Random bits of Matt's News, in reverse chronological order (most recent first).

2/22/03: The TWiki Upgrade is complete. Only took about four hours of time to get done, spread over about 36 hours, start to finish. From the looks of it, everything is working how it should...after some modifications. This kind if upgrade is anything but automatic. But, it worked and didn't take too long to complete.

The idea now (when I get a few minutes) is to install my hybrid news system to replace this archaic single-page thing. That, and finally get new/more pictures online.

2/19/03: Woohoo! The server box lives...in glory! After really not all that much fiddling, I managed to get DHCP working! I believe there was a version difference in addition to the previously attempted setup which made the largest difference. But it works, and everything on the network (including the laser printer) now receives its IP address from the DHCP server. I've also left a few addresses open on the intranet so 'temporary' or 'visitor machines' (e.g. laptops and such) can magically plug in and work properly. They won't necessarily have the SMB connectivity of the more permanent machines, but they will be able to go online and also FTP things around the network. Hooray for me.

In addition to that, I managed to pretty much get everything else reconfigured with the server box. And with that said, it was time to get scheduled backups in place of the more important stuff (.conf files and user data) so we don't run into this server hard drive dying problem again, which also didn't take that long. As I don't have a tape backup system available, though, I did another semi-innovative thing: backup over SMB.

So what does that mean? It's pretty simple, actually. I made a mount point specifically for system backups. The only difference is that it's a network mount point (e.g. on my windows box). While the world is never perfect, this seems quite suitable for me. Mostly because 1) backup files are stored on a different physical machine, and 2) chances are if one machine goes, I'll still have the other. If for some reason there's an act of God which takes out both of my machines (which would have to be pretty severe since I've done pretty much everything you can do to prevent power sags/spikes and surges for the entire network), then I'll chalk it up as bad luck and redo it all over again.

With that said, I'm going to wrap up this post and work on the TWiki Upgrade.

2/18/03: Again, another late update, but as I mentioned in the previous post, it was going to be after the 16th. Which the 18th is!

The State Festival Trip was again an overwhelming success! There were many excellent shows there this year -- and it was another fun trip. The hotel at which we stayed was also much nicer than last year, which makes the stay just a little more enjoyable. Fortunately, traffic was pretty good both days as well, so overall I have to give this years' trip high marks.

As of last night (Monday, 17 Feb) I finally got the server box back into working order (as it'd been prior to the hard drive failure). After over a half-month of dreading the times I walked away from the console (monitoring the logs for inappropriate connections), I got the firewall back into the 'robust' picture. Until yesterday, it was doing regular firewall things with some basic security on common ports, but was not as tight as I like to keep it. In some ways the server hard drive failure was a good thing -- it made me come up with a much better firewall setup than I'd previously had...even though that firewall rule set was a good one. It was also nice to get the DNS server operating correctly. Again it's caching queries...as well as serving the all-important intranet with its important DNS information (allowing me to type much less).

Today, I went to the UPS office in town to sign for my printer part I'd ordered. After having the printer for several months, I finally installed the 500-sheet lower paper tray on my LaserJet5, having received the paper stop piece for the tray (and actually having some spare time and the drive to move things in our "Office Room"). Even though I'd looked at the paper pick-up roller to inspect for wear prior to ordering the paper stop piece, I apparently didn't look close enough. While the roller wasn't completely worn out, it was worn enough to only work correctly about 50% of the time. So, I ordered the replacement (a mere $6)...which arrived last week. Since we were gone I had to go pick that up at their office today. Anyway, I installed it in about 20 seconds and then decided that perhaps I should inspect the memory banks of the printer.

I quick took the side panel off the printer to see what size RAM modules it required. Fortunately, it was what I'd thought I'd seen in there the last time I took it all apart (for cleaning) -- 72-pin SIMM modules...of which I have many lying around. The quest -- to turn the printer that currently had only 4MB of RAM into something much more. This really isn't that big of a deal for our Windows printing experience, but rather the Macintosh/Linux side...and the magic of Ghostscript. I was losing some of the print jobs (or the last part of them, rather) due to the lack of printer RAM. Anyway, after much fiddling with various modules, I managed to turn the printer from 4MB (2MB built-in, 2MB module) to 18MB (4MBx4 modules, 2MB built-in). Needless to say, the printer works better when printing from the server side.

