But does he?

I was driving back from my parents house and I saw an older Ford Bronco - the kind with the back window that used to roll down. It was a bunch of teenagers with every window that could open, opened.

Well thinking back, I thought about my teenage years of driving around in cars without the luxury of air conditioning. I thought how hot and miserable I used to be in the summers in rural Ohio, with the vinyl seats sticking us and sweating rivers. The only air was at 60 MPH and above.

Then I thought, actually, those were the best of times, but I didn't know it. No mortgages, electric bills, watching your weight, knowing when to say when, and all those other adults things we spend so much of our day worrying about. Sigh..

Then at an intersection the truck turned and from my day dream I awoke to read a bumper sticker on the car in front of it:

"Have faith in God"

My first thought was, "But does God have faith in me?"

And my second thought was, "it doesn't matter, as long as I have faith in me..."

MAC attack - not what you think

This one got me the other day and no, not a Mac Apple Computer either! A MAC ethernet address.

I was setting up a new VMware Server 2 appliance for a development environment in use with the Symfony framework. The base OS was Ubuntu 9.04 Server.

Well I like to back a backup of the raw OS before I put anything out there since it took a bit to make the VMware appliance. It is simple - or so I thought, you just make a disk copy of your appliance folder.

Well, I did that, as well as manually edited the .vms file. Turns out, vmware assigned a mac address in the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-presistent-net.rules file to eth0 that had been already assigned to the appliance hosting machine.

Example:

# PCI device 0x1022:0x2000 (pcnet32)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:0c:29:bd:5f:db",
NAME="eth0"

# PCI device 0x1022:0x2000 (pcnet32)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:0c:29:bd:5f:e5",
NAME="eth1"

Basically to fix this, delete the etho entry and change the eth1 to eth0 and restart the appliance.

Wow, one of those obscure moments solved via google.

Be well,

Jeffrey

The shiny red laptop

It was awhile back I actually replaced the DVD in my new Dell laptop. I love the laptop. Specs are pretty darn good for a $600 laptop, the screen is large enough for my 1/2 blind eyes to see. Here are the specs for those interested:

Dell Studio 1737 Refurbished Notebook PC - Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz, 4GB DDR2, 320GB SATA HDD, DVDRW, 17" WXGA, Vista Home Premium, Red

However, it is a refurb, and sometimes things go awry. Well, my DVD drive stopped reading disks. Luckily I had tech support for a year and they sent me a replacement drive - catch was I had to install it.

I downloaded the instructions for repairing my laptop. It was, in a word, ridiculous. I had to remove everything to get to the DVD, including the screen. Then I lost a screw. I looked and looked and looked. I turns out it fell into a hinge of the screen back and I had to disassemble the screen. Geessh!

All and all, I got it back together, with all parts, screws, and wires going back into the machine. And can you believe it! It all worked, including the new DVD!

Some pictures of the event:














I still would recommend the machine even if fixing it is going to be a lesson in the efficiency of space. However, my coaches would be to get the extended tech support if you don't feel comfortable cracking the case on it (I was a little leery since it was a laptop). Also, this thing is a tank - 14 lbs. So if you want to be mobile, but less computing power, get a netbook. I do use mine for active software development, and I am considering upgrading to 8GB of ram.

As a side note, I will be returning to my minimum of once a week posting and will be covering my newer projects as well as my current freelance job hunting.

That said, be well,

Jeffrey