Just last week, I was locked in a life and death battle with my Internet server for several days. During that time, my connection to the outside world was cut off. Here’s what happened.

About week ago (it was a Friday) Michelle noticed a message on my workstation saying that “a network cable has been unplugged” and that she could no longer get on the Internet. I came home, power-cycled the workstation, and everything seemed to be okay after that. Then, on Sunday, it happened again. No amount of power-cycling, or anything else, could fix it this time. The light on the hub for the NIC simply refused to go on. In other words – my onboard Gigabit Marvell had died.

We went out shopping – but all of the computer stores proper were closed at that time of day. A stop at Future Shop, and me asking if they had any Intel Gigabit NICs, resulted in some young sales guy saying, “Oh, yes, we used to – but I don’t see them here now – and, gigabit – that’s awfully fast – why do you need something that fast?” (No doubt implying that the stock of 10/100 Mb cards, which were on the shelves, would be fast enough for anybody. Or – at least fast enough for him to make a sale. We quickly left there and went to our regular store – Staples. I’m not sure why we went to Future Shop in the first place.

I found a Gigabit card there. It was a D-Link DGE-530T. At that point, I paused mentally and considered things. There was also a 5-port Gigabit switch. Plus, a couple more of the NICs. Perusing the back of the box, I saw that the NIC was also supposed to work with Linux. I decided to go ahead and upgrade my entire network to Gigabit speed. So, I bought a second NIC (for the Linux server) and the high speed switch. In addition – just because I knew I was throwing down a bunch of cash I hadn’t really intended on doing prior to waking up that morning, and I was in a “What the hell?” kind of mood – I grabbed one of the new Microsoft ergonomic 4000 keyboards. (The keyboard ended up being a wonderful purchase. I’ve been working with the old Microsoft ergonomic keyboard for years and have always like it better. This new version is, I feel, as much better than the old one as the old one was better than a normal keyboard. I love it. I’ve requested one for work and, if it’s not approved, will simply by another one for myself there.)

I got home, swapped out my old switch for the new one, disabled my defective on-board NIC, plugged in my new one, and booted up Windows. Everything went just fine. It found the new NIC, installed drivers for it, and I was back on the Internet again. (With a slight sour taste in my mouth that my onboard NIC had died in the first place – but it does happen from time to time and I just had to live with it.)

Now I had a switch with one green light and two yellow lights. The green indicated a Gigabit connection, the yellow a 100 Megabit connection. The slower connections were coming from my Linux server – and also from Cogeco’s cable connection. I couldn’t do anything about my ISP, obviously, but I still had a second D-Link in a box to put into the server. So, I shut it down, put in the card, and then tried to compile the module for it. That didn’t work – all I got was compile errors. I went to the D-Link site and downloaded the source for the module directly, but this only resulted in the same thing. Some Googling led me to believe that a newer kernel might fix this.

So – I upgraded from the stock 2.4 kernel to the latest 2.6. This gave me different set of errors, but it still failed to work. I thought to myself that, perhaps, the OS itself was simply too old. (I’d had RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 on there.) So – I decided to upgrade it to Fedora Core 5. The virtual machine, which has the real Internet presence and is actually running in a virtual machine on the physical box, uses Fedora Core 3 – and I’d actually planned on upgrading it to Fedora Core 5 at some point. I also knew that GSX 3.2.1 wouldn’t properly support FC5 – either as host or guest – so I knew I had to switch over to the second beta of VMware Server. But the first thing I had to do was upgrade the host to FC5.

I had 7 CD-RWs and 2 DVD-RWs. I’d already downloaded all of the CD ISOs for FC5, and the server didn’t have a DVD-ROM drive, just a regular CD-ROM drive. I didn’t feel like having to rip my DVD-ROM drive out of my workstation and put it into my server. (Anything involving wholesale cannibalism of parts, and multiple machines being operated on, I try to avoid if at all possible.) So, I started to burn CDs. The first one worked just fine – none of the others did. I kept getting write errors. So, I decided to go with DVD after all. But I couldn’t get that to burn either.

