Tom's Insights - Week of 2/04/02

Week of February 4th, 2002

Most Recent : Thursday, February 7, 2002
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Wednesday February 6, 2002

Holy Moly what a wild ride the past week has been... Friday Suzie left our home. Her mother made a decision that she wanted her to attend a private school in Regina -- the reasoning was she thought she would get a "better" education there. So Suzie packed all her stuff into cardboard boxes, and we drive her to the bus station. Leah and I were a little ticked that Suzie's mom didn't discuss her decision with us, as we could have provided some feedback (primarily cons) on such a move. But the ones who really suffered were the kids -- they'd become pretty attached to Suzie. Anywho... it was a quiet weekend, and we actually enjoyed having one less people in the house. Monday night Suzie phoned. She wanted to know if she could come "back home". I guess there are quite a few Koreans at the boarding school and they all insisted on speaking Korean. Suzie's smart enough to know that she needs to speak English as much as possible. She also missed the kids. She also hated the food there (heh-heh-heh). Suzie arrived back home about an hour ago.

Next. Over the course of the last month or so my notebook develop a thin red line down the left edge of the screen. I planned to send it in and have this fixed, but I really didn't want to part with my beloved Phaedrus for even a day, never mind three or four. So I tolerated the line, and procrastinated. Monday AM I hit the power button to start my day's work, and... and... nothing. Nada. No blinks, no bleeps, nothing. Dead in the water. So I phone Dell customer support at about 13:30 and got the required RMA/shipping number. They gave me a account number for Purolator (a Canadian courier); I didn't have to pay a dime. The courier arrived at 17:30 and transported my baby to the Toronto area for repair. Purolator arrived this morning with my repaired notebook!!! Man. Talk about service. They changed something on the motherboard, and put a new LCD in. All in less than 40 hours. That includes transit time to the other side of the country. I am thoroughly and totally impressed. I understand that prompt and quick service is generally the norm in the US; not so here in Canada.

Other than the above, everything's just ducky ;-)

Samba 2.2.3 was released Monday. There was a small "mapping" bug in it due to a spelling error, so if you're planning to upgrade (recommended), make you download 2.2.3a, which should be available sometime today.

O'Reilly sent me a copy of the recently released The Web Design CD Bookshelf, which includes a dead-tree copy of Web Design in a Nutshell, 2nd Ed.. I've just had a quick glance through the contents, but I can tell already that the CD will make it to my "Recommended" list. It's got everything a web designed/developer needs, all in one place. Plus you can search across all the titles. Very coool...

Gotta run -- Leah's putting together a bacon and pea sauce to serve over fresh pasta and I definitely don't want to be late for supper!

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Thursday February 7, 2002

It's been a long and busy day -- I've been doing the Samba since shortly after six am. As always, perseverance has won over the forces of evil in the world. After a mere 14 or so hours of head-scratching, poking in the dark corners of the Windows registry, recompiling source, and mucking about with a dozen different smb.conf option statements, I have:

Samba 2.2.3a up and running on Phoenix.
It's functioning as a PDC.
I have roaming profiles working.
PLUS, I can make all the above work with an XP client.

Hah. And to think there were doubters in the crowd... Actually, the hacks to allow XP to log into the domain are pretty ugly, but they work. Oh, and don't forget, when I say XP I mean XP Pro. XP Home doesn't have the capability to connect to a PDC.

Have a great evening. I'll do some more testing tomorrow and if nothing blows up in my face, I'll post my smb.conf file.

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