So I think I may have found the cause of my super flakey server of late. It looks like the drive on my UML host machine filled up completely. I’m not sure why the VMs care since they have their own, already allocated, slices of the main drive but I guess maybe they did some how. Now that I’ve freed up a bit of space on the host drive the VMs seem to be running more reliably. Strange.

At work we have a lot of information that needs to be documented (for internal use). This information ranges from our coding standards documentation, to schema change documentation, to designs, employee phone-lists, etc… In the beginning we had a bunch of scatter word documents. Pretty much this meant nobody actually read the documents because nobody could find them. Then (years ago) Kyle installed a python based wiki on our Linux box (NEO) and it revolutionized everything. Then NEO died and was never rebuilt. Back to word documents.

About a month ago Tony revived the wiki idea and installed some crazy .NET based wiki on an IIS machine here. It took an awful lot of work but in the end it worked pretty well. It definitely was not particularly polished but it worked. Then Tony noticed that Media Wiki, the wiki software that powers wikipedia is available for free (PHP/MySQL based) so we thought we’d try that out as it looked much more polished and much more powerful.

We also have been running an internal Jabber server on my machine so this sounded like a good idea to move that onto a dedicated machine.

So anyways to make a long store short we decided to setup a Linux machine (I demanded Debian and won). We didn’t have a spare machine to give but we do have a really fast machine running VMWare (for our builds) so we just made a new VM on there. We configured it to have a 4GB disk image, 128M ram and attached the CD to the Debian Net install CD image and we booted it up.

The debian installer worked absolutely perfectly. We pretty much walked through and chose defaults all the way through. The network was configured with DHCP (the VM was setup to use bridged networking), the drive auto-partitioned, etc. It just worked. When the install finished we chose “Manual Package Selection” when asked what we would use the machine for and then bailed out of aptitude so that we had a bare minimum machine.

Now it was just installing the server software. I wanted SSH for remote administration, the jabber server, and apache, mysql and php for the wiki.

$apt-get install ssh apache mysql-server libapache-mod-php4 php4-mysql jabber

That installed all the required software.

Configuring jabber consisted entirely of opening /etc/jabber/jabber.xml and changing the hostname to the system hostname.

We downloaded the MediaWiki tarball and untarred it into the Apache docroot /var/www. Reading the instructions we then had to make the config directory writable and the wiki’s installer would do the rest.

$ cd /var/www
$ tar --strip-path 1 -xzvf /tmp/mediawiki-1.4.0.tar.gz
$ chmod a+w config

Now you go to http://127.0.0.1 in the browser and get the MediaWiki config page which asks for the Wiki name and database information. It’ll even create the database and a user for the MediaWiki if you provide the MySQL root user name/password (which is just root and empty password since it’s still defaults). Press the go button and it created LocalSettings.php in the config/ directory. Just move that file into /var/www and remove config and we’re done.

$ cd /var/www
$ mv config/LocalSettings.php .
$ rm -rf config/

Finally to enable image/media uploads you have to make the images folder writable and remove the /images alias from the Apache config file.

$ chmod a+w /var/www/images

And in /etc/apache/httpd.conf. Comment out the “Alias /images/ /usr/share/images/” line.

And that was it. The whole process took less than an hour and we have a jabber server and very fancy wiki system. Tony and I were stunned at how it just worked. We didn’t run into a single snag.

Finally got back five rolls of photos and had some great ones. Including this awesome one of Grace:

New albums: 1 2 3 4 5.

On a related note I’ve been having some very strange problems with my server. Seems like a bunch of disk writes are failing. It took me several shots at uploading this stuff before it “took”. Jenni and Thom are experiencing similar problems. Not good. I really have no idea where to look to fix this. Probably I should upgrade to a new HDD.

So in a moment of stupidity my hacked together comments system now supports those trendy TrackBacks.

I deviated from the SPEC a little big so that users who don’t provide a URL (ie. those that accidentally click on one of those TrackBack URLs) will get a friendly form to fill in the details on.

The Wizbang Standalone Trackback Pinger is a “utility” that lets you create TrackBack pings without a fancy blogging client or a basic understanding of HTTP.

I came across this sweet deal on VFXWEB today. It’s basically a 1TB Sun StoreEdge Array filling 3 racks.

Sun StoreEdge Array System, (2) A3500 Raid 5 Ultra SCSI Controllers, (3) A3000 Raid 5 Controllers, (9) D1000 Drive Cabinets, (108) 9.1GB SCA SCSI Drives with brackets, (3) Sun 42U racks, 68pin Wide SCSI cables for connecting all units, pulled from clean-room, drives tested, Sold as complete unit

VFXWEB is asking only $2100 CDN for this thing. From what Mika tells me the racks themselves are likely worth that much. Can I Anji.. Please?

Last night I tried making hamburgers myself for the first time instead of using Safeway preformed pattys (yes yes really not all that exciting). Anyways the result was soooo much better. My recipe was mostly invented:

• 1 lb lean ground beef
• half a jalapeno
• three cloves of garlic
• 1/2 cupish of shopped parsley
• about half a “stack” of saltine crackers
• a couple tbsp of Worcestershire sauce
• 1 egg
• 1/4 onion

I actually took care not to burn them this time and didn’t so instead of little round hockey pucks we had things that resembled real hamburgers. It was easy and they taste so much better.

