I'm working on moving an enterprise java app that I host to my new gentoo box and have run into a few interesting nuances. I finally got everything installed and up and running (had to put DTD's in my XML deployment descriptors and use the new template for a datasource). Now it is time to try to run the site... Everything worked fine until I tried to hit the DB... Turns out that I was using a really old version of the JDBC driver which threw this exception: "Option xactisolevel is not recognized"... I found this article which explained that I needed to grab a new JDBC driver. Once I got that installed and everything else working, things are good.
I even like the feature which warns about DB connections that are left open. I know I (and co-workers of mine) have issues with remembering to close the connections when they are done with them. The new version of JBoss will actually throw an exception warning that the server had to close the connection for you and tells you to fix it... Now why would companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for other J2EE servers that suck when JBoss is free?? I love it!!
Well, as promised, I scanned the ultrasound photo. You can view it here.
Well, It's official. Karen and I are going to be parents. We had the ultrasound this morning and everything is perfect. Of course, being a geek, I had to set up a website just like John and Claire did for their baby. You can view our website at http://baby.shoutstudios.com where we will record all things related to the prenatal and post partum process and all other fun things. I won't re-iterate here what I have already said on the other site. Take a read. I will work on the ability to add comments soon. I also need to redesign it to fit in more with our planned nursery theme. But thank you John and Claire for the great idea and start to this site. Hopefully by the end of the weekend I will have all that I want to do done, but for now, you can leave comments here or email us.
Alright, here I go again with the political soap box again. But this is just a blatent waste of money on the part of the California legislature. While reading Slashdot, I came across an article refering to a request in the County of Lost Angeles to remove the "master/slave" term from all computers and product descriptions used in that county. Talk about a waste of time and money!!! I won't preach to the choir on this one, but let me know what you all think.
Alright, all my friends seem to have had the time lately to improve the look and feel of their blogs. I guess I just need to get on the ball and do something about mine. It's still just the cookie cutter MT basic site with a few modifications. I eventually want to put up an area that has links to other blogs that I frequent, and other interesting information on the site. Damn my job for taking my time :)...
Alright, I know I said i wasn't going to turn this into my little soap box but I read an article on MSNBC (again) that got me all fired up. Those of you that know me, know exactly where my priorities lie when it comes to the environment and the government. I'll just paste in a few sections of this article that I find rather amusing or that get my goat. You can read the whole article here.
"CPAL Director Peter Altman says “All of America’s public lands are under assault by an administration that favors corporations over conservation.”"
"The idea is that government will pay private companies to manage park resources, and those companies will in turn hire and pay workers to do it. Think about that. If the government wants to lop 20 percent off the budget for parks, that means these outside companies will have to try and take the jobs currently being done by professional, trained park employees, and do them on 80 percent of the current budget. "
"The government has already spent $16 million on the outsourcing study, to which they will add another estimated $110 million over the next three years, according to a CPAL report. Note that that’s not $16 million spent on doing the outsourcing itself; just on the study to see what privatization might save. The conclusions that these very well-paid contractors came to: privatization could save taxpayers a whopping $600,000. Subtract that from the $16 million spent on the study, and total net cost to the taxpayer: $15.4 million."
"“I will ensure that the federal government meets its responsibilities by devoting $5 billion to eliminate the backlog in maintenance and improvements at our national park.” Wouldn’t it be nice if a president said that?
Well one did—or at least he said it on his road to the White House. It was part of a stump speech George W. Bush gave on Oct 27, 2000, less than two weeks before the election.
Bush’s team came up with $5 billion figure from the 1998 General Accounting Office estimate that, in addition to the regular annual costs to run America’s National Parks, monuments, historic structures, and trails, it would take and extra $4.9 billion just top fix the crumbling facilities at parks and national monuments. This is called the backlog.
Bush crows that he’s taken care of 900 backlog projects to the tune of $2.9 billion. Wouldn’t that, too, be nice? Too bad it’s a lie."
Ok.. enough copy and paste.. you can read the article for yourself. I was so happy a few days ago when I heard that the new energy bill would not allow drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but it seems good 'ol W is hell bent on destroying our earth one area at at time and putting the extra money in his own pocket. Get your priorities straight. Auto makers have had the technology to create engines that do not run on fossil fuels but it's the oil tycoons (like 'ol W) that are too concerned about their bottom line to allow such engines to be produced. I'm moving to Canada!!
