August 2001

Last night was the first night of trying to use the KVM to switch between Slave1 and gbox. All did not go well, probably because I was also trying to use an external USB hard drive, and since Slave1 has the drivers but gbox doesn't, it kept getting wiggy... I also see why old pal Nicholas opted for the super-KVM he got, which cuts the delay you see when switching between machines... still, it's well worth it, and indispensable already...

I'm pretty sure I heard someone pronounce the word 'extraneous' as 'extra-aynee-us' today...

Is it still the Age of Quarrel?

Does anyone know of any good resources for information about HTML formatting when dealing with variable data, like for web based apps? I've got to believe there is some good research on this out there somewhere...

Well, I moved the office once again (Hello Indiana!) and we are now located in the top level of Fowler Park North Corporate Center... better known as our upstairs... This marks the 1000th time I've moved the office, between four houses and about eight rooms - all in the past 5 years... The good news is we now have the KVM in place to easily control two machines, the bad news is, this move is somewhat temporary, and we'll move back into the underground offices at some point. Oh, the really bad news is that we just recently got proper grounded outlets in the underground office, and now we won't even be using them... argh...

Progress on the shed moves along. We now have a good floor, and... a... tenant?

I saw the albino squirrel yesterday. He was hanging out in our yard for quite sometime. We will not be shooting at the albino squirrel. That is, as we understand, a crime. Plus the locals would probably string us up if we killed ol' whitey...

We had our rummage sale this weekend, and things went well. We made a bunch of money from our useless old junk, and it only rained a few times... (If I'm lucky, we won't have another rummage sale until next year.) We had planned to start at 8 AM, as that's what the signs and the ad said, but when I walked outside and around the corner of the house at 6:45 AM, two cars pulled up and people cautiously approached. Unbelieveable - an ambush! Before 7 AM we had a handful of people who made purchases and were gone... sheesh!

Modem's are slow. DAMN are they slow! Almost as slow as Windows! ha ha ha...

I'm dying to get the new G4 (which I've dubbed 'gbox' for now) up and running... I've installed the RAM and the 2nd hard drive, I've got the KVM and the other goodies I need... one thing I still need to do is build some sort of shelf. There seems to be no way I'll fit old Slave1 and the gbox on the same desk, so I plan on building some sort of CPU stand to go next to the desk. Maybe I'll build it into kiosk type thing to keep the kids from repeatedly pushing the power buttons... oh, the possibilities...

saucemaster reports he's tried Red Hat and Mandrake, and is now (happily?) using Debian. Yay...

Shhh! Don't tell anyone - more Open Source secrets! We put Apache on one of our NT boxes, it's running right alongside IIS, serving a site we ported over from a *nix machine... and yes, it's using Perl as well...

Palm buys Be: I missed this! I've been waiting for the end of Be so I could retire my Be shirt, which is pretty worn out and full of holes. I just wanted to be able to say that my Be shirt outlasted the company... now I can...

We went to the Dells over the weekend, what a blast! It was great to be able to take the kids on a vacation (even if it was only for a day and a half.) We stayed at The Grand Marquis, which is a nice little place with a nice little indoor water park for the tykes, though mom and dad enjoyed it quite a bit too... We took in 18 holes at Pirates Cove Adventure Golf and had breakfast at Paul Bunyan's Northwoods Cook Shanty. Woooo.... today it's back to work... grumble, grumble, grumble...

www.photomontage.com is interesting...

I figured it out - I just ordered a USB KVM, so that I can have Slave1 and the new G4 on the same desk, connected to the same keyboard, mouse, and monitor. this way I just switch between the kid's machine, and mine with the click of a button. Oh, I also ordered an extra 512 mb of ram for the G4 today, and since ram is so damn cheap, I'll bump the iMac up another 128 as well... things are looking up!

We have this little shed behind our house, we call it the 'bug house' because the bugs live there - but now a guy named Jared is fixing it up for us in exchange for letting him live there for a while... crazy!

Well, I've ordered a new PowerMac G4 "Quicksilver" and if all goes well, will be running Mac OS X and burning CD's by this time next week. I also got a 40 gig drive and will be ordering an additional 512 mb of RAM sometime very soon. I can't wait to start running OS X, development of perl related things should be much easier, and I'm hoping the Tk stuff all works properly. (I'll be running JBmail in no time!)

