Ian's blog

So much for this being a work on the house day. I decided to look into the publishing my calendar on website with out having to buy a dot mac account. This was easier than I thought. I got my webserver set to allow webdav to a specific directory. I have the authentication tied into the same password set as web mail. I hit publish and it works. Now all I need is for HY to publish her calendar and we might have a chance of keeping up with what the other person is planning.

This blows you can’t subscribe to a calendar that is on an https site
see

https://tuttlesvc.teacherhosting.com/blog/blosxom.cgi/labor/technology/schooltool/313.html

for more details.

I have a packet of Milk Chocolate hob nobs, a laptop, a 3.5 inch USB drive enclosure with my old failing 2.5 laptop hard disk enclosure in it sitting open on my desk. So it is safe to say I am having a geek day.

I worked on updating my resume this morning. I will post it on my imacdonald.co.uk website at somepoint. I am listening to WAMU.

My trip to the post office to get my mail was one of those times where I should taken my bike. A trip that should have taken 15 minutes took me close to 30 mins because they have closed off a lane at the end of Pratt and President.

I discovered this week that my quicken file didn’t copy over correctly to my file server. It seems they do something funny with the file. When I copied it back after swapping out the hard disk the file wouldn’t open. I didn’t know this but the .qdfm isn’t really a file it is a folder with lots of files contained in it. I was able to create a new file then copy data bits to this new file but the stocks were missing and all the account transfers were pointing to the wrong accounts. Which is why I bought a USB drive enclosure and 3.5 inch to 2.5 inch IDE convert able. The disk seems to be working so I am copying everything off just incase I find other files in the future that have the same problem.

Tomorrow is going to be a work on the house day. I need to patch the whole in the living room ceiling from repairing the leaking shower.

Some, well one of my friends has been saying that I look like Ewan McGregor. For those who haven’t seen me recently I have a beard and longish hair. So an other friend sent me the following link this morning. Which would explain the conversation I had with my girlfriend where she suggested I dress up as Obi Wan for Halloween.

My 12″ powerbook now has a new 80 gig hard disk in it to replace the 40 gig that died. and my main desktop machine is now an AMdDsempron 2800+. It is zipping through a roll of film right now. It is also has a quiter fan than then old motherbaord. At somepoint I need to rebuild the file server using the 1.3 Gig Motherboard and CPU I pulled out of my main desktop machine but I need to find a quiter fan for it first.

I suspect that my Mac laptop’s hard disk is dying. When will it ever end. I got the laptop booted and I am in the process of running this little script I hacked up. It uses ssh and rsync to syncronise files between my mac and the linux file server. If you are not using sshkeys then you can remove the lines about ssh-add and ssh-agent. It backs up the Desktop, Documents, etc folders.

#!/bin/bash
eval `ssh-agent`
ssh-add /Users/ian/.ssh/sshkey
for folders in Desktop Documents Faxes HTTP Pictures Projectphotos Public bin photos p
roject src
do
echo “doing $a”
rsync -avr –rsh “ssh” –exclude “*.aiff” –exclude “iTunes” /Users/ian/$folders ian@linuxbox:/home/osx/backup
done
kill $SSH_AGENT_PID

Had fun weekend, bought an 80 gig hard disk and a 120 gig hard disk and a new ata 133 controller. Typical the ATA controller doesn’t work in my old P233, so I made a backup of the 120 gig mirrored disk onto a spare 120 gig hard disk. I am currently copying everything off 2 6 gig hard onto the new 80 gig disks since I think one may be in the process of failing. This all started because I ran out of disk space and I can’t be bothered/don’t have time to delete stuff. The original plan was to add the new controller and a 120 gig hard disk and make the mirrored pair a raid 5 array. The back up plan is to move /usr/src to the 80 gig or just add the new 120 gig drive as a slave on the existing ATA 100 controller suck up the fact that it might be slower.
I am also looking at the possibility of putting a new motherboard in the P233 case. I replaced the power supply a while back so I should be able to add a new motherboard in with out a problem.

I gave up waiting for 120 gigs of data to copy so went to DC and had dinner at Bombay Bistro then saw Sideways at the arlington cinema and draft house. It is funny film if you haven’t seen it already.

Today was Breakfast with a washington post and some american history via a cartoon on the WB channel. So I learn about Paul Revere and the phrase “the british are coming” I was surprised that something of semi educational value was playing on WB. Then a quick trip to Microcenter to price out some motherboards then lunch with some friends then dinner with some other friends. The conclusion is most of us hate our jobs.

