I upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 8.10. I have high hopes for this version as it has benchmarked well and with the improvements to CPU usage. My biggest problem with 8.04 was how often my fan turned on (it wouldn't be such a big deal if it wasn't so loud) and how my hard-drive would spin constantly. So far the fan has turned on as much or less than it does with XP and the hard-drive spin issue seem so to be resolved as well.

I have one beef so far: VPN support in the network manager is broken out-of-the-box. It took most of today to get it figured out. Settings wouldn't stick when editing my VPN connection, saving my password resulted in a random error and a needed refuse-EAP setting was unavailable. This was all eventually resolved with much searching and reading. It is frustrating to have something that worked so well in a previous version completely changed and broken in the next.

That said, I am happy to have a Linux installation on my laptop that's not so CPU intensive. As I write this entry, top shows CPU usage under 10% whereas in 8.04 it was usually up around 15%.

More thoughts on Intrepid Ibex to come later.

Those of you who know me may know that I am slightly opposed to Microsoft products. This stems mostly from my anti-institutionalism and fondness for the open source community. Really, it all started with price. So you could say that my Mennonite heritage is what has produced my technological stance.

With that said, for the next several weeks, probably months, I will be donning a Microsoft hat for a project I have been assigned at work. I will be setting up a Sharepoint Intranet for one of our clients. This is as Microsoft as you can get. I will be working with all things Microsoft: MS Office, MS Projects, Active Directory etc.

I am approaching this with an open mind. I am actually interested in seeing how this turns out and learning a bit more about the world of Microsoft. It's definitely something that would look good on the resume. As I have said to a few people: "If it comes to the worst, at least I'll have a reason to not like Microsoft."

Pies are great! Today we had meat and pumpkin pie with Dan and Christina. To steal Dan's phrase: "I like pie!"

I write this post mainly for my own benefit so I can have somewhere to go back and reference when I need to do this again one year from now after I have forgotten what it was I did.

At work we use Modx a lot for CMS projects. One cool but annoying feature is the "QuickEdit" bar that allows you to make page edits from the page instead of from the manager. The problem is that the quick edit bar uses a Javascript library that often breaks other Javascript on your site - but only if you're currently logged into the manager. Which means, you often won't be able to test while you're logged in and making changes, that you need to test.

Here is the hack to remove the bar.
Edit

assets/modules/quick_edit/output.class.inc.php

In the function, mergeLinks change $allowed=true; to $allowed=false;

You know the media has next to nothing on you (Harper) when the press is running stories about how much public affection you show your kids.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/CanadaVotes/News/2008/09/30/6929886-cp.html

I finished my DIY laptop cooling device. I added telescoping rods to keep everything together and provide an adjustable platform.

What do you think?

I have always been a fan of DIY projects, but never so good at carrying them out to fruition. Well, here is one that I have indeed managed to see through to at least the proof of concept.

I have always complained about my HP Pavilion's noisy CPU fan. So in an effort to keep my laptop cooler with less interference from the CPU fan I build my own laptop cooler. The use of hoses was inspired by another DIY laptop stand I had seen on the net. Add 2 Princess Auto 5v fans, a USB cable and minimal solder and you get this:

I intend to tidy up the wires a bit and maybe attach the 2 hoses with telescoping rods for maximum adjustability and in an effort to keep everything together. The fans are not the quietest either, so there is the option of switching to 12v fans and since they will be underpowered they would spin slower. But at least it seems to work somewhat.

There was some excitement in Bow Island last night. There were a lot of people standing around watching this house fire. We got there a bit late so my pictures aren't as impressive as some people got earlier. The whole front of the house had been one big wall of flame.

You can see an old VW Bug in the garage. It's always sad to see an old car destroyed.

Dan, this one is for you.

You know that outline on href's you see when you click the link? I used to get rid of that with an "onclick=blur()". Well, I just found a way easier method.

a { outline: none; }

And I call myself a web developer. How did I not know this?

Finally. I have succeeded after much reading and trial and error to create my own custom firewall and more importantly QoS script. I have revisited QoS several times since I lost my Shorewall config to a hard-drive crash at work. I endeavored this time to build a QoS script from the ground up with no 3rd party software. This proved a little more difficult and time consuming than anticipated.

The very high level break down of how it works is this, IPTables is used to assign port, destination or source based traffic arbitrary marks. These marked packets are then read by traffic control (tc) and put into designated Hierachical Token Buckets (HTB) which have assigned rates and priorities. That's the gist of it.

It all sounds quite boring and simple but I assure you it wasn't that simple and boring is a subjective label. It's exciting for me because it is the final piece to the SNAP (one of my pet projects) puzzle.

