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| Tuesday January 30, 2007 | Posted at 8:05 am | |
| Black Tuesday... | ||
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Microsoft Vista goes on sale in something like 70 countries today... Mama, don't let yer babies grow up to run winblows.... Seriously, if you gotta have it, at least wait for the first service pack to come out. Oh yeah, it is already in the works and due out towards the end of this year. How sick is that! They found enough holes in the software to already plan the first service pack BEFORE the OS hits the mainstream. Sure some businesses have been using it for a while, but many, and I repeat, MANY companies are not loading Vista. There simply is no good and compelling reason too.... |
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| Sunday January 28, 2007 | Posted at 11:05 am | |
| Another project... NASCAR-Fans.com | ||
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Besides the Great Northern Beer Festival website, and a bunch of other little things keeping me amused and working, I have finally, after many, many, many years of ownership, finally launched NASCAR-Fans.com. For now it is a place where I can go and rant, rave, and not be mindful that I am typing a post for a family site, about all things related to NASCAR. As I eluded to in previous posts out here, I love racing... Many years ago, long before the term blog became mainstream I had always had a "What's Happening" page to discuss family stuff. Plus, I also kept two sections for NASCAR and the Packers on the site and I would post comments about the past weeks event. I had schedules, who won/lost, and tons of opinion on both the beloved Packers and NASCAR. In the early days it was a manual HTML edit process and was too much work. As my web database experience grew, so too did the technology that drives the site, but it was still time consuming to do and ate up space on this page. I had originally intended for NASCAR-Fans.com to be more of a NASCAR portal where I could have related ads, forums, etc... I ditched the forums idea because I really don't give a crap about other peoples opinions and traditionally those type of public forums become a place of flame wars and viagra spamming... Not for me. I like to write... I like for people to read my writing, so I decided that I would make it a blog site. I was going to use the same application that I created for making Huml.org, but I wanted more options and I was too lazy to write the code to create those options. So I decided on WordPress... It is available as an installable application on my web server with the Fantastico add-on software available for cPanel. Shameless plug ahead: So remember boys and girls, sign up for a web hosting package with me, and you too will get all kinds of freely installable software... WordPress is just the tip of the iceberg... We'll see how NASCAR-Fans.com evolves... If anything, it gives some separation from my family site... After all the geek crap I have been spouting off here lately I should probably get NerdBoyFromCrandoon.com and setup a blog there too, huh? I am also working on another little side project... I leaked a bit about it in a previous post... Did you notice it? |
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| Saturday January 27, 2007 | Posted at 9:48 am | |
| More Geek Speak Ahead... | ||
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This past week was a breakthrough week at work... I've been working on getting a Linux distro that will run Coldfusion MX installed for a few weeks now. I really want to run CentOS as I have read nothing but good things about it, plus, my own web server, which is serving this web page and the web pages of my many happy customers, runs CentOS. I had one of our old web servers, a Dell Poweredge 2450 brought to my cube. Everyone I work with hates that thing! We work in a closed room that is about 24-26 feet square and have taller cube walls setup... I have to get up on tippy toes to easily look over. Anyway, these old pizza box servers have plenty of fans and they are NOT built for quiet... I've offered to eagerly move into my own private office, but that ain't happening! Anyway, enough about the co-workers wanting to kill me... I was having FITS getting CentOS installed, so I gave up... The real goal of this whole exercise is to see if I can successfully get out website, which runs on Windows operating system, running on a Linux box with Coldfusion. I then tried Fedora Core 6. This is supposed to be identical in almost nearly every way to Red Hat Enterprise, a little more bleeding edge, kinda like a BETA for RHEL. RHEL is supposed to support installation of the Coldfusion Linux binaries. Yeah, it really doesn't... I literally spent days getting Fedora Core 6 running on the old clunky hardware. As