Digital Choke Daynotes

A nice visit today with the whole family; all were here except Stacy (at college in Idaho), who we talked to by phone. Christine is very close to her due date (3rd child), and is at the point where sooner is better. She has a very positive attitude about the whole experience, but is ready to deliver. She just needs to convince Max (the pending child).

So we all had a nice BBQ dinner (inside, it's a bit warm outside, with temps in the low 90's). It was marinated chicken breasts, and chicken thighs with BBQ sauce. We had enough to cook that it filled up the grill, which now needs a serious cleaning. There was corn on the cob, homemade bread (bread machines are great -- Pam has two now), and a fresh fruit salad (watermelon, berries, pineapple). All quite yummy. And there was enough left over for 'care packages' to send home with her family and Jason.

For a while after dinner, this place was a bit more geeky than usual. Jared and Jason both brought over their laptops, so I set up the router to give out a couple more IP addresses. They both did a bit of surfing, enjoying the increase in speed over their dial-up lines.

Jason got a new laptop -- new to him. He found a nice used one on "CraigsList" (I think). He's the musical person in the family. He's been using his desktop system to compose music, and now does it on his laptop. He burned a CD of his latest creations, and I've been enjoying them this evening after everyone left. He is quite talented. In fact, you might want to visit his web site (www.manimatronrecords.com) and sample his tracks. He doesn't have a mail link on his site yet, so any comments can be sent to me here. All of his music is generated on his computer. I don't know all the programs he is using, though. I'll have to ask him for a list.

This should be an interesting week at work. Our interim CIO has gone on to other pastures, leaving our department headless at the moment. They are working on a new CIO, but don't know the progress on that yet. But the sections of our department are pretty well organized, so things should progress, at least in the short term. It will be interesting, though.

And then there is the impending arrival of "Max", anxiously being awaited by all. Pam jumps each time the phone rings, and checks caller ID before answering.

I spent some time at work on the Cold Fusion program, working with the conversion of a database application so it can server three different business uses with the same database structure. It's an information-type database, but each business use needs slightly different text headings, although they can still use the same database structure. A comparison would be a customer database, but different language prompts and text on the screen.

With some tricks and variable variable loading, I got the basics working. There is some fine tuning of the actual text to display, but the big work is done.

At home, I spent some quality time with a dirty BBQ, which is now much cleaner after liberal application of cleaner and elbow grease. And some time messing with RedHat, but that's not quite done yet.

Announcing the arrival of Maxwell Donald Jensen; pictures here (where you might also find the first pictures of me, so you are warned...).

Max arrived this afternoon at 1:39pm, Christine arrived at the hospital about 9:30am. Pam and I met them there, and I took the two grandkids home while Pam and Jared (husband) helped out Christine. Most of the pictures were done by Pam, who did quite well with the Canon digital camera.

I brought the kids back to the hospital at about 4:30pm, where Joelle and Liam met their new little brother. All are doing well; Christine is tired but healthy. Pam and I took the kids home about 6pm (after the obligatory stop at McDonalds), and Jared returned home a bit after 9pm. We got home about 10pm.

And I spent the last two hours tweaking the picture page. I sent out emails to some of the family with the page link. The picture page was created with a bit of PHP code; I'll probably work on the thumbnails tomorrow. But it's just a bit after midnight, and time to hit the sack.

Aren't babies cute?

A short day today, for various reasons. It started out early in the morning (before "oh-dark-thirty") when one of the UPS in the data center died after a massive power spike (a stroke?). That shut down half of the servers, including most of the DMZ and 'front' of our Internet presence. Luckily, the person that is called for this type of incident is not me. The guys that did get called spent most of the hours before 6am getting things back to normal. So there was minimal effect on the rest of the company. It did cut down a bit on the overnight spam, which is usually caught by our spam filters anyway.

So by the time I got there about 7:30am, all was well. After pursuing the overnight email (and the mail left over from yesterday), I fired up the laptop and started vmWare with the Red Hat installation. All of the vmWare partitions are set up to NAT the network connection, but I have to manually turn reset the 'eth0' connection to get RedHat to "see" the Internet (it doesn't get set correctly during startup). Now it may also be that I have to establish an Internet connection on the laptop before starting vmWare. I'll have to test that a bit tomorrow.

