Monthly Archive for December, 2003

One of the things I used to do when I hosted billimek.com on my own box was keep a window open tailing the apache log file. On my own server I could control how apache logged things. When hosting on my own box I have the freedom to configure it however I want. Apache has the ability to log with hostname lookup enabled at the time of logging. This is nice because when glancing at the logs, I want to see if a hit is from fbi.gov instead of something like 61.121.58.90.

1&1 has Apache configured such that it doesn’t log with hostname lookup. I found a way around this by piping the logs through a program designed specifically to address this (called ‘logresolve’). They probably don’t do DNS lookups for performance reasons. If it’s a high-traffic site you don’t want apache spending all of its time doing DNS lookups.

Fortunately 1&1 gives you direct read access to the access_log file from apache with all traffic to your site. Unfortunately, they have it on a daily rotation, so at midnight (EST), the log file is closed and rolled off and gzipped.

Originally I planned on just having a window sshed into my account on 1&1′s server. In that window, I would do a simple:

[code]tail -f `ls access.log* | tail -1` | jdresolve | colorize[/code]

To break it down, this would run a tail -f on the ‘last’ access_log file (since there are older, rolled-off, logs), then pipe it to jdresolve to replace the IP’s with vanity domain names, and then pipe it through colorizer to give the output in color.

All of this would run on the 1&1 server. After a while I realized that this wasn’t the best solution because the process would get killed after about four hours. I think they have something running to keep long-running processes from going on too long – I’m not sure.

I had also tried doing something with catting the access_log file to a named pipe and then working off of that, but that didn’t work too well either because jdresolve refused to even begin parsing until after the input file was closed, and the named pipe never closes. What a mess.

So I came up with another solution. From my local linux box, I will ssh into the 1&1 box and run a remote command (‘tail -f `ls access.log* | tail -1`’). I then pipe that output (locally) to logresolve and then pipe that output to colorize. So in essence, the only thing I’m doing remotely is a tail command. I’m doing all of the ‘heavy lifting’ (logresolve and colorize) locally. It works out fairly well.

One snag is that if I control-c out of the ssh remote command, it leaves the remote processes running in a zombie state that I have to manually kill. One way around this is to force pseudo-terminal allocation (with the -t switch for ssh), but that doesn’t work either because then my remote tail command gets killed after a while.

I didn’t have any meetings today at work which was a nice change. Things were a bit slow since it was the first day back from our holiday.

When I left work I went to the shopping center at the corner of Delk and Powers Ferry road and got a haircut. After the haircut, I went shopping.

I got very little sleep last night and was really dragging today. It was cold and rainy outside too. I also think I’m getting sick because my throat was really scratchy when I woke up. That’s usually the first sign for me whenever I get a throat infection.

I had a couple of afternoon meetings. One was to talk about a production problem that occurred Monday night with the MQ-series queues failing. We ended up losing tickets and needed to replay them. In the meeting, the MQ guys were expressing their frustration with IBM because we weren’t getting much support from them on this problem.

I skipped dinner and went to bed early.

The first thing I did this morning was to email some photos to Dad. When we were both in San Diego last, we went shooting with Larry and I photographed the occasion. Some of the photographs were of Dad and he requested that I send the pictures to him. I never got around to it – until today.

I heard a rumor this morning that many contractors (DT & Accenture) are going to be leaving at the end of the year or early next year. Something similar occurred shortly after 9-11.

I chatted with Larry a little and he told me a funny story: He ordered the Sigma 50-500mm lens from B&H using his AMEX and had it delivered to his office so his wife, Amy, wouldn’t know. Unfortunately B&H sent a confirmation email to their home address and Amy saw it. Poor Larry got busted! He told me that Amy now wants to buy some purse as retribution.

Today we took Brian out for lunch to celebrate his 34th birthday. We went to the Jamaican Caribbean restaurant on Old National highway. About 15 of us went. The food was pretty good. I had the Jerk Chicken (boneless) with coconut black beans and yellow rice. I must have been hungry because I completely cleaned off my plate – something I don’t usually do.

The weather forecast for tomorrow in St. Maarten is clear and 82 dressed Fahrenheit. In contrast, Atlanta is like 35 degrees and rainy and dreary and depressing. The flights look great this weekend to St. Maarten. It would be so incredibly easy for me to go out there tomorrow morning and come back Sunday night. I couldn’t find anyone to go with me, but am still considering making the trip alone.

So sometime last week I downloaded the ISO for MandrakeMove beta. It’s the latest in a growing niche Linux market of Live CDs. The cool thing about MandrakeMove is that it gives you the ability to use a bootable CD to boot into a fully-functional complete Linux environment without requiring a HD. This is the ultimate in disaster recovery or temporary portable OS. Another popular distribution based on the same LiveCD concept is Knoppix.

The cool thing about MandrakeMove is that you can use a USB flash drive (the keychain drive things) to store all of your personal settings and customizations. As I understand it, this means that the CD in conjunction with a small USB keychain drive (like 128MB) will allow you to carry around a bootable customized Linux OS anywhere you go. That’s a really cool concept (at least to geeky people)!

Unfortunately the beta version of MandrakeMove doesn’t provide the key-drive functionality so I wasn’t able to test it out. I’m worried that even only the ‘retail’ version will allow this type of functionality. I certainly hope that isn’t the case.

