LiLAX/IEEE joint meeting

I was working late last night getting one of our servers to work again, but since the LUG meeting was close enough, decided to check it out. Pretty good turnout, although, basically Dallas Legan only spoke to the IEEE crowd, since I was the only LiLAX guy there that I could recognize, not surprising the meeting announcement went out very late and the meeting was on a Tuesday night, rather then the normal Second Saturday that everyone knows is LiLAX's meeting day. The AIU gave us a great room to use, and IEEE provided lots of California Pizza Kitchen food, more then the crowd could eat, so people could take it home if the liked. I saw the tail end of the first presentation. and then the phone rings, baby cries, .... I shall finish this post later.

Time, blog, I have Fast Money on, and as I listen to it, I can blog a bit, time is so tight. So Jon Inouye has a very interesting sounding talk, but I got there late so didn't really get much of it. Dallas talked about bash a subject I always find useful as I use bash quite a bit, he cover lots of material in the 2 hours he carved out for himself, went over the end time, but the audience didn't protest, but rather asked questions.

fire hazard

About 2 Friday's ago I got a call that a laptop was broken, I was off that week, but had someone extract the data and a new HD went into it. It burned that one out in smoke, so the Dell guy came to service it and determined that this laptop shall never be powered up again, it is dangerous and they will send us a new D420, funny, the picture is of it being worked on before it was deemed unrepairable and a fire hazard.

Spent the weekend trying to get a Polycom 320 to work with a NAT, much harder then the Grandstream which supports STUN. But Polycom has better sound quality, so there, more expensive, I don't want to review phones here, just my little experience and still looking for a good place to teach me how to port forward SIP, not on that great website I always use, too bad, Skype is on, and I have done that, increases your transfer rate and probably promotes you to ta super node.

Our Lilax.net server died, as it is on the UML-coop and all those are gone, Chris is trying to fix it tonight. Bought a 1TB external USB at Fry's for $199, cool, nice big storage, now how many MP3s can I keep? 250,000, wow, anyhow expensing it to work, don't have the time right now, although I bet I could sell this thing on Amazon, the 3/4 TB went for $350 there, don't get it. Strange. No ready made listing on Amazon, oh well, bad time to sell things anyhow.

Work

The temperature is rising both outside and at work. We are rushing to get things done and I have been busy with a newborn as well at times, although it has been less time this week. I went to the data center and found wet suits drying on some cars. I just rediscovered my Amazon Store, I got to work on this more, I still want to sell Katmandu's Furniture on the internet someday. I was trying to edit that picture, blur out license plates, but I am on Windows, I have to say it sucks, Ubuntu would have a great program called Gimp to let me do this right away, plus this computer might have spy-ware and viruses on it as well. Maybe even a keyboard logger, who knows, I inherited it and didn't do the right thing, which would have been a factory reinstall before using it, time and all that, didn't have the CDs yet, but now I found them. Windows XP has a great tool in Start, All Programs, Accessories, system tools, Files and Settings Transfer Wizard that would allow me to move all files to a new computer, and then I could delete this one. Must try this one day with my old HD. I wish I could do it from a USB device. It works over a Direct cable, serial or LAN, even removable media, like a floppy, what a bad example, CDR might work, but really who has 1.44 MB of data anymore? But that means a USB drive should work, great! I still am a bit bugged by the poor tools in Windows, how do you crop in Paint? Funny, Linux used to be hard.

Norco ZFS

Benton called with the idea of putting a ZFS filesystem on a Norco. I was asked about LVM+RAID, but I got to admit that Mike Fedyk is probably the right person to answer those questions. But it got me thinking about creating a 12 Terrabyte storage server with 1 Gig SATA $199 drives. Total price $3168 and 3Us on the rack. ZFS is really cool and I do want to play with it. Seems he had problems with Solaris, so is now going to attempt it with Ubuntu 8.04, cool stuff, hope to blog more about this. Maybe I can even get one of these toys myself to play with. At least I can play with ZFS on a system I already have, last talk I went to it made me want to install Solaris, but now that I hear Ubuntu, yes, that is even better. I don't think I have ever been excited about a file system before, but ZFS does have cool features.

UUASC-OC

UUASC-OC had a talk about Embedded Linux Systems by Ruth Gu. By slide 4 the usual group feedback drowned the speaker in an argument as to what is an embedded system. This is actually pretty usual for this group and I would suggest that future speakers come prepared to answer questions, there will be questions. Embedded systems as far as I am concerned are getting more powerful and the line is fuzzy anyways. As usual the speaker ends up speaking to Charles since the rest of the 18 people crowd mostly is waiting for the beer, and 1.95 burgers, well just kidding, some others do ask questions. Anyhow the speaker was well prepared, but the barrage of questions and some Open Office Impress problems flustered her. She had just installed Fedora 8 on that laptop, further telling me that you don't do big changes right before you use something, tried and true wins. But we like the presentation so much we invited her for part 2 in August, so stay tuned as a really good talk is coming in August.

Google Health

I am listening to Jumping Monkeys and am amazed that Google and Microsoft both are creating a health on the web information service. This seems like a great way to leverage the internet. On the other hand Google handles my email, knows what websites I visit, handles my phone calls, they really are big brother. Oh least I forget all the thoughts I am publishing here, but then again those are open to anyone to read.

In further talking with someone about this I realize that Yahoo and WebMD are also big in the area. I have been spamed by WebMD for a long time and they are Jim Clark, of Netscape fame's Healtheon.

I can get a house for $329

I just have to pay off the tax debt, I wonder what ghost town these houses are in, OK I am up too late tonight. It gets even better.... no don't call 800 214 6237, tempting as it sounds, I have thought about moving to a less dense area, cheap it sounds, but geez, they are sure making it sound appealing.

Wow what a great website to protect people from falling for the scams. Probably should sleep, not done that in a while. But on Conan someone who is building a space elevator in his garage, geez... I have to fast forward the DVR. Is this how it starts? We should make LiLAX into something big.