Skiied at alta yesterday, man I have never had to ski on powder before and I suck.it snowed all yesterday afternoon, all night, and all day today. We decided to try snow bird today since it had the least snow over night. We took the tram to the top. When I got off it was so cold and windy my goggles had frozen on the inside. From there we skied a black that had a foot of fresh powder on it. I stopped every 5 or 6 turns because I was panting from doing the turns and the high altitude. We ended up skiing most of the day on what we thought was a blue or a hard blue. It turned out to be a green but because of the foot of fresh snow made it a lot harder. By the end of the day we were getting faster partly because the snow was a little better packed partly I was getting better. I love mogles made of fresh snow. You can hit them on a turn and its a nice soft hit rather than the hard stuff I am used to. At times I was skiing through pounder that went above my boots. This was fine till I needed to turn then I would generally end up flat on my face. Any way I am having fun. I think we are taking a day of rest tomorrow. Park city on thursday then find some where else for saturday or sunday. Warning don’t take a advanced beginner to the top of the snow bird tarm when 1 to 2 feet of snow have fallen and only blacks are openn also see my comment about the green earlier. And for those how know me that wasn’t my beginer am talking about. She fly in later in the week.

I have been listening to pod casts, i have been hearing about it for a couple months but I didn’t there wasn’t any content that finally me want to try it. A few weeks ago I heard the on the media (National Public Radio) was podcasting there show. I like the show but am rarely in my car when it is on. So I set up ipodder www.ipodder.org to download the on the media. I also set it to down load Adam Curry’s daily source code since he was the one that started the whole podcasting thing. I think I am addicted.

I also set up a skype account today to see what it was all about. I have tried using other services, but I can’t remember why I didn’t use it much

I came back from Houston last night. I was in Houston for the Bindview insight conference. I ended up doing my presentation on Bindview Controls place in an IT security organization twice. I had had a lot of fun presenting and got positive feed back so hopefully more in the future.

My cat is coming back today, she has been in DC for the last week since I was out of town in Houston. 🙂

I picked up my new skis today, so I thinking about going skiing tomorrow to try them out. I am also planning a skiing trip to salt lake city. On of the other guys at work wanted to take vacation at the same time I am out, but I gave notice about my trip months ago so I get to take mine.

After almost a year of living in my new house I finally hung the last of the photos that should have been hung months ago. I was planning on painting before hanging them but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. I have the ski trip coming up, then a wedding. I was trying to get tickets for the tori amos concert in DC but they sold out in less than 24 hours 🙁 I am going to the Sarah McLachlan concert in May

I did a bit of searching this evening. I run a geeklog for the local community group. It has been up for about 3 months and see the google bot indexing the site every so often but it never comes up on searches. If you search for Riverside action group baltimore on a about the 4 page you get a link to the mailing list i am testing for the site but not the rag.iwasdot.com site. So I did some hunting. Someone posted a siteindex.php that you can add to geeklog so google has a better chance of indexing it. Since Geeklog is continually being updated the links never have the same content. The idea of the page it that it lists static links to stories that can be crawled and stored in google. I also noticed that the google bot keeps searching into the calendar so I added an extra entry to the robot.txt to stop it doing that my theory is that it never completes the crawl so it never gets added to the google index. So we will see if that makes any difference.

I need to upload some of the photos from new york but I don’t have time tonight, maybe tomorrow.

I am on a greyhound bus to New York. It never fails to amaze me the cross section of america you see on one these buses. I guess most people with money would drive or fly rather than take the bus, but I am from a country where public transportation works. Plus I don’t think you can beat the $31 return fare from dc to New York.
Everyone has cells phones the woman in front is going beep beep on her nextel. I am typing away on my blackberry. One of the kids in play gameboy. I think the disgusting part of the trip so far is the toilets. Every time someone openS the door on the bus you get strong smell of protapotty blue stuff plus something more ick.

The intention is to go see the christo gates in central park. I also want to go to little italy and see if I can find some good food for lunch. We were consider trying to see spamalot but the tickets were verging on the silly end of high.

My new computer came to the office on friday. $300 later and it is probably the fatest computer in my house. I feel ashamed of my lack of geekyness. I went drinking with friends in dc rather power on a shinny new computer, what is the wold coming to……..