"Better Vulpines through Technology."

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Wed Nov 28 22:58:34 CST 2001

Subject says it all, not really much of anything going on. I should work on something geeky, but I can't really think of anything I want/need/have to get running. Well, there is Gabber and getting vulpes to resolve DNS correctly, and finish some emails, and whine about work. Ok, maybe I do have alot to do ;)

I need to finish cleaning house here, I'm thinking of playing hooky from work tomorrow so I can spend the day cleaning house. Clean out the office, move stuff back in there. Reinstall vulpes, build new things, all that fun stuff. Maybe I will, maybe the need for money will win. Though either way I need this place clean soon. I'm going nuts. Plus I need room to reinstall my SGI Indy, and my Sparc station, and all the other toys I have stored in here.

Winter Wonderland	Wed Nov 28 13:58:31 CST 2001
Well winter hit North Texas yesterday...or at least what this state considers winter at least. Sleet, cold, and general idiot drivers. Wheee ! On the plus side, I'm nice and comfy. The office has heat, the car's heater works, the apartment is warm. All is good.

DNS evilness.	Mon Nov 26 23:08:11 CST 2001
I had some nasty DNS flern happen today, for some reason Vulpes, my home DNS server was routing www.cyberfox.org off to god knows where, some server running IIS. Argh, no idea why...but it was my server causing the flern. So Vulpes is out of the DNS loop for now, it needs to be reinstalled anyway. Fun fun fun.

New script foo	Sun Nov 25 17:15:27 CST 2001
Ok, just because I was bored, I stuck a script to measure server uptime for my webservers. Nothing major, but it does what I want :) I'm getting good at this scripting jazz.

Round Robin DNS	Sun Nov 25 16:47:12 CST 2001
Well, after reading a bit more into DNS, I've got round robin dns setup for Cyberfox.org. Easy, once I knew what I was doing. :) The next step is to figure out load balancing DNS, so I can have redundancy...but for now, I'm happy with round robin. :)

KDE Downgrade

November 24th, 2001

Well, KDE 2.2.2 from SuSE is not ready for prime time, Konqueror got mighty slow, and really hammered the CPU, so I went ahead and went back to 2.2.1. Feh...gotta love buggy stuff.

Damn, I'm posting alot this week, gotta be the boredom. Or the job. Or the tiny feeling that I might actually have half a clue about what I'm going to do with my life. What can I say, I feel alot more geeky than I did a week ago. Give me a few months, and I'll actually know what I'm doing :)

DNS foo

November 24th, 2001

Well, in my joy about setting up the new hosting for cyberfox.org, I utterly borked my DNS foo.

www IN A 66.34.116.97.
does not work...I hate periods. I usually screw things up like this, simple mistakes...but cause I didn't check the logs, I assumed it worked. :( Oh well. On the plus side, I've figured out a little of what I need to do to have Round Robin DNS setup or Load Balanced DNS . If i'm going to maintain lair that is...hmm, new things to learn, new things to play with :)

One more Test.	November 23rd, 2001
Just in case DNS doesn't update correctly, or fast, I've changed my script to update both Cabal23 and Lair, so everyone should be happy. Hmm, I need to look at a load balancing script I think. ponder :) I know Mej uses one...I'll have to figure out how it works. :)

Cyberfox.org migration	November 23rd, 2001
Well, I started moving my website to it's new home on Cabal23.net. So far, everything looks fine, about to update DNS. So you may not notice updates for a while, depending on how fast your DNS updates. This post is actually a test of my journal script, see if works with the new server. Not sure if I'm going to migrate email as well, probably not, I like sendmail way too much :)

Workin' Thanksgiving

November 22nd, 2001

Still a slow day...maybe 1 call an hour. Still have almost 2 hours to go. Ya know, this is the first thanksgiving I've worked since 1996, and it feels weird. (Though I was oncall for 2 thanksgivings, and I did work on them, but that was from home.) This is really a waste of time and money for the company, but I'll take holiday pay. I need the money. I always need the money. Oh well, hopefully by next year I'll not worry about it as much.

Turkey Day Boredom

November 22nd, 2001

Hey all. I'm here at work on Turkey day quietly loosing my mind. It's so slow I think I'm going to just go to sleep. Which will probably get my ass fired. So I babble. Babble babble babble.

In the saga of Vulpine and the Kernel, I'm still happy with how it's running. Memory utilization seems to be ALOT better. Normally, by this point X is using 25-27% of my RAM (xinerama is a memory hog). Currently it's using 14.4. It's nice to not have to worry about RAM (though with 512 meg in Kitsune, I didn't worry much.) I also upgrade to KDE 2.2.2 today. Not that it took much, since I snagged the rpm's from SuSE. If your running SuSE, you can go ahead and snag them from Cabal23. Enjoy.

What else, plotting my next move. As in apartments. I've been at this place for 2 1/2 years, and I'm pretty sick of it. Problem is, most any place I want to move to I can't afford on my salary. So I'm thinking, if I do move, I'm going to move to a rather smaller place. Why you ask, simple... I don't entertain much, so no need for a big fancy livingroom/dining room setup. Even a studio apartment, if it's big enough for me to pack my crap in would be ok. But I want out of Arlington. Closer to either Dallas or Fort Worth. Probably Fort Worth. I'd love to get a downtown loft in Fort Worth, but that is SO out of my price range it's not even funny. Oh well, we'll see. maybe when the market improves.