Anyway, I started a 'terminal' session (sort of like a command prompt in Windows) and entered a 'ifconfig eth0 down' command, followed by 'ifconfig eth0 up'. Once those two commands complete, an 'ifconfig -all' command shows that an IP address has been issued by our network's DHCP server, and connectivity to the Internet is normal.

The reason for going through that was to get all the updates installed. RedHat comes with an 'up2date' program that is started from the GUI by clicking on an icon on the 'taskbar'. That starts up a 'wizard-like' program that walks you through getting all the updates. The first step to that is get the database of all the updates, so that takes a while. Once that is done, you can select the updates you want. I figured that selecting them all was probably a good idea, which required about 380MB of downloads. On our high-speed connection, that took more than an hour, then another 30-40 minutes to install everything. There were no problems during the whole thing, so it looked like all was OK. The updates didn't require a reboot of the system.

By that time, it was getting past 11am, and I had to leave at noon. So I used vmWare's "snapshot" process to backup the current configuration. That will be useful if I ever screw up things as I am wandering through this new operating system (new to me).

Pam and I left at noon, intending to go visit Christine and Max, but they were going to check out of the hospital soon. So we went to lunch, then stopped by the toy store to pick up a few things for the grandkids, then home. Pam went off to a dentist appointment, and I played around with the "Max" picture page program. The result is a little program that grabs a list of all of the files in a folder, then puts each picture file in a cell in a table. I was pretty proud of myself, not being a "PHP" programmer, but I do know enough that I can make things work, with the help of various sample programs and documentation found on various PHP sites.

The program uses a 'directory list' type of command to get a list of files into an array. Then each element of the array is converted into an 'href' link inside a table cell. The program builds the table, puts each picture name in a separate table cell, three cells to a row. The directory list command I use is 'opendir', which gives you all the files in a directory/folder. I had to add a program line to skip over non-jpg file names. I suspect there is a version of the 'opendir' function that will allow a directory list command that uses something like "*.jpg", but I haven't found it yet. But the result is in the "Max Picture Pages" link. That works good enough to send the URL to friends and family, which makes emailing pictures much easier, since you just send people the link, so their email message is not cluttered with attached files.

Along about 5pm, Pam returned from the teeth cleaning experience at the dentist, so we left and stopped by the grocery store to get some supplies before heading over to Christine's house to help out there. Pam will be spending the night to help out, and then taking a few vacation days to do the 'grandma' thing. It's nice that they live so close that we can do that. So we had a simple dinner over there (sandwiches), then visited a while before I left to go home. And here I am.

I leave you with this little joke, which got a chuckle out of me.

After his death, Osama bin Laden went to heaven. There he was greeted by George Washington, who proceeded to slap him across the face and yell at him, "How dare you try to destroy the nation I helped conceive!" Patrick Henry approached and punched Osama in the nose and shouted, "You wanted to end our liberties but you failed." James Madison entered, kicked Osama and said, "This is why I allowed our government to provide for the common defense!" Thomas Jefferson came in and proceeded to beat Osama many times with a long cane and said, "It was evil men like you that provided me the inspiration to pen the Declaration of Independence!" These beatings and thrashings continued as John Rudolph, James Monroe and 66 other early Americans came in and unleashed their anger on the Muslim terrorist leader.

As Osama lay bleeding and writhing in unbearable pain an Angel appeared. Bin Laden wept in pain and said to the Angel, "This is not what you promised me." The Angel replied, "I told you there would be 72 Virginians waiting for you up here. What did you think I said?"

Heh. (Note to all of you international readers: Virginia is one of the founding states of the USA.)

And I just noticed that scientists have found the 'cheating gene', and are able to turn it off, a least in 'voles' (a rodent-like critter). This article at MSNBC says "A single gene inserted into the brain can change promiscuous male rodents into faithful, monogamous partners, scientists said Wednesday.".

Insert your own joke here.

I remembered this morning that there was a change to the network card configuration file that allows the vmWare partition's network connection to activate properly. I had actually done this before in a different Linux distro installation, but forgot all about it until I cleaned up some piles of paper on my desk at work. (And Peter Thomas sent me an email that I got tonight that reminded me of the same thing, along with one from John G telling me about the shorter ifdown/ifup commands. Thanks!)

I should have followed the example of Jerry Pournelle, who, while working with computers, keeps a detailed log of things that break and how to fix them. If I had done that with the prior installation, I could have referred to my notes to fix that problem.

