Month: August 2003

There’s rumors that there’s a cure for cancer, just that it would devastate the modern medical profession so they hush hush it … or kill people over it … but isn’t NOT sharing a cure also killing people? Anyway … Kevin Conroy, Sr. was buried yesterday … He died from cancer. Not even 40 yet with two kids 12 and 8 years old …

Was a different type of wake or viewing that I’ve been to before … This was all done in the church … So, after you went by the casket, you sat in a pew if you were staying for the mass … While you sat there, you saw them close the casket for mass … so you saw the families say their last goodbyes … You saw his two children and wife stand in front of the casket and look on at their father, husband for the very last time … I thought that was pretty damn heavy to be a witness to …

Then after all that, we sat there for an hour mass … I thought it was too long personally … I opted not to go to the cemetary … Like I said, I thought it was too much … Kudos to those who could handle it … After witnessing everything I did at the viewing/mass, and the fact that I hadn’t eaten (which contributed to me not feeling well), I couldn’t take the long drive to the cemetary and compose myself for a gravesite mass as well … The funeral was huge … Kevin had many friends …

I think it was a mixture of all those things … including some things I’m not mentioning … I will leave it at that .. but death is certainly something we must deal with … whether we want to or not …

So, it starts off like it normally does … with sleep … I sleep as much as I can so that I’m not driving home at 4 in the morning falling asleep at the wheel of a 14′ box truck … Before I go, I come down and check out the email and the forums … I see I have a phone message, and I play that … It’s Ed, we’re on the big stage at The Springfield tonight instead of the stage behind the bar … So this means I have to bring in most of my PA .. not realy a big deal, but Ed sounds very excited. So, instead of wasting time calling him back, I get ready to go so I try to avoid most traffic. On the way I call Fish to see if maybe I should swing by and pick him up. Well, he already made plans and he has to get up early tomorrow, so again, not a big deal, but I’ll have to do all the work myself. Something I’m not a stranger to. The only thing is, they don’t have lights … Luckily Crystal Roxx is playing LaCosta which is right down the street, and they have enough extra to throw up a light show. I got to run the light show along with doing monitors and mixing them well enough to come through the excuse for a PA at The Springfield. I did such a good job, they even threw me a little cash at the end of the night …

So I hurry up and get out of there at the end of the night … I think I was loaded out by 3:30 or so (they stop around 2:20) and the truck was loaded and I was on the road by 4AM … I come home and do the normal messaging, foruming and picture processing from the nights festivities … Whatever I did lasted me until about 8AM I guess, and then the phone call came. My father could not boot his Windows 98 machine that he uses for a lot of his work at the office. This was a major crisis. So, I was awakened at approximately noon or 1, I don’t remember, and I had to go over to his office. He had pulled the machines out to check the connections to the boxes and everything, and it wasn’t as bad as I had thought … He has a W2K machine sitting right next to the W/98 one (which everything from W/98 was to be migrated to the W2K machine, but that was months ago … Anyway, so the W/98 machine won’t power up … I take the power cable from the W/98 machine and stuff it in the W2K machine, and it powers it up just fine, so it’s not the power cable. I told him he needed a new power supply … So I took apart the machine and stripped the p/s out and sent him to buy a new one while I sat in darkness in his office. After all, this was the middle of the night for me. He came back, I stuffed in the new p/s, pushed the machines back in place and pressed the power button. No dice. So it wasn’t the power supply. Wait! That silly little switch on the back. Set to 1. Then tried again. Bingo! So now there’s a problem with his registry, and it keeps saying it restored it and you have to boot … He did this about 4 times. I told him it would keep doing it. I boote dhim into safe mode, rebooted and everything was fine … Then I fixed a local problem on his firewall and went on my merry way.