long as I kept seeing progress, I kept at it... But after a few days trying to resolve all the library and Java dependency errors I was getting just trying to install Coldfusion, I gave up on Fedora Core 6. I then tried Ubuntu server, just for kicks... What the hell, I figure Ubuntu installed so nicely on my laptop and found all the hardware without issue, maybe, just maybe I could get it running on the Powerturd! Installation was a SNAP! A few slight issues, but nothing that was causing me fits... Until that is, I tried installing Coldfusion... DAMNIT! We have licensed copies of Coldfusion MX 6.1 server, which has been my main focus. However, I also had been trying to install the 30 day trial of Coldfusion MX 7 as well. Who knows, if 7 is the only version we can install, then we can think about upgrading. But, we just made a HUGE purchase in a new database cluster, I don't think they will wanna spend anymore money, haha. Neither Coldfusion 6 or 7 worked on Ubuntu. I had literally read every bloggers page and every support page I could find trying to get this stuff installed. Mind you, I was also working on other projects so it wasn't like three total weeks dedicated to trying, entire days would go by where I wouldn't touch it. Fighting fires takes priority:) My boss suggested we look at Oracle Linux which is identical to Red Hat, but much cheaper. I was reading through documentation on the install and it looked ok... What the hell, burn the 4 cd's and start the install. Hmmm, it has the same problem that CentOS did, when trying to install!! It would make it to "running /sbin/loader" and hang up. Crap! What is it with these friggin distros based on Red Hat that will not run on the Poweredge. I started doing more research, read googling, for a solution! In a thread I was reading, someone asked this person who was having my problem if they had a USB mouse. He suggested that if you had a USB mouse you should disable the USB mouse in the BIOS and use a serial mouse. WTF? Could this have been my problem all along?? A friggin $2 Dell Optical mouse made by Loogeytech? I hit up our MIS Techs for a PS2 mouse, of which, there was none. But, they did have one of those adapters that converts a USB mouse to PS2. What the hell, better than nothing, I better try it. Hooked it up, went into the install of Oracle Linux and made it past "running /sbin/loader". HOLY CRAP! It was the friggin mouse!! I would have never suspected... I honestly thought it was the Perc controller. After all, I had tried a few installs with different boot options and always had some issue with the drives... So now I got into the install screens, but my mouse refused to work... During that time, an MIS Tech found me a real PS2 mouse! A vintage mouse to go along with the vintage hardware. This server was a top performer when I first worked for this company back in 2001. Now you can't hardly give them away... So, I was happier than hell!! I immediately booted the CentOS install disk with the new mouse and had the whole server up and running, sans Coldfusion, within an hour or so. Who would have thunk it! A stupid mouse! That is why I am blogging about this! My site gets tons of hits everyday from Google based on my content. Maybe, just maybe, my writing about this here might help some poor emmer effer server dude find a solution to his/her problem. If it does help you, use the contact link under the Live Help section at the bottom of the nav links to let me know! This is getting pretty long... Time to wrap this up... Coldfusion 6 still would not install on CentOS 4. However, Coldfusion 7 did! And, a few hours later, I had most of our website running on it! Major victory!! But, the company would still prefer to save a ton of money by not upgrading all our Coldfusion server licenses. So, next week I will be trying to install CentOS 2 or 3 and Coldfusion 6. One of the last errors I received was along the lines that GLIBC was having a cow over a version mismatch. I did some reading and I think I might actually have to downgrade the GLIBC version. I have some pretty good Linux knowledge, but I am no guru. As a matter of fact, most Linux admins would probably say that I know enough to be very, very dangerous. |
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| Thursday January 25, 2007 | Posted at 9:44 pm | |
| Tips for Web Developers seeking employment!! | ||
Wow... We lost one of our co-workers this week to the lure of the big city and big money, not too mention a warmer climate... My boss asked me to review some of the resumes he had received that were looking for work as a "Web Developer". I was astonished, for the most part, to read these so called resumes and cover letters. Shocked may be a better word for it... So for all you hot shot programmers, here are a few tips on how you might want to present a better resume!!
