andersonfam.org

Wow…today was a long day. I started out with church at 8:00 for to sing in the choir for two services. Then after church, we had rehearsal for the brass ensemble. After that, I drove home quick to change, and promptly left 15 minutes later to head down to Wooddale, where our church choir was participating in a choir festival. We had an hour and a half-long rehersal there, and then another hour and a half-long concert. Now…I’m finally home, exhausted, hungry, and with no voice left to speak of. Okay…so now I’m sitting, trying to relax a bit. A bottle of Hazed and Infused is treating me well.

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Two companies that all tech-geeks love to hate will soon be merging.

**sarcasm** That’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time.

P.S. Two posts in a day…rather unorthodox for me :-)

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Worked on the basement. Here are the results so far. I’m about 1/4 done with the framing.

Happy monday.

general general, work

Yeah – it’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I figured that I should give an update…

The last week or so has been good – stuff is pretty busy at work, and I’ve had a few large projects on my plate. One of which has been moving our ~30 gig CVS repository over to a new server. The old server only had a gig or so of disk free, and our engineers were chewing through about 1 gig a month, so that repository really needed to be moved :-) Luckily, the move went over fairly well with very few issues, which is a good thing, since if CVS is down, that pretty much means that no one is able to do productive work. I’m pretty please with how I have CVS working now…I have samba/winbindd running, which allows me to use a pam module for winbind which authenticates users against our Active Directory server. This makes administration much easier for me. Eventually, we’re hoping to work towards some sort of Single sign-on architecture, and this is a step in that direction.

Okay, Ijust realized that I used four links to wikipedia in that last paragraph. Geez.

Also this week, I found out that my building permit was approved, so we’ll be starting serious work on our basement soon. 2×4’s, here I come. It’ll be great when it’s done…there’s just a large amount of work in front of me.

In other news, I got to place two calls into Dell support today, which is always great fun. This morning when I got into work, as I walked by one of our server racks, I saw the dreaded blinking orange light. Turns out one of the RAID 5 members died last night. Thank goodness for RAID5 – no data was lost. I called that one into Dell, and they had a replacement disk at our door in under three hours. Not too bad. I was able to replace the hot-swappable disk and start rebuilding the disk, which was still rebuilding the last time I checked. Fast-forward to about 45 minutes ago…I’m dorking around on one of my linux boxes using GNU Screen (I use Screen nearly all day long, so my left Ctrl key gets quite a workout). While navigating in Screen, the Ctrl key is used a lot, and all of a sudden, the Ctrl key got very mushy and stopped working. Great. So I got to call in a keyboard replacement. Hopefully that’ll arrive by friday. Luckily, I have been running with my Caps-Lock key re-mapped as a Ctrl key for the last year. I’m not sure what I’d do if I had to (God forbid) use the right Ctrl key. That would throw me off in a nasty way.

With that…I bid you adieu for the evening.

general general, linux, work

I was reading a discussion on Slashdot tonight about how Wikipedia is planning to release a DVD version of their article database. Some guy on slashdot made a rather hilarious comment about why the German version of the DVD will be smaller in size then the English version:

Deutche has an amazing built-in fractal encoding scheme. For example, the German version may say:

Gerflugenichterschweitzenbaggen.

whereas the English version has to write out:

Shortly after September 11, 2001, the United States attempted to rally its allies for a strike against the presumed Al-Queda stronghold in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, the RAR algorithm averages a 3% compression ratio on German text, in comparison to 82% for English and 94% for French – it’s like bzipping a .gz file. On the other hand, there are significant savings due to the lack of entries on “sweet nothings”, “pillow talk”, and “Bavarian romantic verse”.

I thought his post was extremely funny. Of course, the humor I find in it might just be because it’s 0026 hrs, and my brain is 3/4 shut down.

G’nite all.

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