You know, when you are charged to figure out what a previous employee setup and try to duplicate it on a new device (in my case trying to duplicate a ipsec config on updated software for a new firewall) you would expect things to somewhat make sense.  You know, have production config files in a location other then a directory labelled “ccd_notused”, atleast be funny and label the directory “ccd_isbeingused”.

The moral of the story is to not trust someone elses logic.  I’m sure it made sense to whoever at the time, but the configs are confusing enough without trying to figure out counter intuitive naming systems.

Also, I’m now the replacement for the for the other senior network admin here at work.  The person in my back filled position just asked me how to copy a file, or more accurately  I asked him “You know how to copy a file right?”  to which his reply was “Give me a minute and I’ll remember.”  yeah, I know…..

VLAN 46 is cursed.  Never Use it.  That is all.

So, today Ian’s moved a lot of his stuff out.  His TV.  His desk.  It’s going to be different not living with my roommate of 5 years.

Maybe people heard, but my Mac died a week or so ago so I ordered a replacement and got it a couple days ago.  Dual Quad core Xeon, runs pretty slick I must say.

Only real issue I had was importing my music library from a backup.  Somehow I managed to get duplicate files, and duplicate library entries, and basically have a decent mess in terms of music at the moment.  I’m glad I run everything on Unix, I’m not sure how I would ever go about fixing this without the unix find command and rsync.  I got a seperate toll to clean the duplicates out of my iTunes library, but using find /music -name *1.mp3 -exec -rm -r {} \; was gold to cleaning duplicates in the filesystem backup and then using rsync to merge my clean copy over my existing library was very helpful.  I honestly don’t know how people can cope with windows?  It baffles me.

Next issue to fix was getting my Mic working on my Mac.  Before I had a seperate sound card in my mac so I never had any problems using a standard pc mic on my old mac.  Mac’s use a Line Level mic port which requires a powered mic to work rather then the mic port most home pc’s use that send power to the mic to power it.  The line level gives a cleaner signal since you are not sending power and sound across the same wire, but it makes it a pain to use existing headsets and stuff.  So I have a Belkin iMic ordered and hopefully will be here this week sometime to fix that.  It has a build in pre-amp that is powered through usb port so it should do what I need it to do.

So at the moment those are really the only two issues I have at the moment.  My rsync of my music is still calculating as I type this.  I imagine it’ll take an hour or so, there is a lot for it to calculate.  In the mean time I think I’m going to get cleaned up and run to the store.

Ok, I’m hooked: Jump In!

I’m oh so very bored right now. Why does work have to be so boring.

Kind of hooked on the japanese version of this song, but they recently released a dubbed version which isn’t half bad. I like the Japanese version better, but I like this version to I guess. : God Knows…
Also, for the record, Open Office Calc by default rounds to two decimal places. Royal pain when you are trying to compare values in a database to values in a spreadsheet which can have more then 2 decimal places.

Guess that’s really my first negative I’ve found in my couple years of using Open Office, and it’s configurable, so I guess I can’t complain too much.

Have you ever transfered code from one machine to another and not have it work?  If you’re a programmer or have ever attempted to program I would imagine that you’ve run into this at least once.  In my case I take windows developers code which has been developed to work on solaris (poorly sometimes I might add) and build my development environment around that base to work from.

Today I spent 4 hours trying to figure out why the code that works perfectly well on one machine would not work on mine.  Ultimately the error I was getting was “connection Refused” when trying to connect to my local mysql database.  I traced through the code, made sure everything was correct, printed out all the user account information to make sure all was well, make sure the database and everything was running, listening, accounts worked, make sure connecting on the port and not using the local socket worked….everything worked and looked correct but my application consistently kept getting “Connection Refused”.

3-4hours later over digging though everything I could think of I was somehow lead down the path of “What is localhost really pointing to?”  Sure enough I look in my host file (if you don’t know what that is…leave…NOW) and found that localhost was pointing to “::1″ the IPv6 equal of 127.0.0.1.  I’m not sure if it wouldn’t connect because mysql wasn’t listing on any IPv6 interfaces, or if it’s because there was no loopback IPv6 virtual adapter, but either way changed the entry appears to fix the problem.  Not that I tested a lot after I got it working… I promptly left work after solving it.  I don’t know of many developers who would have figured something like that out.  Hell, I don’t know many networking people who would have thought of that.  I’m not even really sure how I thought of it?  I mean, seriously, who troubleshoots that “localhost” is wrong when accessing a web page, mysql from the command line, and everything else you are using localhost for actually works.

Anyway, in summary, those of you who are developing on Fedora 6 and probably the new 7 be aware that ::1  != 127.0.0.1.

So, a few things have come to my attention.  The PS3 has had a $150 price drop.  I’ve discovered why / how they have done this.  Sony has removed the “Emotion” chip which is part of the PS2 architecture from the PS3 to cut costs and in turn replaced it with software emulation.  What this means is that there will only be like 80% software compatibility from PS1 and 2 games vs the 100% compatibility having the emotion chip brings.  In summary, if you are buying a 60gig model of PS3 then you have the hardware inside, the 80gig versions are all software emulation.  What this means for me is that rather then waiting like I had planned to get one I’m likely going to get one this week.  Annoying, but I had planned on getting one eventually anyway so it’s not so much a big deal.

On the plus side I received a check from NRC today which will help pay for that.  I had worked for them a few years ago and appearently a new deal was struck where the CS staff get a raise plus get all the pay they would have earned retroactively for the past few years.  Appearently I fit in that crowd and got some free cash which I figure will pay for about half of all the PS3 things I plan to get.  Plus I got like 5 hours of overtime which will cover a decent part of the rest
I also ordered a laptop a week ago from Dell.  2Ghz Turon X2, 2Gig of ram, 120gig harddrive all for $1013 including taxes and shipping.  It was a good deal and hard to justify spending much more for what I’d be doing with it.  It will be nice to have a laptop for being on call and doing general work in the living room rather then at my desk.  I like my desk and all but there comes a time when I just don’t want to sit at a desk.

Anyway, that’s the biggest news in my boring little corner of the world.  I should get back to it.

“Someone call Canada, we need Alanis Morissette stat!”

There are things that belong in source control, and there are things that do not belong in source control.   An ISO image DOES NOT belong in source control.  The files to build the iso, sure.  they will constantly change, get updated, and allow you to build the latest version.  The finished ISO, if you need it, should either be burned and / or stored on the LAN for all to enjoy.  There is no point in checking in a 700MB iso file.  I 3MB jar file I don’t mind so much, but an CD ISO image it a bit extreme.  Especially where there are 4 of them….