August 2, 2008

Johnson vs Acronis

The story goes something like this: Originally, we used external hard drives plugged in via USB to our servers to back up our servers. This worked well, except that we had two external drives and 7 servers. About this time I started working this job and immediately set up a MediaWiki website for storing documentation and a Mantis Bug Tracker website for storing information about ongoing projects–I think I’ll try to write a post about that at some point as well.

July 30, 2008

Dijkstra's Algorithm Paper

The week before my sister’s wedding, I was tasked with writing a paper on Dijkstra’s Algorithm for my Discrete Mathematical Modeling class. I think I might have missed the mark a little bit, but I had so much fun writing it that I’m posting it here. I’m almost considering writing some more stuff in this style… anything anyone would like to see written about? Here’s a link: Dijkstra’s Algorithm

July 15, 2008

Of Weddings and Best Men

This past weekend I had the honor of being the Best Man at my sister Crystal’s wedding. It was a beautiful wedding at Silverlake Winery in Zillah, WA. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a pretty spot like that, and it was definitely adequate for our relatively small 120 person party. Also, the wine was excellent. I enjoyed their Chenin Blanc most of the night, though I tried everything about twice, and ended up going home with some of their Reserve Chardonnay.

July 10, 2008

PHP Vulnerability Checklist

Ray(the boss) and I were chatting about how we should implement our secure upload page. The way it should work is, an IP is added to the genhosts database, it sets up a 5 minute wait, and at the end of five minutes, redirects to the data upload page, at which point the computer is allowed to connect, since the new IP has propogated into /etc/hosts.allow(via a cronjob that takes MySQL entries and parses them(via HTTP and XML) into the standard /etc/hosts.

July 7, 2008

NSA's RHEL5 Guide

One of my tasks at work is to write up a security checklist of sorts, and from one of Ryan’s notes, I happened across the NSA’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 guide. It’s pretty cool and covers basically everything. Have a look

June 23, 2008

Odegaard Copy Center

This is going to be sortof a short post with not much worldwide applicability, but I just learned a couple of weeks ago that Odegaard’s Copy Center will bind a packet of papers for fairly cheap, it turns out. They do it with a clear front cover and a back cover of your choice, plus binding you pick out from their samples. They do it while you wait and have good hours.

June 22, 2008

Firefox PDF on OSX

June 3 was a fantastic day, though I didn’t know it at the time. The reason? My biggest bitch about Firefox has finally been fixed. The big problem is that Firefox’s OSX program has the default behavior of saving PDFs to Desktop and starting Preview with it. Which isn’t a huge problem, except that if you download the file several times, it just downloads a file with -N appended. This is sortof a pain because in college a lot of teachers call files hw5.

June 21, 2008

Skeletool CX

So, I finally got fed up with never having a screwdriver when I needed it unexpectedly. Perhaps this was due to the recent MacGyver watching binge, but either way, I’m calling it excess frustration. It seems like it always throws me off when I’m trying to do something at work or at a friend’s house to their computer or… whatever. I had started to carry my little red Swiss Army knife a while back, and it came in handy at least a couple of times a day, so I decided it was probably worth further investment to get one with a real screwdriver on it.

June 20, 2008

Brazil Tickets

I’m a little bit late announcing this, but…. I BOUGHT MY BRAZIL TICKETS! It ended up being like 1300 bucks, and I have a 13 hour layover in Atlanta on the way there…. but I think that’ll be okay. It’s actually enough time that I think I might go in and see the world’s largest aquarium, the CNN headquarters, and the World of Coca Cola. We’re going to be staying somewhere called El Misti Hostel, and make up about 70-80% of the residents there.

May 12, 2008

Differential Equations

I’ve realized that a lot of people are nervous about differential equations. Which is understandable, but in general there’s some pretty straightforward ways to solve a fair number of the ones you come across. I’d really like to write some of it up. My basic idea is going to be, show a bit about integrating factors, a bit about separation of variables, the characteristic equation, and the method of undetermined coefficients.