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| Thursday January 25, 2007 | Posted at 9:13 pm | |
| Great Northern Beer Festival | ||
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I have been busy the last week or so, much is happening, both at work and at home... I have been working with Bill to get the Great Northern Beer Festival site up and running. If you've been stopping by here for any length of time, you know I am all about the beer, haha... The Great Northern Beer Festival is going to be one helluva event! The committee members are feverishly planning and getting details ironed out! I am once again providing my expertise, haha, towards the effort. Check out the newly launched site and if you have the means to get to Eagle River for this years event, I strongly encourage you to do so! If you have a website and you would be willing to help them out by adding a link, please visit this page. Proceeds from the not-for-profit event are donated to local charities and organizations! I am sure that BP South and I will once again be there on June 9th! Come hang out with the BP's and drink some beer, you know you wanna!!! |
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| Wednesday January 17, 2007 | Posted at 9:27 pm | |
| In Memoriam ~ Benny Parsons (BP) | ||
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The real BP passed away the other day after a battle with lung cancer, he was 65 and had had his last cigarette in 1978. Newer readers to the site may not realize it, but I am a huge racing junkie... I just love nearly all forms of racing. Hell, gimme enough beer to endure it and I'll watch a couple of roaches race!! Back 3, 4, 8 years ago I would make regular comments out here about each weeks race and the happenings with NASCAR. I stopped doing that after it began feeling like a chore. But usually, when something big happens in the sport, I'll still comment on it here. I own a domain that is totally geared towards NASCAR. Someday I will work on that, right after the 20 other domains get some useful content on them. Anyway, if you ever watched a race, and if you were a real fan of racing, you probably loved BP. He wasn't a commentator with an agenda or some gimmick he was trying to promote. Nope, he was a real race fan! You get most of those clowns from FOX all trying to position themselves for some other "deal" outside of NASCAR. Not BP, he was one of the "real" people in NASCAR. It is a shame to have lost him, race broadcasts will never be the same. This is the second NASCAR racing figure to die in as many weeks. Bobby Hamilton passed away a few weeks back due to head and neck cancer at 49. That cancer is some kind of nasty!! Michelle bought this (NSFW, BAD LANGUAGE AHEAD), pretty much sums it all up. When she is done with that we'll hang it by the big ugly fish on the wall here in the office. Check out the tribute to BP over at NASCAR.com. Also, he had his own site and a blog, check out BennyParsons.com. Godspeed, Benny!! |
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| Monday January 15, 2007 | Posted at 9:04 pm | |
| Quickie... | ||
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Yup, still alive! I didn't slip on the ice and break anything this year. However, the ankle that I badly sprained there last year seems to remember and was sore most of the weekend. Still is... Who knows, old age... We had a blast and got blasted. Jimmy came up with a great way to drink beer that is partially frozen! Just slam the can back and when the ice block slams up into the top of the can all the beer will come streaming out!! Chug-a-lug that goodness down and voila, no more beer creeping out the top from the expanding ice! Only the really cheap beer iced up, the Jimmy beer... No wonder he had the solution!! A big huge thanks to Porn Star, the lovely Mrs. Porn Star, Joz, and Lynn for the excellent hospitality and warm trailer to hang out in!!! A super big thanks to BP and Jimmy for letting me have the bed, haha... Also, a huge thanks to them for the constant entertainment, especially the 2 AM giggle-fest... I haven't laughed so much in, well, about a year since we last did this!! All kinds of stuff happening and moving in the web world both at work and home... Just got done with about 4-5 hours of stuff for my biz, time to go hang with Michelle for a few minutes and then head to bed. We'll catch up with you all in a couple days. Hopefully I will have something to write about by then. |
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| Wednesday January 10, 2007 | Posted at 10:29 pm | |
| GEEK CONTENT AHEAD... Leave if you're scared:) | ||