On the other hand, I installed and am in the process of upgrading my intranet TWiki. The new version came out around the first of the month. There are some much-desired changes with it as well. So far so good. The actual installation and basic upgrade only took a few hours, but I have yet to merge the Preference and WebHome pages to include the new features. Although one of the server hard drives died, it wasn't the one with all the TWiki information from my past setup, so all that data was saved. Hooray for me. It was good to have my up-to-date calendar working again. Once I get my intranet TWiki upgrade complete and get some more time, I plan on upgrading the MZ Online Wiki. That, I imagine, will take a week or so...depending upon my time available. Merging the datafiles and other stuff goes quickly, but it's the merging of the preferences that takes some time. More about that at a later date, though. For the meantime, I'm still using the old December 2001 version. I imagine that with the change in TWiki version I'll also have good reason to implement my new MattNews system that I've mentioned a long time ago now.

As a last random thought, I also am hoping to take another stab at DHCP...especially now that the network is set up properly and firewalled properly. I was having a problem with listening only on one NIC when both were connected to the same source. Long story but it didn't work nice. It should be much better working now...I just need some time.

But anyway, this news post got to be far longer than I'd anticipated. Until next time...

2/7/03: Well, much has passed since the last update, but here's what I know:

• Our troupe at the Sub-Section Competition in Montevideo (1 Feb) got a pretty respectable 4th place. I was somewhat disappointed in the judging at the competition. I'm not saying the shows that won didn't deserve to win (because they were very good), but on a point-distribution scale, it seemed very apparent that the judges this year clearly found it easier to give a comedy show a higher rating than anything not-comedic.
• My server box (for the home network) died. Yeah, that sucked. Badly. Hard Drive failure. I've managed to get it back up and running. It's providing at least the routing that I need. Also some other basic services that I had before. Still needs to be reconfigured, but it's working at some length.
• Life is finally calming down. I'm done doing the general manager stuff at Subway now until the next time she goes on vacation. School stuff is still going on, but...that's a work-in-progress. And right now I'm just taking over for sidewalk snow removal around the three buildings in our neighborhood while the caretakers are out of town. One of them had to have back surgery, so I'm taking over the basic stuff outside until they get back. He won't be able to do much when he gets back, but at least she'll be back then...so we'll get it all figured out then.
• Planning out (well, that's done now, pretty much) the trip to State One-Act again. We obviously didn't make it, but after the overwhelming success of the trip last year (everyone had a really good time)...I couldn't pass it up this year. Besides, it gives me an excuse to go watch them myself.

I believe that's all for now. I'll add more hopefully once I get the new news system running (which won't be until after the 16th now, but...sometime soon. :)

1/27/03: Again, it's been some time since the last update, but things are progressing. Have been really busy with the One-Act again...especially now that all the pieces need to come together for the first competition we have on 1 February 2003. So, when I've not been busy building set stuff, writing light cues, or arranging other things...I've been in class or doing other busy work. Go figure. This week is pretty busy, so I don't anticipate any more updates until after our first competition on Saturday.

1/16/03: Well, it's been nearly a month since the last news item, so I figured I'd bring it up to speed. After a much-busy Christmas and the beginning-middle of the One-Act season (which is really why I haven't been updating this more often -- see the One-Act Wiki), I'm back in school again for the last semester! Eight credits to go...

Anyway, after Christmas I managed to swap out my old 'static' website (on our home network) with the TWiki system. This is a private system inaccessible from the 'outside world,' but which has lots of (easy to edit!) information for mainly myself. Beth really has no interest in it at this time -- but I'm just convinced it's because she hasn't had to use it! Along with that, I had to start using my Mac much more intently with One-Act, mainly for MacDraft, which I use for groundplans and light plots for the show. This is the same as last year, with the exception that I no longer have a laser printer with PostScript support (my old HP LJ IIIP had a little PS cartridge in it that made it PostScript compatible) -- since my HP LaserJet5 was the 'cheap' version. So, for a while I was converting everything to pictures and sending them across the network to my good machine to print...it was a mess.

