Diary of a Network Geek

The trials and tribulations of a Certified Novell Engineer who's been stranded in Houston, Texas.

9/11/2004

BlogChalking

Filed under: Art,Fun,Fun Work,Geek Work,Linux,News and Current Events,Novell,Personal,The Network Geek at Home — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Horse which is around lunchtime or 1:38 pm for you boring, normal people.
The moon is Waning Crescent

I have no idea what this is.

They tell me I should put this in my blog:
This is my new blogchalk:
United States, Texas, Jersey Village (suburb of Houston), English, , Jim, Male, 36-40, writing speculative fiction, Novell Netware and Linux. 🙂

I’m assuming this is like warchalking, but softer and gentler. And, for blogs.
No seriously, I know this is about driving the right kind of blog reader to my blog. Maybe it’ll mean I have more than three readers soon! If you click on my BlogChalk over on the right-hand side of my blog’s front page, you can get your own.

9/10/2004

Muppet Scientist

Filed under: Fun,News and Current Events — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Hare which is in the early morning or 7:00 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is Waning Crescent

Top television scientists are muppets!

You know, I always love Beaker and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, but I never thought of them as “scientists”, per se. Never the less, according to this article on CNN.com, they’ve been voted the favorite TV scientists by viewers of the BBC. They beat out such luminaries as Mr. Spock from Star Trek and Dana Scully from The X-Files, not to mention Dr. Frankenstein, Frank N. Furter, of the Rocky Horror Show Picture Show, and Dr. Strangelove. Quite a feat indeed!

Anyway, it’s a fun article, and a Friday, so go check it out.

9/9/2004

Cool Solutions: DFMail.pl

Filed under: Fun Work,Geek Work,News and Current Events,Novell,PERL,Personal — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Snake which is just before lunchtime or 11:29 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is Waning Crescent

A few comments about my Cool Solutions solution.

First, it’s best to run this as “perl –noscreen dfmail.pl”. Of course, this assumes that you copied this to your sys:perl\scripts directory first. I’ve gotten several e-mail (already!) about “errors”. Those shouldn’t show up with the –noscreen option. In fact, I think they’re just informational messages because I used the “-w” option in the first line of the script. That means “show warnings” to the PERL interpreter. If you remove that, just the “-w”, the script should run without those problems.
Second, you have to have the settings right on your mail server or it won’t send mail! If you’re getting a message that says “failed to connect”, or something similar, that’s what’s happening.

To be honest, I was somewhat suprised to see that this old thing had gone up on Novell’s Cool Solutions website. I actually wrote this stinker last year and posted an entry about it in February. I sent this to them about two months ago and just heard back. I had totally forgotten that I’d even sent it!
Anyway, it’s a pretty “quick and dirty” solution to an ugly problem at my old job. I ended up not even using it because we were so strapped for disk space that I had to actually delete PERL from those servers. Anyway, it’s a free monitoring tool that uses the “duct tape of the Internet”, PERL. You can see the actual entry here. If you like it, vote for it!

UPDATE: J�rgen Schmitz from Germany discovered that PERL version 5.06, which is native on netware 6 if you haven’t done any upgrades, etc., needs UCSExt changed to Perl2UCS
So, replace the first couple of lines with:
use Socket;
use strict;
use Perl2UCS;

my $server = Perl2UCS->new(“UCX:Server”) or die “Can’t get UCX:Server object”;
my $sname = $server->{“NAME”} or die “Can’t get NAME from ucx:server
object”;
my $volume_mgr = Perl2UCS->new(“ucx:volumemgr”) or die “Can’t get
ucx:volumemgr”;

That should do it!

9/8/2004

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross is dead

Filed under: Criticism, Marginalia, and Notes,Life, the Universe, and Everything,News and Current Events,Personal,Personal Archive — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Hare which is in the early morning or 7:30 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is Waning Crescent

Actually, this happened more than a week ago.