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I have been working real hard on not booting into Winblows!! Short of ripping a few movies onto DVD, I have not had to. I still have to boot Winblows at work but, I now have a Dell 2450 server sitting on the cube floor and I have been working on getting Fedora Core 6 loaded onto it. I had wanted to use CentOS, but there are some issues with the Dell Poweredge servers and CentOS. We may eventually lean towards Red Hat Enterprise, but in the interest of speed and the ever popular "comfort factor" I have chosen Fedora Core 6, code named Zod. Why? Because I am using it at home on the desktop and laptop and have been pretty happy with my results. The 2450 is an old hunk and I have been battling my share of hardware demons... Most notably issues with assigning a static IP... A task that only took a few seconds at home would up being a major headache at work! DHCP, no problem... Assigning a static ip, HUGE problem. And the weirdest thing was that the problems I was having made no sense! The adapter would be fine, I would /etc/init.d/network restart and it came up... Reboot, and lose it... Started checking the ifcfg-eth0 file and everything was cool as hell, looked good... Open a terminal and hit a simple ping to my desktop machine and get 'network unreachable'. Yikes... Seems to be all fixed up as of when I left today. Before that was video issues... DANG! Old hardware sucks! I can't wait until we get our new SQL cluster and I can get my chubby little digits on one of those nice servers that we're going to decommission from the SQL to web world!! I would get a login screen that was unreadable... I think Jeff at BZT had this issue too! I found out why, Jeff! haha... The display depth was set for 24 bits... No way that old hardware was gonna do it, so time to boot Linux into rescue mode and edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. While I was in there I added the refresh rate stuff and screen size modes because I knew that too would be a headache. I think I would up booting rescue mode a number of times... Oh well, I had fun!! There were other problems, but they were small in nature compared to that network and video deals... At home I have been playing with the Beryl Project... If you spend any kind of time on a Linux box, you're gonna be doing lots of command line driving... When that is all done, ya need to get some bling on your desktop and a way to make your life more fun. I have been enjoying some of the 3D desktop effects and cubes from Compiz, but Beryl has been much cooler! I am trying to get a desktop video made and I will share it with you, someday. You can see some of the Beryl effects on their features page. Here are some of the Compiz screenshots. Even running all the bling, BIG-ASS-DOG, is running fine! It gobbles up memory, and a bit of CPU but not too bad... Hell, I got a gig of ram, might as well use it! You don't get extra points for leaving 900 megs free! Besides, I have been looking for a reason to upgrade to 2 gigs of the PC6700 stuff anyway! I am sure that eventually the novelty will wear off and I will opt for more stability and a minimalist view, but for now I am enjoying it. Sammi was checking it out tonight and had some good drool going on! I can't wait for the day when the kid comes to me and says, "Master, I mean Dad, teach me to be an über nerd, like yourself". Sure, the kid digs her electronic toys, but she cringed tonight when I showed her "code view" in Dreamweaver! Patience Grasshopper, one day, you will get there... Oh yeah! While I was typing up this shiznit... I got an email from someone who happened by the site via the NCN at JohnDee.com and sent a message via the site and said she liked it. Cool, cool as hell! That's like two new folks in as many weeks!! I've gained 100% user traffic! Better bump up my quotas on the server for Huml.org, haha. No blogging this weekend... Unless I make a quick post from the hotel! BP South and I are heading to the Vintage Snowmobile races this weekend at the Deckerhead's track in Eagle River! Our annual deal of drinking too much, watching races and well, other things we can't talk about out here. What happens in the race trailer stays in the race trailer. Unless of course there are video and pictures! I will probably bring all the camera/video gear to get content for VintageTwister.com. |
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| Sunday January 07, 2007 | Posted at 4:00 pm | |
| London Calling | ||
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I haven't posted a video in a while... I got on a kick today listening to The Clash and The Ramones and decided to check out YouTube (GooTube) for some videos. Also found some Plasmatics... I can remember Wendy O. Williams being beaten by cops in my former hometown, Milwaukee, in the early 80's for simulating sex on stage. Now you can't watch a cartoon on The Cartoon Channel without someone/something simulating sex! I also found some Sex Pistols (remember that crazy stuff with Sid Vicious and his girlfriend?) and B-52's!! Stuff I really used to dig and still like to catch up with every now and then. London Calling is probably my most fav tune from The Clash. |
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| Friday January 05, 2007 | Posted at 8:26 pm | |
| Referer log fun | ||
I was checking logs, cleaning up, doing my weekly server stuff on Huml.org tonight and saw a couple fun ones that I had to share.
