Sleep Is For The Weak

I am in the process of moving from Windows to Linux on all of my personal computer systems.  My laptop no longer dual boots Vista 64bit Business and Ubuntu 8.04.  It is now a strictly Ubuntu workstation.  My desktop at home currently dual boots a 40gb Windows XP Media Center Edition install, and a 400+ GB Ubuntu install.  The Windows system is there strictly for the Dorktoberfest VI Lan Party which will happen in October.

At the Indy 1500 Gun and Knife show I replaced my HK P30 with a second generation Glock 19.  The Glock has a July 1994 mfg. date and shows signs of being carried for a number of years.  For what I want a defensive handgun to do, the Glock will be a slightly better fit than the P30.  It does not feel as good in the hand as the P30, but things like XS Sight Systems Big Dot Sights are available for it.  Magazines, Holsters, Magazine carriers are all readily available from a number of sources rather than having to custom order everything.

I’m looking forward to taking the new handgun to a USPSA match to run it through it’s paces.  As always you can stop by the Indiana Gun Owners Website for more information about gun ownership in the state of Indiana.

If you are outside of Indiana, and interested my FFL will ship the firearm to your FFL per ATF rules.  I will have the firearm with me at the Indy 1500 on Saturday August 23rd.  Contact me for more info if you would like to meet.

What I have:
1 Heckler and Koch P30
all adjustable grip panels
Factory “Super Luminova Sights”
Original box, paperwork, and spent shell casing
4 15 round magazines
P30 Kydex body for Comp-Tac MTAC holster

What I’m looking for:
$700

Yesterday we received a piece of server grade hardware that was being decommissioned from it’s previous job.  It’s a Dual 2.4ghz Xeon system with 3gb of ram and mirrored 75gb 10,000 RPM SCSI drives.  I loaded CentOS 5.2 on the system, configured apache, php, and nfs, and deployed the system to replace a desktop system that was filling in for that roll.

The hardware does qualify as extreme overkill for the job it is performing, however unlike the desktop we now have some level of redundancy should a component like a hard drive or power supply fail.

The source video was captured with my Nikon digital camera. It’s not very good.
The completed video is my first attempt at video editing. It’s also not very good.

Shooters are. Fenway, Pami, and W9ZEB. Then Rhino and ObiJohn from http://www.ingunowners.com

I think this about sums it up.

Amazing day!  We, members from the Indiana Gun Owners Board, traveled down to the Rice property in Brown County.  Lots of short barreled rifles, suppressed weapons, and even a couple machine guns.  The real winner of the day was the Serbu Super-Shorty.

The event was run very safely.  We had three range officers, and two firing lanes.  The RO’s weapon you were going to be shooting was in charge of your lane while you were ready to shoot.  You would get a detailed rundown on proper function of the weapon, insert your magazine, and unleash hell.

I fired three rounds through the Serbu Super-Shorty shotgun seen in the attached image (That’s a friend of mine taking his turn)  I also put twenty rounds through a suppressed Ruger Mark-III semi-automatic pistol.

More information after I’ve slept.

A Photo Gallery of the Event.

On August 9th, 2008 Pami and I visited Hamilton County Fish & Game to watch an IDPA match.  We had traveled to Atlanta Indiana last month to watch a USPSA match and were interested what the differences between the two sports were.  IDPA focuses much more on practical defensive shooting.  It is much less of a game and each stage is laid out with a story, such as “A man in a parking lot confronts you with a knife.  He says unless you comply his four friends are going to join the fight.”  The first stage started with you standing at contact distance from Target #1.  You are to backpedal while you draw your weapon and put no less than two shots into the him.  Next you move behind cover and engage two targets.  Be sure to engage them in the order you see them, or you will get a procedural infraction.  Finally you cross the gap to a second cover wall and engage the last two targets.

We weren’t able to stay for the whole match.  What we saw interested me and I think I’ll get involved in the next match.  I would like to sit down with someone from HCFG before the match and get a complete list of the rules and procedural requirements to avoid infractions.  Both USPSA and IDPA look like a lot of fun.  I can’t want to start sending lead down range with the best of them.

Click here for a photo gallery from the event.

I haven’t used a Fedora Linux system since Fedora Core 2.  Back then the yum updater was terrible and I went looking in search of something that sucked a lot less.  On the recommendation of a few folks at the local LUG, I ended up on Ubuntu, and haven’t looked back.  Now that our office has a couple of CentOS 5.2 machines I figured it might be time to give an RPM and YUM based Linux distro another look.

The installation of Fedora 9 wasn’t terribly difficult.  It asked me a few questions about how I wanted the disk arranged, create a non-root user and such.  Typical Linux stuff.  I chose to do a network based install due to a severe lack of spare DVD’s around the office, and a fairly narrow T1 shared by 5 people.  It took a fair amount of time to build the system, and download updates but I expected that.

One thing I’ve noticed about Fedora 9 in comparison to Ubuntu is some of the things I’m used to being able to do very quickly and easily don’t exist.  That’s not really the fault of Fedora, more a fault on your author for getting lazy.  I’ll admit however having a “Restricted Drivers” icon I can press to configure the nVidia Drivers & Broadcom WiFi drivers is pretty slick and a feature of Ubuntu I missed moving to Fedora.  Also Ubuntu has a single package that installs Flash, DVD playback, MP3 playback, and all the other restricted formats not officially supported by free software.  This is another quick and dirty thing I missed moving to Fedora.

It is my opinion that Fedora 9 is somewhat faster than Ubuntu 8.04 was on the same hardware.  I can’t say that for certain but this does seem to be the case.  Both systems are completely stable.  I’ve yet to crash any software on either OS.

I will write a few specific articles on how I configured some of my software later.  All in all I’m unwilling to say Fedora 9 is better than Ubuntu 8.04.  I am however willing to say it’s not exactly worse either.  I’ll continue to use the system for a few more weeks and let it grow on me, then we’ll check back.

A portion of my job has been holding the hands of our customers as they attempt to migrate their website and mail from whoever they were hosting with previously to our servers.  As often as not the domain is locked, and the customer has no idea who registered the domain for them, much less any idea what the login information might be for any accounts attached to the domain.

The primary tool I use to find out who the registrar of any particular domain happens to be nslookup.  This queries the various whois servers out there and outputs whatever records are on file for any given domain.  From these I can usually determine where to start looking for the answers to some of the above questions.  Helping at least partially clueless customers migrate locked domains that don’t have any personal information included in the registration “For privacy reasons.” takes a lot of time.

We recently hired a new lead web developer.  This is the first one we’ve had that actually knows his way around a server, as well as what nslookup is, and how the registrar process works.  Add the fact he’s got far more people skills than I, and I think we found someone to take over one of the things that annoys me to no end.  Cheers!