Diary of a Network Geek

Wow, my traffic sure hit a spike in March!
And, it’s been dropping off ever since. Hmm, I wonder who’s not obsessively stalking my website these days? Or is it that I don’t talk enough about popular subjects, like Strom Thurman. Yeah, can you believe that’s still my number one search term? You’d think that “lucy liu porn” or “mariska hargitay porn” would do it more often, like over at Fantasist.net. Go figure! Well, I’m sure when the divorce is over and I’m feeling a little more talky about strange and personal things, traffic will pick up. Not to mention when I finally start dating again! Hmm, I could test future date’s “geek cred” by seeing how impressed they are with my Googlerank. (I’m still the number one hit for “CNE resume” on Google.) What’s a guy got to do to get webstalkers? Never mind, don’t answer that!

Well, time enough for all that. And, of course, I am more than my traffic stats.

I have a feeling I’m wearing thin on my friends.
Especially because I want to bring Hilda with me everywhere I go! As I’ve mentioned before, I really regret not socializing her more with my in-laws dogs when I had the chance. My sister-in-law has a little lhasa (sp?) mix that could’ve used some socializing, too, so it would have been a good thing. Ah, well, no help for it now. So, I need to find friends who have dogs. What to do?
Lo and behold, while checking my Hotmail account last week, I found an article about meeting people. One of the suggestions was to go to a dog park. Perfect idea! Not only does my dog get socialized, but so do I! So, I did a quick Google and found the Houston Dog Park Association. There are several that should be an easy drive. At least, I think it’ll be an easy drive with Hilda. She’s still getting used to the whole car-harness thing. And, I recently made contact with a former head-hunter who is also recently single and a dog owner. Could it be kismet?
Probably not, but it might be fun anyway. Stay tuned for more details about our doggie adventures!

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"You may give out, but never give up."
   --Mary Crowley

Hilda and I went out for dinner last night.
My dog is learning to ride in the car very nicely now. Well, now that I’ve adjusted her car-harness so that she can’t creep out of it! Actually, she’s learned to sit in that front seat and lean her chin against the edge of the door where the window is and have her nose in the air from the vent. Sure, I have a bunch of dogsnot on that window now, but she looks so cute.
Anyway, I decided I need to socialize her more, and I need to get out some, too. So, instead of packing crap that will be leaving the house, I came home from work late, phoned a couple of friends and, ulimately, invited myself over to dinner. And, of course, Hilda had to come with me, since she’s become my little, brown shadow.
She was even an angel when I stopped on the way home to get gas. She was laying down most of the way home and simply sat up and made faces at the strange man in front of us at the gas station. It sill amazes me how much respect I get at gas stations driving a retired police car, even with my beard. Go figure.

Oh, and if you’re wondering why I keep talking about my dog, it’s actually quite simple. There’s nothing else safe for me to talk about right now. I can’t talk about my work troubles, in case someone there reads my blog. And, I can’t talk about the “other stuff” in case I’m being stalked. Or in case anyone thinks I’ve said or done anything worth sueing over. Or, whatever. So, Hilda is a nice, safe topic. Though, maybe I should name the koi after operating systems and talk about them to boost my Google ranking….

Okay, so it occurred to me that there had to be a better way.
Yeah, sure, I could talk about the evils of free porn until I’m blue in the face. I could even rant about how terrible it is to manipulate searchengines. Instead, I’m going to try and do it. Again.
Yes, again. I did it once back in 2000/2001 to get my site ranked so highly on Google for the search terms “CNE resume” that it was the number one hit. I did all sorts of crazy things, not the least of which was start this blog, incidentally. One thing I did was look at both the Google Zeitgeist and the Yahoo Buzz Index and try to use those terms in my site. So, for instance, according to Google’s Zeitgeist, I should talk about: how I felt about the Golden Globes and who won; the fact that Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day; what Teri Hatcher was wearing at the Golden Globes; who Teri Polo is and what she wore at the Golden Globes; what NASA has thrown into space lately; what “naughtiness” Prince Harry has been up to over in the UK; detailed specs on the iPod Shuffle; the super-model antics of Naomi Campbell; the fact that Mariska Hargitay also won a Golden Globe; and how the movie “Elektra” was doing in the box office. As you can see, that first hit, the Golden Globe Awards, was a really popular one, since it was repeated in, or was effected by, several later searches.
Last week, I should have been talking about: Amber Frey, the adulterous whore who was banging Scott Peterson; the terrible damage done by the tsunami in India; how terrible it is that Ashlee Simpson was caught lip-synching; Delta Airlines for some reason; the Weather Channel coverage of that tsunami in India; Heidi Klum, because it’s always a good time to talk about Ms. Klum (and she got married to Seal); NFL player Randy Moss, presumably because he sprained his ankle; the Orange Bowl, because it’s still football season; the fact that Brad Pitt is single again; and all the cool concept cars at the Detroit Auto Show. Crazy stuff, right?

Well, according to Yahoo Buzz Index, I should have talked about some very different things this week. If I wanted to get Yahoo hits, I should have talked about: OJ Simpson’s daughter, Sydney Simpson, getting arrested; Playboy Playmate Alicia Rickter, for obvious, pornographic reasons; those nuts over at Jibjab, who made another hit animation; Enter Location, because, uh, people were travelling a lot?; actress Elisabeth Harnois, possibly for the Golden Globes again?; O.J. Simpson, because his daughter got arrested, of course; the fact that Julian Ozanne got married to Gillian Anderson and no one knows who he is, but everyone knows her from the X-files; anything and everything about actress Lucy Liu, just because, she’s Lucy Liu; the Tennesse-based music and arts festival, Bonnaroo; “How We Do” almost anything, from the sound of it; eating “Breakfast and Brunch”? Or is that more travelling stuff?; how cheap Costco Wholesale pricing is; soap-opera star Annie Parisse, most likely because she moved on to something better; the fact that Japan had another big earthquake; and Jimjab.com, which is most likely a mistake for “jibjab.com”.

