Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.
- David T. Wolf [1]

Especially funny since I have a co-worker that thinks very much along those lines. To top it all off, his name is eerily similar.

November saw another birthday. Nothing special, or as my grandmother would say “It’s just another day”. Sometime around that point I bought an Xbox 360. I never thought I would give Microsoft money like that, but there were a couple of games that I wanted to be able to play that were only going to be released on the 360 or the PS3. Sony wanted too much for the PS3, so hello Microsoft.

I picked up a few games initially (Orange Box, Halo 3, Gears of War, and Oblivion) and eventually got a few others (Army of Two, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, and C&C 3). Many enjoyable hours playing those game were had by all. Portal (part of The Orange Box) in particular was waaaay too much fun.

It wasn’t all peachy at first with the 360. The first one, yes I said first, died within a couple of days. It quit reading DVDs, both games and movies, which basically makes it useless. I opened a support case with Microsoft until I realized the amount of downtime I was going to have to deal with (more than a month). That’s when I decided to just exchange/return the stupid thing.

Walmart, where I bought the first one, did not have any others when I tried to exchange it, so I just returned it. I took the cash and went down the road to Best Buy and paid 2 cents more. I have not had any trouble with the new one since that point.

More to follow before too long.

Once that’s done, the shortcut editor will actually recognize the key. This is as much for my future reference as anyone, but if you find it useful, it was worth it.

I opted to not have Home Depot deliver/install the washer and dryer mainly because of the amount of money they wanted for the service. I bought a nice, for me at least, front loading washer and dryer that put a big dent (crater?) in my checking account, but it’s the type of item I expect to have around for some time. Home Depot wanted over $100 to deliver and install them. I have a hard time paying anyone that much for so little. Heck, I’m of the engineering mindset, right? The hitch, the washer must weight 250 - 300 pounds *dry*. Wow! Jimbo and I nearly died getting that thing up the stairs and into place.

In more upbeat news (and less painful), the move is essentially over. I turned in the keys to my old apartment Wednesday morning and signed all the paperwork for the new one. No more trips with heavy boxes or furniture to be made. And all just in time as the Q4/Mullet reunion is this weekend. There are already people arriving. Slackers!

News and photos from that event [possibly] as it happens. For sure after.

So, I’ve been trying to get moved into a larger apartment since early August. I asked my current complex if they had anything available and when they said they didn’t, I began looking around. It didn’t take long to decide I’d rather wait out a larger apartment becoming available at North Huntington Hills (NHN from now on, my current place). The prices almost everywhere else were significantly higher. I’m not talking just a $50 or $100 per month difference in many cases.

NHN said they should have something open around the end of August or the middle of September at the latest. I bugged them constantly checking on availability. I’m sure they got tired of hearing from me every other day. I think there was someone on the waiting list ahead of me that got bumped so they could be rid of me. Ha! They wish.

I finally got word from the complex that something would be available at the end of September. The current occupant was doing the same thing I was planning to; moving to another apartment in the same complex. Apparently she was taking her time (at least that the impression I got from the manager) and the complex was having a hard time estimating when she’d be clear.

I finally got a move in / sign paperwork date: Oct 5th, 2007. Yeah, not even in September anymore. I stayed in touch with the complex office, which I’m sure they just loved, making sure that the 5th was still looking good. By the 4th it became obvious it wasn’t going to happen. The tenet still had stuff in the apartment, was out of town, and could not move the remainder until the weekend. The office manager was extremely apologetic (and has been through most of the process), but told me that she’d issued an ultimatum: the tenet had until Monday morning (the 8th) to return the key. Anything left in the apartment after that point was going in the dumpster.

The manager gave me the opportunity to go take a look at it on Tuesday. If I’d been willing to deal with the current state of the apartment, I could have taken possession then, but I wasn’t. I was then told that I’d be clear to move in on Friday afternoon. That would give them time to finish painting, fix the usual things, and get the carpet cleaned.

Friday finally arrived and I got the key (but didn’t sign any paperwork yet)! Then I left for Houston for the weekend. Obviously nothing got moved over the weekend. Since then, Jimbo and I have gotten most of the stuff moved over. All the heavy items got moved on Monday with a fairly steady stream of other stuff throughout the week.

Wednesday I was at the apartment in the morning when the power when out. I hadn’t moved the utilities over into my name yet since I hadn’t signed a lease or any other paperwork at that point, so it was pretty obvious what had happened, but that didn’t make me any less unhappy. The apartment office told me that they only have power applied while the cleaning crew was in the apartment, and I understand … I do, but a little warning would have been very nice. I was specifically holding off partially due to decisions they’d made.

I got the number to AEP (the local power company) and began the process of transferring my service from the old apartment to the new one. It went pretty painless until I was told that the connection at the new apartment could not happen until Thursday at the earliest. At least it wasn’t 100 degrees outside. Candles sufficed as lighting for one night. It’s turned out though that they never flipped the main breaker on after hooking up my service.