In the end, Glen convinced me to give Nero a try – thinking that the problem wasn’t the media but the burning software I’d been using (CDBurnerXP Pro). It turned out that he was right – Nero had no problem burning at all. I immediately deleted my old software, although with some regret since I always prefer to use freeware options where possible. Now I could get both CDs and DVDs for FC5. For some reason (a kind of “Well, why shouldn’t I be able to do this?” attitude) rather than just using a series of CDs, I started to investigate how I could use the DVD image without having to rip things apart.

I started by discovering that I could put the ISO directly onto the server’s hard drive, and boot up (using the 1st CD, which I’d already burned) with “linux askmethod” to tell the install to grab the full disc image off of the hard drive. Unfortunately, doing this required that the image not be on one of the partitions to which files would be written. I knew I’d have to resize a partition and create a new one. The System Rescue CD utility saw the partitions, but wouldn’t let me resize. Partition Magic saw them and did let me resize. I though I had things well in hand – until, at the beginning of the install, it aborted to say it couldn’t write to /proc and that it would have to reboot the system.

At that point in time, I had a non-functional server. It would boot – but only into a minimal configuration without various filesystems mounted. Further, as I attempted to “undo” my disk repartioning, I discovered that there were now errors on it. Essentially, I’d screwed up my hard drive. Luckily, I still have access to the data on the disc. I booted using the System Rescue CD, mounted the partition with my data, gave it an IP address on my internal network, and copied my virtual machine (the only thing I really cared about from the server) over to my workstation.

Once that was done, I knew I was going to have to wipe everything on the server and install from scratch. Around this time, I discovered that, rather than installing from hard drive, I could have installed from HTTP and pointed it to my workstation’s Web server which was sharing out the FC5 files. So – I did this. (Rather than burning the remaining set of CDs or ripping things apart to use the physcal DVD.) This started to work quite well – until it aborted because it couldn’t read from a file. It turned out that my original DVD ISO download was, itself, corrupt. (I’m thankful I hadn’t ripped things apart to get a DVD-ROM drive in the server – it wouldn’t have done me much good.) I copied all of the files from the various CD ISOs onto my Web site. This finally worked. I only wish I’d realized I could have done this at the beginning of the whole process.

I got Fedora installed on the server. I then compiled the kernel source, compiled that resulting kernel, and got VMware Server installed and working. I copied my virtual machine files back to the server, and was able to get everything else working. (It wasn’t quite as simple as I make it out – I had to do several different things to make it all function properly – but, compared to everything else, it wasn’t that difficult.)

So, I was back on the Internet – but I still didn’t have the Gigabit card activated. The compilation of the modules still failed. In the end, I discovered that I needed to build in support for an “skge” adapter – rather than the “sk98lin” that originally drove this device. I had to query the kernel .config file to determine that to use “skge” I had to have “New SysKonnect GigaEthernet” support enabled. (You would think that there’d be better documentation for this, either in the material provided with the card, or on the D-Link Web site itself.) Ironically, I’m sure I could have compiled this in while still using the old OS on the host – so I didn’t need to go through with the upgrade in the first place. Of course, I hadn’t realized that at the time.

But, in the end, this was a success, and I now have both my workstation and server operating at Gigabit speed. I didn’t have to go through all of this grief (things would have kept working as before if all I’d done was replace my workstation NIC) but, as with most difficult processes, I learned a lot of very useful information by going through it all.

Voila! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it’s my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.

As a follow-up to my recent entry, there are now several public sites being published that are soliciting a boycott of HD – at least until AACS is de-coupled from the technology. Two of these are Boycott HD (although it’s not much more than just a statement by the owner at this point), and the HD Boycott Site – which has more information.

The buttons on the left-hand side of this page will now work no matter what portion of them you’ve moused over. (It used to be that you had to actually click on the link text itself. Now you can click anywhere on the button.) I also fixed a minor problem where, on hovering over the form buttons, you’d see a dot appear at the bottom-left and bottom-right of the site text. It turns out that this was caused by underlining the links on hover, and that, in combination with the rounded design of the buttons, made it appear as dots. (No doubt IE users saw what was happening better since IE can’t show the rounded design as can the Gecko browser engine. One case where a lack of a feature would better expose a problem.)

There’s a next generation of DVD that’s coming out. Actually there are two competing technologies: Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Both of these seek to do for the DVD what high definition broadcasts have done for regular TV – dramatically increase the resolution of video, thereby producing far sharper pictures. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with this – aside from what should only be another technology battle along the lines of VHS and Betamax. In practice, however, Hollywood has stuck their noses into the mix and screwed it all up.

