I'm going to try to do a weekly round-up. Try to establish consistency and all that... Retro Computing As part of trying to do my small part in preserving Atari ST history, I figured that it doesn't take too much time or energy to find batches of floppies out there in the world and see if there is interesting source code or software that needs to be preserved. I recently won an online auction for very cheap that had 200+ disks. The shipment arrived this week. It looks like the majority of the disks are ST-related, with some being Windows/PC-related. I hooked up my external floppy drive/Greaseweazle enclosure and imaged the disks to my hard drive. I still need to go through each disk to see their actual contents, and from there, will determine if there's anything that needs to be archived online. The Adventures of Johnny Thrust I've begun...
Category: IT
Slinking Along
A few days of extended work hours at the day job has messed up my schedule a bit. I wasn’t able to get as many things accomplished as I had hoped, but I did make some progress. We’re back on track now, though. I’m writing a small import utility in PowerShell with a XAML UI. The software ingests Excel files and adds entries to a database. I’m running into an odd roadblock today where the specific Commandlet that performs the import is not able to properly latch into the Excel file and read its data. I need to get this tool ready before tomorrow, so this issue is really slowing me down. I'll be in the day job's office all day tomorrow, so my weekend won't see many more personal projects completed. The wooden boxes for my geeky collection of items have arrived and they’re great. They’re raw wood (sanded,...
Weekend Loose Ends, Scheduling
I added Marriage Story to the library today and fixed the cover art to Jojo Rabbit. We completed assembling and populating the new fish tank and I was able to put the surrogate 10 gallon tank and all the supporting tools back into the garage to dry out over the next few days until I can properly put them back on the shelves. I went through the hard drives of my old PC and cleared off all of the data I might need and put it on my new machine. I have a lot of projects I want to complete and have decided to start properly planning them out and putting them on a schedule. This basically means that I'm going to take all of my non-day-job time and divide it up and organize it so I can start to get things completed. Once I figure this out, I may...
New PC
I've finally had time to build out my new PC, and I'm writing this from it. It's really nice to have such a fast machine. I think I'll end up being a lot more productive in the long run. Most of my day-to-day software has been installed. Dev tools, 3D printing software, and games are still pending (well, I did install Minecraft and tested it - wow!). A nice side-effect of building the new computer is that I've been able to clean up the office a lot. All of the boxes are now gone and my desk is no longer an assembly area anymore. We're on day 3 of the Monte Carlo seeds in the aquarium. Still no visible germination. I ordered some Dewalt folding workbenches to augment the workspace in the garage. I think these will help m a lot with some upcoming projects. Speaking of garage, I'm going...
Balancing Projects
The replacement motherboard for my new computer arrived yesterday. I haven't unboxed it yet as I need to perform some initial setup tasks on the aquarium. I plan to begin growing a bed of Micranthemum Tweediei (more commonly known as Monte Carlo) in the tank, which requires no standing water and a greenhouse effect to be in place for about a week. Once that takes root (pardon the pun), then I'll add water and relocate the fish from the 10 gallon tank. While the Monte Carlo grows, I can focus on building the new computer.
A Long-Overdue Update
Hey, the site's working again and I'm back... We moved into the new house on October 29, 2016, which was five months ago. Of course, just prior to the move I shut down and packed up the entire network from our old apartment and brought it to the house. For the first 3.5 months here, the servers were powered up, but there was no internet connectivity to them. This was due to the fact that the ISP Ethernet hand-off was in the laundry room, whereas the server rack is located in my office. And there was no Ethernet between. Workstations, mobile devices, Apple TVs, etc. were all using the default Wi-Fi from the ISP. Then, finally, about 1.5 months ago, I finally got up into the attic and ran some cable to cross-connect my pfSense firewall to the ISP. Viola! So, you may ask, if the servers have been online for the...
Network Re-engineering Complete
Soon after I got this site back up, I decided to re-engineer the internals of the network at the studio. This, ultimately, took this site down again (along with others). The biggest change was the refactoring of the hypervisors' datastores. I have two hypervisors running VMware ESXi. Each hypervisor had a series of internal hard drives that stored all of the data (datastores). When I first implemented the hypervisors, I thought I was clever by having these disks internal, as I was using the OSes of the VMs to mirror across multiple physical disks for redundancy, as well as JBOD the disks for greater storage. The problem was that this wasn't conducive to having the hypervisors redundant, only the hard disks. The only way to fix that was to get a NAS or SAN that supported iSCSI. So, l got an enclosure, populated it, and began the process of building...
Quick Cap Recap
Sunday we went and saw Captain America: Civil War at the AMC West Shore. I'm not going to spoil it for anyone and go into details, but I loved it and would like to see it again in the theater. It was a long movie, but flew by. Yesterday was a big day - I resigned from my day job. I have something lined up. More to come. I'm now going to spend time organizing all of the comics we bought on Saturday.
All Sorts of News
A lot has happened since my last post. I'll start with the more mundane... I had trouble rendering SCS047 and guessed it was a Windows issue with my main workstation. So, about a week ago, I reformatted the box and re-installed everything. Since this is pretty painful to do, I thought it might be nice to make my C: drive an SSD, so I bought one and installed it. I made my old 1TB HD a secondary drive and installed less-used software to it. I also had a bunch of unused RAM laying around, so I upgraded the machine from 8GB to 16GB. I'll most likely up it to 32GB in the coming months. I got everything shiny and new, fired up LightWave and ... the application crashed again. So, I decided it was time to upgrade from LightWave 10 to LightWave 2015.3, which ended up curing the problems. SO,...
Firewall Update
A couple of days ago I implemented a new firewall that seems to be working out quite well. By "new", I mean "new to me". It's actually an old WatchGuard Firebox X700 that I cracked open and upgraded some of the hardware, then wiped the factory OS and replaced it with pfSense. So far, I couldn't be happier. It allows me some expandability and gives me some great tools I've always wanted on the network. As for this site, I'm going to be investigating new blogging plug-ins, as the default Journal system just isn't cutting it for me. I mean, it works, but it's lacking a lot of features.
