James Drews Blog Spot

Network Computing has posted my brainshare report on their site. Happy reading…

Ah, must be spring time. Trying to get some work done and the radio just came on with a tornado warning. yup, a bit dark outside, but still no rain here at work (but from the looks of the radar, my house is plenty wet by now). Guess there was a tornado on the ground a bit north of Madison.

After a long week in Salt Lake City, I have made it back to Madison. I can tell Boo (my cat) missed me. After returning, she is following me around the house and rarely lets me out of her sight. This usually lasts for a day or two.

Sitting at breakfast with a couple thousand other geeks and figured I would zip out a quick update. Out in Salt Lake City attending the Novell Brainshare conference. Its a week long event, and the days get long (9am to 10pm yesterday).

I need to keep this short, as more and more people show up for breakfast and turn on their laptops, the wireless connection gets worse and worse. It is amazing how so many people that are “IT people” can’t configure their wireless connection right. On the forums, there were complaints of people screwing it up and causing problems for everyone else trying to use the network. Oh well, guess I will just have to move away from the crouds to get a better connection (or go use the few wired connections provided around the place)

I had a few “dud” sessions yesterday. The descriptions looked promissing and thought I might learn something, but no. For example, the “no so stupid cluster tricks” session was one. If you had been using a cluster for any amount of time, you really didn’t learn anything. I even disagree with some of the information they presented - like the recomendation to “down” the cluster when installing service packs. Uhm, no, you move the resources to one half of the nodes, upgrade the other half, test, let them back into the cluster, and move the resources over to the upgraded nodes. Then go upgrade the rest of them.

Oh well - time to run off to the first session of the day…

I was browsing around on the Novell Open Source site today and discovered that my MRTGEXT project is the 5th most downloaded application from their site. That’s cool. Maybe that will get me to put some work into it again. There is a minor bug in it that I have fixed in the source code, but the Novell NDK was upgraded since I last released, and there are now problems with it. Guess I will need to spend some quality time with the developer manuals to find out how to fix the problem.

Wow, it’s been quite some time since I have had to resort to a dial-up internet connection! Woke up this morning to find my cable modem on the fritz - the modem isn’t finding a signal. Called charter, and of course the best they can do is say “someone will try to be there today - and call you 30 min before hand”. And of course there is no guarentee that someone will try today either. Ouch. So much for trying to get any work done from home today (waiting for a UPS delivery)

At least the UW has a dial-up pool I can connect in to (after calling people at work to get the number). I am still waiting for the 118 messages I got since the cable modem stopped working to download (on 31 of 118 now).

Of course to make things worse, there isn’t a working phone jack in the office. I had a few lines to the house a number of years ago, but once I got the cable service, I dropped the extra line. I never did rewire the room to put the last existing line into there. Guess I may need to do that now. For now, I am off into another room of the house with the laptop…

Another weekend has come and gone. They never seam to be long enough. Sunday morning I got trained to do the audio control for our church’s broadcast of the 7:55am service (tape delayed of course ). I have been doing audio stuff for them for a couple years now so not too much new. Just had to find out what their procedures are - like what needs to get recorded and when, what to do when the director calls for audio up/down, etc. I fly solo on Easter morning - sounds like most people wanted that day off. Easter will be a busy morning for me. I have been scheduled to run the audio for the 6am service (means getting there a bit after 5am to set up) and then head up the TV control room for the 7:30am service. Oh, and of course I am also supposed to help out with Communion at the 6am service as well. I mentioned my Easter schedule to someone else, and it sounded like I wasn’t the only one that gets double-booked. You would think with a congregation membership of 6000+, you wouldn’t have that problem…

I guess the ground hog got his signals a bit mixed up. My front yard almost had the snow gone, but woke up to it covered in the white stuff again. Oh well, that’s the way it goes some days.

Work is kind of crazy these days. Got lots going on. Trying to get my head wrapped around Oracle 10g databases (we need to upgrade our production database from Oracle 8.1.7 this summer). Got a few coding projects that I just can’t get the time to work on - hopefully one of these days. Novell finally released service pack 3 for NetWare 6.5 and the updated client. I am still waiting for a few post service pack fixes to show up before I deploy to our environment. I found the bugs a bit too late in the beta testing cycle to get the fixes in the service pack. The client update has a few bug fixes in it that will help us out, so will start working on deploying that out to our labs tomorrow.

Tonight was mostly a veg in front of the TV night. Had to watch the O.C. so I could see the new Star Wars trailer. Hmm, still have a few months before we can actually see the movie. Bummer.

Another day, more changes. After doing more testing, I decided I didn’t like the image gallery software. That one is now removed, and I have replaced it with one I like better. I am in the process of uploading the photos again - more from the family reunion this time as it is MUCH easier to do a bulk upload of files. To see the family reunion pictures, you have to register for the site. If you previously registered in the old photo gallery, you need to redo it - sorry.

The gallery is at http://www.drews-family.org/gallery/

I have managed to get a few more pictures uploaded to the photo gallery. Note: for some, you have to register to see, and some are restricted to family members (after they register on the photo gallery site and I put them into the right group for viewing).