I ran over to Micro Center today to pick up a 256MB USB 2.0 flash drive. It is on sale and can be purchased for only $50 (when you use a $20 rebate). That’s a great deal. Unfortunately I procrastinated and didn’t make it over to Micro Center until around 5:15pm, close to closing time. The lady at the counter in the back told me that she’s sold all of their drives today! No flash drive for me.

I did Laundry throughout the day today.

I’m not sure how it happened but I started reading about a linux distribution called Gentoo. One of the unique things about Gentoo is that everything you install you actually compile from scratch – even the kernel. Now I’ve built kernels before so it’s that that big a deal to me. I’ve been pretty frustrated with dependency-hell with RPM’s in Mandrake and I think I might rebel against that.

Apparently Gentoo uses an advanced system called Portage which supposedly makes dependency problems a thing of the past. I spent a great deal of time reading the excellent documentation on the website and am seriously considering switching to Gentoo. I downloaded the two ISO’s so I’m good to go if I make the decision.

Do I really have the time to invest in building a Linux server from scratch? I’ve done a lot of tweaking and tuning to my existing server and now finally everything is running great. I even have automated daily security-patch updates handled by cron. Maybe that’s part of the reason I’m leaning toward starting over.

Would it be the excellent learning experience that I am trying to convince myself? Or would it just be another gigantic time sink for me to waste my time watching stuff compile every night? I can’t deny that I’m in a great position to undertake this project because the only thing I need my current server for is an IMAP server. I could live without email for a few days while I rebuilt a working gentoo.

As it is, I think I could safely experiment with it. I currently have two physical HD’s in my linux box:

[code]Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 17G 3.0G 13G 20% /
/dev/hdc1 43G 2.3G 41G 6% /home[/code]

I could temporarily move the /home mount point to hda1 and then make hdc1 my boot partition for playing with gentoo. If I decide it’s not for me, I can easily switch back. I think I may try that this week.

Tonight I bit the bullet and decided to install Gentoo. I knew that by doing this I was going to be investing a great deal of time with probably little tangible benefit.

My first task was to move my /home mount from my 40GB HD onto the older 17GB HD where the rest of my Mandrake 9.1 install is running. That task was relatively simple. I brought the system into single-user mode from the console (init 1), copied the whole /home tree over, renamed it, unmounted it, and then moved it into place.

I then physically switched the HD cables inside the case such that my old 17GB drive was sitting on the secondary controller and the larger 40GB HD was sitting on the primary controller. I then booted into the Gentoo LiveCD and followed the comprehensive installation instructions.

Everything went fine until I rebooted. As per the instructions, I created a small /boot partition on /dev/hda1, but it wouldn’t boot. This particular problem plagued me for the next 24 hours.

I actually didn’t go into work today. I woke up and felt pretty crappy – probably due to me staying up so late last night. I knew this project would be taxing.

When I wasn’t resting, I spent a lot of time getting my system in a working state. I got the networking working with no problems. I actually learned quite a bit. When I was running Mandrake, I had a problem with connection timeouts and solved it by running the shorewall firewall. I later found out (when tinkering with gentoo) that this particular problem was caused by not enabling the correct iptables settings for masquerading.

The UPS guy came today and dropped off the charger for my cell phone. It was great of Larry to ship it to me.

At one point, I was strongly considering scrapping my gentoo project and just switching back to Mandrake. It was pretty frustrating at some points to get things configured correctly but in the end I decided to stick with it and work through the problems, learning as I go.

I woke up at 6am this morning. After showering and packing, I kicked off a huge emerge to build gnome, kde, and openoffice. This was about 180 packages to build. I knew it would likely be going all weekend long.

I left the apartment at 7:30am and drove to my office where I picked up a shuttle bus to the airport. There was a very long line in the terminal for the international check in. I didn�t fancy waiting in line a long time, so I went through the airline employee line at security and on to the E concourse. There I went to the empty international check in counter and checked in for my flight.

After checking in, I called James on his cell phone since it was already beyond 9am. He was only now on the shuttle bus. I advised him to go straight to the E concourse due to the long lines in the terminal. I got some breakfast at the food court and then looked for an ATM.

There are only two ATM�s in the entire E concourse. One was unplugged and the other was out of service. No cash for me.

I went down to the gate (E1) and got my boarding pass (first class, seat 6B). I checked with the gate agent and James had not checked in yet. I called him up and he was just arriving in the concourse. I was a bit worried for him because I understood that you had to be checked in at lest an hour before departure for international flights and it was now about thirty minutes till departure and he wasn�t checked in yet.

In the end, everything worked out. I guess the one-hour rule didn�t apply in this case.

The flight was pretty good. I broke open book 9 of the Wheel of Time series. It started out strong, which was great. I�m pretty depressed because I know there is only one more book left in the series (so far). The in-flight movie was Tomb Raider 2. I didn�t watch it. I had three crown & cokes on the flight but then they ran out of Crown Royal! The horror! I had a jack & coke next but it just wasn�t the same and I couldn�t drink it.

I got about an hour of sleep on the 3.25-hour flight.