If anyone is interested in these scripts, let me know and I'll make them available.

Sound problems has been one issue that has been in Linux for quite sometime. Usually what happens is that sound stops working after watching flash in a web browser.

To find the offending process type this:

This command will output a list of processes which currently have the sound device open. If you kill those processes you should get your sound back without needing to reboot.

We have seen some intense weather this summer. On the way to Bow Island this Friday we saw these ominous clouds.

I've had this weird problem for a while where my one USB drive would only mount as a read only filesystem. After lots of Internet searching across multiple days and weeks, I found one post where this one person just switched USB ports on his PC and it worked.

I tried it. Guess what it works.

Weird.

Tomorrow I'm 30 and I've gotten over it. People seem to make a big deal of this number. Pointing out that I'm no longer in my twenties as if the twenties are the prime of life. But I think the 30s will prove to be good years.

I'll let you young'uns know what it's like.

After several years of using a variety of Linux flavour desktops, I have to say that Ubuntu 8.04 is by far the easiest Linux to use to date.

One thing though - the Java version it installed by default on my AMD64 machine was terrible. Java routinely used 100% of my CPU. After installing Java 6 from Sun via Synaptic (Add/Remove), things are much, much better.

Thought other Ubuntu users may find this information useful.

Now with 50% more shininess!

Lately, I have been experimenting with Scriptaculous and Prototype JavaScript libraries. I used to be wary of using third party libraries for either backend or frontend applications. But now, because of some recent requirements for a website I looked to some libraries to implement these features quickly. I found that over the past year or so, Scriptaculous libraries had matured greatly.

So if you look to the title of my website, you'll notice it's changed from v5.0 to 5.1b to indicate the implementation of these libraries throughout this site.

Take a look at the experimental section to see what I'm currently toying with.

This is the Porsche 9ff GT9. It's top speed is rated at 252mph! Too bad it's 2mph shy of the Veyron. You'd think they could have squeezed 3 more to put it over the top. Guess not.

Everything went to pot yesterday. At least on my computer. I had noticed a few odd things recently like my TV capture card stopped working. Yesterday everything stopped working. The clue was that during boot every executable returned a "Unable to execute binary file" error.

Thankfully I could recover most of my files with Fedora Rescue. So as of this afternoon I am running Ubuntu 8.04. The first setup attempt messed up. So I tried again and the install failed completely. I tested the install disk and it failed. Burned another, tested it failed too. Tried installing off the second burn anyway and it worked.

Dual monitors was a snap to setup once it installed NVidia's driver for me. All I had to do was add the TwinView option in the xorg.conf. VPN is working - quite a bit nicer than the old pptp-config I used to use.

I'm still in the process of getting Eclipse to where I want it and I'm sure there are other things that I will find I need in the next couple of days.

Wow it has been a long time since I have written anything here. Maybe because I've been so busy shoveling snow. Calgary has been living up to it's crazy weather reputation lately. We actually drove to Bow Island and back during the weekend. On the way back, the highways were probably 80% ice covered. Our vehicles in the ditch count between Brooks and Calgary was 14. 4 of which were semis.

When we got home, I found that my 2 LCD monitors had been delivered Friday after we had gone, and left on our steps in plain view of the entire neighborhood. Good job Canada Post. I'm surprised they didn't disappear.

I set them up Monday and they're awesome! Working from home is going to be fun now! No more fuzziness or wavy effects. Not to mention the desk real estate that opens up.

Now to see if I actually have any time to do any work this summer. I think we've over extended ourselves a bit with our evening activities.

We are back. Abby was great with her babysitters, but she does seem very happy to be home. There was no issue with her coming back to us. Her grandparents had an especially good time with her. A big thanks to Janelle who had her most of the time.

Abby has been incredibly hyper tonight. For the past hour she has been screeching and playing with a (child proof) pill bottle. I often wonder what's going on in her head.

I have finished putting up pictures from our trip. I may put up one or two more if I find I missed some good ones. I have enabled commenting, so comment away on the pictures if you'd like.

Until next time.

"We're leeaaaving on a jet plane...."

Our flight leaves late this afternoon at 5:30pm. Crazy! I'm quite looking forward to having a couple weeks off with Julene.

Maybe, if you're lucky, I'll post some updates and/or pictures while we're traveling.

We are booked to go to England! This was kind of last minute. We had initially planned to buy tickets before Christmas, but due to certain circumstances we decided to wait. Then just recently, we were able to find babysitters for Abby so we could go. Thankfully, there were still tickets available that weren't super expensive, although, more than they had been in December.