So, back to sleep, I woke up later than I wanted to go out to LBI. Didn’t shave even. I got out there about 9PM, and I thought I was late, but there was plenty of time since hit was 11, and all I had was band gear … I had the stage ready in about a half hour … Before anyone from the band got there … That’s always a plus … A lack of communication to start the night where the house guy never asked if I was the sound guy, I stood by him the first set while he mixed, and every so often, I told him when a lead was coming up. I didn’t feel like telling him I was the sound guy and if there was some sort of new policy where he had to mix (cause they got this brand new monitor system in there). Also, sometimes I like to hear other people mix the band I mix every night… He did a fine job … toned things out, and I could hear all the instruments. One thing I found very surprising is, he didn’t even mess with effecs. I find a lot of guys are effect crazy … (like the guy mixing ChasingKaty the night before) ECHO Echo echo, oh my!

Anyway, I think the DJ said something to him between sets, and I mixed the remainder of the night, but it’s not necessarily a big deal to me unless it’s a song that requires my expertise … He was late on leads, but that’s understandable, and it’s not like it matters to the drunk people, it only matters to the band … The first set had no effect requirements as the second set did … I want you to want me and Middle … 526 and 720 respectively … A pretty easy load out, and a ride home and the band weekend was over … I never made it down to the computers when I got home, so I woke up on the couch at around 11AM … Went down and did the pictures then. Also updated all the Zone’s pictures. Played some Counter-Strike. Had a late Brunch/Dinner around 4PM and fell asleep on the couch after ward .. Woke up around 9PM or so and came down and moved Bigg Romeo over to the new mail server … Made sure that their site would still function as it was with the elist, etc … They also have an email sent on just about any form submitted to their web site …

Went back upstairs about 11:30PM to see the Sports Final to hear about Duce Staley and didn’t move from the TV until about 8AM when I fell asleep … Up around noon time to Mike arriving to do the Out On the Town, and so the cycle continues …

… or should I say ncurses? Getting back into C a little bit, and wouldn’t you know the first thing I come across is that the *nix side of the fence doesn’t have a conio.h library? I started creating a simple C program that would read one line at a time of a text file full of email addresses, and the first thing I wanted to do was clear the screen. Simple, right? Just clrscr(); … Well, no … Unix isn’t so happy to oblige. So I go off looking for conio.h and find the dreaded curses.h library that everyone suggests referring to … My gosh .. what a different world! So, I’m a little upset that this is a perdicament … All the program I wrote way back when will never compile on a Unix machine like I thought they would. There is a conio.h curses.h wrapper that someone wrote to get around this, but writing new things is going to be slower going because it’s so much different … and just for the heck of it, I installed TC++ 1.0 (Includes TurboC 2.0) on my desktop machine. DOS based, and it takes up less than 5 megabytes. =)

Know what I did for this simple program? system(“clear”);

I was just doing some surfing … and through all the links that I found, and through all the little holes I find on the net where people don’t protect their directory listings, etc … I found a screen shot of some guy’s desktop, and on it is the following quote:

Real Programmers consider “what you see is what you get” to be just as bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in women. No, the Real Programmer wants a “you asked for it, you got it” text editor — complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous.

Oh, this is at http://drunkmonkey.org

I am a programmer … Since the late 80s, I have written programs … The first programs ran on mainframe computers, and they were written in ASM/H (Assembler) … For the most part this was for work, but I did write a program to keep track of our pick-up work softball team stats … Things get done when your’re motivated …

Then, in the early 90s, I started running a BBS, and I started coding utilities for this BBS in C … I chose C because it was portable … (You could run it on almost any platform unchanged) … I wrote a ton of C programs … Communication utilities, network utilities, online door games and tons of utilities for my Spitfire BBS System and I had registrations from around the world for these utilities as I shared them with other Spitfire Sysops … I started delivering the Inquirer, and I wrote a program that did everything except deliver the papers … This was before Windows/95 … before RDMS such as MSSQL, Access and MySQL … Then the Internet was born, and my 5 node BBS system that received over 100 calls per day dwindled down to nothing. The Internet took over …