The main problem I was having was converting PS print jobs to non-PS print jobs (which the printer can understand). Being too cheap to buy a $50-100 PostScript SIMM module for the printer, I decided that Ghostscript would be my friend. Ghostscript converts from PS to non-PS. The trick is to get it working...with different print queues and such. After about three weeks of testing around...and lots of FAQ reading...and some downloading/installing, I finally got my server box to print PostScript jobs to my LaserJet5! This means that the pages printed actually look the way they should (the other ones were somewhat dithered due to the conversion to picture)...and I also have about 6 less steps to do when printing from the Mac. The problem: Something's wrong with my Mac and its printing system. It has a tendency to 'hang'...and not actually execute items in the print queue until after a restart (!?!?!?!!) -- I don't ask why, but that's what's happening. Items will stay in the queue all day...but as soon as you restart the Mac, they start getting pushed out. So, what I have to do right now is 'print to file'...saving those files on the server box, then using lpr at the command line to push the jobs through. It's only two steps...but at this point in time, that's better than what I was doing...and it's printing nicely.

One-Act Competition begins in a little over two weeks (1 Feb 2003), and I believe we're on track with where we want to be at this point in time. Things are going pretty well with that endeavor.

12/21/02: Okay, so now that I've had some more time, I've managed to get a working version of the aforementioned news system (see news bits below from 12/18 and 12/19) put up (see the RCW One-Act Play web). This isn't how I intend the system to look when I adapt it for this particular location, but information will also be included in calendar form. I don't imagine that (right now, anyway) this change will be made until after January 1, but I've definitely figured out how to get it working pretty smoothly.

12/19/02: Well, I've been playing around with some stuff and ideas I got from the UMM CSci Wiki, and changing them as I found necessary to accomplish the same sort of tasks (essentially cataloging news). I've been playing with the stuff over in the testing web (it's set to be a non-public web). I've got a sort of 'merging of ideas' going on. I'd like to use a more simplistic system (such as that at the aforementioned CSci Wiki) as a base, but also be able to have the information available in a calendar-type view (the best of both worlds -- on one page). Right now it doesn't appear that the searches which comprise the UMM CSci news system will work in creating a dynamic calendar-type of thing. But, this needs more research. And this certainly wouldn't be difficult to put together in a dual-format way. We'll see what happens.

12/18/02: Also, it's becoming somewhat obvious that this news page is getting on the large-ish side. I'm thinking of a way (actually, I know of a way to do this) where I'll restructure this news page, while still retaining all the old information for back reference...but only really keep the newer stuff right at hand. More to come as this progresses, but hopefully I'll get this done (perhaps over Christmastime).

12/18/02: It's been a crazy few weeks! In this time I've managed to go through the last two weeks of school (including finals -- I'm done as of TODAY!), manage to work on the Cryptography final (which only took a week of spare time), make a final choice in show for the One-Act (we're doing Making Choices -- see the One-Act Wiki for more information), hold auditions, cast, have a first meeting, and get the CalendarPlugin working.

Anyway, things are going well. By far the coolest geek thing I've done (aside from the Cryptography final -- which gave the opportunity to write a brute-force factoring program (for large odd numbers) and an implementation of the Pollard p-1 algorithm to factor large numbers) was to get the calendar plugin working. It took some work, but it's got some really NEAT stuff it does. I use it most on the OneActCalendar page...so you can see it in action there.

We'll be leaving for Christmas activities beginning Friday sometime (20 December). We'll be travelling around...here and there...and be back home for periods of time in the middle. It should be a busy end of December, but a good end to the year nonetheless. I think that's all I have to say right now, though.

12/6/02: I've managed to make some time to get more GeorgePictures^? online. About 25 more, actually. If you're curious, check the Diffs option at the bottom of the GeorgePictures^? page (below the Devil navigation thing). That lists all the changes and their associated dates, etc. I also managed earlier today to add a few more PythonSkits -- but those take more time, so I only managed an additional three.

12/5/02: Well, it would seem as though much more time has passed without an update from yours truly. You have my apologies. Life has been busy, but it's finally starting to settle down (or at least there's light at the end of the tunnel). I finally managed to get the File Encryption Project complete! Miraculously, it works! Only took five weeks! Well, not five whole weeks, since I didn't always work on it, but...you get the idea.

Once the Crypto project was complete, Seth Rowan and myself did a protocol presentation for the same Cryptography class on Digital Voting which was really cool. We had a neat paper example of one of the protocols we covered...which was pretty cool because we managed to do something backwards -- paper version of something digital. And it worked! If you're really interested in how Digital Voting (in a raw sense) works, check out the URL above.

