A few days ago, I decided to take the e-plunge, and install the next version of Ubuntu. I always dread the upgrade, because the update manager always makes you choose if you want to keep your current configuration or install the package maintainers configuration. This is troublesome because I always wonder how much the config has changed, and if it warrants me dumping my current one for a new, blank one. At least the update manager shows you a diff between the files, that way you can make a more educated decision. Anyhow, after installing Hardy, Apache didn’t want to serve pages anymore to the outside world, which kind of defeats the purpose. After playing with the sites files and the httpd.conf file for about 4 hours, I finally fixed. (Not sure how…)

Today, however, I couldn’t access my site. I figured, maybe Apache was being temperamental, since I had restarted sometime yesterday. So I ssh’d into my box and looked around, but didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. Later this evening, after trying for several hours to make it work again, I concluded the server was working fine, but port 80 was mysteriously being blocked somewhere outside my network. Since we have Time Warner’s Road Runner service, I immediately figured they were blocking it on their end, which wouldn’t be the first time they had pulled some jack-assery of that type. So i got on the live chat and asked them. They stated that they NEVER block ports on their end, which I just assumed was a bold faced lie. After playing with port settings and a few other things, still no luck, I decided to reboot the router. BINGO. Working website. Maybe running the release candidate of DD-WRT isn’t the most stable thing for the network that I always trust to “just work”.

Besides that issue, I started summer school a few weeks ago. It’s ok, I suppose. I’m still trying to recall how to write good VHDL code, since it’s been about 2 years since I’ve even looked at VHDL. Vacation to Myrtle Beach starts this Friday, and I’m missing the first week of my 5 week Latin Civilization class. Alwell, I haven’t been on a vacation in years, and I think it’s a well deserved break.

So that’s about all that I can think of that is new right now. Hopefully summer class ends well and I can glide right into fall semester.

Yesterday the snow began to fall and as of today, there will be upwards of 16″ of snow on the ground. This has caused a lot of problems on the roads and a lot of delays around the area. Today is definitely a “sit-at-home-and-relax” day.

Besides the snow, a lot else has happened in the last few months. I finished my co-oping period with ABB in December. It was an enjoyable and valuable experience. It does feel good to be back in school though, I was really starting to miss the academic environment that has become so familiar to me over the last few years. Christmas break was pleasant, we spent some time with family, saw some friends, and burned up a lot of time playing Rock Band and other video games.

Now I’m back in school, and back to the grind. This semester I only have four classes, but they’re all engineering courses, so it’s a very difficult semester. I am taking VLSI, Operating System Concepts, Electromagnetic Compatibility, and Communications & Signal Processing. Over the summer I’ll have to take a few more courses to make sure I can graduate next spring.

Other than that, the last few months have kind of buzzed by. Tim is looking at colleges to attend in the fall and head to France after he graduates in June. Mike is not currently attending school, and is trying to find a job (which he is finding out is very difficult in today’s job market) . I spent some time with Nick Koehler over his winter quarter break a couple of weeks ago. Nick will graduate this spring and start working at AEP in Gahanna, OH this summer. Also, Tom Downerd will get married to Ashli Litten this April. Exciting times for all, that’s for sure!

Anyways, that’s pretty much all for right now. Hopefully I will be able find some time to blog a little bit more often than once every 3 months!

No, thats not my age! Today my blog celebrates it’s Two-Year Old Birthday. It happened to be by pure virtue that I was browsing in my archives today, and noticed that my first real post (besides test posts which I should delete) was on December 19th 2005.

HISTORY OF MY BLOG/SERVER
My first post was actually written back when I had a Blogspot account, which is now owned by Google, and renamed to Blogger. These posts were then carried over onto a new install of Wordpress on my first server. The specs for that machine were: AMD K62 @ 400MHz, 92MB RAM, Windows 2000 Pro and XAMPP for the web services. There were a few other things that my server was doing for me, like running HoTTProxy and VibeStreamer, but all in all, everything was it slow and not very pleasant to use… Once I decided to take the plunge into Linux, the experience was a whole lot better. Basically from this point onward, I have loved my Linux experiences. I make reference in a post about how the server just performs better with Linux, and it is so true! Fast forward a bit, last November I got a new server, since Lake Twp. was going to auction off some old PCs. This machine has really helped me out a lot. It now has a 500GB RAID1 storage array for music, movies, games, and backups of my laptop. Its a torrent box, uPnP server (for getting media to the 360), web server, phone proxy, and probably a couple other things I forgot. There are a few choice pieces of software I miss that are Windows only, but both of them have plans in the future to release Linux versions.

It’s crazy to think that just 2 years ago, I didn’t know anything about Linux, let alone hosting a website. I will have to say, that my experiences with my Linux server are invaluable to me. I have learned so much about so many different things; from troubleshooting system problems and software problems to writing shell scripts to automate tasks. The whole concept of being thrown into an OS with no idea how anything works is now tolerable for me. Anyways, Happy Birthday Blog and Merry Christmas to all!

P.S. Special thanks to Ben for helping to introduce me to Linux. You really helped me a lot Ben. Thanks!