So, I grabbed an empty notebook and started writing things down. Including the commands needed to activate that virtual network port. I also changed the setting to remove the autostart of the 'x window' (the GUI). The X window can't be running when you install the vmWare tools, for example. And I hadn't figured out (yet) how to exit X without restarting the Linux OS. So a change to another configuration file lets me manually start the X GUI.

There is some additional work I need to do to the RedHat installation in preparation for a class I am taking next month. I need to install some additional programs from the RedHat CD's. This is done through the "Add Programs" program. But I ran into the 'unrecognized' CD command during the install; it couldn't read from CD #2, even though I used that set of CD's to install the OS. I ran out of time to figure that one out, but I think that I'll try copying the CD's and installing from the copy.

I left work a bit early today to go over to Christine's house to help out a bit. Jared and I put a flip-latch lock on the front door (so the kids won't escape), and fixed the towel bar in the bathroom (using a wing-bolt). And their Internet connection is still dial-up, but they only get a 28.8KB connection. So I went outside to the telephone box, disconnected the inside wiring (modular plug), and plugged in the laptop to that connection. That connects the laptop modem directly to the phone company side of the wiring, bypassing any potential problems with the inside wiring or phones. That connection was still 28.8, so a call to the phone company was made; they'll be out tomorrow. Their house is in a new subdivision, so they should be able to get a faster connection than that.

The plan for tomorrow is to play a bit more with RedHat, getting it configured for the class, along with some other projects.

I spent all morning and part of the afternoon installing a fresh copy of RedHat in a new vmWare partition. And had lots of problems. Since it appeared that the original set of disks (fresh from RedHat) had defects (according to the RedHat CD verification test that is optional at the beginning of the install), I started out by burning copies of the original disks. That might sound weird to do, but the files were all readable outside of vmWare. So I burned new copies of the disk, and started the install.

Actually, I tried to add some additional programs from the CDs that I needed for the class next month. The install would ask for CD 3, which I dutifully put in, and then the install program couldn't read them. In fact, it got into a loop that didn't have a 'cancel' option. The only thing to do was to exit the whole install program.

So, since those CD's (and their copies) didn't work, I started the download of fresh and updated ISO's. There were four to download, and even with our fast connection at work, it took a bit over an hour and half to get the four ISO's downloaded. Then a bit more time to burn the CD images before I was ready to try an install one more time.

I blew away the vmWare partition I was working on, created a new one, and started the install. After going through all the screens, the install started. It trundled along for a while, then asked for CD 2. I stuck it in the tray, pushed it in, and the install program complained about a missing file. Now, I knew that the CD's were OK, since I had the install program test them first before starting the new installation.

Then I remembered that sometimes CD 2 was not read correctly; it's a vmWare bug that sometimes occurs. The sequence recommended by vmWare is to wait until CD 2 is asked for, then take out CD 1, and leave the tray empty and close the tray. The install program complains about not having a disk, so you open up the tray, put in CD 2, close it, and the install program continues.

But you have to do those steps exactly as detailed. If you put CD 2 in when asked, and the install program complains about a missing or damaged file, and no combination of empty or full CD trays will get you past that point. You have to abort the install, which means that you have to start all over by blowing away the vmWare partition, etc.

So I did that, started the install again, got to the 'stick in CD 2' part, then carefully did the proper sequence , and the install got past that point and continued. So I finally got the new installation done.

Then it was time for the 'up2date' process to get all the current upgrades. To do that, you register your installation with the RedHat site, and then you get to download all the updates that are needed. I'd done that with the first install (on a different vmWare partition, so this was like a second installation) and it worked just fine. But this update wouldn't work, I think because I'm doing a second installation. By this time it was after 2pm (I'd started about 9am), and it was time to go on to something else. I'll need to do some more research to get past this new problem. I did purchase a one-year support license, so will be sending off a support note to RedHat.

I finally got out of the office a bit after 3pm, stopped by a fast food place for a drive-through lunch, then off to Christine's house. A bit of relaxation there, holding Max and playing with Joelle and Liam, then a dinner together.

We decided to take Joelle and Liam home with us so that Christine can get a bit more rest. It's always fun for them to stay at "Poppa's and Grandma's" house, and we enjoy having them. Pam will fix breakfast for them (I think that pink pancakes are on the menu), and we'll walk over to the neighborhood park for a while, and then go back to their house in the afternoon. It should be fun.

And with any luck, I'll figure out the 'up2date' problem. But I am keeping notes as I go along.

... more later ...
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