Went down to New Orleans a month ago for a vendor conference/training session. Overall it was fairly informative, and possibly worth the money to the company (6 people from my division went...to an event with 40-something attendees...with 3 main session tracks...). The three days went kind of fast. In any case, I got to see New Orleans! Never been down to "the South" like that before (sorry, I don't really consider Florida during Spring Break to be very old-south-ish). We were at the Hotel Monteleone, which is a cool old style luxury hotel. With a unique floor plan that caused me to spent 15 minutes trying to get to the rooftop patio for the initial sign in. Found out that Bourbon Street isn't really my sort of thing. But, on the advice of a friend, I got to go out and have fun my way, by looking for better wifi, and failing that, any cell coverage. And by getting up early and walking around the French Quarter taking some pictures of course!

Looking up Royal Street towards Canal Street in the evening.

St. Louis Cathedral ("a minor basilica")

And of course, the Mississippi River, with a steamboat (the Natchez)!

Now playing: The Awkward Stage – Slimming Mirrors, Flattering Lights – 07 Only Good Days Caught on Camera

Back in April I headed down to the Bay Area again. Drove this time instead of flying. It's a looooong way down there! But, it was pretty, and now I've at least seen southern Oregon, Mount Shasta, and the Sacramento Valley. Plus driving was cheaper than flying – just two tanks of gas each way, so ~half the cost of flying. Driving down at Christmas should be an even better deal...although then I might need to head down the coast instead of taking I-5...driving through the snowstorm at the end of April was bad enough!

So, here are some pictures (full album here):

Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, California

Coast Guard ship heading out of San Francisco Bay under the Golden Gate Bridge. It actually came back an hour or so later escorting a grain freighter/tanker of some sort. And sorry, I did a bit of quick internet searching, but I couldn't find the name!

South side of the Golden Gate, looking out towards what maps say is "Baker Beach".

Now playing: Vienna Teng – Inland Territory – 07 Stray Italian Greyhound

(sorry, couldn't think of anything to draw...but I think the crayon tool in ArtRage came off pretty good :))

Should have gone to the beach this weekend & built sandcastles. That way when the tide came in & the ocean washed away my delusions, dreams & fantasies, I could at least have a clean slate to start again from...

Plus, childish sandcastles are just kinda fun...

Now playing: Thalia Zedek – Been Here and Gone – 01 Excommunications (Everybody Knows)

Finally upgraded to Forefront TMG 2010 RTM last night. And screwed up the web listener for this site. And didn’t know it. Ooops...

It should all be good now though. At least the web publishing part.

I'm still having problems getting the VPN working. L2TP seems to be working fine, but the SSTP endpoint is complaining about certificate problems and not working correctly. Plus, web proxy clients are now trying to connect to one of the RAS demand dial interfaces instead of the internal one they're supposed to. GRRRRR! (DNS looks correct, so no idea how clients even know about the DHCP assigned address...but that's what the logging is reporting...)

Also, for some reason after applying the latest round of Windows Updates, system startup has slowed to a crawl. It's now taking 15 minutes to go from POST to the login screen. Nothing is being reported as being problematic, so no clue where to even start looking. Even worse, sometimes services don't come back up, requiring manual intervention at the console to start them. They've been different on each of the handful of reboots I've done, so now I'm getting afraid to reboot...

IPv6 support is also sorely missing. It's kind of there under the covers, and bleeds through when configuring DirectAccess stuff. But without being supported & without a UI to configure rules, whatever underlying support there is is useless.

On the bright side, recreating the old rules was a breeze. And the Best Practice Analyzer is nice; it caught a couple things that I missed.

I think the best approach is probably going to be to start over and reinstall everything. Ouch. That'll have to wait a bit though...next week (+weekend) I'm down in the Bay Area again, and two weeks later I'm in New Orleans...

Now playing: Vienna Teng – Warm Strangers – 04 Shine

I finally hopped on the solid state drive (SSD) bandwagon. Got an Intel X25-M G2 160GB drive yesterday. And ended up spending all day trying to install it. Definitely should have thought about how to go from the old drive to the new drive a bit more. But, it's working now! Unfortunately, I haven't really noticed a performance boost at all...although that might be because the only things I've done with it so far are resync my offline file cache, create silly little drawings, and write blog posts. Nothing too disk intensive there, and certainly nothing that would really benefit from the improved random access times. So I'll see how this works out in the long run.

In the mean time, this is how I migrated from the old drive to the new drive:

1. Remove encrypted (EFS) files. It turns out that for some reason I had a random encrypted file sitting around, which caused the backup procedure to fail.
2. Boot into WinPE. I used a USB drive that I've got laying around for installing Windows Server 2008 R2.
3. Use imagex (from the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK)) to capture an image of the old drive's volumes.
4. Shutdown the system & install the new drive.
5. Boot using the bootable USB drive and install Windows. I did this because I needed to create the partition structure, file systems, and configure the new drive to be bootable. Windows Setup does that all for me in a lot less time than it would take me to document/chase down all that stuff and apply the changes manually.
6. Boot using the bootable USB drive again. Quick format the OS partition (or: delete everything on it).
7. Use imagex to apply the captured image.
8. Reboot. Be happy that actually worked & didn't result in weird errors from bootmgr (or even worse, "ntldr not found"! (that would have been really bad because Windows Vista, Server 2008, 7, & Server 2008 R2 don't even *have/use* ntldr anymore!).
9. (optional) Write blog post whining about how I didn't use dd, Ghost, TruImage, some other disk cloning tool, or even just did something as simple as hooking both drives up at the same time and doing a robocopy. (note that most of those would require having both drives connected at the same time, which isn't possible for me because I don't have a computer with 2 free SATA ports...yes, it's probably time I upgraded).