So, the new Ubuntu distro has made it’s debut, and I can say I’m pretty happy with what it has to offer. The upgrade this time was a much less invasive process, compared to 6.10 to 7.04. It only took me about a total of 5 hours of work to get the machine fully upgraded, re-configured, and functioning again. The only thing that is kind of daunting about upgrading, is the fact that the updater wants to replace a lot of the config files with their distributed default ones. If you choose to replace or keep, no data is lost, but it can be a real pain in the butt to track down what is going on when something isn’t working. Overall this time, i felt more confident in what the updater was doing/replacing, so I guess I wasn’t as nervous as last time. From a desktop user perspective, this new distribution has some things that make it a lot more user friendly. I can’t really comment too much on these things however, as of right now I’m only running it on my server. I have seen a little bit of a performance increase, my load has dropped a bit, but the cpu usage has gone up. I’m not sure if this is a symptom of the tickless kernel or not, but regardless, as long as the system is stable and performs well, I’m happy. I would recommend the upgrade for anyone who is thinking about it, and for the people who have yet to try Linux, now may be a great time to take the plunge into OSS.

Most “self-proclaimed gurus” have determined that the only real difference between 64-bit OS vs 32-bit OS is the amount of supported memory… This is the most obvious difference, however this is far from the only difference. I was catching up on my digging this morning, and I came across an article at bit-tech.net interesing article that discusses 64-bit processors. I can’t that I went into the article knowing everything about 64 bit vs. 32 bit, but it seems to be a bit clearer now. It will be interesting to see how 64 bit computing affects us, and how the OS developers embrace the new platform. YAY FOR MEGABITS!

Just saw a cute cartoon over at xkcd and wanted to share it. Engineers/Mathematics majors will get a kick out if it.

Wow, Transformers, probably one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time! I thought Michael Bay and ILM did an awesome job making the Autobots and the Decepticons look amazing detailed and believably realistic. The story was good and the action sequences were even better!

I guess someone made a short film titled, “Transformers Preview Review” which looks at all of the material that was out before the movie and tried to make some predictions. I’d say for the most part, it was valid. A point that I thought was really interesting was that the Transformers movie was setting up for a trilogy. I suppose this makes sense, because most of the huge blockbuster films over the last few years have been three movies. Some of them that come with built in fanbases (i.e. Spiderman, Batman, and Transformers) create a new movie with new characters and pretty much drop all of the references to the original series. I guess Michael Bay was told that he could only have 4 vs. 4 or 5 vs. 5 or something like that, rather than having an epic Tranformers battle.

Overall, I thought this movie was amazing, and if I had the time, I would definitely go see it again! I remember reading just a couple of months ago that low theater attendance was being blamed on piracy. The MPAA can blame it on anything they want, I still feel that the real reason is because there aren’t enough “Transformers” in the theaters. So if you haven’t seen it yet, like giant robots, and were born in the 80’s… what are you waiting for?!

I thought it might be nice to put up a quick update of what’s been going on lately. I have tons of stuff to talk about, so I’ll have to post some more later. And no, I don’t especially love Vanessa Carlton, I just liked the sound of the words.

Anyways, for starters, I am currently employed at ABB part-time over the summer. This is pretty cool because in order for me to make the same amount of money every pay, I would probably have to work about 2.5 times more hours than I work here (Here being where I am right now). Not to mention the work isn’t too difficult (Note the last parenthetical statement). Also, this summer, I finally embarked on the Great Journey (read Circuits II), hopefully it will turn out like I expect it to. Speaking of the Great Journey, I bought a Xbox 360 back in May, and it is leet. I tried to buy used, to save some bucks, but that was a bad idea. Out of the two used ones I had, neither worked… Regardless, I now have a pretty all white Core system, and the Halo 3 beta kicked serious butt!

The new Transformers movie comes out today! It should be cool, I’m going to go see it at 10:20 PM tonight. I’ll have to put up a post of what I thought of it. Today I had this for an away message… “Transfloormerz! Robuts in Da’ Guys!” And Ben Radey messaged me with “transgenders! more than meets the eyes!”. That was good for a laugh!

I’ve done a couple things to the site lately. First of all, I made a new header. I used the base Flash file that the snow header was created from, rewrote the action script, found a cloud image and did a little PSing, and it looks pretty good to me. I also dropped a Twitter javascript into my sidebar. So that’s been a summary of the last couple months. I’ll update again with more soon.

So, i was just sitting here, really trying hard to find something to do (that didn’t suck), and I started typing a really long section of commented code in to my VB app… Then I realized that essentially I was writing what I should write in my blog. so, here it is.

‘I am wri9ting this because I am suppored to be working right now
e’I reall don’t know how Long I can type snsles chars in to the VB editor
‘because i have still 1 hr and 57 minues, oops make that 56 minutes left
‘before I should leave. I reawlly want to gome and break out the 360 but mom wou
‘ld be so pissed that i bought one.

That’s life unscripted peoples…

Anyways, I really wanted to post some stuff over the last month, but either have been too lazy (bad me…) or been forgetful. So I will make another update soon. I mean for gosh sakes, the stupid server that hosts this blog is in my basement, there’s no reason for me not to update it!

Peace outs!

So, I guess this is my first post of 2007. The year so far has been a good one! I started my co-op position and its going quite well. The job can be fairly boring sometimes, however so far there have been quite a few challenges. I’m living with my cousin and his wife, and I am eternally grateful for them taking me in, room and board in the Cleveland area is way expensive! I usually am home on the weekends to see my family and catch up on the household chore-like things. It has been very cold lately, like single digits and below with the wind chill. Mark Nolan says “Arctic Air” from Canada has come down to visit… I don’t care much for Canada’s air.

I like to check in on my Linux box/Blog sometimes, I’m still surprised how well my site performs. I really hope over the next few years to learn more about PHP applications, and MySQL databases. Maybe I can write a WP Plugin or even help with development someday! My friend Ben is learning ASP .NET at work, and he is excited about that. We’re just a bunch of geeks!

I want to start my Photo365 project pretty soon, hopefully before 2008! I guess that will happen soon enough!

Stay tuned for more updates soon!