Archived News starting from 10-20-2003 and earlier
BlogI recently read a
very good article passed on by
Stavos. I'm personally hoping for possibility #7 myself. Regardless, it will be interesting to see how things pan out.
This weekend my
girlfriend and I decided to drive out to Hell, MI just for kicks. What better way to spend sweetest day? I've been there a few times and it's nothing entertaining. Two buildings and some landmarks, that's about it. The whole point is that you're in hell, get it? At the very least it was a nice drive to enjoy the fall leaves, and we stopped off at a cider mill on the way back. We took some
obnoxious photos of the trip along with a few post-hell trip shots. As you can see from the photos, it's definately a trip worth making.
Sometime this morning, my
RT314 Router decided to stop resolving DNS requests for the first time in it's three year operation. Either the cable modem freaked it out or it's just getting old. Access to this server was unavailable during the error. Service was restored at 1:01pm after physically power cycling the router.
An unforseen problem during transfer to the new server caused both
atomicinternet.homeip.net stats and
cougarfest.com stats to stop updating from Oct 4th - Oct 9th. IIS 6 uses a log format different than IIS 5 which was the cause of the error. Fortunately it was an easy fix, and I also took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of
AWStats as well. I'm too lazy to update past logfiles so those days will forever be shrouded in mystery.
This server is now running on Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6 along with the latest versions of ASP, ASP.net, ActivePerl and
PHP. The system hardware has also been upgraded significantly and I took the opportunity to centralize many of the system
functions into one location. The new servername is PROTONX so I can run both simultaneously if I find a problem. If you
happen to stumble across one, please email me immediately so I can panic. Even though I'll never use many of the new
features of 2003, I'm tickled pink to be running it!
Old System (PROTON) |
|
New System (PROTONX) |
Oper System: | Win 2000 Adv Server |
|
Oper System: | Win Server 2003 Ent |
Web Server: | IIS 5.1 |
|
Web Server: | IIS 6.0 |
Processor: | Pentium II 333Mhz |
|
Processor: | Pentium III 933Mhz |
Memory: | 224 MB |
|
Memory: | 512 MB |
HDD: | 50 GB |
|
HDD: | 50 GB |
Databases: | MySQL 3.1.2, ODBC 3.123 |
|
Databases: | MySQL 4.0.15, ODBC 3.525 |
Languages: | ASP.net 1.1.2102 |
|
Languages: | ASP.net 1.1.4322 |
| Perl 5.6.1, PHP 4.3.2 |
|
| Perl 5.8.0, PHP 4.3.3 |
Thursday morning I went to startup my computer and got halfway through when it rebooted itself. Starts up again with the "Windows did not start properly" menu. No matter what I chose it kept choking halfway into the boot cycle. Since Windows XP doesn't natively support Serial ATA I have to load a driver during setup. Since I don't have a floppy drive, and it only reads drivers from floppies this is slightly inconvienient. After I get the driver loaded, setup says my partitions are of the "RAW" format and it can't read them. At this point I've spent almost two hours trying to fix it and was more than late for work. I also have a sneaking suspicion the drive is completely hosed. Fast forward to tonight: I bring the drive over to
Stavos house since he has a working computer with a Serial ATA interface. Hooked up my drive, ran scandisk, and voila, all better. My theory is the drive got overheated, but it could have just been a random fluke. If it happens again I'm saying farewell to Serial ATA and going back to good old EIDE. I included the checkdisk error below in case anyone else experiences this:
A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.
The attribute of type 0x80 and instance tag 0x0 in file 0xc9f has allocated length of 0x1000 instead of 0x1c5000.
Deleted corrupt attribute list entry with type code 128 in file 3231.
Unable to locate attribute with instance tag 0x0 and segment reference 0x2000000005a7d.
The expected attribute type is 0x80.
Deleting corrupt attribute record (128, "") from file record segment 23165.
|
Yes, it's true. The SCCA Solo season is officially over. The final event was held at Compuware arena in Plymouth. I recently installed my Schroth 3 point harness and Kumho VictoRacer tires on my
cougar so I had a better vehicle setup than any other race this year. Unfortunately, I didn't adjust my harness properly the first run so I wound up wasting it. The next three runs were better, but I now realize I was "plowing" through the turns (not braking enough before entering the turn). I didn't do as well as I'd hoped, but I did accomplish what I set out to do, which was wear in and get used to my new tires, and get comfortable with the new harness. Unfortunately, I have to wait 6 months before I can go again :(. At least I'll have
event photos to look at while it snows outside.
Tonight I was a groomsman in
Duane and Gina's Wedding. During the rehersal, everyone in the wedding party had discussed at what particular time Duane would most likely pass out. Surprisingly, he only had the nervous smile and remained conscious during the entire procession. It's rumored he passed gas at the alter, causing everyone close to laugh, but luckily the congregation was singing and probably didn't hear it (if it happened). The reception followed with Duane using a mechanics creeper to remove the garter. All in all a very successful wedding and enjoyable reception. I'm glad to have such great friends as Duane and GIna and was honored to be in their wedding. Here's to a long and happy marriage: <tink tink>
My friend
Stavos was recently hit with the
latest trojan horse that takes advantage of a flaw in Internet Explorer. Before we knew it was a trojan, it was quite the puzzle. Able to access any website except search engines, I blamed it on the
mercury retrograde and went to bed. Before I sleep I always read the news on my PDA and the trojan was a top story. I have to applaud the guy who wrote this one. No real damage, but definately gets you confused. I'm glad
PCWORLD had an article on it, otherwise I'd have been wondering about it all night. Since Stavos was compromised by this trojan, I have no choice but to label him a security risk and end all communications with him. Stavos, you were a good friend, and I'll miss you.
When I first moved into my house, I actually enjoyed doing dishes. I think the novelty of washing my dishes in my new house kept me entertained. Fast forward to today, and the novelty has long worn off. I now view dish duty as wasted time I could spend on other things. After seeing my mom's dishwasher installation I decided it was time to get my own. Budget minded as I am, I got a
midgrade model that does everything I need and nothing else. The installer came today and
my dishwasher looks fabulous! I immediately
loaded it up and tried it out. It may take twice as long as I do, but while it's chugging away, I'm spending my time wisely (watching TV). I love modern convieniences!
Click Here for older News