I got out of computers for a while, and when I came back, I went to setting up a web page for the band I was in. I started using Netscape Composer, but when I got undesired results, I went back to editing the source HTML text as I had been so accustomed to in the ASM and C days. I never went back to a WYSIWYG editor. I tried development IDEs, and they didn’t return desired results either …

I taught myself ASM/H. I taught myself C. Then when the time came, I taught myself HTML. At some point, someone wanted me to do their site, and I was in a situation where I had to have somewhere to put it on the web, so I got into hosting reselling someone else’s space on their servers. I brought up my own web server using Windows NT4 on a 200K SDSL line and developed my own web site. I taught myself ASP. After the DSL company went out of business, and the number of people I was hosting grew, the viable solution was a T1 line for my own internet access, and my NT4 server was more reliable than the hosting servers I was reselling at the time. I taught myself NT4 (and eventually 2000) and I taught myself IIS, FTP, SMTP, etc … I taught myself to host web sites …

After a while I got into the web and wanted to do more things, so I looked into starting to develop COM+ apps for use with ASP, but I was disenchanted by the VB6 IDE … I was back in an IDE and I hated it … Then I found PHP … PHP is the best thing I have ever found … It’s like C, and coding PHP has been like an old shoe … So much more available for PHP than there is for ASP (unless you want to pay for ASP/VB components). The more I got into PHP, the more I was looking at Linux … The more I started learning Linux, the more I was exposed to FreeBSD as a solution for hosting and Internet servers (as they were the first Internet servers) … I now have a FreeBSD Mail Server that does SPAM prevention, Virus Scanning and it’s all updated dynamically via the Internet. The only investment there has been the time I put into it to get it configured properly …

So, now I have almost 50 computers all prepared to do Internet hosting in a reliable environment … I no longer get the errors I had previously at two other places I bought reselling from … I checked market value at the time and I have set up a pricing scale that made sense … Now here is where the problems start …

After all this history I have in computers (mainframes to minis to micros) and I grew up with the 8088, 80286, 80386, 80486, DX2s, SXs and Pentiums, there are those that seem to think they can fill my shoes by buying an IDE to do what I do … While some people may become pros at this, they are SOL when a problem occurs … Most of them will just start from scratch and hope the new one works … In my development of ASP and PHP (web scripting languages) I have also evolved with them knowing their idiosyncrasies and why things are as they are, or why something that used to work doesn’t work anymore … With the development came security and different way of doing things so that systems wouldn’t be compromised … To call yourself a web developer if the only experience you have with the code is looking at what the pretty GUI application created for you, think again. Unless you understand what’s happening, you’re a fool to submit it and run it on a web server …

So what I describe is a person who thinks they’re a web developer without thinking … This goes hand in hand with web hosts that think they’re web hosts … I have had this stress for a while now … I get the SPAM, I bet everyone gets the SPAM … “FREE 1 Gigabyte Web Site!” “$5 a month after 6 months” “No setup fees!” … Here is where they come from: A guy buys a computer or rents one (more economical to buy) … He then throws it in a datacenter rack somewhere in the world, and is now a port on someone’s network. He buys Plesk or cPanel and now has a “Dummy’s Guide to Web Hosting” installed on his computer. A bunch of scripts that will set up and manage hosting accounts for him, he doesn’t need to know squat. Some companies even install it for you, and here’s your password … Off you go …

Then this novice web host fires up Dreamweaver and creates a nifty web site that produces PHP code that he doesn’t even understand, but hey, he’s getting a return on reselling his disk space that he has sitting colo’d somewhere. So he easily makes his $150/month dedicated server payment. But what happens when the formmail.cgi bug is found in cPanel? What happens when Plesk goes south? What happens when his MySQL or MSSQL server is compromised … What about service updates and well, what I like to call “System Maintenance” isn’t done cause he doesn’t know better … What about when every port has a running service on it and his machine is shut down by the ISP because he has rogue IRC servers and FTP servers running on his box because he didn’t know any better? Well, your web site goes down.