James & I were the first off the plane (down the steps � they don�t use jet ways in St. Maarten) and rushed towards immigration. We made it through immigration in record time and caught a taxi to the Maho Beach Hotel about a mile away.

We checked in and got the airliners rate which was about $90 for the night. Fortunately tonight is the last night before �high season� starts at which point the rates will be higher.

In the room, we changed out of our hot airplane clothes, applied some sunscreen, and headed out to the tiki bar. We�ve always called it that, but it�s really called the Sunset Beach Bar. We got there around 3pm.

For the rest of the day we sat around the bar, soaking up the sunshine, watching planes, and having drinks. It was nice and relaxing. My drink of choice was red bull & vodka. I sipped on several of these all day long.

(paradise)

At one point there was a tractor with four Santa�s in the scoop. They were raised up (in the scoop) and then turned around and mooned everyone. It was great fun.

(the mooning santas)

We sat at a table on one end of the deck with two couples from New York. The two I spoke with worked as editors for newspapers. The guy was an editor for the New York Times. We talked a little about the times and the Jayson Blair incident. It was pretty interesting, but the lady I was talking with had a it much to drink (so did I), so to an outsider the conversation probably sounded really lame � you know how it is.

(A fisheye view of the bar area with James & the people we talked with in the fireground)

As the day went on and it turned dark, I must admit that my memory got a bit fuzzy. I remember everything that went on, but am unable to recall some specific details. This upset met greatly because I remember a lady near us who took off her top and danced around, but that�s all I remember about it, no details! Later Casey would berate me for not getting a photo of the scene.

A while later I saw a guy (wearing a dorky photographers vest) walking around with a tripod and SLR. I approached him and attempted to engage him in conversation. I noticed he was using a Nikon system and asked if he was film or digital. He was film. From what little I remember, the guy was a bit standoffish and he walked away.

There was a live band and they were playing a lot of U2 and REM. It was good music. I had a great time.

(The live music)

Eventually James and I were hungry and left to get some dinner. We went back to the hotel and I dropped off my camera. We decided to go to the place we went to last time back in March. This was the place where Casey (who had too much to drink) got into an argument with the waitress about them not accepting American Express. The owner, an older French guy, was quite pleasant. I had the rack of Lamb. It was delicious!

After dinner we decided to head back to the hotel so I could rest my eyes for a bit before going back out. As we reached the street, I noticed some police men blocking off an area. Soon after that, a throng of dancers dressed up as Santa�s came running out into the street and danced to some tropical Christmas music. Most of the dancers were hot-looking girls wearing these skimpy thong-like Santa outfits. It was really fun to watch. Unfortunately I didn�t have my camera or else I would have caught the moment. I unsuccessfully tried to photograph the scene with my cell phone but it didn�t come out.

Back at the hotel I laid down on my bed to �rest my eyes� and James turned the TV to Minority Report. I fell asleep.

Thus began a very busy and hectic week. I’m not complaining, mind you, because I like being challenged and having work to do.

I knew this week would be very busy because we’re supposed to be entering system test for the 1.3 release this week. My how time flies. I seems just like yesterday that we were entering system test for the 1.2 release. Needless to say I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been for this. I really should have started the numerous tasks involved with getting our components ready for 1.3 as early as a couple of weeks ago. However last week I did enlist Ram’s help to consolidate all of the library changes for our huge dataservices component.

Larry is in New York city this week on a ‘business’ trip. He sent me this photo from his camera phone of B&H photo. He decided to go there in person to return his sigma 50-500mm lens.

(B&H Photo, New York City)

When he called me later today he told me that every single person working there were dressed as Jewish orthodox rabbi’s.

Today for lunch we kicked off our semi-annual ‘BBQ week’. We went to a place called ‘Dusty’s’ in God-know-what part of town. I think it was near little five points. Rodney, Brian, Casey, James, Alex, Keith, and I went. I had the shopped BBQ pork plate. It was ok. No one else liked their food. We developed a new rating scale and gave Dusty’s only four out of twelve ribs (as you know, a full rack of ribs is twelve ribs).

When I got home I received a call from Mom-Mom. She’s going to be coming to Atlanta for Christmas next week and is a bit concerned about her airline ticket. They gave her a seat assignment coming down here but not one for her return trip. Because I never purchase tickets, I don’t know if that’s normal. I offered to help and collected her ticket info. Once off of the phone with her, I called up the Delta reservations center where I interacted with a friendly guy named John. I explained the situation and he assured me that she would indeed have a guaranteed seat on her return trip. The confusion was that she’s currently assigned a seat at the front of the plane which is somewhat reserved for passengers using wheelchairs. That’s why they can’t give the seat assignment this early. I called her back and everything was good.

When she arrives on Monday I’m going to try to meet her at her gate at the airport to help out.

Late this evening I went to Publix to do my weekly grocery shopping.

Today we had an integration load but Jegan took care of it. I’ve been heads-down trying to get everything squared away for 1.3 system test. I either didn’t communicate it correctly or Ram didn’t understand me, because I couldn’t get him to synchronize the dataservices libraries. I asked him last week to do this and it still wasn’t done and I couldn’t wait any longer. I finally had to tell him that I would do it. It took me about fifteen minutes to get the appropriate list out to release engineering.

