Posts

I’ve had some time at work this week to get a lot done on our intranet site. We moved to a new server as noted in the previous post and I also took the development server and upgraded MySQL to the latest development version (4.1.1a). One of the problems I ran into was a couple web applications erroring out after the upgrade:Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client Come to find out, MySQL 4.1 has implemented a new password hasing function which isn’t supported by a number of apps yet, such as PHP (or at least not in the version I was using). ...

I believe I’ve never left a review of Shiroi Hana on the blog. This is the place I frequent the most in my newfound love for sushi. My first date with S was to a sushi joint and ever since then, we have it about twice a month. Shiroi Hana is just down the street from me at 3242 N. Clark St. I usually get the spicy tuna roll, although the dragon roll does look really cool. And then I go with a random assortment of sushi. ...

18 day(s), 21 hour(s), 8 minute(s), 0 second(s) That’s how long my laptop has been up and running. This evening, I resumed it from standby and 9/10 of my applications died upon coming back from standy. I guess that’s why you have to reboot on occasion.

Yes, I left chapstick in my pants and put them through the wash…and the dryer. Now all the clothes in that load - most of my work clothes - have little chapstick spots all over them.

I run Debian Stable (woody) because I enjoy the superb quality of their software. Occasionally, however, I have the need for more recent software than the Debian Stable archives provide for. SpamAssassin, for example, is what I use to cut down the massive amounts of spam I have coming in to old accounts. Running the latest and greatest version of this is to my benefit in order to best identify recent spam. But how to continue using Debian’s wonderful APT packaging system with the latest software? I could use the unstable archives, but those usually require other versions of core system software. Norbert Tretkowski’s (aka nobse) Backports to the rescue! Backports are recompiled packages from testing (mostly) and unstable (in a few cases only, e.g. security updates), so they will run without new libraries (wherever it’s possible) on a stable Debian distribution. What a wonderful solution. ...

I had this odd dream last night where there was a tsunami in Chicago. As I was walking into the Sears Tower, I looked over my shoulder and saw this giant wave coming towards the city from the lake. I ran inside and up a bunch of stairs. As I looked outside again, the wave came crashing down and the water level started to rise. I kept running up. It wasn’t as if I was scared, I was just trying to get to a safe level. The water eventually came up to the 200th floor (I know, there are only 110 stories). I was eventually rescued by this cruise-liner type ship that was going around. It was quite odd because I could see the tops of many other buildings and this ship was just weaving in and out of them almost nonchalantly. Meanwhile, there was the thought in the back of my head, that this tsunami and the ensuing flood was somehow caused by terrorists… ...

I went bowling with S while she was visiting and managed to whip up a 178 out on the lanes. Not too shabby, if I say so myself. S was right behind, but couldn’t quite catch up after I had removed the sweater to allow maximum movement and flexibility… ;]

Spent the New Year last night chatting it up with buds and then spent a quiet night with S. I was all psyched to see the ball drop when at Midnight CST time, I realized “the ball”, as in the Times Square ball, had already dropped an hour earlier. Oops. So we turned off the TV, clinked glasses, and cheered to Twenty ‘aught Four.

I’m home again for Christmas! It’s good to be back and relax next to the toasty wood-burning stove. I stayed up until 4am last night implementing the anti-virus portion of the ubermail article. I also added the amavis mail filter so now I can have mailgraph draw pretty graphs for me. I like pretty graphs. Unfortunately, it seems like my Chicago network is down and now I can’t access any of my servers back in Chi-town. I’m a little worried about this as it seems either the wireless router or the dsl modem is down. I have no idea why either of these would go down and the unknown worries me. It also means I’m without access to my nix boxen and proxy server at home, which is very depressing. ...

One of the things that always bugged me about Adobe’s Acrobat Reader was the length of time it took to load. Luckily, somebody else had the same frustration and has a good way to make Acrobat load faster [dotnetjunkies.com]. The page specifies Acrobat 6, but I’m still on 5 and it worked like a charm. The way to do it is to remove all the files from the plug_ins folder with the exception of EWH32.api and search.api. The only plugin I didn’t have that the site specified was printme.api, but it seems to be working ok without it.