All I’m getting at is that you get what you pay for, and while some deal might seem great, you really ought to know what you’re getting into … I do everything I can to make sure my connection to the Internet is top notch. I do everything I can to solve day to day problems along with recurring Internet problems (such as SPAM or email Viruses) … I keep my systems up to date and monitor mailing lists to make sure I hear from the people doing the same thing I am doing, competent admins running reliable hosting on networks they manage. I also run both flavors, Windows and Unix Internet servers. I have mailed my customers countless times about the availability of a SPAM/Virus Free server available to them.

In relation to the connection, I found a glitch in Fast.Net’s network. They regularly once per minutes without fail would exceed 80ms on the routers in their network. I reported this with tons of evidence. My customers didn’t notice cause 80ms is nothing in terms of HTTP. SMTP, POP3 or FTP. I was not satisfied, and Fast.Net said there was nothing they could do, and that this was acceptable per their SLA. I found it completely unacceptable and called a Tier 1 Provider after I hung up with Fast.Net’s tech. Wouldn’t you know, Fast.Net is in Chapter 11 as of June 2003. See, they should have listened to me. I know what I’m doing …

Well, off to another club date … This is the first time at Cavanaugh’s, but we were booked there before … Got canceled due to the weather I think, and tonight there’s a 50% chance of rain … I didn’t get the call, so I guess I’m heading down there … It’s the old Kat-Man-Du … I don’t really feel like going, but I have no choice … No matter the situation whether I be sick or anything, I have to go and provide for the band … There is no calling in sick to work when you’re a sound man … I guess I just don’t feel like going there alone … I could bring Fish, but he costs money … and I’d have to go pick him up, and he lives south of the Commodore Barry Bridge … There’s a Springsteen concert at Licoln Field as well as Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake at the FU center .. or Wohicka or whatever it’s called now … So, traffic down by the bridge will probably be pretty bad … Then I would have to take him home … Oh well, it’s a living …

So yeah, there was a bachelorette party at The Springfield, and one of them left their plastic phalic drinking cups … That thing made its way to being propped up in the front of my truck for the ride home … Luckily, we stopped at the WaWa just outside of Sea Isle on Route 9 and it was removed before the trek home … Haha .. funny … Fish and Alex are comedians …

Why do people pass trucks? They seem to pass me just to be in front of a truck, and then they slow down and I have to pass them … Then they will speed up while I’m passing them so they screw everything up … My favorite is the people that pull in front of trucks … They think, okay, I can go now, it’s a truck .. they’re slow … But do they realize, that’s a BIG truck … It could crush me in an instant and I will be dead … It takes much longer to slow down a big heavy truck than a passenger car … I guess they don’t think this … I haven’t killed anyone yet, but I have seen it happen all too often … Yeah, it takes a while to get up to speed, so we’re slow on the start, but when we get going, don’t try being cute, cause you will die, and us people in the truck probably won’t even realize it …

We won a scrim last night against a clan that we thought we were going to scrim, but all the ringers showed up … It looked bad when we started being we were down 3-9, but we came back 10-2 to win the first map, and the second map we tied 12-12 but we won 4-0 in overtime … That was a great win for us … even if it was only a scrim …

Princeton was loads of fun last night, I think I hurt my shoulder … But it’s all worth it to hump all that stuff in and up on that stage for the few people up front of a packed place who at least recognize that there’s a band there … Tonight it’s down to The Springfield Inn … Yeah, I came home … Why wouldn’t I? So now I am about to leave to do it all over again … Of course coming home gives me the chance to get a good sleep and offload the camera … handle anything that’s come up in email or forums …

Billing went out … some loose ends on some sites fixed up, and a new site went up … It’s the first site that is completely Microsoft free … Unless you count DNS, but that will change soon I hope … But HTTP, SMTP and FTP are all handled by FreeBSD … Now I must nap before my glorious weekend down the shore … Yipee!