One of the big problems with the rigid processes we have in place is that it takes forever to get simple tasks done. The reason why it takes forever is because you have to rely on so many other groups & organizations to do things for you before you can do your own work. I’m able to work as much as I can, but I need something done which is honestly 45-seconds of work, but I end up burning half a day waiting for the other group to get around to processing my request. Even then they make me feel like they are doing me a favor because their ‘SIA’ is a 24-hour turnaround. What a mess! I wish I could put to words how inefficient this process feels. Something as simple as a code compile ends up taking literally a week because of all the bureaucracy I have to go through to get some very simple tasks done.

I was originally supposed to go volunteer at the Atlanta Food Bank today but I was so busy that I had to cancel. Carole ended up canceling too.

We broke away from ‘BBQ week’ today and went to the ‘BBQ Kitchen’. While it may be called ‘BBQ Kitchen’, it’s not really a BBQ place.

I ended up working very late to get as much work done as I could from our side. I left with several tasks queued up in front of the release engineering group (which could be completed in a matter of minutes if I had the access/authority but in reality will end up taking half a day).

I don’t know where the time went but I ended up going to bed early without dinner and without getting anything done. Maybe I should go back to school so I can actually accomplish stuff outside of work.

I got an email from Jenn last night. She’s doing well in Mexico and I think she’s having a good time. I didn’t get a chance to write back to her until this afternoon.

It’s pretty depressing to read the news as an IT worker these days. On Monday IBM announced that they were going to offshore 5,000 programmer/IT jobs to India and China. Today there were two more articles about offshoring. One predicted that the local IT industry would shrink by 25% in 2015. I think really need to look into switching careers.

Carole came by this morning to wish everyone a happy Christmas. She left early today and won’t be in the office next week. She gave me her cell number as well as her husband’s cell number in case I needed to reach her next week. In fact, a lot of people are going to be out next week and were saying their goodbyes today but I was mostly oblivious to it because I’ve been stressing about getting all of the revapps stuff into system test.

For lunch today we finally went to another BBQ place. Today we went all the way up to Roswell to Brian’s favorite place called Swallow at the Hollow. I finally figured out how to get there on my own this time. It’s very close to Stony River.

I had the chopped BBQ platter. It was so delicious! Our waitress was pretty cute. Some of the guys I went to lunch with were ogling over her and suggesting that I ask her out.

During lunch I had a pretty good conversation with Scott and Melissa about condos and town homes in the Vinings/South Cobb area.

This whole week I’ve been thinking about PVR’s. I looked into building my own but it didn’t seem feasible. I finally broke down and signed up for the $99 DirectTV/Tivo combo. They are supposed to come install early on Saturday, Jan 3rd. I wonder how long I can get away without having to pay the $100 deposit to Post?

Casey informed me that he was heading down to St. Maarten this weekend. I would love to go but I have other responsibilities. It’s been so cold I could really enjoy sitting out on the hot beach even if I was there just a week ago.

I worked late again today – until about 7pm. I did managed to get all of our components built, deployed, and activated in system test. It was a nice feeling to get it done finally.

Before I left, I spent some time with Jegan helping him out with computer assembly. I opened up the tower he has at work and walked through the anatomy of the components and such. He seems pretty excited about the project – I don’t blame him.

On my way home from work I stopped in the Vinings area to buy some gift certificates. Before leaving there, I went to the Vinings Publix to buy all of my Christmas cards. It was quite evident that the Vinings Publix location has a lot of young & attractive women – much more so than the one near where I live. It was like a candy store!

I also called Dad and asked him if I could come visit him in Austin tomorrow. He seemed fine with that idea, so I’ll be taking the 11:40am flight tomorrow morning.

I’m using MS Office 2003. One of the new features of Outlook 2003 is the built-in spam filter. It was amusing and ironic to see that the built-in Outlook spam filter caught & filtered out an advertisement email from Microsoft!

Finally, I saw a funny image from the wacky people at PETA:

I wish they weren’t so extreme, because they might actually gain some credibility otherwise.

I must have been very tired because I didn’t wake up until 9am. It’s been a long time since I’ve had 11 hours of sleep. I wonder if it has anything to do with my bed back home in the apartment. Dad reminded me that the bed I sleep on back home is about 14 years old. I can’t wait to get a new bed, but must wait until I move.

Shortly after I woke up, I got a page from Carole. She was paged by the TCC about an MQTux problem on one of the ODE servers. I looked into it from the application side and everything seemed fine. I called the TCC and advised them to page ODE.

We went to a local Mexican place for breakfast. I had two bacon, egg, cheese, and potato breakfast tacos. They were indeed delicious!

After breakfast we went back to Dad’s place and sat outside in the backyard for a while. It was nice seeing Tex and Hicks again. Tex hasn’t changed at all. He’s still a highly-energetic, excited lanky black lab who loves to play with a ball. Hicks, my favorite cat, is laid back and always sleeps in the same location.

We talked about going to the South Congress area to get some lunch and check out the shops. Before doing that, however, we decided to head to Mt. Bonnell. Mt. Bonnell is really cool because it’s a park high up overlooking the lavish Lake Austin. We drove up highway 360 and then on route 2222 in order to reach the entrance.

