The Thinking Minority

We had our 22-week ultrasound on Monday, and from the weird and alien images, it appears to be a healthy, growing, perfect little boy!

"I check their underpants to ensure there is only one penis."

And this one gets a big "That's what she said."

We find out on Monday if it's a boy or a girl, so if you haven't made your guess yet...

The bulb that spawned this beautiful flower was in a bag that was sitting in the corner of our kitchen next to out sliding glass door. It had been there for at least four months. This was growing out of the bag. Lots of sun and no water...

I have had my first drill since I was sent off to learn the law of the military and it could not have been more exciting. Many things have changed, many have stayed the same, and I am stuck in the middle with you (sorry, I couldn't resist).

20 weeks today!


(Yep, Livin' On A Prayer is stuck in my head. Figured I'd put it in everyone else's heads as well. Sorry.)

This is Jimmy A's guitar. Jimmy started me out with a few chords last year at "Old People's Beach Week" in North Myrtle Beach. I've since learned Margaritaville and the opening to She's Gone. Thank you Jimmy A. Thank you.

Well, not just those two songs, but those were the most exciting to learn. When I get done with the oppressive tedium of academia, I'm gonna take lessons. I can then I add Slow RIde and Freebird to my repetoire.

Dear DB (think about it and you'll know what insult I'm using),

When you decided to up and leave town, the blog went all Greek. Then, terrorists started shooting at people from the side of the highway. Yes, I said terrorists - I'm now afraid of the highway. WTF?

What the hell happened to the blog? Why is it no longer in American?

I figured I'd start posting stuff from Flickr here. This was one of our better days in New Orleans. The engineer...what do you call the guy that drives an electric train in 2008?...was pretty nice. He picked us up even though we had no tickets and took us to the place to get tickets. Afterwards, he didn't even make us use our tickets. If you need streetcar tickets for New Orleans, just let me know.

Our next ultrasound is scheduled for April 21st at 11AM...so if you want to take a guess as to whether it's a boy or a girl, you have until then.

I'm really not sure, so I can't help you. :-)

Here we are, only 5 hours later .... and I have just about everything done. Still missing:
1. MediaWiki
2. Fully configured Apache2
3. DNS (really not needed)

It's late, and my blog posts are confusing Mrs. B, so it's time to call it quits.

Top on the list: fighting with AppleTalk file sharing on Linux.

Long story short: to get Leopard to connect to the Ubuntu/Debian versions of netatalk, you have to allow cleartext passwords under Leopard. On the mac, run this:
defaults write com.apple.AppleShareClient afp_cleartext_allow -bool true

And voila! it works. This is because there's a licensing issue with SSL; you can break the license and rebuild netatalk, but it wasn't working for me. Yet. For now, I will hack it.

Found the hack courtesy comments here, and found the SSL rebuild magic here.

On to the next headache :-/

Δεν καταλαβαίνω μια λέξη όλου αυτού.

2 hours, 40 minutes in, and I have solved my RAID problem. The RAID device is now resyncing (should be finished before midnight).

Next: download & rebuild the netatalk package to allow SSL-encrypted AppleTalk (because Macs are sexy).

Fixed the first snag; pseudo-static DHCP did the trick. On to snag #2: RAID.

Have managed to solve this, but what a PITA. Had to create /dev/md0, which involved
sudo /dev/MAKEDEV md

which put the devices in a lower-level subdirectory to be added to /dev/ at a later date. This makes sense in retrospect, but wow ... I'm glad I've got Google. One reboot later, and some shenanigans in /etc/fstab, and I have RAID.

So: I now have a working
1. Base OS & networking
2. Apache 2.2.4
3. MySQL 5.0.45
4. PHP 5.2.3-1
5. Software RAID (but haven't proven this is reboot-proof yet)
7. USB
8. SSH

Now on to the rest. This is going quite quickly, all things considered.

Problem #1: IP addressing. The king server needs a static IP address so the other hosts on my network can find it. The default Ubuntu installation uses DHCP. I could modify the /etc/network/interfaces file to specify static addressing, but I think it might be better to tell my router (which is acting as a gateway & DHCP server) to serve king the same IP address every time it connects. Trying that now.

Acid test number 1: the first reboot onto the hard drive. Open questions here:
1. did I install grub onto the correct partition? I used the master boot record of my first SATA drive (/dev/sda1).

2. Did I pooch the mail installation? Probably. I can't remember the server that I'm using as a relay. No worries: I'll pull this from the saved config files on my backup disk (yeah, I made a backup). That is, assuming USB works, and I can get to the disk.

First problem: remember which partitions NOT to erase. The installer is complaining the two partitions involved in software RAID (mirroring) have some sort of error. I think this is normal.

I hope this is normal.

Now installing the base OS .....