Well, maybe not ever. But it’s still pretty neat-o.

I’ve suddenly become fascinated with old AT&T Transcontinental Cable Routes (L-Carrier) and their markers. I’ve collected a whole bunch of markers and taken pictures of them…

If I get some more time, perhaps I will post a KML file. For the time being, look at them on Panoramio!

Anyone else got pictures and coordinates of markers, along with their marker numbers? Throw em in the comments – I’d like to start a hobbist database.

I got a Motorola DROID phone to replace the old Motorola Q9c I had.

If the iPhone is the Jesus Phone, then this thing is the God Phone. It is simply phenomenal.

I won’t go into detail of the phone itself here, because world+dog has already done that, but I will say this: The phone is easier to use with Microsoft Exchange features than my previous Microsoft Windows Mobile phone.

I’ll give you a minute to let that sink in.

…

Yeah. I said it. You read it. Wanna fight about it?

I’ve been playing around with Ubuntu again, mostly just to entertain myself. Runs nicely on the new “The Beast”. I haven’t had any major glitches and all seems well.I have always liked the compositing engine in Ubuntu, and it’s even easier to deal with in 9.04. It was a pain in Hardy and Intrepid, but Jaunty seems to flow better.

Oh, and the friggin thing boots like lightning on a crappy 80GB SATA. Can you imagine what it would be like booting from the Velociraptor? I don’t want to format the Windows 7 partition on that just yet, as I want to see what Ubuntu can do for me long term for once before I do that, but man, that would be so sweet.

Installing apps. Playing with settings. Surfing the net. All seems well right now.

Anyone have any suggestions for use, apps, or other cool stuff for Ubuntu Jaunty?? (am I even spelling that right?)

Oh, and why is OpenOffice.org Draw installed but not on the Apps menu? That is really f***ing annoying. You have no idea. Another thing that kinda chars my circuits is there isn’t a “Quick Command” or something similar to the Windows “Run” box right on the applications window or somewhere easily accessible. Yeah, I know I can pop one on from somewhere, but shouldn’t it be right there, especially in something like Linux? It bugs me to have to drop into a terminal to run an app I know by name but don’t want to have an icon for (like I do with Calculator or Notepad in Windows… it’s just faster for me that way.)

Uhh.. blah.

Couple of things I found out in the past week that filled my geek heart with levels of geek joy until now not known by any geek anywhere (well, maybe just a little…)

LCD panels are fairly interchangeable between LCD monitors. As long as the panel size and pixel dimensions are the same, you can basically swap a glass LCD panel from one monitor to another. Handy to know when you have two monitors, one with a busted panel and another with a busted power supply. A little surgery and you get a fully functional Frankenstein’s Monitor.

PovRAY 3.7 Beta 64-bit + Core i7 920 = LOVE. Benchmark run in less than 2 minutes. Its like having my own render farm… but right here on my one computer.

The server was continuing to do weird things so I did some more research. The mysqld service was randomly crashing because of an out of memory error, even though the damned server has 2GB of RAM and plenty to spare when the crash occurred. Hunted around a bit and found that some other people (like 2) were having a similar issue, and it was seemingly related to a failed swap partition. Looked at my config and sure enough: swap was not loading. Something to do with the GUID of the partition changing and fstab not changing to match it. That’s been fixed and swap is loading now.

After all that, I found out that mysqld was not initializing properly on boot. I have no idea why, because the fu–ing syslog says it’s starting and there are no errors anywhere, but mysql status says its not running. Created a startup script and popped it where it’s supposed to go and now it loads. Again, still nothing in the log to show my new script is running. This page was a great deal of help in creating the startup script.

Lets see what else this stupid server has in store for me.

Inanis.net is now running WordPress 2.7, in case anyone wanted to know. I am sorry I haven’t gotten to any of the comments or email lately – I just don’t have time. Heck, I’m posting this during a 5 minute break at work!

When I get time, I ll get back to your posts, emails, comments and hopefully get the final touches done on Inanis Glass 1.2+ (or 1.3? I don’t know what version number I’m going to use.)

Sorry about the server problems folks. Either someone is playing a game of “Denial Of Service” on me, or the Inanis.net webserver has hardware issues.

The hardware will be replaced shortly.

UPDATE:

#define EPIPE           32 /* Broken pipe */

A process gets EPIPE when it tries to write to a pipe (or socket) when the process at the other end has closed the connection.

Bad network card? Bad network equipment between the server and the Internet? More things to look into.

UPDATE 2: Server hardware replaced. Seems much faster and more stable now, but I think there is a firewall and/or switch issue causing dropped connections to the server. This is somewhat out of my control but I will stay on top of it…

Voyager 2 has to be one of the most amazing pieces of technology ever built. Launched over 30 years ago, the thing is still operational, responsive, and sending back data about the farthest outer reaches of our solar system.

It brings a warm feeling to my heart; technology that was created in a time when engineering was more about getting it right and less about doing it in a monetarily efficient way.

Float on, little Voyager.

Read about it.

I told you about it before, but I am too excited for words. Here’s something better than human speech…

More pictures and a Museum entry as time allows…