What I Learned Today

1. Frickin VMS - looks like we lost a disk in the vms cluster. So all I wanted to do was go in and remove the automount command for said disk. I consulted some manuals, all of which said - "set the boot flags to get into a conversational boot" sounds easy enough, and then it said that each type of console had its own boot flags. Ok. I've got a MicroVax 3100/95. I think the manuals for that box have already decomposed. Anyway.. The boot flags for the MicroVax to get into a conversational boot are boot /R5:0000001 DKA300: Then you get a nice prompt called sysboot> at that point you can modify the default startup parameters so i did a set startup_P1 "MIN" so that way the machine would boot with minimal services and would allow me to edit the systartup_vms.com file. So I finally get in there and edit/edt didn't work so I had to set the terminal type first. So I get into the file and see that it actually calls mount.com to do the mounts, so I go into mount.com and see that it refers to a file named disk_names.dat and it goes on and on. Still haven't fully stopped it from trying to mount the drive on all the machines in the cluster.

2. So Comcast's new thing is that if you dont pay your bill they will try to force you to download their crappy "enhancements" and then enter your account number. Then they will tell you that your account needs "Servicing". You can grab an IP address and you can ping your local gateway but you can't get past it and no inbound ports work either.

1. Today I learned or perhaps was strongly reminded of the fragility of life.

2. When driving into work I forgot my toll money and my atm card. So I had to take the long way. I was running late for the eye doctor so I called to tell them so. I missed my exit and ended up on a different interstate, which was under major construction. I then ended up on the express side as opposed to the local side, meaning that it would be that much longer before I could get off the interstate and either turn around or try to muddle my way through the city. Anyway - I found that at the place where the local and express merge, I could drive straight across the local lanes and catch an exit. Lucky for me, there wasn't much traffic so I made a 90 degree turn across 6 lanes of highway and made to the exit. (IL 1 - North Halsted) I was then able to turn on 156th street and make my way back to I-94.

2. Twin Beds are really expensive -- when walked into the mattress place and I saw the $279 price tag on the bed, I was like, ok thats a lil more then I wanted to spend, but I can handle then. It took me a few minutes to realize that was only for the head board and the footboard. The mattress and box spring were an addittonal $399.

1. seems like comcast is doing something different when you dont' pay the bill for a few months. Before they would just stop the modem from grabbing an IP address. Now it seems like they delete modem's registration information. Will have to find out more - neice's computer is still having issues, so I think she just needs to pay the bill.

1. Birthday parties are very tiring !

2. Though I never would have believed it when I was younger, there is such a thing as too many toys !

3. Audio Mapping is disabled by default on Windows 2003 server. This means that a remote connected client cannot use sound.

1. Our new Intel based Imacs arrived today. i have to admit I'm impressed. They even have an Ipod-shuffle looking remote control that smartly attaches to the side of the LCD so it doesn't get lost when its not being used.

2. I learned that we haven't figured out how to get a projector to work with an HP NC6000 running Windows 2003 server. Works fine with Xp,.. and we tried applying the XP driver to the 2003 machine, and the driver installs succesfully but refuses to send the image to the projector. I am going to have to look at this myself on Monday.

3. looks like we are getting a new platform to port one of the products to. Solaris x64 here we come ! Amazingly not only is Solaris 10 free but the Sun Studio 11 is free too. I paid $1,000 for it last year (version 8 command line edition) - how irritating! Could be worse I suppose, I could have bought 10 power pc based macs 2 weeks before the intel announcement...

1. SGI is a pretty terrible company to do business with. As I'm sure everyone remembers I had to jump through major hoops to purchase their debugger. Our developers were still having issues and noticed that the version of the of the debugger that we are using is not the latest and greatest. The most recent patch for the debugger was released in early 2005, so it makes no sense why the software I purchased does not have the most current version. I called SGI to inquire about how to get an update to the debugger. The friendly support rep asked me if I bought a support contract when I bought the debugger, of course I didn't. He said I would have to buy the software again to get the most current version.. after beating my head against the phone I explained that I bought the software 2 weeks ago and for some reason they didn't ship me the most current version. So "out of courtesy" the rep agreed to ship me the most recent version of the software. He had no idea as to why they shipped me a version that was 3 years old !!

