Archive for category Geekiness

GIS Software

I’ve been trying to focus on getting much more in-depth with GIS tools. Our project is preparing to deploy an ArcGIS solution from ESRI in the next year or so but there are so many other options out there (including some neat stuff like Google Earth’s whiz-bang servers). It’s neat stuff and right now ESRI is kind of dominating the market — mainly because their the only ones that offer such a huge enterprise-level system. Most other GIS tools have been developed for specific applications and for specific clients.

It’s a neat area to work in…

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Website stuff and Gentoo 2006.0

So… I spent a fair chunk of time last night getting the Grace OPC
website up and running again. There were some really weird problems
with WordPress. It should have been a normal upgrade (which is only
slightly painful) but for some reason my FTP client (FileZilla) seems
to have a new bug that sometimes shuffles file names. So if you upload
files 1.txt, 2.txt, and 3.txt with “1”, “2”, and “3” as the contents
respectively, you’ll end up mismatching values. All the DATA is there,
just not in the right file name. Obviously, when you’re talking
configuration scripts, this is mayhem. What a mess — I’m going to
browse and see if FileZilla has already listed this as a bug or what.
Is it possible this could be a server-side issue? (I’m running
ProFTPd)

Anyway — that’s all for now. My attempts to get Gentoo 2006.0
installed were only partially successful. The installer fails if you
don’t have an Internet connection (which is just weird because
although it may be obvious to others I’m not used to my installation
routine talking to the mother-ship. The reason I didn’t have Internet
was because support for my wireless driver (ipw2200) wasn’t installed
out of the box. Kind of a pain. I just need to plug it into the wired
network at home and “emerge” the package. Maybe my opinion will
improve. I’m sick of Fedora Core so hopefully this is an improvement.

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How time flies…

It seems like I just posted to this site and it’s actually been an entire week.

Lots to do — I’ve been playing around with some new geospatial software (ESRI’s GIS suite). I’ll be writing some add-on functionality to it over the next year for work. Fun stuff but a lot of material.

I’ve been struggling to get printing to work at home. I was trying to use CUPS to share a printer on my Mac. In theory I should have been able to connect to the printer from my Windows XP laptop but it doesn’t quite work. When I was troubleshooting the issue I found a number of people who had exactly the same problem with no clear-cut solution. It’s a feature. I just wonder whether it’s Apple’s or Microsoft’s fault. My guess is Microsoft.

I’ve puttered around a little bit with touching up some webpages as well as correcting some mistakes (I had DNS misconfigured for every single domain on my virtual dedicated server). I added Scuttle to my server so that I can have my own list of bookmarks that are easily retrievable and centrally stored. It’s very much like Del.icio.us but you’re not subject to their ridiculous downtimes and slow connections. I like. You can see it here.

I also got my calendar server up and running again. It’s using PHPICalendar to display iCal files (that I can edit using either my Mac or Mozilla Sunbird). Also pretty neat. I had been running it before but I’ve upgraded to the new version. I also hope to actually use the darn thing this time. You can see it in action here. I need to add my stuff to it — for now it’s just U.S. Holidays. The important thing is that I’ve confirmed it works! You expected me to actually post my boring schedule?

I’m looking into Mac-on-Linux. I just got a new hard drive for my Mac in order to support mirroring the primary drive and I was planning on blowing away the original installation in order to try this out and also to get some annoying issues fixed (from when I dorked around a little too much and messed some things up in OS X). At the very least, I want the ability to dual-boot on my Mac.

All for now,

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Busy busy…

Things have been busy, busy, busy in the Pacific Northwest. Work has been keeping me running. Lots of neat stuff getting done but it’s wearing me down a little bit. Not much new on the tech front. I’ve been trying to get password maintenance issues resolved. I’d really like a crossplatform method of encrypting a password database. The best I’ve found so far is KeePass. It works on Windows quite well. There’s a linux port that supposedly will compile on Mac if you have the patience to compile Qt. I don’t. Well maybe, but I haven’t gotten around to it. I also spent some time trying to keep my Dad’s network up and running. There were Exchange Server 2003 problems that led to more and more problems which led to several hours staying up late troubleshooting a remote East Coast server. Not easy, but I ended up getting it working sometime around 4:30 just as I was leaving for work. We really need to either give in to the Evil Empire and install Windows 2003 (which will work better) or just embrace our destiny and install Linux. It’s frustrating how even small companies get into such a locked mindset regarding certain features (which are specific to Exchange Server 2003). Ah well…

I just registered a new website at andrewflanagan.info. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it up and running ASAP. The concept is to use it as a CV site per the recommendation of my friend Bill. Even though I’m currently not really looking for new employment, it can never hurt to publish your CV. We’ll see how that goes.

