So long Serendipity

I just blew away the Serendipity install. Felt pretty good to get a clean transition to a new product.

I used the RSS importer and it worked pretty well. I made a few category changes during the transition so I just had to tweak those and I was all set.

Long live open source where we get to choose which products to use without being tied to the past by some arbitrary file format.

I just want to say thanks to the Serendipity developers - it's a great product.

Back to Wordpress

I'm back on Wordpress, following the 2.0 release.

I'd been playing with the betas and release candidates and was fairly impressed with what I saw.  It's still clunky but it's definitely a step up from Serendipity at this point.

Trifecta

Sigh - ran into a driver issue with EMC san and Windows 2003 SP1.

Blue screen after applying SP1. Turns out I should have done my research. There is a minimum driver level required for Emulex 9802-E when running SP1.

So much for backwards compatibility in a stable OS series.

New BOT

Must be a bad Microsoft week - we found a new BOT on the network - infected 3 machines and was able to reboot Windows 2003 fully patched sans SP1.

Patchwork

Ran into a problem with a custom Windows build today when applying MS05-051 (KB902400).

Our build had tweaked permission on stuff inside the %SYSTEMROOT%, including removing EVERYONE permissions in places.

With the patch applied this borked the "Network Connections" service. Symptoms were no network connections listed in "Network Connections". Also, when checking dependency tree for the "Network Connections" service a "Win32: access denied" popup would appear instead of the expected results.

Fix was to add "Network Service" or "EVERYONE" READ ACL on %SYSTEMROOT\Registration directory. Not sure what the security implications are yet.

Domain 0 allocation is too small for kernel image

I've been battling this bug for about two weeks.

Then I spotted this gem on #xen

11:04 < tab> it's about the fedora xen kernels
11:05 < tab> and the memory issue
11:05 < tab> did you changed the ld layout of the kernel ?
11:06 < riel> no, 2.6.13 did
11:06 < tab> yes, but did you tweak it to be able to run xen ?
11:06 < riel> I tried to
11:06 < riel> but it's still not getting linked right
11:06 < tab> because I use to have the same problem in the early 2.6.13 port
11:06 < tab> used*
11:06 < riel> how did you fix it ?
11:06 < tab> you have to redefine LOAD_OFFSET to 0 in page.h
11:07 < tab> I'm almost done with 2.6.13 anyways, and I will upgrade the repository soon I think
11:08 < riel> ohhhhhh
11:08 < riel> too bad Fedora is on 2.6.14-rc3
11:08 * riel is seriously considering not having Xen in Fedora again until xenolinux is upstream

VPSEasy is no more

A Xen VPS hosting provider I was testing out - VPSEasy has disappeared without a trace.

Good thing I only had 9 days of service left and not much data on that host.

Even weirder, the thread discussing this on WebHostingTalk mysteriously lost a bunch of posts.

Hmm...

Visited states

I couldn't resist trying this out.

I haven't actually been to Hawaii yet but I put it in there since I plan to go next month.

I'll have to try this again sometime and exclude the ones where all I saw was an airport.

Ride to the barn

5 of us rode to the barn for lunch. Alex, Chas, Ted, Bob, and I.

Trip was pretty cool. We stopped at the national cemetary in Wayne county, saw skydivers rain from the sky, and ran out of water just in time for a very nice lady who insisted on giving us ice water instead of the hose water we asked for.

The food at the barn was pretty tasty.

Yard Sale

We are having a yard sale today. It's raining so it's more of a porch sale.

So far 3 customers.

Update: Turned out to be a bad sales day. I think we only had maybe 10 customers all day.  And the very next day was a beautiful sunny day. Bad luck!

South Towpath

We rode the towpath from Akron to Bolivar today. Traveled about 45 miles and it took us 5-6 hours.

We are thinking about riding the north half to Lake Erie. But we aren't sure how far we can go on the path.

Basement work

We started work in the basement yesterday. Primer was first.

We'll be starting to paint tonight.

Here's to luck because I'm not 100% sure this is going to turn out looking good but it will certainly be fun trying.

Concert

We went to see the orchestra play Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Struass last night.

Lightning storms were dancing above the stage in the sky several miles away during the performance. It was pretty even while I was thinking about how dangerous it could be.

Little bit of rain but had a great time.

Ayaka told me this morning that she really liked the concert. That was the first time i can remember her recalling something from the previous day and having an original comment about it.

Long days

We've been working 7am-9pm daily. Pretty depressing but then we come outside and see a beautiful sunset over the ocean. Wow.

Rise to space

I'm in Stuart, Florida - we went outside to watch the shuttle Discovery launch today. It was incredible to see it rise in the sky and know there were people onboard.

In case anybody's interested - from about 90 miles away you can easily spot the smoke trail and you can easily see the flame at certain points during the ascent, especially when then throttle up and then again when the solid fuel boosters separate.

Homecoming

There's nothing like a homecoming. All is right.

West Nile numbers down in Ohio

West Nile numbers in Ohio are down 97% even though conditions are perfect.