2. One of my faithful commentors, Christy - mentioned my car might have a distributor cap problem... unfortunately my 97' cavalier doesn't have a distributor cap :( but it is definitely something with the starting mechanism... I'm going to take it Auto-Zone for some free testing. Thanks for the suggestion and keep them coming !

3. Is it really possible that Apple offers no upgrade path from OS X Server 10.3 to 10.4 ? I really have to go out and buy a completely new license ?

1. I learned the other day that my drivers license expired back in November. So this morning after getting donuts for Anna's birthday breakfast I thought I'd stop by the local BMV to get it renewed. To my surprise - the state has shut down the branch. This was probably the best BMV ever as there were never any lines and the ladies there were semi-friendly. I guess that led to the demise of the branch - now I have to go to stinky portage, not much further, but much busier.

2. My car starts. I hope I don't turn into a cranky old man anytime soon... Actually we think it is a condensation thing, where something in the engine gets wet that shouldn't, so the car won't start. Once it dries out, the car starts fine.

3. The Portage BMV isn't so bad. They have definintely improved their processes and are running much more efficently then I have ever seen before. It took about 8 minutes to get my new license. My new eyes passed the vision test so I got the "glasses or contacts" restriction removed from my license.


4. I learned this last week but forgot to put it down -- the salvation army donation box is in the Northwest Corner of MC's Lowe's parking lot.

1. I have decided to omit "what I learned on" in the titles of my posts - this is more of a declaration as opposed to something actually learned, or well I guess I could say I learned I'm too lazy to type "what I learned on" in the title of each post...

2. My car still won't start. Not that I have tried anything but starting it. I keep thinking it will magically heal itself like Christine. It has done it before, honest.

3. I am listening to the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis on CD and they have setup the discs so that each track is one chapter. Its nice because there are only about 4 chapters per disc, so only four tracks. Makes it easy to simply stop at the end of the chapter and then pick up where you left off later. However, what I learned today was that if you stop in the middle of the chapter it is very annoying to try to fast-forward through the reading to find your place. I also have the Lord of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien on CD and they were set up with a new track every 3 minutes, regardless of where in the chapter you were. This made for 20 - 24 tracks per CD, however it is a little easier to pick up where you left off.

4. Z/OS is not bullet-proof, well atleast the machine that my z/OS is running on isn't. We have an issue where some of the storage units seem to have magically been "erased" or perhaps "initialized" either way , they don't even contain their volume label anymore although they formatted correctly.

5. I learned that I am baffled by window's 2003 DNS scavenging. For some reason it likes to delete my mailservers A record. That causes all sorts of issues for CVS as well my savvy users who insist on Thunderbird over Outlook. The answer at the moment. Turn Scavenging back off.

6. Thanks to Oprah, I learned it is not smart to hire a stripper for your 16 yr olds bday party. It is also really not smart to allow your 14 yr old son to take explicit pictures - it is really really not smart to then take the roll of film to your neighborhood Walgreens.

7. I got the protective contacts removed yesterday and now my vision is at 20/25 - I have another appt. next week, hopefully it will keep improving. I think x-ray vision would be nice, but I doubt I'd get invited to any more FOA events .. or anywhere for that matter.

8. I received a quote from IBM for a new P-series box that would allow us to use lpars and run both AIX 5.3 and I/OS simultaneously -- only about 125K.. for a machine that between the two platforms, we have about 6 customers. Not really worth it at this point.

9. I learned that there is a lot more to do then just pick out new chairs when it comes to re-doing our current office space. I have to make the determination if we should rip our existing cat 5 cable and bump it up to cat 6 . We signed a 10 yr lease - so it seems to make sense that we should upgrade now so that we will be able to accommodate faster speeds in the future.. but I need to do some more research.

