have their purpose.

Lately I have been testing out some of the new features in 10, and have been quite impressed.

N1 Grid Containers - rocks. Much the same as when I would set up virtual servers in Linux, but appears to be a little more solid. I have purposely crashed my test Zones on several occasions, and am pleased to say the Global Zone has never winced once. Ohh, and in my opinion setting up a Zone in Solaris 10 is easier then a virtual server, or even a chroot environment in Linux.

ZFS - wow, an amazing advance in file systems and storage. I have not played much with it yet, but the implications are almost endless.

Dtrace - take truss or strace pump it up on steroids, throw in a little C syntax and there you are. I'm still going through the guide on this. .but it has been pretty easy to pick up, and I have been impressed with the potential for this new tool.

http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/817-6223

Janus - Nice, nice. .I have had little problem so far. I mostly compile all most apps locally on each box, for what every architecture it's using. But. .it's nice if you don't need to as well ;) Some ideas I have read about are using an N1 zone to run a completely functioning Linux env inside Solaris. Or just run Linux apps side by side your Solaris native stuff ...your choice.

In the beganing

2004-10-07T09:37:00.000-04:00

Yeah, so . .everyone else has a blog, I might as well too.
This is just the first of many boring Posts