June 2004 Archive
June 29, 2004 Posted by mitch |
house, life |
The time has come, my wife and I are finally moving out of our first appartment and into our second. I hadn't really planned on moving into another appartment when we moved here I thought we'd move into a condo or house when we did move. However that wasn't what ended up happening. With things not going the way I had hoped at work, it kinda put a halt in that plan. So, we are moving because we really don't like the neiborhood... After my stereo was stolen out of my car, and we've had packages left on our door step ripped open.... Can't really trust the people living in the complex anymore. Seems like they're all a bunch of theives... I know thats a bit extreme to classify them all as theives... but their has to be atleast two... one that stole my stereo, and an other that was going to steal our package. And why someone in the front office signed whatever waiver which made it "OK" to leave the package on our door step is beyond me. I don't like that... I asked the place we are moving to... they said that they "always" take the packages and hold them in a special room untill we would come get them. I like that... Our current place has done that for us in the past with other packages... just this one time they didn't... it confuses me why they wouldn't remain consistent. So with that in mind... I've been sending all the packages to my parents house. Because I never had any problems there with anything I had ordered over the internet. Anyway... I'm rambling and I'm tired... still have some packing to do and my dad is supposed to be here at 8am to help us move. So... looks like I'll be getting up early... again.
Linux: Global File System
RedHat can walk the walk as well as talk the talk. They bought a company a couple of months ago for several million who were the original inventors of the GFS file system for Linux clusters. And now they are releasing it under the GPL. They are asking for the community to help them get the patches needed to the kernel source to be added to the main kernel. Allowing everyone to be able to use GFS easily. Very cool stuff. Way to go RedHat!
June 26, 2004 Posted by mitch |
movies |
Got The Last Samurai from netflix the other day, and I got a chance to watch it last night. I liked it. Not sure why I didn't really want to see it before. Guess it was because I had heard everyone say they didn't like it. I don't recall however, what it was they were saying they didn't like about it. I'm not a huge fan of Tom Cruise, because I think he tries to hard. With that aside however, I liked it.
I'm finally breaking down and going to really learn php classes. I've found that in order to duplicate how this site works for my own needs, I'm going to have to learn classes. That way I can seamlessly use smarty for templates, and somehow implement a plugin system so I can create a base Authentication, User Administration, Site Administration, and Themes, and then be able to plug in different "sites" into that framework without much trouble. I might eventually release the source for it, as I don't believe there are many frameworks that are simple. They all try to implement some type of api to plug into... Where I think mine (atleast will start out this way) won't have one really... just have to include a different class, and add it to the main navigation links... Anyway, those are some thoughts, i will keep this updated with my progress.
I get one training a year at work, and I've decided to take the RHCE exam. I'm not sure when I'll taking the week training and the exam (tenative is Sept 13th in Las Vegas, but I'm not sure). Anyhow, I bought a book from amazon. I got it because its the newest and it has a 5 star rating on amazon... I'm looking forward to the practice test and drills it has you do. I could try to come up with my own to help me study but I don't think it would help me a whole lot. Anyhow, I plan on cramming for the next couple months, hopefully get a chance to do the drills over an over atleast one every day as time permits I suppose. However I do believe no one will complain if I work on them at work as well.
June 17, 2004 Posted by mitch |
books |
I finally finished reading the first harry potter book the other day. I would have finished it earlier, but I got called about a DNS problem at work and had to go in for it. Anyway, I liked it other than the fact it really is written for a younger reader. I didn't think it was a whole lot different than the movie. I mean there were alot of little parts left out of the movie that were in the book, some of which explained alot more than the movie even hinted at. Anyway, I liked it, I'll just have to wait for another week or two before we'll be buying the second book so I can read it finally. (My wife wants the hardback books and we haven't seen the quad set anywhere recently so were just going to buy them one at a time). Anyway, I'll start the second as soon as we buy it in a couple weeks.
June 13, 2004 Posted by mitch |
movies |
I went and saw this movie on saturday. I liked it, regardless of what the people on imdb are saying. I agree they didn't explore or explain much in the "Ridick Universe" as much as I would have liked. But it wasn't cheezy like alot of movies have been. The ending could have used a little bit more depth as well, and still could have left it open for another sequal like they did. Anway, I'm not saying it was a great movie, I'm saying it was good enough I don't regret seeing it. And because of the nature of it, I liked it better than "The Day after Tomarrow", but thats personal opion. My wife would disagree with me.
June 13, 2004 Posted by mitch |
books |
I've been reading harry potter and the sorcerers stone for what 2 days now? I'm almost though it, I have less than 100 pages to go. And so far so good. For the most part the movie followed in line with the book. I think it left out a couple of important details along the way however, but those scenes would have taken a while to portray on film I suppose. Anyway, I'll update when I've finished the book.