For many years now, Hollywood (or, more specifically, the MPAA) has been aghast at what they believe to be a huge impact on their profit margin: people who pirate DVDs. As such, they’ve managed to convince technology companies that no high definition DVD can be allowed to function unless it has certain copy protection built into it. The term for this particular system is “HDCP” (High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection). This is okay in principle, but they’ve taken it to truly Draconion measures. While things have not exactly shaken out in their entirety, I’ve heard things like you’ll only be able to play a next generation DVD on the player you orignally put it in, your player will send data back to some information centre, letting people know who’s playing it, and it will be impossible to make a backup copy of media. All of these are things designed to prevent piracy. But they also serve to dramatically hinder the privacy and fair use of people who are the legitimate owners of media. The worst part is that there’s really no objective research that’s been done to show that Hollywood’s belief that they’re losing money hand over fist to movie piracy is actually a defensible position. There aren’t any hard figures – and those that are given have only been “spun” a certain way by the executives, while a contrary conclusion could also be drawn. (This is all similar to the music industry going crazy over the “huge” numbers of sales that MP3 downloads have cost them when, in reality, there’s no clear cut evidence of that either. In fact, some studies have shown that users who download music are more likely to buy after having sampled.)

In addition to the things that might be done to prevent actual copying, those same measures are also going to have a major impact on the ability to even view a movie that’s been recorded onto one of these new DVDs. Assuming you’ve spent the money on a TV system that can support this – you’re simply out of luck when it comes to viewing it on your computer. There is, currently, no available computer monitor or video card (and you need both) that will let you view such a movie. Or, if you can view it, view it in its proper resolutions. (You may only be able to get a slightly-better-than-current-DVD quality picture out of it, even if you can play it in the first place.) In all likelihood – you could pop the movie into a next generation DVD drive (that you’ve just bought), push play – and have your monitor simply go black – as this article discusses.

So, to say I’m unhappy with Hollywood studio executives here would be an understatement. As far as I’m concerned, this is an exciting technology that I could easily see myself buying into – if it hadn’t been so completely hobbled by fearful panic button pushers who have too much influence over these things. In the current state of affairs, I can clearly state that I’ll be boycotting both new technologies – and hoping that they both fail utterly. I don’t want to see either fail for their own sake, but this is the only way I can see that the these people can get the message. Hopefully, they’ll spend lots of money on producing new versions of their movies, only to find that there is no market because they’ve stifled their audience. In the end, with any luck, they’ll realize their mistake and “fix things” so that we get the technology without the ridiculous limitations that are going to go along with it at first.

The last part of 2005 was a little stressful for me work-wise, but it’s all sorted itself out in the end. I’m not going to go into the details, except to say that there were certain things happening with resources at work that shouldn’t have been happening, and it ended up causing a lot of confusion and tension on everybody’s part.

As of the New Year, things have changed and everybody is much happier about the situation. From my personal perspective, I’ve been given a raise and and promoted to “Team Lead” of the technical division in which I work at VMware. As such, I’ve been transitioning out of being on the “front line” of taking support cases, and working instead on more managerial tasks, and team development and mentoring. In fact, as of about two hours ago, I’m no longer taking any cases at all. (Those cases I do get will be on an exception basis – most likely any that have been “escalated” for whatever reason.)

Starting next week, I, and my team, will be reporting to a different manager but that’s okay. I’ve known him just as long as my previous manager, and he’s a good guy too. The team is going out for dinner tonight so that the newer guys can get to know him.

Also, just this week, Michelle got a new job. The pay isn’t great to start, but she’ll be the first employee at the Canadian office of the American company. So, she’s on the ground floor and will have seniority over everybody else who starts. So long as she impresses people at the company (and she’s bound to) she should be going places quickly.

All in all, things are looking good all over.

I just updated Movable Type to the latest current version (3.2). I did this because I’d received some spam comments, had gone to “de-spam” them, and discovered that the old MT-Blacklist spam plugin was no longer fully working. (It had blocked the comments, but wouldn’t let me add the posters into my blacklist.) In reading up, Movable Type 3.2 had these filters built in and that plugin was now obsolete. I had a bit of a scare when it wouldn’t perform the upgrade until I figured things out. But things seem to be working now. The new interface (administrative anyway) seems nicer.

