My bad. Thanks for reading.

OH! And one more thing. Bobby and Craig just added this to their blog. I think this is a fantastic idea. Once the idea matures a little, I think this will be a necessary addition to blogs.

The cheapest and best solution I found was to go with a Linux firewall/router solution–IPCOP.  Now, conceptually, this is a great idea.  IPCOP has up to 4 interfaces you can set up: RED-External, GREEN-Internal, ORANGE-DMZ, and BLUE-Wireless.  The Blue and Green networks are completely independent by default.  This sounded like the perfect solution for us.

But, I have a glitch.

I installed the IPCOP Monday, and was very happy with how things were going.  Unfortunately, I didn’t do enough testing.  The staff was complaining all week about the internet being very slow.  Now our internet isn’t very fast anyway.  We are only getting about 800Kbs down and 200Kbs up.  Nonetheless, after doing a speed test on the line with the IPCOP in place, we were only getting 156Kbs down!  The upload speed was actually consistent with what I would expect to get (200Kbs).  I was about to call the ISP when just for the sake of experimentation, I put the old router back in place.  Our down speed went back up to 800Kbs. 

I have no idea what is going on.  I want to believe the hardware IPCOP is running on is ok, but seriously, how could a default install of IPCOP create that much of a bottleneck?  I’ll let you know when I figure out what I’m doing wrong.

I was very under-whelmed with Vista. As a geek, I like a lot of the stuff it offers. But as a professional, I won’t be able to provide all the eye candy to my users. Although I do like some of the recovery, imaging, and administrative access they are providing with Vista.

Office 2007 on the other hand is AWESOME! I’m a huge fan.

I’m still getting used to the ribbon, but I’m getting there. I have always been a spreadsheet junkie and the new Excel just feeds that addiction.

I’ve done very little as far as development on a Windows machine, but I see a lot of potential with the new Office. The coolest thing is that the data in an Office document is now structured! This is awesome news for a programmer. Up until now, it has been a pain in my rear to dynamically create anything in Office.

Let me share with you what made my jaw drop. Take any Office 2007 document (.docx) and change the .docx to .zip. Then open the zip. Structure, baby!

And the geeks rejoice.

Setting up this thing has been a nightmare. I never did get it to work right with Fedora. Today, I switched to Ubuntu. The Zenoss install on Ubuntu was effortless. However, the Apache, PHP5, MySQL, and phpMyAdmin setup left something to be desired. But after I got all those playing nice the Zenoss install itself was simple.

The Dashboard looks cool. I like the layout and it’s all web based so we can check the logs from anywhere without the need for an extra terminal.

Now we need to log something. The Zenoss guys suggest a couple different ways of getting the Windows syslogs to the Zenoss server. We’re playing with them to see which way gives us the best results. One thing I’m not thrilled with is that we have to do a lot of categorizing of the events ourselves. Training this thing will take some time. I would have thought the server would have been a little smarter than that. I might be wrong though, we haven’t tested it extensively yet.

Since we’re all about discussion, what are you (if anything) doing to keep track of your syslogs? Is anyone going as far as tracking workstations as well as servers? Are there some other alternatives you would suggest?

For those of you who haven’t made the connection yet, my hometown of Madison is somewhat famous. Did any of you see Jim Caviezel and Jake Lloyd in the movie Madison? Yep, same town. And a very neat town it is.

The movie focused on Hydroplane racing, a sport that has been a staple of this community for many years. Every forth of July weekend, thousands flock to the Indiana and Kentucky banks of the Ohio river to watch the amazing boats glide across the water.

If you’ve been watching the news, this years Regatta captured national attention when a car went crashing through the main gate, speeding through a large crowd of people, crumpling a golf cart, and ultimately stopped after barreling into the water.

This story haunts me, but not for obvious reasons. Most instantly think of those who weren’t able to get out of the way in time. My heart and prayers do go out to them as well as to their respective families. They were planning on attending a party not a hospital. This is genuinely tragic for us as a community and catastrophic for those who were injured.

For some reason, I think of the driver of the car the most. I don’t know the kid. I’m not aware of his past. I have no idea if he’s a model citizen or a shady character. At this time, it’s still unclear what other factors may have contributed to the accident. With so much uncertainty, it’s hard to speculate what might happen to him. If he is charged with a crime, what are the odds he won’t spend a significant amount of time in jail?