1. My car won't start

2. I'm not strong enough anymore to push it up the incline of my driveway and into the garage. ( I swear I would have been able to back in the day...)

3. The new Imacs with the Intel procs shipped yesterday, that means they should comein this week which means I'd better order that "special ram"...

4. I am in absolutely no pain and my eyes are no longer sensitive to light ! I get the protective contacts removed tomorrow morning, hopefully the vision will improve. Its good now, but I'm hoping for superman-like vision.

1. When the eye doctor says that you will be in "slight discomfort" for a few hours after the surgery, he really means "imagine two hot stakes poking your eyes" for a few hours. Well maybe it wasn't that bad, but it hurt more then I was prepared for.

2. With PRK things start off good then get worse then get better. I knew that going into the surgery but didn't realize to what extreme. I felt great about 18 hrs after the surgery, I could see fine and my eyes didnt hurt. I took a nap about 24 hrs after the surgery and when I woke up , my eyes were very sensitive to the light and hurt quite a bit. My vision was also very blurry compared to earlier in the day. I slept alright last night, but this morning my eyes continued to be extremely sensitive. When I woke up from my afternoon nap (approx. 50 hrs after the surgery) things were much better, my eyes were not as sensitive to the light and I could actually look at the computer screen. I'm looking forward to Monday morning when they take the protective contacts out of my eyes and my vision should improve quite abit, although it can take up to 3 weeks to get my "best vision"

3. I have managed to go for about 48 hrs without logging on to my work email and surveying the damage that occurred during my absence. That might be the longest I've gone in about 3 yrs.

1. Despite the fact that is not listed - OpenSSL is a prereq for Curl on Solaris.

2. This will be my last blog for a few days until I can see again - unaided I hope !! The big surgery is tomorrow and today they verified that they are doing PRK not LASIK, because of my thin corneas. I have my Chronicles of Narnia books on CD and my Lord of the Rings on CD to keep me busy while I am unable to look at a computer for the next couple days..

3. Thanks to my faithful commenters. the FOA girls - I hope you guys will be alright without my blog for a couple days ! :)

4. Lastly - It is incredibly easy to setup windows 2003 server as a Pop3 email server. I just installed the Pop3 service via add/remove programs -> windows components then I defined the domain and mailboxes within the Pop3 mmc snapin. The only gotcha in the whole process is that the domain can not already exist on the SMTP server - it has to be created via the POP3 server. Also - in order to get "local user" authentication to work I needed to enable SPA on both the server and the client.

1. I am capable of sticking with something for a whole week !

2. To easily convert Windows text files on a mac do a :fileformat = mac :w in VIM and then exit and open the file. This will get rid of the nasty ^M line break chars. More info here.

3. When using the Verisign site to order SSL or Code signing certs - get the amount from the website, but before you provide any information, have the PO created. They force you to put a PO number before you can submit the request and the site will time out if you leave up for more than a few minutes at the PO screen it will just time out and you will have to re-enter ALL the information.

4. I started working out again -- at Bally's in the hole under a building not too far from work. Its part of the discovery health body challenge thing .. 3 of us from work signed up for an 8week free membership. Anyway - they don't have locks on the lockers of course, so I had to find my lock from my last feeble attempt to work out and try to recall the combo. Finding the lock was easy the combo did not come back so quickly. Before thinking too hard, I figured I could probably look up the combo on line. So I go out to Master Lock's website and find the lost combo FAQ. They want a Notorized statement (with Raised Seal) that the lock is indeed yours and a picture of the lock to prove it isn't attached to anything ! Too funny. So that wasn't happening as I need the lock for tomorrow. So I stared the lock down and just started twisting the dial and sure enough i got it to work . 34 - 26-21

5. I finally got the hosts file thing working on the mac. In most unix flavors i believe there is some sort of file called nsswitch.conf that defines the order that a machine uses when looking up name info. Well the mac has to complicate things and let good old NetInfoManager take care of this, so its not as easy as just switching some services around in a flat file , you actually have to load up the lookupd order into netinfomanager and then load the hosts file that you want to use as. To top it all off , the hosts names are case sensitive. What a pain. Guess its a BSD thing.

