More minor changes to the presentation of statistical data!
Crazy day at work- Amongst several other minor catastrophes the script I put together yesterday that could parse IP’s suddenly started giving two seperate IP’s per login. This caused a headache or two. It’s fixed now, but I still fon’t know what caused it. Managed to hurt my right arm somehow. It hurts all the way to my fingers to the point that typing is rather uncomfortable and I find myself taking frequent breaks.
Went to the Kirkwood train station tonight to meet Faith’s friend, Connie and her two children. They just came in from California and will be staying with her brother for a couple of weeks. Faith always gets so excited when her best friend is in town!
It’s official, I don’t like my stats page. Charlie has a much better way of displaying and keeping track of his data, so I will have to see just what I can come up with.
[ Stats (maybe) ]
Today at work, I fleshed out my user menuing system to include support for X terminals. (More precisely, support for our known X terminals- meaning I parse a list of IP’s that are known to be x-terminals) Now I have a single script that not only displays the appropriate menu items based on the user, but also decides (via the parsing) whether or not to utilize x-displays for the individual choices. Not a bad day of coding, but my lack of sleep has been making even the simple molehills into mountains. I really need to get a good night’s sleep one of these days.
Talked to my brother today. This weekend is the annual St. Louis County Fair & Airshow at Spirit of St. Louis airport. Steven and I have been making a habit of going every year. This will make five(?) years in row now. This promises to be a good show- the Blue Angels are always worth seeing!
I’m not sure I like the format of my “Statistics” page, but I’ll have to wait and see how it develops over time.
Work today was a nightmare… I spent most of my time fighting an excruciating little script. It was quite beautiful in it’s simplicity: From my main server, I wanted to add users to each of my other boxes with a single script (no, NIS is not an option ). I installed sudo on each of the machines and then ran a list of users through a while loop that would rsh into each box and add the users. Only problem was, the script would cycle through the while loop if I was logged in as root, but would not validate on the other machines (rightfully so, remote root is NOT allowed). When I was logged in as myself (they way I want the script to work, I could run the rsh commands and sudo on the remote boxes, but the script would NOT cycle through the while loop. This was extremely frustrating!!!! I tried looking at the differences in permissions between myself and root, I tore apart the script (it’s only eight lines of korn), looked at every possible angle as to why this was acting this way. I finally figured it out. How? “man rsh”. As usual, after studying the man pages, I realized that rsh was responding to the remote I/O and flaking out my entire loop. Rsh -n (at least on Solaris) fixes this problem. So now I have a nifty little script to add users across multiple boxes! ( I think this one may grow to include group permissions and access to certain tertiary switching equipment.
I installed a 3.5 drive and new hard drive (O.K. so not so new- it’s my original 80 meg hard drive from my first “IBM” style machine) into the Compaq Portable III. Lo and behold, I still had my original Compaq Diags disk to setup the new configuration! (see, there really is a reason that I’m holding on to all those old disks!) After configuring the machine, I put Minix on it just to see how it had changed over the three or so years since I had last played with it. Quite a difference. Minix 2.0.0 installs very easily and comes with a nifty little setup program that guides you through installing to the hard drive. Within maybe fifteen minutes, I had a fully operational minix box! (286-12, 640k 80meg- impressive, eh?) I still need to load the source code and compile a kernel with ethernet & tcp-ip support, but that will come later. I still want to try out ELKS, but that will probably wait until I finish playing with Minix.
Saturday/Sunday, August 26/27, 2000
Saturday morning I slept in (I didn’t get home from work until about four a.m.) while Faith and Logan took part in the Ballwin Days parade! Logan’s cub scout pack had a float in the parade and he rode on it while Faith walked along side and handed out candy. Saturday night we went to the Ballwin Days fair and I took Logan and his friend Jordan all around so they (yes: “They” not: “Me”) could ride all the wonderful vomit-inducing rides. Faith, in the meantime worked the cub scout booth selling food to the masses.
Sunday, I wasn’t feeling very well, so I pretty much just spent the day resting. Faith actually managed to mow the lawn in that heat. I feel bad not doing myself. The lawn looks sooo much better!