Since I was going to be loosing power at the old apartment, I figured there was no point in leaving the phone/DSL there since it’d be useless soon. After calling AT&T I got a reasonable transfer schedule. They’d move the dial tone by Wednesday and then have the DSL hooked up by Friday. That’s a long time to wait, but I do sit in front of a computer all day for work.

Friday I called (after checking to see if I had DSL in the morning) to see what the ETA was on the DSL transfer. Let’s just say that what should have been a 5 minute phone call turned into a 30 minute ordeal that had me talking to a standard rep, her manager, and then the billing department. Apparently the DSL tech showed up before the dial tone had been moved, and therefore couldn’t do his part. The DSL work order got sent back to the phone side . Once they finished, they created a *new* work order for the DSL stuff which caused a new estimated date to be selected. They pushed the install date all the way back to Tuesday (the 23rd). I gave them hell for that, but there wasn’t anything they were willing/able to do to speed it up. The chat with the billing department was to ensure that I wasn’t being charged for the time when I didn’t have service.

I called again this afternoon to check on the status and got a very pissy phone rep that really didn’t want to talk. How much do you want to bet that I have some red flag on my file now after last week’s events? I wanted to verify that everything should be working tomorrow, which she confirmed, but I also wanted a time to expect it. *That* she didn’t want to talk about. It took four times of rephrasing the question before she realized I wanted a worst case time, a.k.a. when do the techs stop for the night. That magic time is apparently 8:00 PM.

So now we wait … some more.

I’ll post some more about the new apartment and pictures before too long.

Here’s a quick run down of items I’ll talk about before too long:

• New application process for next year (all online)
• Major updates to the Diagnostic O written (which was online this year)
  • Tests for all experience levels
  • Part of the application process
• Results and lessons learned from TJOC 2007
• And don’t forget the weather stories …

It’s been a long rampup to camp for me already, and camp doesn’t officially start until tomorrow (well, later today). We did the Diagnostic O written test online this year, and since I’m the one that suggested it and have the skills, I was responsible for implementing it. Not that I’m complaining … it really is a cool project, it’s just my timeline really sucked. I waited too long to really get started, and that left me almost too little time to get all the core features completed before we needed to roll it out to everyone.

But, all of that to say, I’m not the only one up late. There are still last minute test takers going right now. An email was sent out earlier today giving an official cutoff of 8AM CST on Saturday and there have been quite a few new users and test attempts since. If only more of the students had completed it … we just had barely broken 50% this morning.

I guess there are still a couple of hours ……….

Here’s where the story gets ugly … I didn’t have any sound when the machine came back up. No sound! How am I supposed to watch a DVD without sound? It seems that the few applications I have that still have OSS support will function if I manually set them to OSS and not ALSA, but those apps are in the minority by far these days.

So, it’s been a couple of days and there haven’t been any ‘whoops’ updates to ALSA, nor does there appear to be a flurry of activity on the Web. That leaves me in a bit of a quandry. I don’t know enough about yum, even after digesting the man pages, to try and roll back to an old version to see if that fixes it, nor do I really know enough about ALSA (once upon a time I did, but a lot has changed since then).

What really confuses me is that Fedora has a few utilities for managing sound and sound cards. Some of the ‘can you hear this sound’ checks pass just fine (when selecting a card for instance), but the user level properties that let me select ‘Auto Detect’, or a specific device all fail (unless I select OSS, but even then my apps can’t play sound).

Anyone out there know enough to help? I’m on an IBM Thinkpad R50e that uses the snd_intel8×0 module normally (and it’s currently loaded). Help?!?

Since the last ‘personal’ entry I have is really back in the summer there’s a lot to fill in. First off, I got a new kitten on October 11th, 2006. I’ve named him Spot after the various spots of white fur that are in his coat. He’s a very good natured cat and gets along very well with Mocha.

I started letting him out on my balcony after a week or two, and not but about 3 weeks after I got him, he got stung by a wasp right above his left eye. He developed a little foam at the mouth and his eye was watering like mad, but after less than a minute the foam was gone and once I wiped out his eye he seemed fine. I took him to the vet anyway since he was so young and I was a little worried about long-term effects. The vet gave him a shot for the sting and a couple of his baby shots all at the same time. He’s doing great these days with absolutely no apparent ill effects.

I’ve had a birthday and we all celebrated Christmas, Thanksgiving, and a New Year since the last entry here. It was good all around. Erica bought me a bunch of DVDs to add to my collection and the family as a whole bought a new TV (very nice). Too bad I’m not around to use it.

I’ve been eying up the Nintendo Wii for some time, but I’m inclined to let it come down in price some first. That probably means a couple of years, so I may not hold off that long, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to happen in the very near future. It sounds more promising every day as I read reviews and see new games appear. Play over the Internet will be nice as games begin supporting it.