1. When backuping up AIX with smitty you can just specify a remote directory to path such as /mounts/backups/aix/1-16-06-predator.backup. However as I found out - that file might be larger then the ulimit limit. I had to change the hard and soft limit by specifying
ulimit -H -f 2097151000
ulimit -f 2097151000

this allowed me to create larger files for this particular shell session.

2. Turns out the Intel based iMacs we are getting in return for our beta Intel boxes only have 512MB of RAM. Not just any old RAM will do, of course - its special RAM. We couldn't find it at our normal outlets but it is at RAMJET. Not a bad price either .. $250 for 2GB.

3. Its not as easy as I thought to use a local hosts file on a mac... Still looking into that.

4. The Mailbox on Indian Boundary is not in front of the UPS store -- its in front of Hallmark.

1. Kodak EasyShare is up there on my list of annoying software, almost as high as AOL. It will not fully uninstall for me, despite the use of the "clear utility". And the new version will not come down either. This is for one of the machines that I'm looking at for my neice's boyfriend's parents...

2. Its not as hard as I thought to replace a solar sensor on a lamppost. Although I was thrown for a loop trying to determine which circuit the lamppost was on. Turns out it is on the same breaker (15) as the water heater electronics.

3. I bought a purafilter2000 furnace filter today instead of the 3M filtrete. It was 5 dollars less and had the same MERV rating (11). If you agree to give them some info they will remind you by email to replace the filter after 3 months. Although the site looks like it was writen on Notepad - it will be nice to get a reminder to change the dang filter..

1. Ben Watson is my new hero. He ran over 100 yards to catch Champ Bailey and stop him from returning a 100 yd. Interception back for a touchdown. Back my football days, I played offensive line and whenever the QB threw an interception it was always sort of fun to hustle down field and light up some unsuspecting defender who was sleeping on the job. Mr. Watson displayed that hustle and even though the Broncos scored on the very next play it was still awesome to see him give 100% and catch that corner.

2. I really dont' like AOL. I have had bad experiences in the past with all the software that they put on the machine of a subscriber, but today was especially irritating. This machine had AOL's "Spyware protection" or whatever they call it and yet when I put Symantec Antivirus v10 and MS Anti-spyware software on it, it found multiple running processes as well a couple dlls and registry keys. I understand that one Anti-spyware product can't detect everything, but as far as I know -- AOL is the only one that has commercials touting it superiority to anything else out there. Personally I recommend JavaCool's Spyware Blaster - as a protective measure. MS' AntiSpyware and PepiMk's SpyBot Search and Destroy as both protective measures and scanners. Not to mention the fact that after I uninstalled all AOL components in Add/Remove Programs -- the Service "AOL Top Speed" still existed as well as the system Icon...

3. Thanks to a friendly reader named Chris - I learned that I can email my blog updates to this site as opposed to having to trips out to the site and do the updates. Thanks, Chris !

1. This site actually came in handy today when I needed to install J2SE w/Netbeans on a linux box. I just clicked the handy link I put in my first post. Yay me !

2. If your Blackberry device won't boot, ie it never gets past the hour glass after you turn it on, you can use a little executable called javaloader.exe to actually connect to the device and delete the entire application partition. After it is wiped, you can then use the Desktop Manager's application loader to re-install all the software.

3. After you wipe out a Blackberry 7150t and reload the applications, if you accept the defaults, the PHONE application will not be loaded ! You have to go through the apps and make sure the phone app is selected to be installed manually. It was sort of funny after I reloaded the device, got the email working and then found that it did not work as a phone at all. You couldn't make or receive calls.

4. To setup a red hat box as an NTP client from a desktop session you click system -> date and time and check the NTP box. How simple is that ? Almost windows-esque.