My cooking process was roughly. 1-2 minutes per side on high (just long enough so they unstuck from the grill). Another 1-2 minutes per side on high. And then 2-3 min / side on med-low until cooked (another flip or two). Anyways that’s it.

If anyone has other killer hamburger additives let me know (leave a comment).

At work we use Outlook/Exchange. From the sounds of it that isn’t changing and there really aren’t all that many decent (don’t get me wrong. I don’t think Outlook falls in that category) groupware solutions. Oh well. I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that I’m stuck using Outlook so I may as well spend some time setting it up to suck less.

Basically things are made extra complicated by the fact exchange seems to be unable to cope with us actually doing something crazy like storing our mail on the server so we are given some stupidly small quota size and have to keep moving our mail into an external PST file. I hate having to randomly move stuff around like this. It’s a pain.

I also prefer the gmail style of organizing e-mail where I don’t have to try and arbitrarily move my e-mail into folders. I much prefer just leaving all my e-mail in one place and searching if and when I need to find something specific.

My setup is basically as follows:

1. Added a new PST file (labeled with 2005) for all my e-mail.
2. Created a “Received Mail” and “Sent Mail” folder in my PST file.
3. Added rule to move all new mail as it is received to “Received Mail”.
4. Added rule to copy all sent mail to “Sent Mail”.
5. Added Search Folders for “Unread” and “Unread and Flagged”. Both of which are modified so that they only report mail in “Received Mail”.
6. Installed Lookout and configured it to search only my calendar, todo, and “Received Mail” and “Sent Mail”.

So now when I want my “What’s New View” I use the “Unread” search folder. I also use flags to flag messages I need to review / respond to / etc in the near future. The “Unread and Flagged” view gives me by unread messages and those I flagged. So when I want a message archived I just read it and make sure to remove and flags and voila. And when I try and find something historical I can use Lookout to search it.

I really wanted to use Google Desktop Search for this but unfortunately it’s mail searching isn’t particularly configurable and keeps finding the sent items in the mail server sent items and my PST in addition to drafts and stuff like that.

So I recently purchased a 24-50mm Minolta AF zoom lens from e-bay. It’s an awesome lens with the wide focal lengths I love. The glass and everything was minty except the filter ring was broken off (hence me being able to afford this lens). I figured this was no problem. I’d just glue something to the front of the lens to give me my threads back.

Yesterday afternoon I stopped by The Camera Store and they suggested using a step-up adapter instead of buying and gutting a filter. So I bought a 55-58mm (the lens is 55mm but I wanted to upgrade to a large filter to prevent vignetting at 24mm). Last night I pulled out the lens, the step-up ring, and my gel crazy glue and went to work. I glued the ring in place and set the lens down and left it. No I did not glue it to the table or anything like that.

When I came back to check on my new baby I was very very upset to find that the front element was coated in a hard white substance. At this point I’m guessing that it was vapors from the crazy glue landing on the element and harding but it might also been the vapors reacting with my expensive multi-coated element. I really have no idea.

Needless to say I was no even a little bit happy about this. I brought the lens upstairs and tried some lens cleaner on it. Nothing. I figured at this point the lens was shot so I may as well go all out. I tried using various combinations of my finger nail, Goof Off, and rubbing alcohol (I didn’t have acetone which is supposed to dissolve crazy glue and I didn’t want to just leave it in-case it got worse).

In the end I scraped most of the glue of the front element with only minor trauma to the lens. I suspect I’ll never be able to point this in to the sun as the little scratches and glue dots I could not remove will probably all light up.

To make this even worse. I then pulled the back cap off the lens and noticed the same problem on that end too. Same fix and eventually it looked clearish again.

If anyone can offer some thoughts as to why this happened or what I should have done differently I would appreciate it. Did I maybe use too much glue? Wrong glue?

Finally got around to doing some computer stuff this weekend. I setup my old P200 machine as our internal file / print server so finally Anji and I can share files again. We were having divergence problems with all our photos so now we have a central place for them. Yay!.

The machine sucked to setup. It seems the machine couldn’t detect my 40GB drive which was no big deal. I can still boot from floppy right. No. The FDD controller seems shot. So in the end in order to make it bootable I had to setup a old 1.6GB drive in there with the boot loader on it. Ugh. It took me many of hours of pain to get the stupid machine to boot. On top of that it crashes when it works too hard. I think it overheats.

We got our data moved onto it and took that opportunity to both rebuild our laptops. This time I decided to give it a whirl using just Windows. Those who know me will think this is a bit crazy but here is why:

• Windows drivers support my laptop better. Really the only thing I was missing was Suspend/Resume but I really missed it.
• Picaso and Irfanview are two graphics programs I love and they are not available on Linux.
• OpenOffice, Firefox, OpenSSH, and Python are pretty much may day to day stuff and they work well on both Win / Lin.
• I do most of my software development, e-mail, etc SSHd into jclement.ca so really my desktop is just there to establish SSH connections and surf the web.

This’ll be a bit of an experiment to see if I can live without Linux on the desktop. In any case I’m looking forward to being able to suspend my laptop again!

Updated the Inglewood Album with the last few pics from another roll. Also added some miscellaneous pics from this weekend testing out the new 24-50mm.