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| Thursday January 04, 2007 | Posted at 8:48 pm | |
| Suprise... Shock... | ||
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I figured I would get a couple replies about my dork-sounding Yupper accent in the audio post from January 1st. But I was shocked by the number of peeps who commented and it was all positive feedback and supportive for more content like that in the future. I figured BP South would be good for a ripping comment, but he is too busy in the geerodge these days trying to knock out sleds for the races. I got a couple of good ideas from the suggestions that were sent in, we'll see what unfolds... One person, who I wasn't even aware was a reader, sent me a message and said that they have been stopping by here for a long time to read my posts. They came across the site when I used to use BigBlogTool (which is now defunct) and said that it was cool to associate a voice with the dude writing it. Welcome to the blog xxxxx from "down south", I didn't get their permission to use their name on my site, so I will leave it as xxxxx. Jeff recommended a good microphone if I wanna do some more of these in the future. The price is even within my range of "cheap"! I told DKHT tonight in an email it would be cool to get an Astatic D-104 Silver Eagle sitting on the desk!! I've had a few of those in my past life! Too bad I never held on to one of them!!! I think I had an old Shure mic that was awesome too, or maybe it was a Turner... I can't remember, too many years and beers ago!!! So thanks for the comments and kind words! Maybe you'll see more. It is a nice alternative to typing!! |
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| Tuesday January 02, 2007 | Posted at 6:30 pm | |
| No more vacation, sniff-sniff-sniff | ||
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It was fun while it lasted, but it was time to get back to work, after all, the fish tank needed some more RO water. That's reverse osmosis for those of you that may not know. You can't toss regular old tap water in a saltwater tank. I guess in a pinch, you can do distilled water. I'd prefer to get it from work so I brought home 14 gallons after work. Kind of tough to go back! I sure had a blast being a slug at home. I was a restless sleeper last night and was pretty much wide awake at 3:30 AM. So, I eventually tired of listening to Michelle sleep and hit the treadmill at about 5:30. I did a nice casual mile, no pushing it, I figured it would help me through the day. I had about 1000-1200 email messages to weed through. Most are automated alerts and stuff that get sent throughout the week when processes are run. I was off for 11 days, about 100 messages per day. An grossly elevated number due to the many gift certificate emails that were sent during the holiday. My new desk was all setup when I got back! That was a nice treat. No desk drawers were ordered so all my crap is in a box. Supposedly they are on order, along with a new chair. I was thinking that in the coming weeks or so, I need to put together a separate web page for my Fedora Core 6 conquests. I was helping Jeff the other day with getting his Kubuntu distro loaded. While assisting him via email I was busy getting my laptop and desktop configured. I must say, I am EXTREMELY happy with the results on the desktop system and the laptop rocks too!! I was researching and following how-to's online getting my main system all configed! I got my printer configured, which was supposed to have really poor Linux support, mounted my two Windows NTFS systems so that I can access all my MP3's and other files. I even created and setup a third Windows partition using FAT32 so that I can store my Thunderbird and Firefox profiles there and then share them between the two systems!! This was bothering me quite a bit as I really wanted to maintain email consistency between systems. Normally on Linux system I have had in the past I would just leave the message on the mail server and then download it again once I botted Windows. What a hassle, because sent mail doesn't transfer unless you BCC yourself. After a little trial and error in Grub, after bad placement of my FAT32 partition, this puppy is breezing along quite nicely! Some of the 3D desktop stuff is kinda cool too! I can't record audio very well, I'll look into that some other year. I really wanted to record my message post from yesterday on Linux, but, I will have to settle for this message to be posted from the Linux world. My digital camera is recognized as well as my thumb drive and the new UPS, but sadly, there is no version of the Motorola Phone Tools for Linux so that I can synch my phone. Back on November 2nd or 2006 I said, "I have set a personal goal to run Linux at least 90% of the time by the end of 2007". I think I might bump that up to by the end of the first quarter in 2007! I have some development tools to check out, but other than that... There is not much reason for me to use Winblows anymore. |
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| Monday January 01, 2007 | Posted at 1:34 am | |
| Happy New Year ~ Huml Raw | ||
Happy 2007!!!Instead of typing up a New Years message, I've created an audio post! I kicked around the idea for a while and Jeff, over at Buzzcat.net encouraged me to do it. I have always been a sucker for peer pressure tactics and decided what the hell. Click on the following link to play Huml Raw. Let me know if the link gives you any problems... You can always right click on it and "Save As..." and copy it to your computer. Seemed to stream out ok for me the few times I tested it.Let me know what you think... Maybe I will do this again! It actually was kinda fun to do... Here's a pic that I snapped of the kids and I just after New Years. We hope you the best that life can offer in 2007! Hope it is a good one!!  |
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Keep a tight one... (Thanks Jimmy)
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The Huml Family Organizational Unit
 March 10, 2010 :: 9:32 PM |