5. I finally got ghost to work on my Bart PE disk. After what seems like months of searching the ghost CD for the right files to add to the PE Build, I finally found that if you install the "standard tools" not the enterprise client or server, you will get the files that you need. Good old ghost.. I can remember way back when it was shareware, before norton bought it and symantec bought norton.. but I digress...

6. I started watching some of the instructional videos included in the win2k3 server resource kit. I didn't realize all the security features available in WSH 5.6 or that some of the VBScript IDE's actually had "intellisense"-like capabilites. I always just used UltraEdit.

7. The enigneer working on the Inter-Tel phone system today said that it was impossible to have a message lamp light up on two phones for the same mailbox, because a mailbox can only be assigned to one extension. The enigneer I spoke to on Wednesday (the one who told me about the hold music) said that it wouldn't be a problem to have the message lamp light up on two phones whenever there is a message in the "community" voicemail box.

1. Some people never learn. This is an email I received this morning @ 8:45am.

I'm missing some files. How do I get them back? Our meeting is at 9 am.


2. I forgot how much I liked this site to ensure your firewall is actually doing its job. ShieldsUP!

Seems that there are alot of people that don't like Steve Gibson or his Shields up site. My personal opinion is that the site definitely has some good features and can help novice users identify some common major problems with their systems.

3. If your auto complete in Windows Explorer is not working (e.g. if you open an explorer window and type C:\prog then hit the key, and C:\program files doesn't appear) you can enable it by going into Internet Explorer, click Tools-> Internet Options , click the Content Tab then click the "Auto Complete" button. Click the "web addresses" box and click OK then OK again. Now Try It. It makes no sense to me whatsoever as what do "web addresses " and local drive paths have to do with each other ? But whatever. It works. Here is the official article.

4. Freakin DNS - I was wondering why my scavenging of stale RR's wasn't working as I had enabled it on the forward and reverse zones. Well - you actually need to enable it on the server as well, not just in the zones you want to have scavenged. Probably more on this later.

5. If you are trying to install the PDF JobReady client and server on the same machine, and you run into authentication issues, just uninstall both and then reinstall server, then the client.

6. I'm glad the FOA girls are enjoying my techno-babble - I will try my best to keep it up !

# posted by Brian @ 9:04 AM 5 comments

1. Since gdb doesn't work with pthreads on IRIX - I had to purchase the IRIX debugger. So - just go to the website and buy it from their online store... right ? Oh wait. there is no online store, you have to call their 800-number and talk to someone. So after I explain that I just want the debugger, not the compiler - because we are using gcc - they explain i need to buy the compiler to get the command line debugger. They offer the compiler to me at the rock bottom price of only $2340. They won't accept a PO and force me to use a credit card. This was back on 12/30. The CD's finally arrived today. There were about 15 discs in the package and the flexlm key on the outside expired on March 14, 2004. Weird. So I put the MIPS pro C++ disc in and looked for the command line debugger... no luck.. I put the ProDev disc in and the command line debugger was on that disc. Whatever.

2. Thanks to a helpful reader I learned that you can install J2SE via the command line if you grab the generic package as opposed to using the Installshield based installer.

3. I think I need to do this blogging at work when I actually have this stuff top of mind.

4. Our Inter-Tel phone system can only support one hold music source unless we buy an option card.

5. For some reason there about 20 LTO tapes put in "FROZEN" status (using Netbackup 5.1 Mp2) I wonder if its the media or the drive...(.There are 5 reasons media might be frozen.)

1. I 'm paying way too much to get Lasik surgery. (well PRK in my case) A girl at work is paying like $600 and eye..and I'm paying $2800 an eye.
2. You can't install J2Se with Netbeans via the command line.
3. Sharepoint Service "lists" are much more then just lists - however, I haven't been able to figure out how to link two lists together.
4. Intel Core Duo chips are Intel's new mobile platform and will also been seen in the desktops soon. Oh yea - they are in the new i386 based macs.