Now playing: Stars – In Our Bedroom After the War – 01 The Beginning After the End

So, no post last week. Oops. BUT, there are some perfectly reasonable explanations (i.e., excuses):

ReasonExcuse 1:

(no, don't even try to make sense of the perspective in the drawing above...I know I certainly didn’t while doing it...which is probably apparent...hmm...)

See, there was this Holiday thingy, and that holiday got spent hanging out with relatives, chatting, going through pictures, eating, etc. 'Etc.' there does not contain whipping out a Tablet PC and channeling my inner 4-year old to make silly sketches (posting those sketches involves a slightly older age group, say, 14 or so... (what? I didn't have the Internet when I was 4!)).

ReasonExcuse 2:

Yes, Doctor Who is BACK!!! The new season has finally started, and with just 2 episodes in the season so far, I can definitely say I'm loving it . Although yesterday's episode had one little bit that bothered me...see, there's this teeth bit, and there are tubes going into the mouth, and the "overflow" tube in front of the mouth...and then at the end of the episode there's a shot of the entire monster. And for some reason I can't work out the spatial relationship between end shot & teeth shots. Just doesn't make any sense to me...and is thus bothering me. (yes, I know this is stupid...why should that bother me when this is a show episode with 300 year old queens, giant space monsters, the country of Great Britain in a space ship, flying police boxes that are bigger on the inside than on the outside...oh, and that police box happens to be another spaceship AND time machine, and to top it all off, people are running around in their pajamas saving the world!)

Excuse 3:

Umm...so I don't actually remember much else about last weekend now... So I'll just leave this as the Mystery/Fill-in-the-blank/Choose-your-own Excuse.

Now playing: nothing (wait! no! there are cars driving by on the streets outside! I can hear those! and there was just a fire truck!)

So this weekend ended up being spent watching a TV show (Burn Notice, season 2), getting support calls from work, and trying to get CentOS v5.4 working as a Hyper-V VM so I can experiment with replacing ISA/TMG with something that supports IPv6 fully...

Since nothing of note happened, it's time to pull out the good ol' Link Post:

• Sounds like it might be time to re-read Jennifer Government : Elect A Corporation?
• Muhahaha! Fear me reality! : Those Who Forget History
• Also funny; may have to try sometime : Trivial Pursuits
• Scary : The Open Gate | Military Aviation | Air & Space Magazine (via Comments on 'Deliberate Explosive Devices')
• Awesome & pretty : Best Blue Marble Images Yet
• I concur (FYI, I'm a developer...) : Project Manager’s vs. Developer’s View
• Yearly bonuses came out right before I found this. For some reason that just made me feel guilty... : Global Rich List
• Okay, Visual Studio 2010 is cool : Image Insertion – Extension #2
• Yet another "Cat and Girl" comic...I guess it's pretty obvious which web comic I started reading... (& FYI, I live in Portland) : Tall Tales
• First reaction was to the pictures (ooo! pretty area!)...after reading it, I want a zipline too... : I want a zip line.
• Informative : History of the user-agent string
• : Hug me
• And I know where *I* think I fit on this diagram...what's everyone else think? : This Does Appear To Be The Accepted Definition…

Now playing: Lifehouse – Smoke & Mirrors – 06 From Where You Are

This weekend I got rid of the Digital AlphaServer 4000 5/300 that I've had for a number of years. It ended up going a friend, so hopefully some good use will be made of it. Honestly, getting rid of it is probably for the best: it's a pain to move (huge + weighs a third of a ton), and I haven't used it for a while...in fact, it hasn't been plugged in since moving out to Oregon a couple years ago.

Still, I can't help but feel a little bit nostalgic & miss it a little bit...

Between this & the other stuff I've given away over the last 4 months, I'm now down to the fewest number of computers I've owned since December 2002. Huh. Seems odd to realize that.

Anyway, bye Azure the AlphaServer!

Now playing: Lifehouse – Who We Are – 05 Broken

Java EE lesson from this week:

At least on WebSphere Application Server v6.1, ordering of elements matters in a .war file's web.xml definition file.

<servlet-mapping> definitions must occur after the servlet being mapped has been defined. So this works:

<servlet id="JAXWS_MyFirstService">
  <description>My first JAX-WS demo service</description>
  <display-name>JAX-WS: My First Service</display-name>
  <servlet-name>com.ntldr.example.jaxws.MyFirstServiceSoap12PortImpl</servlet-name>
  <servlet-class>com.ntldr.example.jaxws.MyFirstServiceSoap12PortImpl</servlet-class>
  <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlate-mapping>
  <servlet-name>com.ntldr.example.jaxws.MyFirstServiceSoap12PortImpl</servlet-name>
  <url-pattern>/MyFirstService/Soap12</url-pattern>
</servlate-mapping>

(good!)

But this generates bizarre NullPointerException's during attempts to load the .ear file:

<servlate-mapping>
  <servlet-name>com.ntldr.example.jaxws.MyFirstServiceSoap12PortImpl</servlet-name>
  <url-pattern>/MyFirstService/Soap12</url-pattern>
</servlate-mapping>

...

<servlet id="JAXWS_MyFirstService">
  <description>My first JAX-WS demo service</description>
  <display-name>JAX-WS: My First Service</display-name>
  <servlet-name>com.ntldr.example.jaxws.MyFirstServiceSoap12PortImpl</servlet-name>
  <servlet-class>com.ntldr.example.jaxws.MyFirstServiceSoap12PortImpl</servlet-class>
  <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

(bad!)

Yes, I ran into this problem this week at work. And it took me forever to realize that I'd made such a stupid mistake. So, keep in mind: servlet-mapping comes after servlet!

Now playing: Emm Gryner – Stray Bullets – 05 Holiday