Halloween @ Work

Gerardo and Ronda
Originally uploaded by plwizard

Busy Monday, What is New?

Tons of little things, such as: releasing UNIX account on several machines. The heavy one: learning Dashboard application and recording the order search flow.

ATTV

Fished from boing2.

Getting File Cabinet From Ikea

Thinking about getting Galant, but bought Erik instead.

New Cube in Santa Ana (2)

The first agenda of the day: complete the LR scripts for eDoc, and they were completed before EOD. The highlight of the day: Craig called requesting assistance with LR scripts on Dashboard project. It is going to be interesting...

On the right, the cube after it was cleaned up.

Fog in the Morning

After having nasty brown soup in the afternoon, I am being served with a fog coming inland while driving down the I-5S coming into Orange County. Visibility was bad, less than a quarter of a mile, in La Mirada but progressively better once I drove pass Buena Vista.

It is nice having the ocean wind instead of the nasty Santa Ana one.

Perl Binaries Are Deployed to Machines in QA Lab

Finally, finished the deployment script after all of the problems were identified and all of the files were pushed to all of the machines. Another script was developed as added to bonus to check the free space on the C: drive on daily basis.

To do:

1. Need to consolidate and put all information (free space, IP address, etc) in XML format so I could transform it to readable format.
2. Follow up with the ePO manager, the person that setup and manages the anti-virus policies, to ignore certain files.
   

One of the machines in the lab (gabrielle) was displaying weird behaviors, it was fixed and thrown back to circulation.

The LR script that clicks the buttons and links (outside Search screen) was finished and I pimped out a strange security documentation (firewall settings, etc) to all of the QA managers.

Swimming in the Smog

As I was crawling in the brown soup, called smog, along I-605N, I was thinking to myself: what have I done? Is it wise to migrate back to Republic California?

This is my second trip to the dealer and they fixed the tire. I managed to get something done while waiting.

BTW: the wild fires are under control and it is still raining ash in Santa Ana.

Nokia N810

Fished by MFreeman: Nokia N810 gets official.

Perl Binaries Are Screwed Up

Snapshot of Perl Modules 5.8.4 are pushed to all of the machines causing the older binary to complain and shut down. Since the pNGSLauncher was down, I had to deliver the files manually to each machine.

There were many problems namely: crashed VM, FS running out of space, anti virus wracking havoc, locked files due to active processes, and file permission problem.

These problems were slowing my LR recording progress, plus I realized that I was recording the wrong environment, QA's environment was populated with an older build for immediate release, I was supposed to record on the developer's environment. No wonder I didn't see necessary changes to fulfill the requirement.

Well, at least I practiced the deployment script prior to 5.10.x deployment.

Weekly Meeting and Recording Buttons on eDoc Search Screen

Tuesday, weekly meeting day! Also the day where I cursed Outlook for loading too slow and frantically typed the status report in the morning.

Debbie got me a new phone line.

Also, today I recorded LR script for eDoc project, plus scratching my head due to weird changes on the search screen.

It's Raining Ash in Southern California

It was raining ash when we walked out from Ronda's B-day lunch.

Related link: Wildfires Scorch Southern California

Perl 5.10 Nears Code Freeze, Release

Hear, hear: Perl 5.10.0 nears code freeze, release. Couldn't wait for ActiveState to release new Win32 binary since our production is currently using 5.6.1/5.8.4. Testing and upgrade are time hogging processes.

Flood in New Orleans

Holly Molly!! We dodged this.

From IHT: Heavy rains hit New Orleans, flood areas just recently coming back from Katrina damage.

Antoine's Restaurant

713 Rue Saint Louis
New Orleans, Louisiana 70130
Tel: (504) 581-4422
http://www.antoines.com/

We decided to eat here after I misread NOLA's schedule. Well, it doesn't really matter, since NOLA is 6 month back logged.

Mental note: avoid NOLA.

Parking: Abominable!
The crew: Excellent
Appetizer: Bisque (of crawfish)
Main: Lamb chop

New Orleans

• Use cab from airport, stay in the touristy area, the other side of the city is very artsy.

• Don't take flat tire insurance from your car rental if you are not planning to visit the other side of the city, I didn't scour the entire city but most of it seemed debris free. The city/touristy side is definitely free of debris.

• Careful when you drive, avoid wet spot since it could be a deep hole that could break your car axle, beware, since there are lots of them in the city.

• If you want to drive, GPS device is a must:
• Not all street signs, at the other side of the city, are restored after being blown away by Katrina.
• The streets near freeway are spaghetti like.
  

• Never come to this city in October. It rains every 5 minutes!

• French Quarter is asleep during the day.

• The hyped Pascal's Manale is alright, if you could afford yourself being a tourist nowadays, you could have the experience in your city.

• Lake Pontchartrain Causeway is the longest bridge in the world.

• Any Hurricane is better than Hand Grenade.

• "Big Al" Carson is alright.

• Go straight for Bourbon St in French Quarter @ night in October.

• NOLA takes reservation for the next 6 months.
  

New Cube in Santa Ana and File Server Going Kaputz

This is the condition of the cube in Santa Ana when I walked in Monday morning. Yes, it is open and spartan, but I got a window seat.

The boxes hold the computers from Jacksonville. I will post the cleaned-up version later.

Also the highlight of today: file server in Santa Ana blew up. A new instance of the machine was brought up quickly so the work could proceed by swapping the data drive to another machine.