Once there, we climbed the 100 steps to the top and gazed out towards the city. There is a spectacular view of Austin city skyline from one particular vantage point. Despite being a ‘winter’ day, the sky wasn’t crisp and clear enough for the downtown view to be sharp, but nonetheless, it’s a nice view.

Looking down on Lake Austin, one can see the lavish homes built right up on the lake. Looking northward up the lake, you can also see the famous 360 bridge in the distance.

(Lake Austin)

(Some cool houses on Lake Austin)

After Mt. Bonnell, we drove a short distance to a coffee shop (also on Lake Austin) called Mozart’s. It was filled with people either reading book, or hacking away at their laptops. I’ve been to Mozart’s once before when I was a student at the University of Texas. I went on a cold winter night with my friend from high school, Sommer Bender, and some oh her friends. My memories of that night were pretty vivid and I remember having a really great time with them.

Dad had a cappuccino and I had iced tea. I wasn’t too impressed with the tea. It was a red ‘hibiscus’ tea. We sat outside near the lake and talked for a while.

By this time, it was well past noon and I suggested that we go to Iron Works BBQ for lunch. Dad seemed to like this idea too, so we headed into town on Caesar Chaves road (1st street). When we arrived at Iron Works, unfortunately, we discovered that they are not open on Sunday.

Dad suggested that we head down to the south congress area and look for a place to eat there. When we arrived at that area, we saw lots of shops and a few restaurants. I think Dad had a specific place in mind, because he wanted to go on for a while. Eventually he found it: A place called Habana.

It’s a really cool Cuban restaurant with a lot of atmosphere. We ate at the indoor patio part. We both had the Lechon Asado (with Yuca con Mojo). This pork dish is really great. They slow roast the pork for 8 hours and it comes out so tender it falls apart. I was pretty impressed.

After the late lunch we went back to the main south congress area and parked. We walked around for about an hour looking in the various shops. Most of it was antique-type stuff. To me, it looked like a bunch of junk that people would normally throw away. But because it’s from the early 80′s some consider it retro-cool and pay lots of money for it. Indeed, there were many student-types around buying up all of this garbage. I admit some of it was cool but it was all mostly junk.

When I came across a bunch of old presidential campaign pins, I thought of Larry and his collection of Reagan and Bush pins.

Around 3:45 we left and Dad drove me to the airport. He dropped me off and I made my way to the small Delta ticket counter to check in. When I got to the gate, I thought I had a decent chance at first class. However, the gate agent continually came on the intercom inviting people to upgrade to first class for only $75.

I got assigned seat 10A, back in coach. Sitting next to me was a really cute girl, and next to her was a guy with a bad leg. For about half of the flight the guy decided to tell us the story of his near-death experience where he found God. I feared that I would have a repeat of my Jehovah Witness incident when I was traveling to Hawaii earlier this year. Fortunately he wasn’t the ‘pushy’ religious type and didn’t press the issue after telling his story (i.e. he didn’t tell us that we would burn in hell if we didn’t join his church).

The flight seemed short, mostly I think because I rally got into my book. When we arrived in Atlanta, I made my way to the ground transportation and eventually onto the shuttle bus. Before the bus left, Casey came walking on too, sporting a fresh tan. We walked about his trip to St. Maarten and the great time he had. I was pretty jealous.

A while back, some of the server admins instituted an auto-logout rule for sessions idle more than eight hours on the development boxes. Part of me likes this change because the boxes are pretty resource strained. The other part of me hates this change because it’s a pain in the ass.

My normal desktop consists of three SecureCRT windows:

1) Logged into my home PC (running screen)
2) Logged into ddt230 (our development server) running a screen session with two screens for coding & compiling, a screen for merging, a screen for ddt21m (core file anaylsys), and a screen for dst200 (system test) support.
3) Logged into ddt230 – but only for screen. I have six screens, each going to one of the six production nodes.

I also have a detached screen that just like #3 but for integration test.

I actually use all of these logins (at least for #2 and #3). When I leave for the day, they all get logged out and I have to spend about fifteen minutes restoring everything the next day. Even though they are detatched screen sessions, the zelous auto-logout of our HPUX system still manages to kill the sessions. It’s also a pain in the ass because I left to pick up exactly where I left off the day before. It’s actually a pretty significant producvitiy loss for me.

One way to combat this is to issue a simple ‘cat’ in each session before I leave for the day, but I often forget to do this. Running ‘cat’ effectively locks the terminal or at least fools the process into thinking I’m not idle.

This morning when I came into work, I saw that all my sessions were blown away because I forgot to ‘cat’ in each window the night before. Enough is enough. I did some googling for a solution but couldn’t come up with anything. I managed to come across something relating to the latest version of screen (4.x) with a new ‘idle’ feature that will execute a command after n-number of seconds have passed since going idle. This looked like the automated solution I sought.

I downloaded and compiled the latest version of screen and spent the rest of the day playing with it. Unfortunately they ‘idle’ feature didn’t look as if it would work for my needs. I’ll have to come up with something else.

Nonetheless, I learned a lot more about screen and how to configure it. There is a way to resurrect killed windows, so there still may be hope. I just wish there was a way to circumvent the auto-logout thing, it’s driving me crazy.