June 12, 2004 Posted by mitch |
books, life |
Well, I'm finally breaking down and reading the Harry Potter books. Seems like everyone I know has read them. My wife and her sister are obsessed with them. And with the recent movie craze about them, I figure, might as well... right?
So, I'm starting off with the first book. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. I must admit when I first saw the movie I thought it was pretty good. And the second movie was even better I thought. However, the third movie... was somewhat dissapointing. I really think the director messed things up when he did it. My wife and her sister both thought it wasn't that good at all either, they complained that ALOT was left out, alot of important stuff (for the future books and all). But since I haven't read the books I can't speak on that, but I did notice that the movie moved really fast and didn't really develop any characters, no more than what the previous 2 had... just introduced more characters without much of a history or their own development. We'll wait and see how the forth movie handles this.
June 12, 2004 Posted by mitch |
civic |
I've had my new Eibach springs installed now for a week and two days... and I love how much it improved the handling. However, my alignment has been out probably since I put on my 17" rims anyway... so my rear tires have been wearing on the inside badly... I took it in to get aligned and $75 later, it can't be. Because of the after market springs, I need to buy some after market ball joints for the front and aftermarket lower control arms for the rear to be able to bring it fully into alignment. Kinda sucks. Ya know, I really wish there was a web site (maybe there is, I just haven't found it yet) that would give you how-to's and such for car mods... Like say "if your going to do this to this year of car, do this, and watch out for this" type of thing. Something that has been in the computer/software world for a long time. *shrug* Guess I could start one... atleast for my Civic... Anyway, I'll have all my updates here as far as mods to my civic... and I'm going to be working on a page for it as soon as I can. Which should be soon hopefully.
June 5, 2004 Posted by mitch |
civic |
Thursday night, my friend (dave) and I installed my Eibach Pro Kit Lowering Springs (1.3 inch drop). We were working untill just about midnight on them (started after work). I had read that people usually only took 1.5 hours to install them... I'm not sure, but they must be on something... I'm not sure how anyone could have installed them all that quickly.... Granted, I think knowing what we do now about installing them, I think we could have done it MUCH faster than the ~6 hours it took us.... and we'll get a chance soon too, the process of lowering my car blows the stock shocks that are in it still. We'll get to do it all again. The rear from start to finish only took us 1.5 hours which wasn't bad. They were so easy. The first front one we did however... I got a pin stuck that I was using to bang out a bolt that held in the fork for the strut... and that took us a good half hour atleast to remove. Man... lessons learned. The second front spring took us probably about an hour and a half to swap out... which was about half the time the first one took...
At work we use a program called "QuickDNS" for managing our domains for both testing, development and production environments. The problem is it is costly, and to do what we need it to, will cost even more. So, over the last couple of days, I've been contemplating how to write my own, something that just does DNS, because thats all we need. The basics would really be pretty simple, the only thing that makes me think it will be difficult is "checking" to make sure the user of the web app is aware of what they are doing. So they don't screw things up. But I guess that would be possible with the program we are using currently. It doesn't do that many checks, so it is possible to screw up a server if the user doesn't know what they are doing. I'm hoping that after I get all my servers upgraded to RHEL3, I will have a bit more time to play with such an idea, but really I think it would take me about a week to get something working and only minor bugs needing to be worked out. But maybe I'm just being over zealous about it. But then again, its just another project for me to work on. Along with the System Information database... As soon as I get a basic framework for either of them, they both will be able to be plugged into it however. Which will be nice.
June 2, 2004 Posted by mitch |
civic |
My springs for my civic arrived yesterday. I'm excited. A friend from work (Dave) and I are going to be installing them tomarrow after work. When its all said and done, my civic should be about 1.5" lower and handle MUCH better. I will then need to get it in for an alignment, and I'm pretty sure i need to replace my two rear tires anyway... (i hope its just because the alignment is already off) Because it looks like they've been wearing funny since I got my rims... and they've been slowly getting worse as time went on. Anyway, I hope to get pictures and everything as soon as I can.
The latest from Groklaw has some insite on SCO's latest motion in the SCO vs. IBM case. My favorite part is this:
SCO writes that they need IBM to hand these things over because IBM "appears to assert that to establish IBM's breach of the Agreement at issue, SCO requires specific evidence of derivation from UNIX System V lines of code through the versions of AIX and Dynix code to Linux."
Basically, they don't have anything, and this whole lawsuite has been to see if they could get something from IBM. Which goes back to what everyone was saying in the beginning. SCO has NOTHING, they started the lawsuit most likely to be bought out, and since it didn't happen, they started playing a "high-stakes poker game, with lousy cards, but pretending to hold Aces, only now it's time to show their cards", I couldn't agree more with that statement.
Anyway... this all really still urks me, because it seems like its getting so close to an end... but the dumb factor keeps getting worse.