I suspected that the machine might have faulty drive (well, it has failed once and it was a Dell desktop after all) and hopefully I fixed the whole machine by swapping the old drive with one from a cannibalized machine. The machine was swapped and joined to the corporate domain at the end of day.

After the mess died down, the workspace had the next attention.

Transportation

Back to the land of traffic congestion last Friday night, and I need a new transportation. Enter: Toyota Highlander 2008.

I am officially an active participant to the global warming, driving mid-size SUV 80 miles daily.

Willie Mae's Scotch House

2401 Saint Ann St
New Orleans, LA 70119
Phone: (504) 822-9503

Landmark restaurant, the gov, mayor and all of the big wigs plaster their plagues on the wall. But it is significant when Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) raised 200 grand to save Willie Mae's Scotch House after Hurricane Katrina landed on New Orleans in 2005.

It serves simple southern food: fried chicken and pork chop with choices of sides such as butter bean, french fries, cabbage, red beans.

Love and recommend the pork chops with the side of cabbage with rice.

Yes, the crispy skin of the fried chicken is delicious but I like the fried chicken from Publix better.

Last Day in Jacksonville

It was smooth sailing on Tuesday: the junk was laid out, squeezed into the Relocube, excess garbage was picked up, and in the afternoon Craig showed up to pick up the grill, along with Wayne picking up the keys and the ABF Transportation person taking the Relocube away, all at the same time. :D

Wednesday, the last day in Jacksonville, we left at 11:30AM, flying to New Orleans, LA.

My Junks in 6 x 7 x 8

Hellish Monday

Everything went well on Saturday since nothing much is being done, just boxing up my stuff and papers.

Joe swang by on Sunday and helped me squeezed the sofa into the Relocube. After that, everything went crazy. I packed a third of my stuff that night, not much since I was tired from moving the couch and mattresses.

Monday was hell, although it started well, I ran errands: buying cleaning stuff and ratchets to tie down the stuff, keeping them from falling on us when we open it in Pacoima, CA. Took Michael to have lunch with people from downtown, Ray and Jen from SCM also showed up. Went home packed some more, I thought that I still have tons of space, not knowing that I was dead wrong. Later that afternoon I asked Michael for help with storing the vehicle for time being. #*?!@. After renting the car, we went to have diner, I was packing again until 3:30AM in the next day.

Last Working Day in Jacksonville

Good bye cube, smell you later.

Subversive Mom

Working Late

Yawn! Another midnight testing going on again... And the environment is totally crapping out.

Norco DS-520

MFreeman pointed out Norco DS-520 to me. Product spec: here. Additional review @ engadget: here.

My, o my, should I wait for another 4+ bays NAS from q-nap? Currently the 401 is underpowered.

Luminous eye...

Luminous eye...
Originally uploaded by fofurasfelinas

Good luck! (click the photo for full context :)

There are several reasons I like this picture: First, it is a picture of a black cat. While it is sitting on dark background, instead of blurring the subject, it is actually increasing the depth perception and the sharpness of the fur texture. Wonderful.

Glancing at the photo, I thought that the cat deliberately closing it's right eye and the person who took the picture was waiting until the cat was doing so. Wow, I thought, having a cat that could do that and waiting until it did it. What a good combination of patience and luck, I thought.

I was wrong, browsing other pictures, I realized that it was a defect. Poor thing. It is a good picture nevertheless.

Interesting Articles From WtF

Going through the magazine (online) ... I found these interesting articles:

ASSEMBLY 2007 (2007-07-30)
more info: www.assembly.org

FINLAND - SAUNA, GRIT, GUTS AND KOSSU (2007-08-10)
Kossu, eh?

I also like the article about Minna Parikka - too bad, it doesn't have any picture, besides the cover.

Joined Technorati

Mr Late Adopter joined technorati, start whoring himself to the world audience.

Technorati Profile

I Hate .*LOB

Today's lesson : I hate .*LOB.

First pain: there is no working DBI-Oracle PM for Perl 5.6. Now I have to switch to my stand alone Perl 5.8 (according to IPhang: it should work).

Second pain: the ppm GUI decided to die after buffer overflow. I know: oraociei10.dll is 91MB and gzoraociei10.dll is 30MB. So I have to fall back to the olde ppm command line.

Third pain: Oracle connection string, which one to choose? There are tons of non-working possibilities, in the end I picked tnsname.

Fourth pain: DB schema hell - each legal document type has it's own table (whiskey-tango-hotel?). Must insert additional logic here.

Last pain: getting the CLOB value (thank god - no inserting for today). Reading through the pod, tons of non-working examples and hints, I realized that:

1. Must know the length of the CLOB in advance. (select length(CLOB) from table)
   
2. Set the LongReadLen to the length of the CLOB
3. Get the CLOB (select CLOB from table) - voilà - the magic works.

WtF Magazine

Welcome to Finland - not whiskey tango foxtrot. Thanks boing2.

Link - http://welcometofinland.fi/




WtF Magazine (Welcome to Finland)
Originally uploaded by JIMWICh

Generating XML Test File From XSD, part 2

During YAPC::NA::2007, I spent some time researching into the Perl modules for XML processing (after the controversial BeerBOF), and I was confident that I could get the project done using XML::SAX.

Also: I skimmed through the XML Schema (XSD) reference page, part 0, 1 and 2 from W3 Consortium.

Samuel Adams Hallertau Imperial Pilsner

Love it, since it tripled the goodness of my peanut butter sandwich.

But I believe it is inferior to Anderson IPA (richer in flavor).