All over the news tonight were reports of the Mad Cow disease being discovered in Washington Sate. I think they are blowing it out of proportion. Tomorrow could be a buying opportunity for cattle/beef related stocks who will undoubtedly take a hit at the opening of trading.

Also tonight around 7pm, for about three hours I was without my high-speed internet access! It was horrible. I started to get the shakes from withdrawal. Well no not really. Broadband is a basic necessity like water and electricity, isn’t it? I managed to still do some stuff on the internet by way of my cell phone & Bluetooth connection. It’s pretty cool.

I slept in a little today which felt nice. I checked the playtimes for Lord of the Rings: Return of the King and decided to go to the 11:15am showing. I’ve never been to the movies by myself before so this was a new experience.

The movie was great, although quite long. Before the movie started I saw the preview for the next Harry Potter movie (The Prisoner of Azkaban). I can’t wait to see that movie too. Listening to the books has given me a great appreciation for the series.

After the movie I went back to my place and called Dad. He was in San Antonio with all of the family. I thought they were doing the Christmas thing tomorrow, but I guess I was wrong. We didn’t talk very long because it was loud there and we couldn’t hear each other very well.

I cleaned out the containers that Mom had given me from Thanksgiving and then rushed over to her house. When I got there, Mom gave me a hard time about waiting so long to clean out the containers from Thanksgiving. She accused me of not eating any of the leftovers.

While Mom and Mom-Mom bustled around in the kitchen, I sat in the living room with Jim and we watched the first Lord of the Rings movie (which was playing on the television).

Shortly after the movie was over, two friends of Mom and Jim came over. I can’t remember their names but they were pleasant. A short while after they came over, we went into the family room and exchanged gifts which were under the tree.

I got socks (which I need), a gift certificate to Galyan’s, a gift certificate to Best Buy (which will come in quite handy as I need to replace my broken television), ‘Matrix Reloaded‘ DVD, and from Larry & Amy a framed 8×10 portrait of his family. The picture looked really good and I spent some time studying it to try to determine if it was digital or not. I couldn’t tell.

(Mom opening something)

After this, we all made our way into the living room where we went through our stockings. I had a lot of stocking stuffers: Some chocolate candy, some candy nerds, a snake bite kit, a travel first aid kit, shoe insert warmers, a sports watch thing, and a lighter.

By this time, the food was ready and it was quite a spread! We had port roast, lima beans, mashed potatoes, gravy, apple sauce, broccoli & cheese, bread, and cherry pie.

Larry Called to wish us all a merry Christmas. When he spoke with me, he asked how I liked the 50mm lens. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said that he shipped the lens (Canon 50mm f/1.8) to Mom’s house and It was to be my Christmas present from them. See, earlier he told me that he was shipping something to Mom for him, but she wasn’t around on Tuesday when they first attempted to deliver it. So he had me check with Mom on Wednesday to make sure it arrived. When I spoke to Mom on Wednesday she told me that it did arrive, but I think she was mistaken or confused because it obviously did not arrive. We decided that we’ll wait for tomorrow when they should attempt to deliver it again.

When we finished dinner, we sat in the living room for a while and then I took Mom-Mom back to her hotel. After this, I went back to my apartment.

I ended up staying awake late into the night. Tonight TorilMUD started their once-a-year ‘chaos christmas’ thing where player-killing is turned on for the day. It’s a lot of fun. When I logged in, I was invited to join up with a large hunting party so I didn’t pass up the opportunity.

My alarm went off at 6am and I snoozed it two times which means that I really got up at 6:30am. I threw on some clothes and stepped out into the bitter cold morning. Its mornings like this that I’m so happy to have the ‘premium’ car stuff like seat warmers.

I briefly toyed with the idea of going down to St. Maarten this weekend since I would be at the airport anyway, but when I checked the standby list this morning, there were only a few seats left and about 30 ‘HK’ (revenue) standbys. I wouldn’t have made it on the plane anyway.

I arrived at Mom-Mom’s hotel at 7am on the nose. She seemed surprised that I was there on time; I guess I have a reputation for being late? I went with her to check out and then loaded her stuff in the back of my explorer.

Traffic was ridiculously light this morning and we got to the airport very quickly. Once we reached the airport, it was pretty congested. Because we’re at fear level: orange, they are doing car inspections. I got picked to have my car inspected. I guess my old grandmother looked sinister enough to warrant a search – I feel safer already.

Once we got past the silly inspection, I was eventually able to maneuver my car to the curb where I let Mom-Mom out and told her that I would meet her inside the terminal once I parked the car. I drove around and parked in the short-term parking lot.

After parking, I walked into the terminal and searched for Mom-Mom among the sea of people. Once I found her, I led her over to a kiosk and asked to see her credit card. Even though she didn’t purchase the ticket with that credit card, we could still use it to pull up her itinerary. Swiping the card simply reads the persons name encoded in the magnetic strip. Doing this revealed her itinerary and we printed out her boarding pass.

With the boarding pass in hand, we made our way over the wheelchair area and requested a wheelchair assist for her. It was pretty busy there and we had a seat while we waited. Eventually the lady called us up and had a wheelchair waiting. We got her seated and I said my goodbyes to her. I was going to try to accompany her to the gate, but she seemed happy enough going with the person pushing the wheelchair.