Read about it here.

Ahhhh!

They arrived home safe tonight.

Tomorrow

They'll be home tomorrow.

The old days

I did a little reminiscing tonight looking back at some old letters from my exchange student days.

In the last 15 years there probably hasn’t been a single day that I didn’t think of those times and those friends.

Weeding round two

Did a second round of weeding tonight. Only got a little more than half done.

Shoot! The forecast for the next 3 days is rain and Emi will be home on Thursday. There's no way I'm going to get it done. I'm totally busted!

I'm hoping she won't look too closely but I know better - she'll be out there Friday morning working on it as soon as she wakes up.

Exchange rates

I bought Euro's today for the Sicily trip. Even though the currency is near lows for 2005 it still hurt pretty bad

Rate was around USD$1.24 ~= €1.00 for a consumer cash transaction (+4%)

Family reunion day

Headed out now to the family reunion.

Update - turnout was pretty low but we had a good time anyway.

DIY

I put a new garage door opener in today.

For future reference it took about 4 hours since I didn't know what I was doing and I was working alone.

You can put one up by yourself but I don't recommend it.

To do it again would probably take about two hours once you know the drill.

Old legs

Forget what I said about my legs the other day - today I can barely walk.

Time to get on the bike and do another Red Route One. If I don't work these legs tonight they are going to turn to stone.

We had a company picnic out in the fresh air today. Austin Carr was brought in as a ringer for a basketball shooting contest. He can still shoot.

I learned a lot about the game of cornhole today. It's not what you think. 

Lottery math

A lottery is a tax on people who can't do math.

I was bored so I started to look at lottery historical data. I found what anybody with a clue expects to find. The sample size is around 900 out of a possible 175,711,536 combinations over the last 10 years.

There hasn't been a single repeat of the same numbers in 900 attempts. Hardly surprising.

The only interesting item I found was the infrequency that numbers 51-56 are drawn. Here's the data.

Number (occurences)
53 (0)
54 (0)
55 (1)
56 (1)
52 (36)
51 (41)

No other number was drawn less than 65 times. Not sure if this was due to a recent rule change or a flaw in the recorded data. Even if not this is still well within the realm of statistical probability.

The graph for the mega ball looks like well randomized data.

So anyway - I bought a ticket - what the heck?

One week left

One week left until they get back. Can't wait!

Jugar

Played soccer last night - it was a pickup game but we played 11 on a side so it was fairly intense.

I re-discovered why I don't like playing outdoor soccer - 11 guys a side means not very many touches especially if you are playing left fullback

Legs feel good today though...

To Wordpress or not to Wordpress

I've been thinking about trying Wordpress again.

I ran WP version 1.2 for several weeks last year right after Emi started using Movable Type. It didn't seem that impressive at the time.

This year when I started blogging again I just picked Serendipity because I followed a link from Slashdot. I felt at home right away using Serendipity so I guess it's just the inevitable geek urge to play with different tools that do basically the same job.

New Honda technology this year

Honda's finally got a hybrid powertrain that can run electric only at low speed. This should help their sales because Prius has been kicking their butt.

They've also got a an improved gas engine for the Civic chassis now which ups efficiency by 6%.

My Civic will be due for replacement in a year or two - I've been so happy with the Corolla that I've been thinking Prius all the way but I'll be taking a look at what the new Civic owners think next summer (after the hype dies down).

Serendipity

I just noticed now that the URL insert feature in Serendipity is busted when using Safari on Mac OS X.

Per the s9y forums it's a known issue and they appear to be laying the blame on Safari since Firefox on Mac OS X works correctly.

4th of July

Happy Birthday America! Did a Red Route early in the morning followed by an all day party at Ted's.

Headed out for fireworks now.

War of the Worlds

I went to see War of the Worlds last night. Is there really anybody who doesn't know how the story ends? Ted claims he didn't know but he wanted me to spoil it for him anyway.

I give it a thumbs down. I thought I could forget that I knew the story but it simply wasn't possible. I had serious problems with the casting of pretty much every major role. I like Tom Cruise (Ray), Dakota Fanning, and Tim Robbins but I didn't buy any of it except for the performance by Justin Chatwin (Robbie).

The other major problem was just that I knew the story and had a very hard time with the unsurprising ending. Spielberg and Josh Friedman did a passable job at trying to look at the story from a new angle (father will do anything to save his kids in face of alien invasion) but once you know how this story ends it really takes the climax away. The reunion of the family at the end did little to appease this because of plot problems in the middle of the story.

The major character developments were completely unbelievable. In Cruise's case I think this just wasn't in his acting range which is defnitely limited. In the case of Chatwin I think it was just a bad script - he made a good attempt and it was close to believable.

To make things worse I went to the drive-in alone and paid $15 bucks and I didn't even stay for the second feature.

Miss them

13 days left until Emi and Ayaka get back to where they belong.

I miss them but in the meantime I'm trying to live a very spartan existence in order to save some cash - the Euro is a pretty expensive purchase right now.