Now we need to figure out where to go and what to do. We would like to venture to at least one other country while we're out. Other than that, all I've got is to visit some castles. I've always wanted to see a castle. And beer sampling! Julene would like to see a show of some sort in London.

Does anybody have any more ideas?

An older and wiser colleague once told me that during his downtime he would "read a book or technical article relating to my profession." I am experiencing downtime right now so I am doing some experimental programming with Google APIs but am finding it exceedingly difficult to be motivated.

What do you do in your downtime and how do you motivate yourself (if you're doing something productive)?

Click the icon in the top right to leave a comment

-- added
The same question was just posted on slashdot, creating a lot more discussion than would be generated here.

I don't subscribe to New Year's resolutions because they carry the assumption that they will be broken within a month. But one thing that I have wanted to do lately is read the entire Bible. And through a strange coincidence, Google Reader had a "Read the Bible in a Year" RSS subscription suggestion for me.

The feed breaks up the reading into 1 OT, 1 NT, and 1 Psalms/Proverbs section per day. If you're interested, the URL for the feed is
http://www.ibs.org/bibles/dailyreading/rss/niv.xml

Happy New Year!

The holidays are nearing their end. I am ok with that. It will be nice to get back to routine. But I am very much looking forward to our visit to Manitoba this coming weekend. My family hasn't seen us (read: Abby) for 7 or so months. We send pictures but it's not the same. It's always nice to spend some days hanging out on the farm. The atmosphere is so different than Calgary. It is tempting (for me at least) sometimes to trade our house on our tiny lot for a nice big acreage out there - with money to spare. I'll have to start up my own contracting company and work remotely. Some day...

This past weekend I got to single parent Abby while Julene went to help her parents paint their new house. Abby was really good to me, but I am thankful to have a helpmate. Raising a child is not a job for one person - my hat off to those that do.

Thanks again to Jeff for his relentless QAing. He found an ampersand issue with my RSS feed. I will have to be careful when adding links in posts to format them correctly.

I stumbled across this music video the other day. I love the acoustic guitar in it. I wonder if I can find this guy in local music stores?

Wisely: Through Any Window

For those of you interested in attending a Choral Christmas concert, I will be singing in Brentview Baptist's choir concert on Sunday December 16 at 6:30pm. The concert will be held at the newly completed church building on Charleswood and Crowchild.

View Larger Map

I hope to see you there.

I added some new background images (the picture at the top). To view a random different image click the green recycle icon in the top right corner of the page. Or, pick from the list that shows on mouse-over of the icon. My current favorite is the door_handle.

I also added some more pictures of Abby.

Good news! I was able to fix the Corolla's problem without any new parts. It turned out that the problem was that one of the control arm mount points was loose. After a bit of working the bolt back and forth I was able to get it good and tight. The Corolla drives great now with no suspension noises!

woohoo!

I have been on my own for the past week. Julene and Abby are at my inlaws. It feels weird being on my own. I like coming home to a wife and child and it feels weird to open the door and be greeted by silence.

On the vehicle front:
The Corolla is needing some maintenance. I replaced the rotors this week because they were warped. Tonight is the passenger side ball joint. This is a new procedure for me. I haven't replaced a ball joint before. From the looks of it though, it appears to be relatively straight forward. Christopher volunteered to come down and lend a hand if I need it - which will be nice. Sometimes all you need is one more hand or set of eyes.

I am once again very thankful for having my own garage to do these repairs on my own. I can imagine the labour cost would be somewhere around $250.

The !PHP project has passed the pilot stage. We are now waiting for confirmation that the quote we gave them will fit in their 2008 budget. I have been working on it during "down time" at work and I'm enjoying it. I have completed a device discovery web utility which is something the open source solution didn't have. The next step is to finish the monitoring daemon.

That said, it's time to get to work.

I had enough time budgeted so I could start writing a C++ monitoring daemon. I need another couple weeks to get where I'd like to be. If the project stalls, or they go with the open source, I plan to finish it on my own - it would look good on my resume.

In other news, a friend of mine has been chosen for jury duty. As much as I know there is a need for juries made up of members of the public, I'm glad I haven't had to be involved in any trials (as of yet). It does peak my curiosity a bit though. I'll have to bug him about once he's done.

Abby is still a super happy baby. She gets into these hyper moods sometimes and can be quite hilarious. I'm quietly hoping that the hyperactivity slows and doesn't increase as she gets older. She can sit mostly on her own now, we just have to tip her back up occasionally. Her favorite thing to do seems to be to sit on the (or Mark and Esther's couch) and play with a toy while "talking" as loud as possible - drowning out or at least distracting from any nearby conversations.