I think this was the first time in a very long time that I’ve been to the airport wearing such casual clothes (tennis shoes, jeans, t-shirt). I got back in my car and drove home.

Once I got home, I undressed and climbed into bed and fell asleep. While sleeping, I had a weird dream (what dreams aren’t weird?). I was driving away from the airport and James was following me in his car. We were then pulled over by unmarked police cars and then they started shooting at us but I ran away – or something like that. I got about two hours of sleep.

When I woke up, I replaced my pager battery and got a stored page from Carole that she sent yesterday. She noticed that the ticket flow was turned off in production and wanted to know why. I replied that it was a planned outage because of the DB2 reorg RFC. I never heard back from her.

After missing each other a few times, I finally caught Jenn online the same time I was. She’s currently down in Guadalajara. She gave me a number to call so that I can talk with her, but she won’t be at that location until Jan 1st, so maybe I’ll try to call then.

My apartment is very messy right now. I have everything sitting on the floor from my entertainment center when I removed the TV. I need to do some major cleaning.

(my messy apartment)

When I was playing around with the new 50mm lens, Larry called. He was with the family at the beach and wanted to see how I was doing. He suggested going outside and photographing some stuff. That’s not a bad idea. Despite being a cold time of year today it’s sunny and clear and around 60 degrees.

(A wide-open (f/1.8) shot of my Abercrombie sweater draped across the sofa.)

I spent most of the day today doing research online for a replacement television. I’ve decided that I won’t buy anything from Philips Magnavox again. Both my VCR and TV were that brand and both died around the same time (about 5 years after purchase). In fact, thanks for my anal-retentive recordkeeping, I was able to find the original transaction in my MS Money database. I purchased the TV & VCR on May 17th, 1998 from Best Buy for $524.95.

I don’t want to spend much money on a replacement television. I want to get the same size (27-inch) as before but something with at least one s-video input. As I began researching I was happy to see many 27-inchers in the range of $200-$300. Unfortunately all of them had just one s-video input. I want more than once as the Tivo unit will plug into one and then I want to plug my computer into the other (since I play DVD’s through my computer’s MPEG decoder card). Right now I connect my computer to my video system via a crappy RCA plug which isn’t great quality.

So, I started to research a new receiver that would accommodate my s-video needs. This didn’t turn out so well. All of the receivers I found to meet this requirement were at least $250. It isn’t worthwhile to replace a perfectly-good receiver at this time just for that.

Then I found a 27-inch ‘flat-screen’ television with two s-video inputs at Circuit City for only $250. The brand is ‘Apex’, and I’ve never heard of it before. I began researching. About half the people think Apex is utter crap and the other half think its fine. Someone cited a decent Consumer Reports ranking of television brands, and Apex was dead last.

I was seriously considering buying the Apex anyway but noticed that it is a bit wider than most other 27-inchers. In fact, it is one-inch too wide to fit in my enclosed entertainment center. So if I get it, I’ll need to buy a new TV stand/entertainment center. That doesn’t sound too good either. The flat-screen TVs are supposed to offer a much superior picture quality than others.

Now I’m back to considering getting a simple cheap 27-inch tube TV with only one s-video input. I figure I can find an s-video splitter or at least an extension cord that I can manually swap the tivo & computer connections when I need. Or I can go back to using the crappy RCA-video plug from my PC.

I have a few options:

1) Get a regular 27-inch television with one s-video input and possibly an s-video extender. This is the most inexpensive solution.
2) Get a regular 27-inch television with one s-video input as well as a new receiver. This would solve my s-video problem and possibly give me an option to run a digital sound connection from the PC to receiver instead of an analog audio connector.
3) Take my chances and get the Apex 27-inch flat screen TV as well as a new TV-stand to put it on.

I’m still not sure which solution I’ll settle on.

I did some work on my gentoo installation and added a daily 5am cronjob to emerge sync and then email me a list of any new versions of packages I have installed. If I like how it looks, I may automate it further to automatically emerge the new packages too.

I also wrote an init.d script to automatically smbmount my freeside backup share at bootup so I don’t have to do it manually. Lastly, I patched ebuild.sh to run emerge compiles through colorgcc for colorized error and warnings.

I started to get sick today. I had a scratchy throat and clogged sinuses. Before bed I took a Mucophen pill and some Sudafed.

I had a restless sleep last night. Softly after I went to bed, I felt really thirsty so I got up and poured myself a glass of water to keep on the nightstand. I woke up a few times during the night because of thirst.

My alarm went off at 5am and I finally got up at 5:30am. I made it into work a little before 7am. When I arrived, I slipped a Christmas card for Carole under her door since she wasn’t in yet.

I got quite a bit accomplished today. I went through 700+ emails in my inbox and pruned it down to about 30. I removed Sandeep from the ClearCase daily report, patched the tuxedo ‘slowbounce’ script to fix a potential bug, audited the system test 1.3 RET components, versions, and paths, and updated the state of the four components recently deployed to production.

I left work at 4pm and headed straight to Best Buy. It was very crowded. I couldn’t decide between the Sharp 27-inch and the Toshiba 27-inch. It was moot though because I couldn’t get anyone to help me. After about twenty minutes of trying to get help, I left in disgust.

