Known Element Enterprises Corporate Blog

So this weekend I have a good 20 hours blocked out to work on OSER. My end goal is to release a tech preview 2 that allows people to get a taste of functionality of OSER. Release early and often is the often heard mantra of the open source community. I am trying to meet that. Here are my goals
for this release:

1. Get custom kernel (2.6.16) booting. Right now it doesn’t boot for some reason and I am not sure why. I need to get a .config file from the autobuild and test from that.
2. Finish branding the distro. Everything from boot menu to installer and Icewm. This is partially done. I just need to do a global search and replace and a sanity check of grammar etc. I also need to work on the logo a bit.
3. Have all major services working. The following must work. Failure of any of these tasks will result in schedule slippage:
   1. User provisioning. A UNIX user accound should be able to get created in Webmin and:
      • Login to secure IMAP and check existing e-mail and send a message to other users and the outside world.
      • Receive e-mail from other users and the outside world.
      • Login to the Phprojekt web interface over HTTPS and access all functionality.
      • Login to the Sync4j web interface and exercise all functionality.
   2. ClamAv virus scanning and bogofilter spam checking must work. /etc/skel should have a .procmailrc file setup
      to use bogofilter and a Maildir with junk_yes and junk_no folders.
   3. Samba TNG should be configured as a domain controller and have the following:
      • A software share with OpenConnector/PhProjekt/Sync4j Outlook plugin deployment script and executable’s
      • A netprofile share (I think that’s right)with a simple/skeleton install script for outlook plug ins. Even if it just runs the
        setup for each one manually its a start.

   I think this is a fair set of goals for a tech preview. No single sign on or other fanciness. Just simple straight forward functionality test.

I am in the process of updating my web site. I have done masssive edits to the homepage (http://www.thewybles.com/~charles) I am in the process of updating my consulting page
http://thewybles.com/~charles/osds/ I will also start working on the OSER page (http://www.thewybles.com/~charles/oser). I have a lot of content to add.

I am so bored….. I get bored when work isn’t steady. Its coming in bursts here and there. But the tasks are easy quick turn around stuff. I need projects. Things that challenge me and take some thinking. Not brain dead stuff like server deployments. We have a meeting on Friday about Oracle server requirements. Essentially developing a Standard Operating Procedure for an Oracle server deployment. Its about time I say. I have lost count of the amount of server (re)deployments I have done for Oracle. It looks like the data warehouse is finally coming online. I deployed it on the EMC on Friday and earlier this week. Don’t know how long it will take for Oracle to be installed and the data to be loaded though.

Anyway I have been reading peoples blogs and stuff.

I do have a fun project coming up however. I am beginning to migrate all of the gentoo (yucky) boxes to RHEL4 (less yucky). I want debian! RedHat can’t seem to get it through there heads that people want to build stripped down single purpose systems without loads of stuff like X. I mean if you can’t do simple config file edits you shouldn’t call yourself a Linux admin. I guess thats why they bought Jboss. To make more GUI junk. I dislike Java even more then I dislike RedHat. Talk about bloat. And people say PHP doesn’t scale. Bah!

Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None, obviously market forces will take care of it.

http://inthenews.upmc.com/NewspaperTVArchive/WSJ/WSJ04102006_a.htm

This is just wrong. Its scary.

I guess if you can invest that much money/time in golf you have it to invest.

All these rich guys spending time golfing instead of running there organizations/country’s.

Bah.

Ok maybe I am a tad jealous. But golf just seems boring to me.

I have uploaded a thumbnail of myself a This post should have my picture next to it. If it doesn’t I will have to blog about how livejournal is not fullfilling my needs.

I have also upgraded to a sponsored+ account.This gives me the features of a paid account but with ads. It lets you customize your ads based on your interests. Its kind of cool.

I hear they opened a wal-mart in china…. i can imagine the people who shop there… “Hey I just made that yesterday !”

i have a pad of paper in front of me that is a list of every single thing i own.
what’s on it?
‘1 pad of paper’

i need ritalin to make the perl bearable.

can you guys see what I type?
no, raize
How do I set it up so you can see it?

In a post about voice interface software someone said:

No, computer, I said, “awk single quote left curly print dollar one right curly single quote file dot txt pipe sort pipe uniq dash see greater than a dot out”

shudder

Yeah see thats why voice interaction (at least for me) will never move beyond things like:

Pageup/Pagedown
Next/Previous (page/e-mail/photo/etc).
Voice authentication (and thats only a cool/nifty toy. Not all that useful)

and probably e-mail/document dictation.

But for extensive command line use I don’t think so. Or for coding. Now it could be a useful augment to coding (i.e telling eclipse to jump to a certain function definition or to do a compile).

I am very upset right now. I just learned that the Maker Faire (No that isn’t a misspelling) is the same weekend as a marriage retreat that me and my wife are going to. That really irritates me. I had been looking forward to the event since late last year. *sighs* Everyone was pressuring me to sign up for the retreat and I didn’t bother to check my schedule. I really regret that. To late now….

I didn’t really get anything done today at work. I need to put another server onto the EMC and have been trying to work with my manager on getting this done. After working out a few snags and blocking out time to work on it, we kept getting interrupted. Very frustrating. The source of a good portion of the interruptions was the person who wanted it done the most. Since when does asking every 5 minutes if the task is complete get it done faster? You think we don’t know that you are the one who wants it done and will let you know when it is complete? I got e-mails and IM’s and the person coming over and asking me. It really really irritates me the way people send an e-mail and then come over right away and ask about it. What is the point of sending the e-mail in the first place if your just going to talk to me?!?!? I have been more and more forceful with people and directing them toward my manager when they want tasks done. I don’t mind helping people with clarification of things or status updates (even though they can get irritating/counter productive). What I used to be really bad about was letting people come to me and request tasks. My manager has made it very clear to us that we are to route everything through him.

Speaking of e-mail one of the managers at work filled up there inbox. People have a 2 gig quota. Now I don’t want to know how someone fills up 2 gigs of e-mail. That is just wrong.

I am writing an Engineering Change Notice to deploy file integrity checking onto our production Linux systems. I am still not sure why this wasn’t done before I got here. It seems a lot of things weren’t done before I got here. I still haven’t received a satisfactory answer as to why an ECN is needed. I was under the impression that normal System Operations/Administration activities that don’t require downtime shouldn’t need to be approved by anyone other then the manager of System Operations/Administration.

And in other news the DNS for the Asterisk server I am working on was switched without warning or advance planning. Yet the same person who did this is wondering when it will be fully deployed. Well it could have been done tonight if the DNS wasn’t changed. Now I have to wait for the changes to propagate. I tried both the old and new Fully Qualified Domain Name and am unable to reach the server. Or it may be offline. I don’t know.

So all in all a wasted day. And bitterly disappointing.

Except for the conversation with my counterpart at our other facility. He and his wife just celebrated the birth of there first child a boy! I was rooting for a boy and so was the dad We are good friends and he is a pleasure to work with. That was the high point of my day.

Sorry for the randomness/rambling in this post. Its just been a frustrating day and I needed to brain dump.