I'm also managing to narrow down a selection of One-Act plays to use for the 2003 RCW One-Act Play. In the process, I worked on revamping the One-Act Play web for use again this year. I hope to use it much more intensely than last year in that I'll post updated schedules and information there...and hopefully get other people to add their own stuff to the schedule as necessary.

But aside from that, life is good. We got George healed up. He was the unfortunate recipient of a urinary tract infection which was causing the little guy to have little 'accidents' occasionally around the apartment. But, a week's worth of amoxicillin after a trip to the vet and lots more water seems to have done the trick. Tomorrow marks the end of the 15th week of classes...which means next week is the last week...and the next week (16-19 December) is finals. Then more smooth sailing.

11/12/02: Yeah, I know it's been a while. But, life's been busy. The latest cool things to note are this: I've got several pictures of George online now (as of 8 November) -- see GeorgePictures^? for more. I've also added more skits/sketches to the Monty Python Wiki as time has allowed (see PythonSkits for more).

Reason I was randomly not posting more here: I ended up (at the last minute) having to play 'acting general manager' at Subway for a week...and with classes and such above and beyond the call of the salt mine...things just didn't happen much. In other random news, I've been working on a File Encryption program for my Cryptography class. While we're being forced to reinvent the wheel so to speak with some elements of the project, I have been making progress on it...and have managed to generate some very large (and very probably prime) numbers to use as keys for the encryption/decryption. It's been interesting. While I haven't yet gotten this thing to encrypt anything (not quite to that point), the main math behind it is complete...for the most part. Since I hate math, it's been challenging, but it's also been a good chance to brush up on Java again in preparation for next semester (and the last CSci course I need to take).

I'm also working on choosing a one-act for this year...but that's moved almost as slow as everything else on my plate. More to come as things progress.

10/20/02: I've gotten some more of the Picture Pages complete, although there are a few left looming still. I did also, however, get time to add some Monty Python Skits to the Python Web. While it's not much, it's a start...and hopefully will continue until complete...as I get time of course. And it's only the middle of October! Where has time gone?

We had an interesting weekend. I got to dress up again as the Worfle (see past pictures of Worfle^?) for Ma & Dad's 'haunted hayride.' We didn't get any pictures from it (to the best of my knowledge), but this year's theme was 'Alien Invasion' in which Beth and I 'abducted' a passenger of the ride, temporarily. Good times were had, and it seemed as though everyone enjoyed the production...minimalistic and thrown-together as it might have been.

10/17/02: Midterms have been survived, but just barely. What a pain in the ass those can be. But what doesn't kill me makes me stronger, or so was I told. Anyway, I've managed to get the LaserJet 5 working with the print spooler and such. All is seemingly well on that front.

I also managed to begin (which is always the hardest part) the changeover with my Monty Python Website. I got the beginnings of a new look in place (at least all the CSS stuff...so if I want to make a change, it's simple). I made the transition for the Holy Grail script, but I haven't yet had a chance to put up any of the other skits...but with the Wiki, this should be considerably easier (as I get time).

10/12/02: So the week from hell is finally gone. After spending about 14 hours on a single midterm (take-home)...in addition to having a quiz and two other midterms in the same week...I'm a little school burnt-out right now. But it's all over now...which is good.

That brings us to the next chapter: I've got the MIO card for the network printer installed, but am having some issues getting the firmware upgraded...and also in configuring the Windows clients on the network to print directly to the MIO in the printer and not through a host machine. The cool part is that I have gotten the Linux box configured to print over TCP/IP, so half the battle is over. In the meantime, I'm attempting to get Samba set up to do a print spool/share so I don't have to use the parallel connection to the printer...but no luck so far.

Since I've got a long weekend due to fall break, I'm hoping to get some time to work on the Python website and update it for the first time in...over two years. We'll see what happens as I have a bunch of other crap going on...but I can dream. My goal is to have that site completely revamped by Christmas...or the first of the year.