I was browsing ebay for old Porsches and came across what will now be my dream car.
A 1969 Porsche 911.

The prices don't seem to be way out of reach and I have always wanted a Porsche. Plus, I'd rather have a classic than something new anyway. So it meets all my desires. That said, I probably am nowhere near being a place to justify such a purchase. But it's nice to dream - albeit a bit frustrating.

On Wednesday night, I accompanied a couple friends to a Martin Sexton concert. Opening for him was Martyn Joseph, a political singer/songwriter. Both were really good, each in their own way.

Sexton has this way of singing that makes him sound like a muted trumpet. It's kinda cool if you don't mind not understanding what he's saying - but if you already know the words then there's no problem. He's a great performer and I'd recommend checking him out if he comes around your area.

I am finally parting with one of our three cars. I sold the Toronado on Ebay last weekend. It went for a decent price - enough that I nearly came out even after three years of owning and driving it. Which is more than you can ask for from any car.

Other than that, life is getting into the busyness of the Fall/Winter season. It seems that my evenings are mostly taken up during the week. This tends to get frustrating. Maybe this year I will resolve to be less committed. Although that sounds like a negative idea, it would probably help keep me more sane and less stressed.

If anyone is looking for some dark British humor, check out The Extras by Ricky Gervais, also picked up by HBO.

I finally got around to putting in the fuel tank pressure sensor in the Cavalier. Time will now tell whether this is the fix for the OBDII code.

Other than that, life is pretty well moving on steady. Abby is still a very happy baby. It is a lot of fun to watch her discover the world.

I should upload more pictures of her...

"When Jesus said 'Love Thy Enemy', He probably meant 'Don't kill them'"

This could be applied to any 'Christian' nation at war.

Here's an interesting vehicle I came across yesterday. Note the amount of mirrors.

Programming as the Magic of Legend ( http://jroller.com/page/obie )

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be. ... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program."

I came into work thinking, today would be a good day to do the package updating that I have been prompted to do for a while. So I let the update wizard do it's thing and at the end rebooted as needed.

While Fedora (6) was booting I noticed that eth0 failed to get an IP. No worries, we have dhcp hiccups at work alot. Finishing booting. Tried to get an IP manually - no go. Called over the IT guy. His laptop worked fine. My onboard Broadcom gig NIC isn't even lighting up.

Figuring that the driver broker during the update I threw in PCI NIC. Still nothing. No internet connection means no online searching for solutions. So I thought, why don't I try upgrading to Fedora 7. Having never done a smooth upgrade from one Fedora version to the next before I had my doubts. 1 hour later... my doubts are confirmed.

Next I tried a clean install of Fedora 7. 1 hour later - still no network.

Finally admitting defeat, I dug up the Fedora Core 6 install DVD and went back to un-updated Fedora Core 6 and now everything is working. Except Eclipse - the most important utility at work.

What have we learned kids?
Be wary of automatic updates. Proceed with extreme caution and have a contingency plan.

After all of that, I still prefer Linux to Windows.

I used to think that this would be a hard age to turn, but the more I think about it the more I am ok with it. Why not simply embrace the inevitable? It's a path I'm going to have to walk one way or another? However, if I claim to be in some sort of early-mid-life crisis maybe I could get away with getting the V-max I've always wanted.

I have been trying to figure out the cause of my fatigue. Maybe lack of sleep? (usually 7 hours) Maybe poor eating habits - but I normally eat pretty well. Maybe a brain-draining, eternal project at work? But most likely the main cause is that it's between 2 and 3 pm on a Friday.

It's on Friday's like these that I look forward to doing nothing on the weekend. Except that in the summer it seems that all of our weekends through August get booked up by the end of May. I'll try and get some down time to relax Saturday and Sunday regardless.

1095 days. That is how long Julene and I have been married today. 3 years. Wow. It seems so long ago and yet so new at the same time.

With the arrival of Abby our social lives have been forever altered. However, Janelle has graciously offered to babysit Abby for tonight, so Julene and I can go out for dinner. This will be Abby's first babysitting experience and will likely determine how eager Janelle will be to offer her sitting services in the future.

Here's to a nice quiet evening for everyone!

Go Flames Go!

The prospect of being a parent is very humbling. To think that we will be responsible for a new Life. We pray for wisdom in bringing up this child.

Despite having our income status rubbed in our faces, it was a good time checking out what's new in the auto industry.

Mark pointed me towards one such artifact - a Microsoft promotional video for Windows386. As he so aptly put it:

"I'm building a time machine and switching to linux or BSD before this video ever gets made."
- Mark Slevinsky

Here it is in all it's glory.

