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Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
The sun finally came out today after a week of overcast skies and rain. One minor problem with that. It brought attention to the fact I haven't been able to get out in the yard all week and my lawn was a veritable forest. Oops. I think I over-fertilized again. So Landon and I set about cutting the grass, weeding the beds, and generally trying to bring some order to our yard. Big task. We also managed to get the laundry done, the floors mopped, the house vacuumed and dusted, etc. etc. etc. Generally Saturday "swab the decks" stuff.
I spent the balance of my day getting my notebook back in order with a clean install of XP. What a royal pain. The installer didn't like my partition arrangement -- too many partitions (??) to add a new one at the front of the drive where the old one resided. What it was really trying to say is it wanted to own my whole hard drive; be the first and only kid on the block. So I drug out PartitionMagic and dispelled that notion in a hurry by created a new partition with PM, formatting it, and telling XP to install there. Then I tried to add some "critical" fixes. Two broke more than they fixed, so I had to banish them. After about four hours of effort, I'm back to where I was Thursday. Almost. I still have to re-install GRUB as my bootloader so I can dual boot back into Gentoo. Tomorrow.
I'm still mucking about with Unison. It's got some advantages over rsync, namely that it runs under Windows with relatively little muss or fuss. I still haven't found a way to make a "seamless" SSH connection using Unison however. I suspect one could set up a tunnel using CYGWYN and go from there, but that's a relatively complex process for the average user, and I need simplicity above all. We'll see. I'm still experimenting. For now I've got Unison running in socket mode on Kronk and I'm avoiding the SSH issue for the moment. One nice thing about Unison is that it allows you to synchronize bi-directionally. That is, I can either choose to match the remote directory(ies) with the local(s) or visa-versa. As noted, my biggest problem is to force myself to "think out of the box". I've been using rsync for over a year now, on a daily basis, and Unison is a different animal.
I've still got a few remaining chores to attend to, and I'd really like to get some of the piles in my office sorted before I hit the pillow, so I'd best get after it. Hope you're having a fine weekend. Cheers.
... and the power went off. Poof. Nada electrons flowing. And then it came on. And then it went off. Again. So I gave up and went to bed. I see this morning that my UPS kept Hydras alive throughout the outage. Cool.
Speaking of again, I'm pissed with Microsoft today. Again. Three weeks ago, my XP installation on my notebook started acting possessed. So I rebuilt it. But this time around, I decided I'd do things right. I had been using an illegal copy (yes, I know -- bad Tom) so I made the executive decision to install the legal copy I recieved with Kronk, as Kronk is currently running a dual-boot configuration: Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat. So I installed it, but put off registering it as I knew I'd have to phone MS and get a new key. Well, yesterday my procrastination caught up with me. The copy was a day away from expiring, so I dialed up MS, walked through all the voice prompts, and finally got a real-live operator on the end of the phone. Who proceeded to inform me that they could not issue me a new key because my copy was OEM. So I countered. I'm allowed to have a second copy of XP on my laptop, am I not? No, I'm not. OEM copies are licensed to the original box. Period. You can't run a second copy on your notebook; you can't transfer it to another system. End of story. I suppose all this valuable information is buried somewhere in Microsoft's complex, lawyer-speak EULA. I've never seen such a provision, nor have I looked. I'm simply pissed. Serves me right for trying to do things right. I guess I'll be installing my illegal copy again this weekend.
No wonder companies are shunning Microsoft in ever increasing numbers.
It was a dark and stormy night, and...
Serves me right for feeling so spunky on a Monday morning. My world went for a crap shortly after I posted my last update. Two days later, and I can't claim to have the train back on the tracks yet. Nothing serious or life-threatening. Just a whole bunch of Murphisms -- little problems I thought were solved and/or addressed that landed back in my lap for one reason or another. Put another way, lots and lots of energy-draining time sinks. Oh well. Such is life some weeks.
Thanks to David Magda who reminded me about Unison. Roland and others have pointed me to the Unison site in the past; I read some of the documentation and dismissed the product for no other reason than rsync filled my needs.
rsync continues to fill my needs when I'm working on *NIX boxes, and I'm comfortable/familiar with the program options list. But like it or not, I have to dip my toes in the waters of Windows now and then, and there's been several times I've wished for an 'rsync for Windows' (there actually is a port of rsync for NT, but it's dated in verison and functionality, and not stable enough for, IMHO, daily use). Unison to the rescue. Unison runs on both Windows and UNIX and provides file synchronization (based on an algorithm similar to rsync's) across platforms. So you can apparently file sync a Windows box against a UNIX or Solaris box. I say apparently, as I haven't tried the Windows version out yet -- I'm still experimenting with Unison on Linux.
The weather's been kinda unsettled all week. It rained hard all day Monday; Tuesday was a typical "sunny with cloudy periods" day. Today started grey and dark, brightened for a spell, and has now darkened again. Who knows... It's also been a bit cool. I dropped in for a visit with my friend Bill late yesterday. We were sitting on his front porch watching the world go by when, in his typical dry wit, he commented: "You could hang meat out here." I'm still chuckling on that one.
Ahhhh... A morning without a new crop of danellions in our back yard is a fine morning indeed ;-) I feel unusually vibrant this morning -- probably because I spent the weekend with family, puttering in the yard, and generally speaking, avoiding computers like the plague. In retrospect, a wise choice on my part as I will no doubt get my fill of sand and silicon over the course of the next two weeks. Imagine that. Anticipating a full plate in the coming weeks, and taking the necessary steps in advance to counter the inherent associated stress.
Damn. I had several noteables to spout about this morning, but my Inbox just kicked into high gear and the phone's begun to ring off the hook. It's fast shaping up to be "one of those Mondays". I do my best to drop back later as time permits.
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