From Best Buy I went to Circuit City just down the street. I had my eye on a new Panasonic 27-inch and spotted it along the rows of televisions. As I stood there examining the picture, trying to see whatever it is that one is supposed to see that makes one set ‘better’ than the other, I noticed that this particular unit had a problem! It would toggle between color and monochrome. So much for Panasonic being the best quality in televisions. I left Circuit City in disgust.

Just like the past two evenings, I had Christmas dinner leftovers. I finished up the ham tonight. That sure was good ham, much better than spam!

I configured my dhcpd server which was a piece of cake since I cheated and used my old mandrake 9.1 configuration file. One thing I dislike is that you have to specify the nameservers in the dhcpd config file. This means that my nameservers are hard coded in two locations instead of one. I know a solution would be to run my own DNS server (even if it just relays) but I don’t want to do that. I also fixed my postfix configuration. I had problems with it not working correctly when I put in my new hostname (billimek.dyndns.org) for turing. Postfix insisted on calling my box localhost.billimek.dyndns.org, even though I took the ‘localhost.’ out of the $destination tag. I fixed this by creating /etc/host.conf and said the search order to be host before bind, which resulted in postfix querying /etc/hosts before going to DNS. In /etc/hosts, I put an entry for localhost.billimek.dyndns.org. Problem solved.

I took my last two Nyquil gelcaps around 9pm and about thirty minutes later I felt the effects (just like last night).

Yet again last night I had a bizarre dream. This time I was sitting on a plane as it was taxiing down the runway. All of a sudden, a lot of passengers began to scream and cry out. Outside the window I could see downtown burning and on fire as if in great destruction.

I guess the fear level: orange is affecting my dreams too.

I woke up later today, around 8am. The good thing is that I got a lot of sleep, but I still wasn’t feeling too hot. I made a command decision not to go to San Antonio. It’ll be an exciting new years even for me sitting at home all alone!

I made it into work around 9:15am. As soon as I got in, I started working on resuming the RET builds that RAM initiated yesterday afternoon.

It quickly became apparent that something was wrong so I investigated and realized that the initial code merge yesterday was done incorrectly. This frustrated me because it meant a lot more time-consuming, tedious work.

I called upon Sameer to see if we can try out his secret Java project code-named Buretoh (Build Using RET Over Http). He was more than happy to help and we sat down together and tweaked some XML files with the updated components and dependencies. Once we got all of that worked out, we kicked off a top-down build using Sameer’s tool.

At 11:20am a large group of us left for lunch. Today we took Bob Jones out to Longhorn steakhouse to bid him farewell. Today is his last day with the company. He got a job with Home Depot and will be starting next week. Bob was a great guy to work with and I’ll miss him.

After lunch I gave Casey a lift to the airport for his Memphis trip.

When I got back to the office, we had an email letting us know that we can leave today at 1pm if we want since its new years eve. I’ve actually started to feel better too. I changed my mind about San Antonio and called Craig. He seemed happy that I could make it after all. Of course I didn’t plan on going so I didn’t bring a change of clothes or any toiletries. I did have a spare toothbrush and toothpaste in my desk which I stuffed into my backpack.

I checked the status of the San Antonio flight and it didn’t look s good. There were three or four people ahead of me on the standby list and only one seat left on the small 50-seat CRJ. I didn’t have anything to lose so I tried anyway.

The flight was scheduled to leave at 5:30pm so I didn’t leave work until around 4:20pm. Jegan gave me a lift to the airport.

Fortunately I made it on the flight. In fact, there were several empty seats, I don’t know what happened. I sat in the very first row up against the bulkhead so I couldn’t stretch my legs. Those tiny CRJ’s sure are uncomfortable to fly in! The flight attendant was nice to me though, she gave me extra bags of peanuts and refills on my ginger ale.

(We took off right around sunset)

As we made our final approach into the San Antonio airport I couldn’t see anything but clouds. It was a little eerie not being able to see the runway until we almost touched down.

It was a lot warmer in San Antonio than Atlanta. I’m glad I didn’t bring my coat along. Craig picked me up a few minutes after I got outside. With him was his new girl, Julie.

(Julie)

Julie lives in Pennsylvania and is in San Antonio for about a week to visit Craig. She’s a really great girl and I’m proud of Craig. I hope this one works out.

When we got to Craig’s place Alex was in the study browsing Ebay. We talked at great length about speakers and receiver and amps and such.

A couple of hours later more people arrived. I’ve never met any of the new people before, but they were all friends of Craig. We had a great time making merry.

Craig prepared a special drink which tasted much like orange Kool-Aid. The only difference is that it also had everclear in it, but it was quite tasty. Julie wanted to get some pictures with her camera so I decided to bust out mine too and snap some photos.

(Me, Craig, and Alex)

(Craig & Julie)

(Craig’s Dog, Splyph)

(Alex and Laura having a private conversation)

(Kyla)

(Kyla was playing with my camera and snapped this photo of me)

I spent most of my time talking to Julie and then later Kyla.

Around 4:30am the party died down and people either left or were going to sleep. I also went to bed. But before I went to bed, one of the effeminate guys (who was probably a bit wasted) made an indecent proposal to me. I refused.