Sounds like a Monday to me.

Armchair for the mind.
"What I dream of is an art of equilibrium, purity and tranquility, devoid of disquieting or preoccupying subject matter... a sedative, a calmative for the intellect - something analogous to a good armchair that relieves one from physical fatigue."
Henri Matisse - 1908

Julene and I have started discussing names for our future child. It seems that we cannot hit any middle ground. We both like names that other people have taken first but can't seem to find any names that we both like and hasn't already been taken by family or close friends. Any suggestions? Put them in the comments. Julene hasn't taken to my suggestions of Demetrius or Maximus so I have to bring more to the table.

Also, look out for a more complete example of my PHP OOP AJAX framework.

Recently we had our 18 week ultrasound. You can see the pictures here. The baby can be seen sucking her(?) thumb in one of them.

Merry Christmas!

Cause that's what happened to me. They way over-tightened (150+ft/lbs) some wheel nuts (and under tightened others) and when the body shop tried to take off the wheel to get the fender off, two wheel studs broke on one wheel - which costs me $150 because it was an item not on the estimate from the bodyshop.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Being the last day of a yet another really busy week coupled with an early morning car-pool into work, I have to drink my motivation from a cup(s) this morning.

Model: HP Pavillion DV1315CL

Pentium M 1.73 Ghz

1 Gig Ram

80 Gig Hdd

Dual Layer DVD +/- burner

14" widescreen

Tonight I am taking the problem power supply out of the Toronado and bringing it to my electronic engineer friend's place to see if we can find and rectify the issue. Here's to hoping. If we can't get it, we will be replacing the guts of it with some modern parts. It would be nice to have this done for winter as it directly affects the heating of the interior of my car.

http://www.stevenreimer.com/comment.php?id=102 This will be my first full week of work in a while. I wonder how it will pan out. I'm guessing that I'll be beat by the end. I'm trying to work at least a few extra hours so I can make up for my unpaid holidays. My mind tends to shut off around 7.5 hours of work so that could prove to be difficult.
Soon I will be down with extra-curricular sports. I have decided to take a break from soccer for the first time in years. Having the extra time at home to do some extra web development will prove to be very valuable.
Until whenever... http://www.stevenreimer.com/comment.php?id=101 Our holidays are basically over. At least for me. Julene has a few more days off but I am back at work for a while now. I wonder how long it will take me to get back into this routine of work. http://www.stevenreimer.com/comment.php?id=99 I think we have all our pre-trip issues ironed out. Now, if only I could do something about the weather. It's looking pretty gloomy today for our start. And the forecast on the island isn't rain-free either. Oh well, we will start our trip regardless and just dress warm and in full rain gear. http://www.stevenreimer.com/comment.php?id=97 Two days before we leave on our motorcycle trip I run into a significant issue - the oil pan threads for the oil drain plug on my Tempter stripped. I remember that years ago (when Derick still owned it) we put in an oversized bolt because of weak threads. Well, those weak threads are now gone. So I am going to try and find an oversized, tapping bolt to replace it. Obviously this is a pretty important fix as you don't want to be losing all your oil in the middle of the mountains. http://www.stevenreimer.com/comment.php?id=96 I read Luke 6:27-36 today and was struck by a question. Often we hear contemporary Christians (myself included) say: "We shouldn't let people ( take advantage of || walk over ) us just because we're Christians." As disconcerting as it may be, I am no longer sure I can agree with this statement. This passage pretty well explicitly says that if someone takes something from us, to not demand it back. Does this remind anybody else of the Ned Flanders - Homer relationship?
Talk about a difficult command to follow. http://www.stevenreimer.com/comment.php?id=95 I just realized that all the links on my site don't work in IE due to IE being horrible. I'll try and get that fixed. http://www.stevenreimer.com/comment.php?id=94 Hey Faithful viewers.
So I was using my new framework for a friend's website and promptly and unwittingly started breaking the rules those which the framework was intended to help enforce. Particularily, the combination of business and display logic. But don't be alarmed, I have gone back and fixed my misuse of the framework.
In other news: In an attempt to possibly getting the Toronado running again without buying and AC compressor, I posted the question: "Can I run an altenator belt bypassing the AC?" on an Oldsmobile forum. Eveyone that responded seemed to think so. This weekend I will measure the length of the belt I would need without AC and see if it can run without any additional idlers or anything.
Here's to hoping.
Although I may have a lead on a truck, and in that case I would rather not keep the Toronado. I guess I could get something for it if it was running to help offset the truck purchase. If it's still available and we figure out how to get a hold of the guy.

Oh, and feel free to use the feedback to make personal attacks on other feedbackers.