Speaking of game consoles, I’ve been using my Gamecube a lot lately playing the Splinter Cell series of games. I’ve played, and beaten, all four at this point (including all the co-op missions in the last two). I even went back in Splinter Cell: Double Agent and played it on Elite level (the highest, no ammo, insane AI, etc) all the way through with not too much in the way of difficulty. It turns out that my general strategy, and that of a coworker and friend David Smeeton, is to use the gun very little anyways, so not having it available wasn’t that big of a crutch. Now it’s time to find similar games in the Stealth Action genre.

It’s getting a little lonely around here since Jimbo and Colin both have moved on to greener pastures. Jimbo’s back in Chicago for a while with his parents and Colin is at Rockwell Collins in Iowa. We all still call or chat online a fair bit, but it’s not quite the same.

I’m working on some very cool stuff for TJOC this year. We are going to try to do the bulk of the Diagnostic O written test before camp starts this year by pushing the test out onto the web. I’m currently building all the infrastructure for that right now. It’s taking a while due to the fact that we have such a diverse set of question types. Once we get past the rush to use it for camp this year, we plan to add some tests to the pool for instructors or students to practice with. The plan also includes getting a few real study/training resources avilable on the TJOC website.

My car turned a year old about three weeks ago and I did my first real damage to it at about that point. It’s not really bad or even noticible if you don’t know what you are looking for, but I backed into a pole and scratched the bumper a little as well as indenting it ever so slightly in one spot. Like I said, not bad, but still rather annoying since I’ve really tried to be careful.

Well, I need to run for now. If anyone can think of some area I skipped (other than work for now) that you’d like to hear about or hear more on something I did hit on, just leave me a note here or drop me an email.

Where the filename (linuxupdates-2) increments, the ‘count’ in the dd command is a multiple of the one listed (1GB), and the loopback devices (loop2 here) increments.

If you are, and you know a nice way to create a local Ubuntu mirror via rsync, drop me a note here or via email. I’m trying to set one up here at LeTourneau and just haven’t found anything useful (the mirror server is running Fedora Core 5 right now). Also, advice on what to mirror for Ubuntu would be nice, I’m not sure what they are called in Ubuntu, but stuff like universe, mutiverse, etc.

If you are someone who would like my new number, email or IM me (you should already know where) and I’ll gladly pass it along.

BTW, I picked up a RAZR in the deal.

It turned out the the process of sending out emails was really the killer initially. They were taking (cumulatively as there are an average of about 3 that go out per transaction) around one minute on average, and up to 2 or 3 worst case. I have redone the way those emails are being sent and have trimmed that down to an average of under 2 seconds (for all of them). That alone made a huge difference, but it isn’t all
that has changed.

There is a query that I run to determine the journal number (basically a batch number) of the transaction that was just posted. It turns out that it was taking anywhere from 3 - 10 seconds to run. Upon further investigation, the query wasn’t making use of any of the indexes on the table (and it’s a large one, so many, many records). I made a small modification there that reduced its run time to under a second.

Right now I have good data on about 32 transactions that have occurred since I made the bulk of the changes on Tuesday and Wednesday. Here’s a breakdown of the numbers and how they fall into a Service Level Agreement that we are working up:

• Trad Student Account Payments: 7 @ 18, 34, 8, 8, 5, 13, 10 seconds
• Non Trad Student Account Payments: 12 @ 6, 9, 7, 5, 4, 3, 4, 6, 9, 9, 12, 11, 5 seconds
• Non Trad Web Reg Payments: 13 @ 7, 7, 5, 8, 8, 7, 7, 8, 9, 16, 6, 7, 8 seconds

The Service Level Agreement (SLA) is currently defined as the following:

• 50% of the transactions should occur within 5 seconds
• 90% of the transactions should occur within 10 seconds
• 98% of the transactions should occur within 20 seconds

When you look at the numbers I provided previously, we are currently short of that SLA:

• 5s target: Need 16, only have 7 for a real percentage of 21.88%
• 10s target: Need 29, only have 26 for a real percentage of 81.25%
• 20s target: Need 31, have 31, but only have a 96.88% (rounding)

Only the 20 second period is currently within limits. We aren’t far off on the others, but we aren’t done with performance enhancements either. When you look at the averages, things look a little better:

• Max: 34 seconds (fluke, very high system load at the time)
• Min: 3 seconds
• Average: 8.75 seconds
• Median: 7.50 seconds

These numbers are with the posting process (what actually applies the payment to the account) still being a part of the total time. We’ve discussed having that process run sometime after a payment has been made, but within a minute or two of the actual payment. If we go that route, we should be able to subtract at least 80% of the time that we are currently seeing (as far as the student is concerned).