10/5/02: Okay, so I've been really bad about updating this more often, but lots has been going on. In news of the not-so-random-but-cool, the following things have happened around me:

• My new (used) HP LaserJet 5 finally showed up last week (October 2). It's working beautifully (even the auto-duplexer). So, I can now print out entire books automatically double-sided at 12ppm if the need ever arises. This beats much out of the whopping 3.5ppm speed of my old LaserJet IIIP (and it duplexes, too...which is just cool in and of itself). Still waiting for the network (MIO) interface, though. That'll be a cool addition as well.
• My early Christmas present from Beth also arrived on the second of October. We now own a digital camera (and a damn fine one at that ) So, expect more pictures as I get the chance to post them (and the ones I've not yet got to).
• School's still going...and getting busier in its own respect since midterms are around...so still for the next week or so...I'm busy.
• I'm starting to pick out (or narrow down, rather) One-Act plays for the 2003 season. It's slow progress and rather tedious, but it's why they also pay me to direct it.
• I completely rewrote our local firewall rules. This was a (obviously very bad) postponed item due to time. But, I have successfully now changed the input chain to DENY by default (from the external interface)...which probably means nothing to you unless you know how IPCHAINS works. Essentially, the only services exploitable are the ones I explicitly specify now. This is obviously much better than the previous scheme of 'I'll leave it set to ACCEPT by default since I don't have time to mess with rewriting it all...and just monitor the server logs 24/7 via SSH.' While that did work and my server/router box really doesn't have many open ports, it was still somewhat nervewracking.
• I also recently (as in, within the last two days) managed to do some reconfiguring with Apache, mostly for prettiness as opposed to functionality. But cooler is that I ACTUALLY GOT MY CACHING DNS SERVER WORKING! Previously, I had it only turned on, but automatically forwarding all DNS requests. So it basically wasn't saving any time for the localnet. So, I got it to do the caching correctly (which actually does make a pretty noticeable difference, believe it or not. Queries went from average 200-300mS to about, 11mS turnaround. Pretty significant, in a millisecond kind of way). But cooler still is that I (shortly after getting the DNS caching set up) actually set up my own domain. This is purely done for its GeekFactor (the project on this scale is mostly useless, but I can actually do it anyway...just for practice). Actually, it's done to make things behind the firewall a hell of a lot easier to use (which makes no difference to you, because you're on the other side of the firewall). But it's cool, and I'm proud.

The next project I would like to again tackle is DHCP. This is not something I need since I've only got (soon, once the MIO card for the printer shows up) five 'nodes' on my network (see aforementioned GeekFactor bit), but I was having some issues getting it to work properly and assign addresses to the RIGHT subnet (long story -- it has to do with the fact that my router/gateway box is also the firewall and thusly connected to TWO networks...). What I believe to be the problem behind this should be fixed now due to some network topology changes, so I'm ready to make another attempt sometime.

9/17/02: I've managed to get about half of the pictures online so far (see Matt's Pictures), and the priority will come to getting the remainder of them online. However, I also have (on the pile) the ambition to someday (soon) update the links page to some more appropriate and current material. Stay tuned!

9/17/02: Still working on the addition of more pictures to the Wiki. This has been working well so far...it's much easier to post images in a relatively consistent manner (instead of my previous half-assed pictures everywhere routine). I've added some new wedding pictures I received from some people, and I've also added some pictures of George. More to come as time allows. Most of the pictures have been uploaded, but not yet linked.

9/11/02: Another note, I hope to (within the next few weeks) get the rest of the pictures active again (and maybe get some new ones). But the update/look things are done, and that was my big hurdle for the time.

9/11/02: Finally I have gotten the much-needed update complete. All of the wedding pictures I was initially to put online are in place (and not all on one long page). Don't forget to stop by and look at the WeddingPictures^? page. I also managed (which was easy, but took some research) to get the TWiki software to let me do CSS the way I wanted -- namely, just letting me use a single stylesheet for a single web and not the whole thing. This makes more sense if you look at one of the other webs (links are in the upper right-hand corner). You'll notice that those look the same, but different.

9/7/02: Finally getting the hang of some CSS stuff (bear with me if it looks horrid). Haven't quite figured out the "how to make things look the same without tables"...and I'm pretty sure I'll need to get a book with examples to really figure that out, but it is nice to be able to site-wide make changes to stuff. Still no progress on the pictures/wiki stuff, but that's the last step of many. But, it is the next step, so coming soon.

9/3/02: Back in school for another (the fifth) year. Just working on revamping the website and also getting the much-loved pictures back online for everyone to see. Some of you may recall that I had a vast number of pictures floating around. I'm in the midst of cataloging them so that it's not all as half-assed as it once was. Please bear with me. I hope to have this project at least semi-completed in a month or two. --MZ

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