freemode.net

We love you Dell    [ Rants ]

Joel on Software has an interesting article on Dell's supply-chain philosophy.   Having had my fair share of issues with Dell's enterprise support, it's enlightening to see someone else's comments on the company.

GMU Invite    [ Debate ]

Went to the GMU High School Invitational tournment on Saturday - Jessica took the kids on Friday since I was at work - and had fun seeing folks from the WACFL/Northern VA L-D debate world.   Our kids did fairly well, one went 3-3 and the other went 4-2, pretty good for their first time at an invitational.

Standard Solaris .profile    [ Software ]

What's a good standard Solaris root .profile?   If you administer or build a lot of machines, this is something handy to keep around.   Here's an example - I use this as a starting point for my boxes.

Serial console on Linux    [ Software ]

Sometimes it'd be nice if computer UI's were good enough so that you could speak words of command: "Delete thy VGA display and write upon its buffer no more in this system!".   Google helps a lot with this, but there's usually still some amount of grunt work involved.

Say you wanted to disable the VGA output of a Linux box and redirect all the output to a serial port.   Not just run the VGA + serial simultaneously, but make as little output as possible come up on the VGA display.   This is a wee bit more difficult than you might think at first.

New job and back to school    [ Rants ]

It's the new year, and time for change.   I had been looking around for a different job to get away from my unix-admin-in-a-microsoft-bodyshop position, and managed to come across a neat gig doing VPN and security engineering with another company.   Woo-hoo!   So I'm saying goodbye to the folks at $OLD_GOVT_CONTRACTOR and saying hello to new folks at $NEW_GOVT_CONTRACTOR.   I'll miss the people there, but not the position or all of the particular attributes of that environment.

So I have five business days left at the current job now, and I'm feeling like a short-timer.   Everyone's been really nice at $OLD_GOVT_CONTRACTOR, and I'd like to keep in touch with them - it's a small world, and it's interesting to see what folks end up doing six months or a year down the road.

And I've decided to bite the bullet and finish up the classes I need for a degree.   I'll only need four classes or so to get my associate's degree in CS at NOVA community college.   Then maybe I can finish up my bachelor's degree at Mason, or maybe not.   At least getting the associate's degree would give me something, which would be far preferable to the nothing I have right now in the college diploma department.

A slow burning death    [ Rants ]

Garggh, my HP CDRW/DVDROM drive is dying. I bought it less than a year ago, and it's always been a little flaky - burning coasters every now and then, locking up intermittently - but nothing too critical. Now Win2K is spewing device errors on the CDROM0 device and the machine's rebooting itself every 2 to 4 hours.

Should've just bought a Plextor to begin with. Ah well, I can try to RMA or trash the HP 9900 drive and use my once-and-future-video-card money from Christmas to get a Plextor PX-320A instead.

Holiday pictures    [ Site Info ]

Posted our new holiday pictures at http://www.freemode.net/gallery/xmas_2002 - finally got around to uploading the shots from the digital camera to the website.