She passed away on August 24, according to her website. I heard about it via a blog just yesterday. If you’re not familiar with her, she’s the one responsible for the Five Stages of Death and Dying. She was an interesting character who contributed quite a bit to the psychological community, even though she developed a bit of an odd reputation at the end there.
I present this as a “Personal” entry because my father worked with her. Most folks don’t know about it, but the “legwork”, so to speak, for her book On Death Dying was done through a hospital chaplaincy program. A lot of her work involved administering surveys and questionaires to hospital chaplains who were working with people that were in the process of grieving. My father was one of the people who helped make that happen. One of the two, in fact. As memory serves, he was working for the AMA in a religious capacity. Something to do with morality and ethics in medicine, as well as the religious components contained therein. In any case, it’s one of those personal anecdotes that my father has collected over the years. I hope I’ll have a few one day.

(Well, I already do. Sometime I’ll have to write about how I met the #4 boss in the Chicago “Family”. Or, Milton Erickson, for that matter. And, even how I exchanged e-mail with the inventor of ping, Mike Muuss.)

9/7/2004

Remembering Mr. Zevon

Filed under: Art,Deep Thoughts,Life, the Universe, and Everything,News and Current Events,Personal — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Hare which is in the early morning or 7:31 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is a Third Quarter Moon

Last year, on this day, Warren Zevon died.

Warren Zevon was one of the most influental musicians of our time. The sad thing is, there are so many people who don’t even know it. He wrote an amazing number of songs for other people to record. So many, that I don’t know where I’d start. Of course, it was his own work that I loved the best. Nothing beats WZ singing “Piano Fighter” or “Seminole Bingo”. I know for a time, I lived, or wanted to live, “Mr. Bad Example” for real. Unfortunately, he’s known best for “Werewolves of London”. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great song, but it’s just so little of what made WZ great. I mean, what can you say about a guy who’s personal physician was Hunter Thompson! And had guys like Dave Barry coming to see him while he was dealing with the pain of his cancer. He was just a miracle of a man.
We miss you, Mr. Zevon, but thanks for the great music and memories you left behind.

9/6/2004

Google Ads

Filed under: Art,News and Current Events,Personal,The Network Geek at Home — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Dog which is in the evening time or 9:18 pm for you boring, normal people.
The moon is a Third Quarter Moon

You may have noticed a change or two…

Namely, I’ve added small Google ads to my blog. Why? Well, for one thing, this site doesn’t pay for itself. That means that I spend, roughly, $35 per month to maintain this site, as well as my others. (I have several sites, including HavePalmWillTravel and Fantasist.net, and I support the backend for my wife at Babydoll’s Closet. Heh, I like the idea of supporting her “backend”!) But, still, that all costs money. So, I’m running ads now. So far, I’ve made less than $10 in the past month. But, I’m hoping that will improve. Now, all I ask is that if you found anything on any of our websites helpfull, funny, or cool, just click on an ad or two. I figure if I can make even $15/month, I’m ahead of the game.

Anyway, that’s why I’m doing it. We now return to our regular blogging.

9/3/2004

Why, I’m 68% good!

Filed under: Art,Deep Thoughts,Fiction,Fun,Life, the Universe, and Everything,News and Current Events,Personal — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Hare which is in the early morning or 7:09 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is Waning Gibbous

At least according to The Gematriculator .

The Gematriculator has rated my home page thusly:
This site is certified 32% EVIL by the Gematriculator
This site is certified 68% GOOD by the Gematriculator

It’s fun, easy and uses “the infallible methods of Gematria developed by Mr. Ivan Panin to determine how good or evil a web site or a text passage is. ” So, now, I’m 68% sure I’m going to heaven! Hooray!

Hey, it’s Friday, try it for yourself!

9/1/2004

“New” Utility

Filed under: Fun Work,Geek Work,Review,The Network Geek at Home — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Rooster which is in the early evening or 7:46 pm for you boring, normal people.
The moon is Waning Gibbous

Okay, not really new, but new to me.

I was introduced to a utility called Servant Salamander this week by my boss. It’s basically a file and disk utility, but it has plugin extendability. For instance, it comes with the ability to open ZIP, TAR, GZ, and RAR archives. It lets you quickly edit text files, including INI files. It has direct access to the registry and it has a built in FTP client. So, you can upload files directly to a server via FTP as if you were using a regular file manager. Pretty cool. Oh, and there is a free version, but it’s worth paying for the latest.

Enjoy!

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