Alright.. So I pulled a moronic move. I was up late last night trying to get my APC BackUPS 500 working with my new Gentoo box. The USB worked wonderfully, I would plug the UPS in and the kernel immediately recognized it as a device. Unfortunately, I did not have one of the HID Device drivers installed into the kernel so I had to rebuild that. Yeah... what fun. Thank you Stacey for all your help!
Anyway, I get the UPS working and then decide to unplug the USB connection since the computer isn't actually plugged into the UPS at this point. I still have my existant firewall machine plugged into the UPS and figured by the time the UPS went to battery, triton (the new box) would be powering down from a lack of power. Well, guess what happened this morning... Yep... the power flickered. Both my desktop and triton went down (hard), but europa (the current firewall) stayed up just like it should have. Guess I need to speed this process along and switch the firewall.
While reading a posting on Leo Laporte's Blog (Tech-TV host of Screen Savers), I came across this site urging people to delete the mp3's off of their computer and send the files back to the RIAA. I have to wonder if this is real or a joke. It is apparently sponsored by a parents group trying to teach kids that stealing is wrong. Ok, sounds legit enough. But then again, mailing, faxing, or emailing the files or the data from all the files has got to be huge!!! I have to wonder if it's not a way to get the RIAA to STFU and quit there whining and get with the times and start to offer music digitally instead of charging $15 or more for a CD (1 or 2 good songs).
The gentoo adventure continues. So far, I like what I'm seeing, although I wish I had a better machine. The kernel alone took over an hour to compile!!! The only difficulty I had was a dumb mistake on my part. While going through the instructions, i had edit the startup script and map the correct partitions to mount points. I neglected to read the part that said replace /dev/ROOT with your actual root partition (/dev/hda3) so of course it wouldn't boot. But once I figured that out, everything has been running smoothly, although slow.
And I would have been working on it from work today except Sprint decided to drop my DSL circuit on me again!!! Bastards!!! I need to look into getting an X10 module to power cycle my DSL modem if I can't ping out. I found a great article today with scripts and all showing how to do exactly what I want. Now I just need to be able to justify spending the $50 for the X10 module.
Well, I bought that PII 350 that I mentioned before and am currently working on installing gentoo 1.4 on it. I must admit, although more difficult to install than say Debian, I really like it. It's pretty :) and we all know how that weighs in for me. Upon boot from the CD, it immediately detected all my hardware, that's more than I can say for my last debian installation. I'm currently in the process of building the kernel so I'll let you all know how it goes from here.
I didn't want this to become my little soapbox for my political views but I saw something today on MSNBC that makes me happy. For the past counless number of months, the Republicans (namely W.) has been trying to allow for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. With my views and my love of nature, this really pissed me off. If there is one thing that will sway my political views of a president or any other candidate for that matter, it's their view on the environment. However, I read this today: "Republicans on Friday finished a massive energy bill that would double Americans’ use of ethanol in their cars, reduce their susceptibility to power blackouts and aim tax breaks at oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear power providers. However, the measure would deny President Bush his top energy priority: oil drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge." (MSNBC) Read that last sentance again.. I'm elighted and ecstatic!!
Months after purchasing a tape drive (HP Colorado T-1000) from work for a steal, I finally took it out of my trunk and attempted to get it working. I'm just hoping for something small to provide me the capability to have off-site backups without having to burn/waste a CD every so often. Well, after fighting to get it out of the old computer case (a 486), i put it in my desktop and booted. The green light on the tape drive lit and it even accepted a tape and rewound it. I thought I was golden... But that would not be blog worthy. Anyway, turns out that Windows 2000 does not support the T-1000 since it uses the floppy interface. DOH! I guess I'll just have to wait until I rebuild my linux box/firewall/server and just put it in there.
Speaking of rebuilding my firewall, I also have an offer from work to purchase an old PII 350 w/ 128MB of RAM and an 18 GB hard-drive. That will make a much better server than what I have. Something to look forward to. Maybe I'll play with gentoo.
Stupid people piss me off!! I wasted 2 hours of my morning waiting for the builder of our house to show up to finish work that was supposed to be done 6 months ago only to find out that they weren't coming. A simple phone call would have been nice! We are waiting for them to replace a door knob, replace a kitchen cabinet and finish painting. Someone was supposed to be there this morning between 7:30 and 8:00. I ended up calling them at 8:30 asking where the person was. I was told that they would check on it and get back to me. So I waited... I again had to call at 9:10 to find out why I hadn't heard from anyone.. Turns out, the guy who was supposed to come had to take his wife to the doctor. Ok.. Fine... But call.. don't make me call there 2 times to figure this out. It just seems that every time they are supposed to come out and finish things, there is somethign that "happens" to impede their progress... Although it's amazing how letters from a lawyer have made them respond promptly in the past.