New Screenshot	November 21st, 2001
Ok, remember how I said yesterday I'd update my desktop shortly. I've been pushing the new kernel pretty hard, and I like the new virtual memory setup. Not as much problems with releasing memory as before. Lots of ETerms and me editing Picout. One of these days I'll make that do what I want it to do. Check it out. :)

Harry Potter	November 21st, 2001
Well, I'm bored at work, so I thought I'd babble a bit. I went and saw Harry Potter last Friday. Now I've never read the books, but I loved the movie. I can see why kids (and adults) fell for the books. I need to grab them and spend a few days devouring them. :)

Kernel 2.4.14 foo revisited	November 21st, 2001
Well, I rebooted and guess what, I got sound. :) Woohoo. Of course, now I'm getting modprobe errors. shakes head But that fix will be for another day. :) Now to test all this bleeding edge kernel flern. :)

Kernel 2.4.14 foo

November 20th, 2001

Two posts from a bored fox in one day. Well, I went from Liska to Kitsune, and started the process of upgrading my main workstation's kernel from 2.2.16 to 2.4.14. A bit of a leap. I've always been a tad wary of upgrading kernels, mostly due to an utter lack of clue when it comes to configuring the damn things. And SuSE which makes everything else easy as pie, makes kernel upgrades a stone b*tch. Of course, I'm probably missing something easy...but still. Well, back to the story, I started tinkering with the new kernel stuff last night, built it, loaded it, and nothing worked. No network, no sound. Played with it again today, tried installing the network card as a part of the kernel, not a module. Reboot, network worked. Hmm...so now I'm rebuilding again with my sound card installed in the kernel, instead of as a module. We'll see.

While I was building the kernel, I decided to snap a screenshot showing off my "new" desktop setup. Ok, it's mostly the same as the old one, just with a new pretty face. :) (Graphic cheerfully stolen from Tom Gilbert.) Every now and then I get this desire to complete turn things around...two days from now I'll have something completely different up in it's place. But you can see the kernel compile, my music tastes, and the fact noone wants to chat with me :( And yes, I was silly enough to import a screenshot while compiling a kernel... not like I was going anywhere. So here's the Screenshot . Enjoy :)

Liska, the Linux DemiGoddess	November 20th, 2001
Spent a good chunk of tonight configuring Liska, my laptop. She's still running SuSE 7.2 linux, but I spent a few hours upgrading Eterm, setting up Enlightenment and installing EveryBuddy. Still having sound issues and the graphics look off, but I'll sort those bits out later.

New Stereo	November 18th, 2001
Woohoo ! I have a new car stereo. Only took two months to get my insurance company to get things arranged. It's a Kenwood KDC 315S cd player. It's nice, I have sound, I have music. I just need to replace the CD's I lost when my car was broken into. Oh well, got time now.

Rambling...

November 13th, 2001

Not much going on in my life, but I thought I needed to post something, otherwise no one will read this nonsense. Hmm, whats new. Went camping this last weekend, at a pagan event called Goddess Rising. I was staff at this event, specifically security. No, not hacker intrusion kind of security...keeping people out who didn't belong. Did alot of walking that weekend. But it was fun, other than the utter lack of sleep.

Hmm, what else. Well, I did see The One a few weeks back. It's a Jet Li movie, light on plot, heavy on martial arts. I liked it...I need more Jet Li movies. (If your not familiar with the guy, he's the bad guy in Lethal Weapon 4, the guy who kicks everyone's butt.)

Haven't gotten anything done on Cabal23... just haven't been in the mood to design things...plus still no real concrete idea of what to do with it. Any ideas anyone ?

Work is well...work. Nothing more mind numbing than doing level 1 tech support. I miss admin'ing, alot. I miss having to fix real problems, not fixing dinky little dialup issues. Or billing issues, I hate billing issues. I'm not an accountant, I don't care about your bills, just pay them. Oh well, hopefully this will pass and I'll have a nice admin job soon. if the market ever picks up again.,.*dream* *hope*

Hmm, not much else...really really really damn slow week.

New Email	November 7th, 2001
Thanks to WesM for yet another email address. And my first .uk email too. Check it out on the email page.

Picoutput

November 5th, 2001

Well, I turned my hand at coding again. A while back, Mandrake wrote a nifty little program called picoutput . Basically it's a script that turns images into thumbnails and sets up the html code to display them. Very cool. But a few things were hard coded in, such as the size of the thumbnails. So I went in and changed the hard coding to just shrink by a factor of 6. And voila, I have a nice thumbnail generator, that deals well with wacked sized pictures. Feel free to steal. :)

Car Crap	November 2nd, 2001
Well, I'm offically really really poor. I had to take my car in to get it inspected. $280 later it passes. I hate cars. Mostly because I don't know squat about them. I like public transport better. Oh well, at least now my car runs good.