I received my pin in the mail yesterday!
My Internet connection here at the office just got an upgrade. We’re now running on 10Mb dedicated fiber. Woohoo!
I’ve got a sustained download speed of 1180Kb/sec going for the last 30 minutes now. It’s a DVD image from Microsoft. It’s going to take about an hour to get the 3.6Gb file.
I’m trying to figure out if I’m awake or if I died and went to Internet heaven.
In case you stay up late wondering about these things:
Dell’s PowerConnect 6224 Layer 3 switch won’t route packets on VLAN 1
Remember earlier when I mentioned my tape backups were running slow? Today, I finally completely solved the problem. Turns out it wasn’t terribly difficult. Here’s what I did:
- Backup Exec 11d installed
- Updated PV124T firmware from 0027 to 0043
- Updated LTO3 drive firmware from 59D3 to 6B20
- Installed latest Dell drivers for Tape drive and autoloader
At that point, I was getting backups running at around 5 Mb per minute. The next steps:
- Enabled Multiple LUN support in SCSI BIOS for the autoloader and tape drive
- Installed latest SCSI drivers from Adaptec for the SCSI card
- Installed the Backup Exec drivers for all backup devices
At this point, I was running around 1300 Mb per minute—much better, but not perfect. My old backups were running around 2000 Mb per minute. I also noticed that my compression ratio was around 1.0n:1 (almost no compression at all). I figured I’d try to live with it—beggars can’t be choosers.
Or maybe they can. I finally broke down and called support (for an IT guy that reads admitted defeat), and the guy immediately spotted my problem: the autoloader driver said Dell (tm) PowerVault (tm) 124T Autoloader. He changed it to Unknown Medium Changer, which was on the list of compatible hardware, but something I would not have chosen. Certainly not over the very detailed driver name right above it.
In any case, now I’m running back at over 2000 Mb per second throughput to the tape drive and I’m getting 1.5:1 compression. The only change this last time was the autoloader driver. Nobody documented that online. I hope this helps someone else in the same boat.
I hear Spirit of the West from time to time, and I would love to get this CD…
I want one of these kits real bad.
I spent a couple of extra hours at work tonight trying to sort out a routing issue, but had no success. These long days are wearing me out.
You may not have noticed, but I upgraded to WordPress v2.3 today. The upgrade was smooth and painless. Just like all my other WP upgrades have been. I now have native tagging support (yay!), as well as a host of other features I’ll probably never abuse.
For the first time in over three years, I had to run new network cable today. It had to run through the dropped ceiling of the mechanical room of our building, which is about 12 feet off the ground. Many of the ceiling tiles are so old they’ve been caulked in place because they’re falling apart. There were tons of pipes and stuff running through, and access to the ceiling area via ladder was extremely difficult. I came up with the idea of throwing a pull-string through first, with a chemical glowstick tied to it so it would be easy to find.
It was a brilliant idea, and saved us a bunch of trouble. We pulled two cables through. We are now ready for our 10mb fiber.
So if you ever need to run cable through a difficult area, get some glowsticks and string, it worked great for me!
Today I worked for almost six hours to finish the work I had left to do in the master bathroom, and it’s finally done! All that’s left now is a little bit of cleanup. Today I completed all the molding and trim work and caulked all around the tiles and mosaics. I also hung 5 pieces of art we had waiting to go in the bathroom. It looks great. I’ll get some pictures posted as soon as we have the dust cleaned up.
That’s one more room down off our list. All we have left is the great room (hanging curtains), and I can get back to work on the downstairs projects.
Tonight Lorien and I went to see Druha Trava, a bluegrass band from (of all places) the Czech Republic. I don’t know much about the Czech Republic, other than the people are pretty nice. I picked up a couple of hitchhikers while driving through Northern Scotland. They were really nice hitchhikers, and not the dirty crazy kind.
Anyway, I’m not a huge bluegrass fan—I prefer my music to not only have Celtic roots, but to just plain be Celtic. We had free tickets, and although it had been a long day (I worked until 7pm), at my wife’s behest I drove downtown and caught up with her and her father. We had free tickets because the band stayed (gratis, if I’m not mistaken) at my inlaws’ inn. So what the heck. The opening band was okay, but not great. They seldom are (except when I saw Great Big Sea open the Portland Celtic Music Festival back in ‘99 or whenever it was I went there. They weren’t really an “opening band” per se, but I digress). Columbia Bluegrass I believe was what they were called. They weren’t bad, just didn’t have that kick that makes you really want to get up and move. More like the kick that makes you look funny at the other people that actually got up and are moving…
Back to the story: the band played two sets with about a 25 minute break between them. It was a long break. Their banjo player was really good, though. John S. would have liked it. He also played the Irish Low whistle in a beautifully haunting air that really made me sit up and listen more. He later switched to the normal tin whistle and finished the tune, it was quite good. I’m pretty sure he played Overton whistles—I love my Colin Goldie D whistle! The low whistle had a real silky tone that hung in the air, it was really terrific. I believe that tune got the most applause, shy of the obligatory “bring them back onstage to play the encore” applause at the end of the concert.
Probably half of what they sang was in Czech (it reminded me of the Numa Numa song, if not the creepy dancing. I kept getting these pictures in my mind of them performing it, once in bluegrass style, but I’m re-digressing). They also sang in English. Their lead singer was an older guy with Albert Einstein hair, but he had a great voice.
Overall, it was well worth the $12 I didn’t have to spend on a ticket, and I’d not spend $12 on them again. I will not, however, drive down to St. Maries for their concert tomorrow night…
I’ve been working on some areas of PHP that I’m not quite as familiar with lately, getting ready to take the Zend PHP 5 certification exam.
Today I played around a little with sessions. I was able to use them to avoid the annoying browser history “this page was generated from POST data, do you want to resend the POST data?” problem when you go back to a page where login information had been authenticated.
The trick? I use header("Location: /path/to/logged-in-home.php"); after successful authentication, but otherwise display a page with error messages. It’s a small problem, but it’s nice to do away with it.
Going along with Phil, here are some of the stranger, recent search keywords that have brought people to my site:
- Hairy women
- pirate recipes
- bicycle mod
- recipe for scurvy
- jake valek
- carbide cannon
- fimo terrain
- akiko baldridge
- halcyon inverter
- yay brains
- “in case of zombie attack break glass”
- “there’s a weasel chomping on my privates.”
I have no idea where some of those are coming from. Really!
Who are Jake Valek and Akiko Baldridge? I have no idea. I don’t cook up pots of scurvy for dinner, either. And Hairy Women? That’s the #4 search term for my site this month!
There are no pictures of hairy women on this site! Ewwww! Go away! I recommend a holiday in France. Or Seattle…
I did write about a hairy encounter, once, though.
I finally converted from the old school way of database access in PHP to use PDO (plus, I dig recursive acronyms). I used to use either the straight mysql_* API or a database abstraction class, but I have to admit, PDO is the way to go. It’s like someone took all the best features of the other database abstraction projects out there and put them all together in one place. It supports SQL transactions and prepared statements too (things I haven’t bothered to use yet).
The MySQL PDO libraries aren’t terribly hard to set up, but you have to compile PHP for it. You also have to edit your php.ini file and specify the extension_dir and the PDO extensions (extension=pdo.so and pdo_mysql.so). I suppose in Windows much of this is already done for you. Weenies.
Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day, mateys!