Now I need to see if I can upgrade Michelle’s installation too…

Michelle and I already know about a couple of the Christmas presents we’re getting each other.

For years now the chain on my MedicAlert bracelet has been broken. I’ve refused to get a new bracelet, because I don’t like the look of the faceplate that they’re making now. Instead, I’ve been wanting to get a new chain for the plate I already have. Whenever I’ve gone to jewellers I’ve been given odd stares when I’ve asked if they could just supply me a chain, rather than a new bracelet altogether. Personally, I don’t think that this is so “strange” and that any good jeweller shouldn’t have any problem taking my money to work on a custom built chain for me. No doubt if I were still living in Toronto I’d be able to find somebody who would do this. At one point, I even went so far as to buy elastic thread and use it as a chain. It worked quite well for a couple of months until it frayed and broke.

Anyway, the bottom line is that I haven’t been wearing my MedicAlert bracelet for a couple of years now – much to Michelle’s consternation. (While I’d rather wear it than not, I don’t see it as a big deal since my only condition is being allergic to penicillin. I can’t really see myself getting into some kind of trouble where this would be given to me and I wouldn’t be able to communicate to the doctors that they should refrain from doing so.)

So, in an attempt to get me to wear something, she decided to buy me a MedicAlert watch for my Christmas present – and give it to me early. I thought that this was pretty cool and said that I’d wear it. I’m wearing it now in fact, and have “retired” the basic automatic Seiko I’ve had for the past year.

There are pros and cons between the two.

The colour scheme of the MedicAlert watch face and hands is terrible. It’s a kind of silver on white that makes it very difficult to read the time unless you’re looking at it at the right angle with light on it. The only thing that really stands out is the bright red “MedicAlert” text and logo. I suppose that’s a good thing if you want doctors to notice it – but in terms of functionality (actually telling the time) I have no idea why they couldn’t have coloured the rest of the watch hands and hour/minute stops in the same red, or at least black. My Seiko had a much better contrast, and was actually luminescent so that the hands would glow in the dark for a while after having absorbed sunlight. (Which, if you think about it, should sort of be a “no brainer” feature of a solar powered watch.) I had no problem at all telling the time with it.

On the other hand, the MedicAlert is far slimmer and lighter than the Seiko. (In part because the Seiko was an automatic, and there’s a certain amount of technology behind that mechanism that makes it bulkier.) I like the band on the MedicAlert a lot more – and I’m hardly aware of the fact that I’m wearing it. Additionally, because it isn’t an automatic, and has no spring mechanism that winds, I don’t hear it ticking when I’m sleeping at night as I did with my Seiko. That ticking would be annoying and I often had to reposition my left hand so that I couldn’t hear it.

I haven’t yet worn the MedicAlert long enough to know if it keeps time better than the Seiko. I suspect that it will, just because of the technlogies involved and the fact that my Seiko was a bottom of the line automatic that I really couldn’t expect wonders from given how much money I’d spent on it. (Unlike this fancier, and more expensive, model that I’d originally wanted.)

On the whole, I do like the MedicAlert watch more than the Seiko (I think it was a great Christmas present). But, if I were to score them, it would edge it out only by a couple of points. It’s more aesthetically pleasing, even if functionally lacking. I consider the lack of a properly legible watch face to be almost unforgivable. What in the world were they thinking when they designed it?

In the future, I think that I’ll stick with solar powered watches – despite my bad experience with the first one I had that made me swear off of them for a while – just because of their lighter weight and the lack of any ticking that would keep me awake at night. But I’ll be wearing this one at least until I can get just a new chain for my existing original MedicAlert bracelet, or until MedicAlert comes out with an updated version of their watch that improves upon the legibility of its watch face.

However, I’m not keeping count of the days until either of those things happens. At the moment, I’m quite happy with the watch I have – and I think I’ll be keeping it for several years at least.

The whole “fall of the Ontario government” thing is just ridiculous. Does anybody seriously think that any opposition party wouldn’t immediately try for a vote of non-confidence if they thought they could get away with it? The only thing that caused it to happen this time is the series of coincidences that made all of the planets align for Harper, et. al. in order to give him the votes he needed.

