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GRAFFITI -- May 09, 2011 thru May 15, 2011

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Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable.     About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.



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MONDAY    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
May 9, 2011

Wait for it ....

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Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
May 10, 2011

1643 - Good evening. The last big push of the Spring session is on, for me. I've got a 5-10 page paper that I'm going to turn in tomorrow evening. It's due the day after, but I'm due in Crystal City all day on Thursday, and nothing guarantees bad traffic better than needing to be somewhere else around here.

Potatoes and onions
Potatoes and onions

The garden is getting rolling. As I noted previously, I've got potatoes and onions (see the picture above) started in the beds (and habañero peppers, but they've barely poked their heads up). I've got a set of potatoes at each end of the one bed, so that if one end goes south to some disease, I might not lose both batches. I'll be planting tomatoes the same way, more spread out than in previous years. In seedling trays I've got beans, cucumber, several different tomato varieties, and a couple of basils germinating - about half of those are heads-out-of-the-ground already. I've got to get some cilantro going, too.

Now, to work on my paper. Ciao!

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Mon    Tues    WEDNESDAY    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
May 11, 2011

No Post...

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Mon    Tues    Wed    THURSDAY    Fri    Sat    Sun   
May 12, 2011

1928 - Today, I spent the day in Crystal City, at a Splunk event. Seriously, if you do any sort of work with computers for a living, and have log (or other text) data from one or more machines, and you want to learn what that data can tell you, you need Splunk. It's not open source, but you can download and run a trial version for free. You'll be hooked in an hour, get your company hooked on it in a week, and take whatever time it takes to get the P.O. signed for a license of the right size for your organization. It's simply the best data aggregation, correlation, alerting and reporting tool I've ever used. No, they don't pay me to say any of that. Now, I'm going to futz about with Fedora Core 15 Beta (at least, I think that's what's on this USB stick). Ciao!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
May 13, 2011

No post.....

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    SATURDAY    Sun   
May 14, 2011

1221 - No post last night because I was hard at work on a new project. Here's an excerpt from an email I sent earlier today:

I'm migrating some of my services from Zidane to Dreamhost and Google. This is in preparation for a general migration away from that machine. One of my goals with this experimentation is to make sure that I can work with Jerry to provide a relatively painless transition to another hosting provider. Come the day in a month or so, I'll probably need someone onsite to work with Jerry as we migrate services, webs, this mailing list, etc.

Why, you ask? Greg and I have been doing this hosting gig for over a decade, pretty much for free. The money we "bill" for annually went to pay the actual hosting provider. So, a lot of responsibility with only the compensation of helping folks out ... which, don't get me wrong, is considerable compensation. But I'm busier than a one-armed paper hanger (and have been), and Greg is about to become a home owner, after moving about the country a bit. We have other things to work on, and Greg and I will appreciate not having to worry if the latest machine update broke webs or email, or if someone can't connect - Sometimes it's good that the problems are outsourced.

I personally plan to continue working with Jerry on Chaos Manor Reviews.

My process:

Setting up DreamHost for my webs and getting ssh/ftp access took about 30 minutes last night. Hosting there is about $120 a year, and that's with "unlimited" bandwidth and storage. Things have changed a lot from the days when Jerry had to move from Pair because his bandwidth usage was spiking. The dreamhost account is the standard, least expensive one. I configured the DNS on dreamhost, tested it, then changed my nameservers to point there. It's all just working.

Instead of using DreamHost for email, too, I decided to use Google for that functionality, since Google's crowd-sourced spam-processing facilities are great. I'm using the free version of that, since there aren't very many of me. We'll need to look at Jerry's setup to see how many users there are across the board.

My only remaining issue is getting email set up properly on the iPhone. Debugging now.

And the iPhone issue ended up being larger than I expected. The bottom line is that, since I was already known to the Goog under the [email protected] address, I wanted to use one of my others for the new Google Apps setup portion of my migration. But I still want to send through this new account using my standard email address. Useful search terms to figure out this problem appear to be [[ gmail google address sending from alias ]]. So, I login to gmail with the new account, then select Settings, followed by Accounts. In the Accounts tab, in the Send mail as pane, select Add another email address you own, and follow the directions. After verifying the address, that address can be selected as the default sending address. Once that was done, my account configuration and email from address woes were over.

Now I'm going to see if my grades have been posted for the CMIT course — a twinge of unease, since I *really* don't know how I did on the final ... Nope, not posted yet. Waiting on scoring for the final, and for the technical paper. I guess it'll be another day or four. Now to get some work done downstairs, since the potential yardwork's been kiboshed by the rainy weather. Ciao!


2159 - I'll know how well to recommend Dreamhost personally in the next few months, but I was able to figure out everything I needed to work in their web GUI in a relatively short time. They came highly recommended though, so if you decide to go with Dreamhost, click on this link (or the first one in this paragraph), which helps pay my hosting bill. Thanks to Bob for the reminder...

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    SUNDAY  
May 15, 2011

2011 - So ... just WOW! I got an A on the technical research paper that I wrote and turned in last Tuesday night, which is unsurprising: I'm good at writing papers, once the idea and plan are firm in my head. What I'm boggling over is acing the final I took on Saturday the seventh. I really didn't feel good about that test. With the Red Hat Summit that entire week, there'd been no time for tune-up studying. I must have guessed perfectly on every question I wasn't sure of. Yay! And there are ten classes remaining until I have that BS that I started in 1979. Well, one might say that I'm a natural with BS, but that's another story.


Our condolences to the families and units of these fallen warriors:

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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.

All Content Copyright © 1999-2011 Brian P. Bilbrey.

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