I showed Emma a picture of the new Mac, and she said "Oh... I can't use it" and I then asked "Why not?" and she said, "It doesn't have a mouse..." (kids rule...)

I still have to figure out what to do with the kids... do I boot it into OS 9 for them to run their games? Or do I figure out how to keep Slave1 running - which would mean 3 computers on an already crowded desk... hmmm...

The Road to Linux gets some updating, as I now have a 133 mhz Pentium (a Dell Dimensions XPS) to take the place of Decstar...

A brief WATN update as well.

Last night I decided to install NeXTSTEP on an old Wintel machine that I've got... I think after trying 20 or 30 more times, maybe I'll get it to work! If not, I'll go back to trying to install Red Hat on it... that's always a load of fun as well... yeehaw!

Had a weird dream that I was at a beach, and George Peppard was there with his son (George died a few years back of course...) He wanted me to teach his son the value of things, since he thought he was a little spoiled. He gave me this mini-walkie talkie and I started imitating Mr. T. Of course Mr. T showed up at this point, and wasn't entirely amused by my impression - you would think he'd be used to seeing people bustin' out with his sayings by now... anyway, I think this whole thing happened because we saw Mr. T do some low-budget commercial on late night TV before we went to bed. I miss George Peppard...

Hey, Claire Scott, stop sending me your Phone List...

So we're using ColdFusion 4.0, which does not seem to support CFExecute or CF_Perl, so what to do? We have the ColdFusion page do an http request to a perl script running as a cgi, which returns the output to the ColdFusion page... and the user is none the wiser... pretty soon we'll have our entire ColdFusion app re-written to use perl, and no one will even know it! Muwhahaha...

"You have 5 minutes to drink your Mountain Dew... GO!"

I started playing my old vinyl records on the record player I got at a rummage sale... note that it is not a 'turntable' that you might hook up to a stereo, but a self-contained GE unit, probably 30 years old... still works! Once I get a new G4, I play to borrow a turntable from Mr. Bruno and MP3-ify all the vinyl I really care about... that should be interesting...

Today's heat index should be around 105... did I mention the air conditioning in the car gave out a month ago, so basically my ride home everyday is 45 minutes of sweating and trying not to pass out behind the wheel from the heat... fun, fun, fun...

We had the family and friends out for Emma's birthday yesterday... what a difference a year makes, new home in a new city, new friends, new everything... We took the canoe out and tried to give everyone a turn, and it was the first time we've had a real party at the new house. All went very well. We're planning a housewarming in September, if you wanna come, just drop me a line... It's been a very good year. We're happy.

"You have been replaced by a small shell script" - it's a reality. As my intern has been learning more and more perl, we've been able to automate much of what we had people doing manually. Life is good...

Windows users (you poor bastards...) imaging a world where you don't have to worry about sending out private documents to random people as email attachments... I live in such a world...

I'm about to finish up my order on a new Quicksilver G4. Ram prices are insane... I'll probably drop another 128mb of RAM in the iMac while I'm at it... whew...

Almost forgot, we started this 'weblog' type format back in August of 1997 (long before the term 'weblog' came into existance) though the site 'RasterWeb' itself dates back to sometime in the Spring of 1995 - right after we connected our 14.4 modem to our Mac IIvx... just thought you might be interested...

Ahoy! Whoowee... we are deep into software development... and have been for a while. It's ugly in here. So... many... bugs... So... many... feature requests... So much to do! I always get a bit nervous rolling code into production, did we test enough? Well, you can never test enough with web-based apps... Anyway, tomorrow is another major upgrade. Cross those fingers now...

Ken the programmer says that Thursdays are bad days. You don't get anything done, and you spend all day fixning problems. This seems to be true pretty often. He said Tuesdays are the same way though, which leaves us only three days a week to be productive. Not good. He said he wanted to take off one day next week, either Wednesday or Thursday. I suggested he take off Thursday since it's a wasted day anyway... but he pointed out that when things all blow up and go haywire on Thurday, maybe he should be here. We can't win...

Damn you Microsoft SQL Server... damn you!

If you're using ColdFusion, you might want to look at LessWhiteSpace... it saved me from putting a hit on ColdFusion...

What's up with the Milwaukee Perl Monger's site?

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