So now my mother-in-law is writing a letter to the editor of the paper bashing the idiots at the builder. Yay for her! Unfortunately, my wife can't since she is a "court appointed official" and isn't allowed to have an opinion... (i thought this was a democracy...)
Anyway, just my $.02... And if you plan on building a house in the Susquehanna Valley area of PA, email me and I will let you know which builder not to use.
Thanks to links I have found to other blogs on friends sites, I have now found a complete waste of time for my days. Take a look. Of course, this can't be saying too much about what I need to be amused!
I dropped my film off for processing on Sunday and got the negatives back. I must say, I'm fairly impressed for only having a 300mm lens. The pictures are really small but the detail is good. The one that I scanned is a bit blurry but that may be from a number of factors.
Stacey also tells me that there is supposed to be another full eclipse coming up in April. Guess I'll just have to find a really big telescope for that one and plan on camping out. I'm sure I can arrange that. Actually, looking at NASA's website, it looks like the May eclipse won't be visible to us but there will be one in October that will. http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/LEplot/LEplot2001/LE2004Oct28T.gif. Here is a listing of eclipse events during 2004. Oh-well.. I was looking forward to a good one in April. Not sure where Stacey got that info from, but post and let me know.
Last night was what was supposed to be a spectacular view of a full lunar eclipse for us. Everything I read was touting nice reds and oranges visible during totality. I was so excited. And since I was going to a friends house for a party, I was hoping that he would have the telescope that he normally borrows from work for the kewl celestial events. No luck... Anyway, I set my camera with a measly 300mm lens up on my tripod and shot the better part of a roll of film during totality. I will get the negatives run later today and hopefully something will have turned out. Anyway, I did enjoy what I saw last night... There was a decent orange hue to the moon and the clouds were very cooperative from where I was last night... All and all, it was a good night.
Karen was so proud of herself on Thursday night when she pointed out the Northern Lights to me. We had a great view of them from up in Marietta and up over Chickies Rock on our way to the mall. It looked like there was a red cloud of dust or something similar in the sky. There was very little streaking to be seen, but it was there.
I also have been watching for re-occurrences and I have my Nikon set up and ready to go. Below is another site to watch that shows where the AB's are occurring. It is updated every 10 minutes.
http://www.space.com/spacewatch/aurora_cam.html. Supposedly according to something I heard on the radio yesterday morning, there is a good chance for a visible storm on Sunday night and possibly Monday night, although the report on SpaceWeather.com doesn't look too promising. We'll just have to wait and see. I really would love to get to see them and photograph them, since I didn't get a chance to last Thursday night.
I'm sitting here catching up on some of my photography listserve emails that I subscribe to really wishing I had lots of money. I have spent the last several years honing my photography skills with what little time and money I do have. I really enjoy looking through other professional Nature photographers galleries and wishing I had comparable photos. Don't get me wrong, I am very proud of a few of the photos I have shot over the years, I just want to continue to improve and eventually turn it into a full time career.
One of my favorite Nature and Wildlife photographers is Moose Peterson. He has done some amazing work and he get's to play with all the latest and coolest gadgets (like the new D2H which isn't even available yet). Take a look at his website at http://www.moose395.net and see for yourself what I'm raving about. And while your in the mood to click on links, you can take a look at the beginnings (2 years old) of my photography website at http://www.shoutstudios.com. Eventually I will update it and put a better sampling of my work online. And hey, If you would like me to shoot something for you, or better yet, get a print of one of my photos, flatter me with an email. I'm always looking to improve and get out and shoot.
While not as kewl as my usual Fall trip to the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, I spent the day out at Lancaster County Park with Staczilla. I was really hoping to get pictures of some really neat mushrooms that she found last week, but they were all wilted up. Damn that short lifespan :). Anyway, the rest of the day was good and we saw a lot of good color. We even had a Great Blue Heron messing with us and occasionally posing for his photo. I will make an attempt to drop off my film some time in the near future and then get them up online. (Good luck, I wouldn't wait too long). But for now, Stacey has her pictures up here.
