Sleep Is For The Weak

Could this Election Cycle be any longer? We’re about to vote for the next President of the United States. This voting will take place on November 4th. I fully expect that the campaigning for Election 2010 to start on November 10th, 2008.

If I were in charge candidates would be given $250,000 to campaign with and they wouldn’t be allowed to start before July of the year of the election. Four months of this crap I could deal with.

About a year ago the company I worked for sold it’s web development and hosting arm off to one of the three partners in the parent corporation. The partner happens to be my father in law, who enlisted my assistance in helping him move the business to the next level. As part of this he purchased three new servers, and a license for H-Sphere from what was formerly P-Soft. P-Soft has since been purchased by Parallels, which also owns Plesk. For those of you who host websites with a large company you might be famillar with Plesk, or cPanel. H-Sphere is a similar type of application.

Parallels offers Per incident support for $75 per incident. We recently had an incident where an account had been properly removed from the system, however during the removal process H-Sphere left ghost records in numerous places. This prevented us from setting the customer back up under a new profile. We finally broke down and purchased support from Parallels. Around 23:30 last night support e-mailed us saying it should be working, restart the server and add the record. About 23:45 the server still hadn’t come back up, which prompted me to take a trip over to the data center. The boot loader was not in good shape. I had to jury rig the computer into booting into the operating system. (CentOS 5.2 for those curious) Once the system finally booted, and showed IP connectivity I left the data center. I got home around 00:40 or so.

The next three hours were spent trying to restore services that did not come up cleanly during the reboot. I had to restore a large number of configuration files from the previous night’s backup. About 03:30 I went to sleep. This morning as I was driving my wife to work at around 09:00 my phone starts ringing. Apparently several sites are still off-line. I dropped her off, made it into the office.

It turns out about 20 Unix user accounts, along with their associated groups had been removed during the “Repair” the previous night. Around 13:00 I finished re-adding those accounts, and re-enabling their site configurations……

So what do you think? Was my $75 well spent? Should Parallels refund the $75 we spent for a fix that caused me 8 hours worth of additional work?

Well week two with the MacBook down. I’ve found that Ctrl-A replaces “home” and Ctrl-E replaces “end” for moving around the command line. I invested in an actual aluminum Apple keyboard. I’ve found that touch typing on this keyboard is a bit easier than using a standard PC keyboard to work on the Mac. I’m not sure why it’s different, other than Ctrl, Option, and Command are in the same order as they are on the integrated keyboard. I Love the dual integrated USB ports. More keyboards should have that feature.

I’m impressed with how easily the MacBook adds and removes an external monitor. Even Vista requires a couple of key presses to re-enable the additional monitor. The Mac recognizes the screen and configures it to the previous settings.

I’m still not convinced overall that the MacBook is a better option for me than any other notebook running some flavor of Unix. But I’m not going to turn down using a fast, light weight, and easy to use system.

Next project, figure out how to get Focus Follows Mouse to work.

Thanks to: raneko for the image

Today as I arrived home from work, I noticed on my doorknob a plastic bag with some paper folded inside. It turns out that Joe Weingarten, who is running for state representative in district 29, stopped through our neighborhood with the intent to meet as many constituents as he could before the election. “To listen to what’s bothering me, and let me know he would be working for me if elected.” He enclosed a flyer that covered a few key points, and a link to his Website & E-mail address.

I went to his website and read what he had to say there, came up with a few questions of my own, and formulated the following e-mail which I sent to him this evening. I’ll be sure to post any reply I get from him as well.

Dear Mr. Weingarten,

I would first like to thank you for leaving a two page note on my door today introducing yourself and explaining in a nutshell what some of your political views are. At face value you are a candidate I could see myself supporting. I would like to ask a few questions.

First what is your overall view on public safety? You suggest on your website that it is wrong to threaten the loss of public safety as related to property taxes, but you do not go into detail on what, if any, public safety policies you would propose at the state level.

Do you believe in Hoosiers’ right to keep and bear arms? Does that right extend outside one’s home or place of business? To what extent do you support or deny a Hoosier his or her right to provide for his or her own defense?

What is your take on punishing Malum Prohibitum crimes? Should tax payers be paying to incarcerate people who have committed these types of crimes? What is your view on “Truth in Sentencing” legislation? How do you propose we solve the jail overcrowding? How do you plan to fund your proposals?

Your website focuses on District 29. What views do you have for the rest of the state and the problems that affect all Hoosiers? Such as eminent domain laws at the state level, environmental lobbyists, (specifically the BP refinery issue.) Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.

I started a new job this past Monday, Sept. 29th.  All of the desktops in the new office are Macbooks or Macbook Pros.  I’ve used OS X before, but not since just after Tiger 10.4 was released, and never in the roll of a Unix Administrator.  So far the machine seems to do most of what I want it to with few unexpected changes from any other Unix Like computer I’ve used.

A few giant exceptions exist however.  Home and End don’t work as expected.  Shift Insert doesn’t work as expected, and several other small keyboard changes that are slowing down my productivity.

Other than that, I think I can make the Mac work for me.  I just need to retrain myself how exactly that work is to be done.

Thanks to: pipe for the image