Now, a part of me wants to say there is a consequence to his actions and he deserves what happens to him. Then again, I don’t know his past. What if he is a model student who just happened to really screw up this one time? What if he’s not? I have a sincere sympathy towards him. What impact will this have on his life? It’s true the crises’ in our lives are our defining moments; hopefully where we learn the most. I wonder where his opportunity for redemption will be. I wonder how this will define or shape his life.

Even in the mundane of my life, I think about everything that happens to me this way; how will this define me?

It would be so easy to let anger take over.  Justice seems certain. Perhaps he doesn’t deserve my pity; perhaps he does. I guess time will tell.

And all of this assumes it was anything other than a genuine accident and no other factors were involved.

If any of you are interested, I’ll try and keep you up to date on the story. I’m sure it won’t make national news for long and we will go back to being a small, quiet river town soon enough.

The Internet uses Meta tags to easily make information searchable. Well, I want to do this with files. I would like to assign categories or keywords to files to make them more searchable. I’m not necessarily looking to store the files in a database; a pointer to the file would work fine (storage is an option though). I’m looking to build a searchable library; my own kind of knowledge base.

I have no idea why I’m being vague. I had the idea of using something like this to help Pastor Bob keep track of all his study and sermons. He manuscripts all of them and they stay stored in a Word file (typically never to be used again after the Sunday he teaches it). I figured I could save him a lot of re-research if I gave him some way of categorizing and searching what he’s done before. Also, we collect all kinds of stories, devotionals, rants, etc. from the web. It would be great to database them and aid in his teaching prep.

The programmer in me knows I’m looking for something that deals with Metadata. That’s a fun little concept that I haven’t had to use since college. Man, I miss programming. I was always one of ‘those’ people that really enjoyed it. I was the only one.

There is no limit to how much metadata you might want to assign to a document. I guess that’s the real challenge of projects like this.

I kind of hinted to Bob I was thinking about this and his eyes widened and his face lit up. Now, I’m committed. I should have kept my mouth shut.
I’ve look up various content management systems, but all the ones I found were designed for web use. I’ve casually looked at some document management systems (which seem like a really logical name for it), however the few I found look way more complicated and advanced beyond what I really need or want. Plus, ‘document management system’ typically describes a stored, scanned version of a document. And I don’t want or need that much complexity.

It wouldn’t at all be hard to write a basic database to do this, but I know someone, somewhere has created a really great something that already does this. Again, I’m not fooled; I know this isn’t a revolutionary idea.

So please help the ignorant. What am I looking for?

Mostly things have been very busy with my ‘real’ job. It looks like I will have to keep up this frantic pace until about the end of May, then things will slow down (I think).

Also, my work was completely passive and caught off guard by the time zone thing. So even though I tried to warn them, I have to suck it up and try to fix it. My boss did come up with a fairly clever way to NOT have to manually change all the meetings. However, we are 3 days into this and it’s just getting deeper and deeper because people have basically had to stop using their calendars or are still using them incorrectly.

Another huge factor that has postponed posting is that I’m close to buying my first house! I can’t wait to have a home of my own. I’ve been looking for a long time. I’m very picky, I know what I want, and I’m not settling for anything. I think I might have finally found the right home for me. It’s not much….because I don’t wanna be paying for the thing for the rest of my life… but it will be mine! Lots of prayer going up about this decision.

So that’s the scoop. Thanks to all of you who read, help, and contribute in anyway to this awesome blogosphere of tech goodness. I apprecaite your patience (and prayers)!

Before I can begin, I need a router. Because the network has only been used for internet so far, we haven’t used one. One is in place, and is routing, but it’s the ISP’s and because the connection is wireless we can’t have access to it. I guess they think we would steal wep keys and distribute them or something. Nonetheless, the time has come for us to control our own network.

I need suggestions. We are saving up for a huge technology bump later this year, and I don’t want to distract them from that goal. Nor will they stray from that goal. I had to work hard to get them working on that goal! Anyway, it’s time. We need this. Even though this is an important piece of hardware, we don’t want to spend a lot of money at this point. Our network is still very small.
My question for the geeks out there, what is a good router for our starting point?