On other fronts, I’ve been keeping up my study of German with Saturday morning classes most weeks. I’ve been getting into the grammar a bit and feel comfortable reading short children’s stories but still have a hard time speaking the language.

I’ve also been trying to work on slogging through the MCSE and MCSD books. My hope is to get my certification in both areas by the year’s end. We’ll see how that goes.

More later… I gotta hit the sack…

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Slow day

It’s been a slow day for me so far… I’ve been trying to fix up some functionality in my .NET applications for work. Mixed results — I’m uncovering as many bugs as I’m fixing but at least things seem to be progressing. Currently I have two applications — one is running as a Windows Service. The second is monitoring this program and using remoting calls to retrieve statistics and get information in real-time as the process runs. Previously, if the Service was not running, the monitoring tool would hang for a while as it tries to do the remoting call and fails. To get around this issue, I have the Windows Service create a Mutex… The monitoring tool then checks this Mutex — if it exists, it knows (or at least can reasonably expect) that the remoting call will work.

This works except that the monitoring tool needs to be able to be located on any machine in the local network (not necesarily the same machine that the Windows Service is running on). I’ve just got to figure out how to do that. If any of my imaginary blog readers have any idea, please send me a [real] email. Thanks.

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Hiatus is Over…[?]

So, I think I’ve had a long enough break from blogging and am ready to give it another go. Not much is new in my life tech-speaking… I’ve been busy working and have spent a little bit more time working with some different Linux distros and some new software packages. Overall, I’ve mainly focused on keeping up at work and  spending time with the family (it’s harder with the little guy around now). We’ll see how this goes…

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Technology Update

Not a whole lot new here… I haven’t done too much new and exciting stuff. I’ve been tweaking my PowerMac G5 a little bit — trying to find out what it’s capable of. I’ve been very impressed. Not only can you change a lot of the under-the-hood settings within the OS X environment, but you can run virtually any Linux/BSD based application including window managers like Enlightenment and KDE. Very neat stuff.

I also finally got my MythTV box up and running well. My only complaints now are the pauses between channel switches (MythTV prebuffers and requires a pause so there’s no fix for it) and also occasionally I get some slight audio and video jittering. I think that tweaking some of the decoding settings will fix this just fine. It’s currently recording prescheduled shows (which I can schedule through a web interface running on my server) and all the other details are working. I’m just waiting for more and more features to be integrated into it. My feeling is that sooner or later there will be a fork that takes MythTV solidly in a new direction that focuses on stability, ease of use, and reliability. For now, I have a “free” TiVo which cost me the price of a Hauppauge PVR-350.

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Microsoft PDC

Last week I attended the Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles. Definitely a neat opportunity to learn about some new interesting Microsoft technologies. Overall, I’m not terribly impressed with how far Microsoft has come. The biggest improvements I think are in the area of the .NET languages (specifically C#). With regards to their operating system (specifically the new Windows Vista and Windows “Longhorn” Server) and some of their new concepts for OS integrated 3D graphical user interfaces I’m more worried than impressed. Almost everything that I saw I’ve seen before. The only thing “new” about is that Microsoft has put all the pieces together. Some of it looks neat, but I don’t feel that overall it’s that great. The demos that they ran during the presentations were SLOW. I have a funny feeling that Microsoft will bring a nice slick new desktop environment (that rivals the look of Mac OS X) and before long people will hate it because of how slow it is and because it crashes half the time. The stability and security of the operating system still seems attrocious. There was some neat stuff in reference to the new Communication Foundation (called “Indigo”) but I’m not sure how revolutionary it really is. It seems like Web Services are easier than before to run but I still have a hard time trusting a 24/7 Web Service to run well on any Windows platform.

All in all — a fun time — I came in 12th out of 400+ gamers in a Farcry tournament that was held one evening. I didn’t win anything, but I came close!

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Extreme Programming

Just some thoughts… Extreme Programming is a neat concept (that’s been around for a while) and it really does seem like it’s a sound concept. On every programming project that I’ve worked on I can see how Extreme Programming could have helped us avoid pitfalls. Anyway — just something to think about… Here’s the website.

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