Snowmobiking (or is that Slopmobiking?) and SCSI

Ugh... I need an addition to my rear fender, I was soakng wet when I got in.
Hopefully it will get coldser tomorrow, as I would much rather deal with ice than with slop.

Weel, the ther Fleck has been busy cannibalising old hardware. The Beast yielded up a couple of hotswap bays and a RAID controller.

This is going to be fun...

This is Radio Clash...

...on private WiFi LAN.

Oh yeah, we got the icecast server receiving streams again, and outputting to the stereo. Good times, good times.

And now, I want to get a new hard disk and convert my windows box into a FreeBSD server. Yeah, and then I can run it as a headless X client... with OpenLDAP for an authentication source, after I get pam_ldap and nss_ldap configured...

Clearly I need to get out more.

All kidding aside, I conquered laziness today: did a grocery run, got out on the bike, cleared out the fridge, emptied the Green Box and resurrected our FreeBSD streaming server. That's a productive Sunday in my books.

Speaking of Open Source and servers... My friend Dan has recently become a Slackware reseller. He is also going to be carrying some *BSD retail product. So, if you're in southern Ontario and looking for a retailer/service provider that speaks Open Source (both the GPL and BSD dialects), check him out: Servicetech.ca, up on Fennell in Hamilton.

Believe me, when this Windows verification thing gets going (sorry, no specific link, just Google it), you are going to want to go OSS just to avoid the hassle. Seriously.

Post Kasabian Blogging

That show rocked, huge props to Stef for hooking me up with the ticket.

Well, for those who don't know, Kasabian have a sound not unlike Screamadelica-era Primal Scream, and they absolutely rock live!

The band was on, the sound great (my ears are still ringing), they played the majority of the album, and at least one track that does not appear on the copy of their eponymous disc that I have sitting next to me for reference purposes.

Definitely the best show I have seen in a while, and certainly the best one I ever saw on a whim.

Unexpected surprise

Well, well, well... Looks like I'm off to Lee's Palace tonight for the Kasabian show.
Should be good, if I'm feeling energetic I'll put up a review later.

In geekier news, switched to a remote Gnome desktop instead of the KDE session I was using last night and earlier today. Gnome's nice but KDE sure is purty.

The SUN-ny side of the street

[UPDATE: Laziness prevails; we had ISOs of Solaris 10 kicking around, so that's what we're getting...]

New project... Solaris for the house servers.
It's all Flecker's fault, blame him.

With the impending return of one of our Sun boxes from co-location, we are going to be reinstall it and the Icecast machine with Solaris 9 (though I'm lobbying for Solaris 10) just because we can.

This is going to be fun.... wonder if work wants to sell off that Enterprise 250 that we decomissioned last year?

So what does this mean for the Geekhaus network? Let's take a step back and do the tally:

2 Windows XP Pro machines
1 Windows Me machine
1 FreeBSD 5.3 (i386) machine
2 Solaris machines

And coming down the pipe this year we should be adding:

1 Mac mini
1 iMac

If this keeps up, we are going to need a bigger switch and Gigabit Ethernet. Hmmm... now there's an idea...

Building blog communities and the Joys of X11

Spent some time this week installing and doing some inital config on a blog community for work, and less than a week into it we have a fairly prolific poster already. Check him out: big bald ActiveNick muses on Active Nick's Big Bald Blog.
I have to say, the software we went with to run the community was some good stuff, IMO; and I don't say that lightly, it runs on .NET/IIS and I am becoming more and more of a php/Apache fan. I think this bodes ill for my future as a Windows administrator.

Just finished checking out my former co-worker Ritesh's blog... I see the Gates are very much a topic of interest in Manhattan these days.
Another (current) co-worker who blogs (and has been doing it for a while) is Ack. Read his blog, and buy his book. I did and I regret nothing.

The Geekhaus continues to earn the name. Thanks to some earlier work I did trying to get X over SSH working, and the Fleck using the old brain and remembering to edit sshd_config, we now have (in addition to the UltraSPARC powered IceCast server running FreeBSD) an X terminal server in the living room. I'm actually typing this on it right now, using Cygwin/X and PuTTY on work's windows notebook.
Beyond the geek-cool factor of just having this in the house, I am glad one of us finally figured out why we couldn't get it working before... Now I have a secure terminal back to the office, no VPN required, no IPSec tunnel limitations, oh yeah. Let the good times roll.
I think I am going to have to play with this more. I like it a hell of a lot better than RDP, and it is definitely more secure. VNC is no longer welcome (not that I ever liked it anyway... remote control sans encryption always made me feel queasy).
I definitely need to get back into dealing with Unix and workalikes more, I can do a lot more with less money. And I like that idea.

Hunter S. Thompson, R.I.P.

This just in: Hunter S. Thompson has has died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Dr. Thompson's work remains some of the best I have ever read (you have seen the name of this blog, right?). Condolences to his family and friends.

What's up with Gmail?

On the off chance that someone (else) actually reads this... What's up with Google's GMail service?

Here's the deal:

I checked my inbox last week and had 50 invites. I gave away 2.
I had 50 again Monday morning.

I have been talking to a few people, and have heard some very different opinions on what GMail is doing.
Some of these opinions can definitely be classified as Fear and Loathing; to wit, that GMail is actively tracking individual users' mail content and personal information... Not passively tracking via an automated system that serves up the proper ad based on the message content, but an Echelon-like surveillance system.
That is a scary thought.
So... who knows what? Is this the real deal with GMail? Or is this fear, uncertainty and doubt?
Hey, it's a free GB (or so) of storage on an ad sponsored site. I don't have a problem with something crawling through my mail to bring me relevant ads. I do have a problem if someone is creating a marketing profile of me based on what I choose read and what is sent to me.
Again, do you know anything? Someone care to enlighten me while I re-read the TOS for GMail?

Drop me a line, theaxon {at} gmail (dot) com[period/EOL/EOF]

Dispatch from the server room: 20050201

It has been some time since my last rant. But it was a good rant, and I don't feel the least bit bad about leaving out there to be digested for a wee while.

That and I moved shortly after the first set of posts (disgustingly enough, to be closer to work... yeah, after that rant, I know...) and then promptly discovered Fable as soon as I got settled in.

And then it was Xmas, with all the lovely family drama that brought this year, and then... well hell, with a massive tsunami devastating south Asia, the wait for the UN report from Darfur, Sudan who the hell has time to write to stroke their own ego and vent their frustrations on a blog? Certainly not me, as I really didn't have anything to say about it.

Ah, well... we live in interesting times.

What else? Oh yes, the Hour on CBC Newsworld seems to have found its feet and its format in the last week, and is getting better.
For those who don't know, this is CBC Newsworld's project to try and do something different, an hour of news coverage hosted by George Stroumboulopoulos (late of the FAN 590 AM, CFNY 102.1 FM and MuchMusic). It's interesting and covers a lot of ground in an hour. Check it out.

Of course, if that's not your speed, there's always Rick Mercer's Monday Report to get you to watch the CBC.

So, what now? No rant for you today, just observations.
I have worked in a few widely differing industries (my apparent inability to hold a job is a topic for a future post), I have noticed that the people I most enjoy working with are the ones who would much rather be doing something else, hell, almost anything else than that which they collect a regular paycheque for.
Which is what really makes people fascinating, that juxtaposition of the stereotype of what they do for a living and how they actually live.
Seriously, I have known bike couriers who were working on becoming industrial designers, network administrators who wanted to be tour guides...
And this seems to be more common among tech workers than any other group of people I have ever been associated with.

Food for thought? Maybe...