Baby

Since it seems that I forgot to mention on my blog, , my wife, is pregnant. That's why we were looking at baby stuff. She's at 7 weeks now or there abouts. In 5 more weeks, we get to hear a heartbeat. I'll try to remember to use the baby tag on my posts that involve him/her/them for filtering purposes.

Baby window shopping

Okay, we went baby window shopping today. Took my mom along (who was tickled pink that we were going to look at stuff). Looked at cribs, strollers, car seats, clothing, all sorts of stuff. I certainly hope that I'm able to get this raise that I'm trying to get. I'm sure in the end things'll sort themselves out, but it'd be nice if I could do that just with money (which at this point is the best way to MAKE things sort themselves out). Lots to buy, not alot to do yet. Going to join some LJ communities for pregnancy, although I don't really see one for new fathers / husbands of pregnant women.. Perhaps I should start one. Anyways...

PS. Okay, I just found .

XM Radio

Oooh! I just got XM Radio. Cool. Wow. What did I listen to before this? I always thought those people who said "FM just plays the same songs over and over" were kooks. I've heard more songs that I liked but never stayed on FM than songs that have (for whatever reason) stayed around on FM the 1 hour or so of XM I've played. I'm not going back. So many great songs (like Nadia's Theme, which I remember from my CHILDHOOD, and I haven't heard it in at least a decade). And there's been others. Of course, I do hear some current songs, and they've got a few channels just for hip hop and top 20 and all. But they do have The Decades (I prefer the 70s, 80s, and 90s). Target's got them for only $50 now, and it's only $14 a month or so. It's cheaper than EQ, I think.. And now XM radio subscribers get the online version free. So even at work or home I can still listen to (most of the channels of) XM radio.

Solaris 10 (more)

Okay, FIRST thing you do with Solaris 10: cry. You have left the lush lands of Linux(tm), and entered the hard, cruel Solaris(tm) world. That said, it can be quite nice, but brutally difficult to figure out. This is not like the difference between Spanish and French, this like like the difference between English and Russian. TOTALLY DIFFERENT. Okay, now that that bitter pill's been swallowed, more hints:

a. export PATH=/usr/ucb/bin:/usr/ccs/bin:/opt/csw/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH
b. change root's shell to bash (vi /etc/passwd, there is no chsh in Solaris 10)
c. load packages from either Blastwave.org (which I prefer) or sunfreeware.com (which works)
d. READ THE INSTALL files and scripts from those sites, particularly for GNU software - you usually have to execute some commands (like openssh) or run a script (like gcc)
e. Google is your new BEST FRIEND. Trying to compile Apache? I hear ya. Okay, go to Google and search on a few of those errors you got. Boy, was THAT fun....
f. unless the Solaris(tm) box you're working on is running the world, realize that it's not the end of the world if you can't get the Stupid Thing to compile. You'll figure it out in the end.

The *ONLY* thing keeping me working on Solaris 10 is the zones functionality. Xen can't beat it, and for system security purposes it's great (sounding). But boy is it a different world here...

Windows 2003 x64

Okay, for those people using Windows Server 2003 x64 (64-bit edition), and you use ADODB or ADO 2.6 or something similar, and you get "METADATA tag contains a Type Library specification that does not match any Registry entry." in your classic ASP scripts, the fix is this: don't use the UUID. Use the FILE="c:\program files (x86)\Common Files\System\ADO\msado26.tlb" or similar setup. X64 seems to separate the 32 bit and 64 bit registry areas, and since IIS is 64-bit, it looks for 64-bit dlls, and the older adodb's only register in the 32-bit dll area, so it doesn't find it. Using the file="" bit forces it to load that file, and it then notices that it's 32-bit. Took me awhile to find that one.

Stuff at work

I got my rackmounts!! Okay, they're really Signal's, but still. I got to hook them up, install stuff on them, and now I'm configuring them. Ohhh.. feel the power. (Okay, they're not ALL that powerful, only 2.8 x86-64 Xeons with 1G ram and 40G raid1 drives, and there's 3 of them, 2 to replace old servers, but still.) We (that being Signal) is slowly moving towards a more professional network and server setup. We have a real switch at the core now (24-port gigabit switch, that), most of the computers are 2 GHz or better (only one now is below my specs, and that'll be fixed in the new fiscal year at work starting Friday). We're migrating our Exchange (ugh) server to one of the rackmounts, and then two linux boxes (our production and development web servers, to be precise) to the rackmount. And we're ordering a SATA-raid 1 hot swappable bay for our linux file server so that we can move all of our file serving (and not just the "downloads and installers" folder) onto the linux box. Then we'll just be using windows for the bits of our web app that run in ASP/IIS (devel and production), our MS SQL servers (devel and production) and our exchange box. Our linux mold grows. :) (of course, it would help if I had pre-downloaded the x86-64 RPMs for SuSE 9.3, instead I have to wait a day or so for them to download because I only had the i586/i686 folders.)

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