James Drews Blog Spot

Busy getting ready for the fall semester at the UW. Got just a few projects in the mix that I’m working on right now. For example, we are going to use the open source course management system moodle for a number of courses. We have written a couple plugins now to integrate this with UW systems (timetable and enrollment). These were a bit tied to our systems in Engineering and we want to make them available for other departments on campus to use. So, to get the data out of our systems and in to moodle we will use SOAP (aka web services). I’ve written the inital web services (with the hopes that the central campus group will pick them up to run for campus). I’m now converting the moodle modules to talk to the web service instead of directly to an oracle server. One module is done, the other is in the works (today’s goal). From the looks of things, I’m going to need to write one or two more web service calls to complete this one.

The pictures from my trip are in the gallery

I’ve survived the mission trip to Cortez, CO and am home now. After 10 days with 36 kids and 7 adults, (6 days on a bus traveling) I am slowly catching up and adjusting to being out of contact. I’ll get the pictures up in the gallery soon, and probably write more about the trip once I’ve recovered a bit (and caught up a bit with work).

After a bad sleep night (stupid thunderstorms and near by lightning strikes), I woke to find that yeah, we had enough rain again to create a slight puddle in one corner of my basement. Ok, ok, so it does it a bit too often. I figured it was all the rain that did it last time that had the soil saturated. Looks like I need to go fetch some piles of dirt to re-grade that area of the lawn….

As I was driving home yesterday, I noticed some really cool flowers growing around a couple trees. Why is it my first thought after seeing them was - Are those real? Sure, fake plastic flowers are everywhere, and sometimes look better than the real thing. It’s just odd that after seeing them, that was my first thought…

This past weekend Wisconsin got a wee bit amount of rain (if you have been hiding in a hole, lots of flooding here). While watching one of the storms, I noticed that more rain was flowing over the gutter than down it. Crap - clogged again. Then Sunday evening I noticed water seaping in a corner of the basement (yeah for it being the unfinished side). With the break in the rain, I got out and cleaned the gutters. The one I saw overflow is now clear (again - did that last year too). Then it was off to the side of the house where the water came in. Neighboor’s tree had branches resting on my garage - note past tense. The seeds from the maple tree had filled up the gutter - guessing that was probably why I had water coming in that corner of the house. The “muck” in the gutter wasn’t all that fun to clean out, but that chore is done at least.

Ah, some days the ability to not throw things out comes in handy. Yesterday, a department server had its disk enclosure fail (and how). The first time, I just powered it off and back on, and things started working again. But failed again just after I had left work. When I got back to look, I tried the same thing but this time the RAID card could not find any of the disk drives. Yeah, the warranty on the enclosure is long gone. The department was planning on migrating over to our cluster this summer. *sigh* Not soon enough I guess.

Turns out, there was an older (only 8 drive bay instead of the 14 drive bay enclosure that they were using) has been sitting behind my office door for the last few years. I think I retired it about 10 years ago, and it got used for something else for a while. Why it ended up back in my office, I don’t know.

At least the failed enclosure only used 8 of the drive slots so I was in business. Dusted it off (lots of dust) and transfered everything over. I figured I’d have to reconfigure the RAID card as a few of the SCSI drive ID’s changed. Nope! The AMI RAID card looked at the drives for the configuration and all was happy. I love those RAID cards!

Long story short, the server is happy again because I don’t throw things out.

Outside my office they are taking down buildings to make way for a new research center.

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Every morning, my cat Boo joins me in the bathroom while I shower. She usually sits on the bathtub ledge peaking around the shower curtin and stares at the imaginary things moving in the water . I’ve often wondered when she would pounce on the water and get wet. This morning she was blocking my way to get in the shower. I tried to get her to back up a bit, got one foot in, and well, she lost her footing and fell in. *sigh* Wet cat. It took her a bit to scramble out of the tub. I got out, got the towel and dried her off - mostly. I then opened the bathroom door to let her out. She pounced out, turned around and gave me the most evil stare. Ouch - yeah, she’s pissed. By the time I got done with the shower, she was back to being my friend. At least she smells clean for the moment.

You know it is going to be a bad flight when walking up to the door to get on the plane you see a kid throwing a temper tantrum on the floor of the waiting area. Yup, 3 hours of listening to kids scream. My flight back from O.C. to MSP had the most kids I’ve seen yet on a flight. Once one kid starts to cry, others follow suit. *sigh* Just turned up the volume on the iPod to try to ignore them. Didn’t help all that much.

Back to reality. From nice temps (upper 70s) back to the single digits. Was a cold ride back from the airport. Car did start after sitting for 5 days. Land of snow! It is official now that we have the snowiest season on record (and a good 2 months to go yet). Anyone want to place a bet on how much we end up with?