Every government is riddled with mistakes and things that go wrong. It’s never been any different (and it doesn’t matter who’s in power), and this is no exception. The Liberals didn’t get knocked out because of anything specific, per se, but because all of the things that they could be criticized for added up to an opportunity for the Conservatives to try to oust them.

So, everything being equal, the only thing that this election is going to do for me is aggravate me by interfering with my personal life. If I had to choose between the 3 main parties, I’d probably vote Liberal. Not because I care any more about their politics than the other parties (although Harper frightens me more on a personal level than does Martin, and I think that Layton’s out to lunch if he thinks throwing his support behind the PCs will help his own party in any way) – but just because I’m so pissed off with the childish maneouverings of the other parties that caused all of this to happen.

As it is, I’m not voting for any of them. If I vote at all, it will be for the Green Party. Just like last time. Because they, at least, haven’t “grown up” enough to forget their ideals in the face of political squabbling for its own sake.

Okay, so once again I’m behind in posting here. It was a couple of weeks ago that my company, VMware, sent me on a business trip to VMworld, our annual software convention. This year it took place in Las Vegas.

Most people would jump at the chance to be sent to Vegas on their company’s ticket. I imagine I’m in the minority when I say I’ve never enjoyed gambling or casinos. Aside from the convention itself, I didn’t really have a good time. Not only because I found the whole lights / noise / crowds / artificial tourism atmosphere distracting and oppressive, but because of several other things that also happened.

The flight out was okay until we were about to land. But when we got there we were in the middle of a heavy rainstorm and we were put into a holding pattern that, had we stayed in the air, would have exhausted our fuel supply. So we got diverted to Phoenix where we refueled then flew back to Vegas again (this time we were able to land). There was then a 20 minute line-up for a taxi until a bus came to take us all to the hotel. Then, another 20 minute line-up at the hotel to register. On top of that, several of their rooms were leaking and most of my party had to be sent to another hotel for the night and next day. (Luckily I wasn’t one of those and was able to stay at the Luxor.)

I’d taken my dress shoes to the convention. I hadn’t worn them in years – although, in the past, I had no problem with them. The first night I got back from the convention I was in quite a fair amount of pain – I had broken, bloody blisters on both feet. The next day I wore my running shoes again, even though they weren’t really appropriate. But, even with those, I could only hobble around and I really didn’t feel like walking anywhere at all.

The rain from our first night continued. In fact, the local news reported flooding and road closures. It kept up until the second last day, and I didn’t actually see the sun properly until the morning of the last day. Even if I had been properly mobile, I didn’t have all that much incentive to go for a walk down the strip.

I locked my key in my room at one point. This wasn’t as serious a problem for me as it was for a colleague of mine who’d done the same thing but who had, also, locked his ID in his room. It took him a long time to get access again, and he ended up missing an important meeting with some big clients because of it. This story of his just seemed to fit into the whole “ill fated trip” theme. I ended up getting a spare key – I kept one in my pocket and one in my wallet to be safe. (I’d originally left the one key on my dresser, while I’d taken my wallet and everything else with me.)

Food costs a lot more than it used to at casinos – I understand that it used to be a lot cheaper. A typical breakfast ran me about $18 with tax and tip. I ordered room service one night – a grilled chicken caesar and two bottles of Heineken – and it came to $30. (Room service is only $2.50 more, so it wasn’t the simple fact that it was room service that made it so expensive.)

On leaving, I got into a cab that took me to the airport. Upon trying to pay with my credit card I was informed by the driver that he only took cash. He indicated that none of the taxis in Vegas take anything but cash. I ran into the airport to find that their ATM was broken. I had to have him take me to a bank, where I could get cash, and then pay him for the extra time. I ended up paying him about 4 times as much as I would have had I realized ahead of time and got cash out of the ATM at the hotel. (I never use cash when I travel.) A fair bit of the extra money I paid came from a substantial tip I gave him for the inconvenience.

All of that aside, while it was probably the least enjoyable trip I’ve ever had (on top of everything else I missed Michelle), I have to say that it was an interesting experience – if only because the whole Las Vegas setting is so different from anything else I’ve ever experienced. It’s all like one big shopping mall. If you’re into that sort of thing, I can see it being really worthwhile. So, in a way, I’m glad I had the chance to experience it.