I left work about eleven today, since once again I am working tonight. (I am writing backup tapes as I type this) I had to come downtown to verify a bunch of stuff before I left. When I did leave, I meandered around a bit until I realized I was near a certain good place to find stuff. (not the particular location that Tracy visits, but rather one that is much closer to me. As I started pawing my way through the two rows of electronic junk (and that’s truly what it was- even the computer stuff), I came across several (three or four) old, out of date monitors, printers and a couple of XT class machines. Bummer. I guess we can’t all find magic boxes (i.e. StepServers). But wait! I turned the corner and sitting down on the floor was an old Compaq Portable III! I have been searching for one for over a year! I am going to try and load ELKS on it. Then I can use it as a terminal on my home network!!!
I have also added a current statistics page that I mentioned the other day. There is a link at the top of this page to it as well. This is a cool idea! Thanks, Charlie (This is where the idea came from, lest you think that I am that creative!). I decided to go with a seperate page instead of integrating it with this one. That way I can keep a running list and can chart the changes as they occur (if and when changes occur!)
Ever have one of those days where you’re running, but you just aren’t getting anywhere? I feel like I somehow managed to pipe this whole day to /dev/null. So, today’s update? In the bit-bucket!
All I can say is: “Rudy should have won!” It just burns me up to see the type of behavior exhibited by Rich get rewarded. I accept that in the end, he really played the game, but still- oh well.
Charlie made mention of a “current statistics” box of some sort. I think I like this idea! It might be kind of cool to be able to track my changing tastes in music, books, etc… I will have to give it some thought.
I upgraded Faith’s machine (this is the one that I am currently using to play Diablo II ::bwahaahaa::) I upgraded the memory to 128 meg and installed a Matrox G200 video card. Wow! what a huge difference it made. I had a bit of trouble upgrading from the Matrox Millenium that I had in there but that was mostly due to the Intergraph monitor that I am using. Luckily, Matrox directly supports this monitor so that I can use higher resolutions (up to 1280×1024)
Discipline is the blacksmith’s hammer. A single strike will do little to the steel, only repetition forges the sword.
Logan had a great time on his first day back to school. “The math stuff is too easy!” he said ::grin:: Week two of working out and I made it to the gym again this morning, although I couldn’t find my lock so I went to Walgreens to by another. When I did get to the gym, the lock was too small to use. So I just threw my bag on top of the lockers and worked out anyway.
I finally got around to sending an email to Kristen and she responded almost immediately! She gave birth to her third child in June and has been a bit busy ever since ( I can’t imagine why!! ::grin::) Anyway it was good to hear from her!
I mentioned a few days ago that I found that remaindered copy of “Smoke & Mirrors” by Neil Gaiman, well I read about a third of it last night. It is a collection of short stories. No. That’s not quite right. It’s a collection of literary genius spilled between the covers of this book. Not necessarily genius insofar that what he has to say is new or groundbreaking, but I have never found an author who could so deftly and eloquently spin a tale and leave such a detailed and descriptive carving in your mind. I would recommend this book to any sci fi/fantasy fan out there who hasn’t read Gaiman before. (You might remember him from a little comic book he used to write:The Sandman
Sunday, August 20, 2000
Recursions! recursions! recursions! Whee!!!! (I can feel the time-space continuum beginning to slip!)
We went to the baseball game today. We lost 6-0. Blech. Other than that, we had a great time! Had to pick up my sister and her daughter from the airport (they spent the weekend in Chicago with relatives) Logan spent the evening getting ready for the big day tomorrow!!! Third grade! Wow, it goes so fast!
John and Anne have decided to adopt not one, but two of our kittens! Both Gonzo and Gizmo have found a new home! (You’d better hurry, Charlie, if you want one!!!) Actually I think That Faith has found homes for Gidget and Gadget so in a couple of weeks we will be back to just two cats (and a dog and a huge guinea pig named Einstein)
Jeff, Journal | Jeff | 
August 31, 2000 7:01 pm | 
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