Tag: Work

I had a great chat with my boss Steve today. We talked long and hard about the plans for the lab and what that would mean for us and the fact that if we grew much we would need more staff. I also expressed an opinion (that I really didn’t even know I had) that I was not enjoying some of the work we did for the Magazine any longer and I preferred doing the government and corporate contract work. This is mainly due to the less geek/more business focus of the new magazine, which I’m struggling to get used to.

He took this all pretty well, and I was glad to get it off my chest. We were then able to get down to the nitty gritty of what needed to be done for this month, and I felt much better from just having talked about it and started.

I feel that as time moves on my role will change to be more of a project manager (which is what the bigger boss, Lee wants anyway) and i’ll be overseeing projects in a way that means I can still get my hands dirty and use my talents in the field, but also use my organizational and lateral thinking talents to develop the business even further.

I got sick of having to explain where the toilets are at work, so I decided I’d write a Toilet HOWTO to put up on the door at work. I thought I’d GPL it in case someone else wants to use it…

Toilet HOWTO
1. Grab the wooden wedge from the lunchroom window ledge beside you
2. Wedge open this door so you can get back in
3. Go up 2 flights of stairs and through the door and to the right
4. Now you have to make a decision
5F. Ladies, follow the right wall past the notice boards and you are there
5M. Men, the toilets are almost immediately on your left

This HOWTO is free software:: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation:: either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This HOWTO is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY:: without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this HOWTO, but it would not fit on the door. If you really want one, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

Things at work are progressing slowly, and I’m having trouble adjusting to the new format of the magazine. I also got sick of Windows XP and went back to ME. All of a sudden my hard disk is not thrashing all the time.posted

I started to look at Windows XP today. It has some cool features, like keeping all your windows for a specific application together on the taskbar, and stacking them if you have too many. The biggest problem I have with it is that I can’t run Groupwise, my email/calendar program. Of course, maybe it is time I broke with Groupwise and started using something else. to be honest, that has been the one thing that has most kept me from going to Linux full time. I suppose it would be ironic if Windows XP was the thing that pushed me over the edge to Linux. 🙂

The Web Server report is done!! Now I can get on with all the other things I’ve got to do..

I’ve been rather busy running WebBench tests on all the servers. I had to end up running the CGI benchmarks as well, because the static tests were pushing the limits of the switch. I unboxed one of the vendors machines and was rather happy to find they had installed Red Hat Linux. I’m going to take one of the machines that has 2000 on it and reinstall with Red Hat, so I can compare both on the same hardware. I’m most of the way through installing all the Win32 software on my machine. When I finish, I’ll Ghost it onto my new 20GB disk and the install Linux on the other half.

Oh My God, I’m soooo embarrassed.. I just sent a letter sized print job to the printer, and wondered why it never came out! Now I know this is a bad day. Having said that, the WebBench tests are running much better now that we chucked out some of the older machines we were using as clients and replaces them with a few newer machines we had lying around. My desktop is running again, there were a few problems earlier, you have to run some of the critical updates to Windows ME before you can install the Netware client. Now it all works fine.

Maybe I should just not be near anything electronic at all. WebBench is still not working, but the most painful thing of all is that the hard disk on my main computer at work failed totally during the night. The machine was just sitting there with Invalid boot disk” on the screen and I knew something was up!! I turned the machine off and back on again, and the hard disk gave a nice loud CLICK and that was about it. I did manage to get it to try and start once, but it failed again after a minute or so. Oh well, another hard disk and a re-install is proceeding

I hate Ziff Davis Media’s Web Bench! I’ve spent 2 1/2 days trying to benchmark just one server, but the clients keep falling over. If I ever get it to work, I’ve got 5 more servers to do after that. On the up side, I’ve had 30 odd minutes between starting each test and when it crashes, so it means I can do things like working out how to create this blog and moving all my web pages to the www.geekzone.com.au server . I also worked out how to do a redirect in Apache, so if you go to the old page, you will get the new page.