Category: Uncategorized

Many thanks go out to the technical team for getting the GrabPERF Web server back on the Interweb.

All the good (and bad) news about Web performance is back.

Conrad Black, who gave up his Canadian citizenship to sit in the House of Lords, wants it back.
Problem: he faces eight fraud charges in the US [here] . Takeaway quote from the article:

“I have settled into my new life as a freedom fighter,” said Black.

I think that he should be held to exactly the same standard that any foreign immigrant is when applying for Canadian citizenship.
Can’t wait to hear him explain away the criminal charges/conviction part of the questionnaire.
Technorati Tags: Conrad+Black, Lord+Black, Canada, citizenship, Canadian+Citizenship

I was futzing around with my WRT54G(L) last night and did something wrong. I thought I had bricked the damn thing. Much cursing and swearing ensued as I put a BEFSX41 on the front-end of the network (I have three of these; don’t ask why) and wandered upstairs with the lump of black and blue plastic that used to be the hub of my wireless network.
After much fiddling, I thought I had it working, so I plugged it into the network drop I have at my desk…and the damn thing disappeared!
Not physically, but from the network. I couldn’t connect to it via the network ports, and when I did connect wirelessly, I got an IP address from the wired router..????
Then the lightbulb went on. It appears that when you put a WRT54G(L) on a network behind another router (most likely only happens with other Linksys devices) , it immediately becomes an access point ONLY.
This was the way it was supposed to work.
And people wonder why Linksys/Cisco sells so many of these damn things. With automagic behaviour like this, it makes the world of networking so much easier for morons like me.
Technorati Tags: WRT54G, BEFSX41, WRT54GL, Linksys, Home+Networking, Wireless, 802.11g, Firmware

The GrabPERF Web server has been offline for more than 4 days, after it was moved to a new rack.
Kevin Burton complained about the lack of availability today [here].
I have enquired about an ETA for return to service. None has been forthcoming.
At this point, I guess you can consider GrabPERF offline until further notice.

The folks who host the server are slammed and trying to figure out what is happening. Hopefully it will return to action tomorrow.

Last night, the folks at the hosting facility moved the servers to a new rack. The database server is up and data is coming in from the measurement agents, but the Web server is not yet back up.

I hope that this will be resolved later today. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I finally tired of running my own blog server, and since most folks use the feeds, I figure I will abuse Matt Mullenweg’s bandwidth rather than my own.

Welcome back?

As a part of my creative hiatus, I have strated sketching. A lot. Still lifes mainly (people are still way off in the future), and mostly objects found on my desk and around the house.

Nothing worth showing yet, but it is relaxing to dissect an object line by line and then put it back together.

Over the last 12 hours, we have had some pretty remarkable “wildlife” scenes in our yard.

Last night, as I took Wiggles out for her walk, she found a cat…a striped, stinky cat.

Skunk 1, Wiggles 0.

We suspect that it had been hiding under our back porch. We are taking steps to encourage it to find new digs. But Wiggles did enjoy her bath at 10:30 last night.

This morning, two squirrels decided to try on their best wrasslin’ moves in the ancient birch tree outside our house. The were tumbling around like crazed…well, squirrels. They rolled down the tree in a ball once, and then fell separately from about 20 feet, bouncing off tree branches on their way to the ground.

When they broke it up, one of the combatants sat in a tree branch for about 20 minutes, recuperating and literally licking its wounds.

Who says that we live in a world devoid of natural elements?