Wow, those are totally different things, aren’t they? Are people who use those two different searchengines that different? Have I been losing out by optimizing for Google?
Oh, I don’t know, but I think I’m going to go have a bit of a lay-down. This whole experience has been exhausting.
(And, yes, I’ve posted this same thing on my other blog, the Fantasist’s Scroll, for the same reason as the last post.)

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
   --Mark Twain

WHAT?!?
What the devil am I doing talking about free porn on this very non-adult blog? Simple, talking about free porn is the fastest way to get hits. Sad, but true. In fact, John Dvorak has written an article about this called Free Porn Magic For You.
I used to think that the Internet had improved with age, that we’d finally gotten past all the free porn, or “pron” if you’re one of the hip, out-of-work webdesigners from the 90’s, and had moved on to something more meaningful. I guess I was wrong. If you read the article, you’ll see that what holds true from the earlier days of the Internet still, sadly, holds true today. People are looking for free porn on the Internet. Now, the hits I generally get via searches on Google, and company, aren’t filled with porn terms, movies, or “performers”, so I’m not really expecting a lot of traffic boost, but, well, it can’t hurt. Can it? You know, I’m already starting to feel a bit slimy with all that. And, yes, I admit that I have actually searched for that sort of thing in the past. The distant past. But, I don’t do that anymore. Why? Because, the pornography industry is a generally degrading, dehumanizing industry that devalues human interaction and relationships. Not, it’s not illegal, but, it is, in my opinion, immoral. I’m doing my best not to be immoral anymore. (Hey, for a guy with a degree in Marketing, that can be a challenge!) So, is it immoral to use porn in the title of a post to simply boost ratings? Maybe so. Well, I never said I was perfect! This whole “better person” thing is new to me. (See previous reference to Marketing degree.) Internet advertising is hell.
So, how else can I boost ratings on this site? For pity’s sake, I know hundreds of people hit this site on a daily and weekly basis, but I have only six sad, lonely Bloglines subscribers. Just six. Did I mention that Bloglines is a free service? And they have nice, FREE tools that let you keep up with your favorite blogs? (Aw, c’mon, subscribe to the Diary of a Network Geek with Bloglines!) Oh, I suppose I could always just produce more content here. Yeah, that might work, too. But, well, I’d rather go with the sure thing. So, for those of you who are websurfers that got here looking for free porn, I apologize. I was just using you to drive my stats up. I hope you don’t hate me too much. And, I promise to respect you in the morning. Honest.
(Okay, yeah, I have this whole post, in condensed format, on my other blog, the Fantasist’s Scroll, too. Hey, it’s hard to generate this content stuff. So, I “recycled” the post, sue me!)

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"When written in Chinese, the word 'crisis' is composed of two characters - one represents danger and the other represents opportunity."

Hmm, that’s a good quesiton….
A friend asked me why I blog the other day and it really got me thinking. Why do I blog?

Well, the reasons have changed over the years. Originally, I started “blogging” to chronicle my search for a job here in Houston. Well, it was also a way to try and drive traffic to my website so that the search engines would find my resume. That was almost five years ago, back before there was such a thing as blogging software. In the early days, I hand-coded every page and uploaded it. As one might imagine, I tried to make every “post” count back then. It was a real hassle! But, I kept posting things about my work. Often, I found myself out on the road doing strange things or going odd places for my work and I wrote about it. I tried to focus on the technical side of things, but every so often, I would throw in something strange about my personal life, like getting married.
Then, back in September of 2002, I heard about Moveable Type, which was the first really good blogging application. It ran on PERL and MySQL, which were things I wanted to learn, so it seemed like a good choice. And, it was. I was able to post more often and more easily than ever before. And, I was out of work, again, so I moved from work war stories back to the seemingly endless search for work. It was the Summer after Enron and IT work was hard to come by, so I started posting more and more about my own personal thoughts, hopes and dreams. The blog started to become much more personal. It was a place to vent my frustrations, though I did so carefully as I was ever mindful that a future employer might read my postings.
Somewhere in there, I also started my other blog on Fantasist.net. There I posted things that were purely fun for me. Nothing but cool science and fantasy stuff, some of my fiction and poetry, and just plain cool or weird things. It was there that I originally started posting my “Fun Friday” links. That carried over here and I’ve done my best to maintain that to this day.
Now, I’ve upgraded to WordPress and blogging couldn’t be easier or more fun. I’m still carefull about what I post. I have a fairly varied audience, some of which include family that might be under the age of 18, so I do my best to be intelligent without being insulting to too many people. I do my best to keep the profanity and “adult material” to a minimum, too, for the same reasons.

So, why do I keep posting? Well, I can always use the traffic, even if I am the #1 hit for “CNE Resume” on Google. But, mainly, it gives me a place to think out loud when no one is around for me to talk to about things. Blogging let’s me share my thoughts and dreams and, sometimes, fears with a larger world. A larger world that often responds with surprising kindness and sympathy, I might add. It’s my way of reaching out to fellow geeks who are stuggling with their own careers or lives and offer a bit of hope that they’re not alone.
Also, it’s a way for me to create a bit of immortality. To feel like a part of me will go on beyond my own limited life. To get my words and thoughts out into a larger world so that I might be remembered and understood.
So, why do you all read my blog? And, if you keep one, why do you blog?

Oh, this is cool.

Okay, so I’ve been doing a lot of work on Linux lately. Not only for the bootable ZENWorks imaging system, but just plain Linux stuff.
Last week, I set up a Red Hat AS2.1 machine for use as an FTP server, but, just as I was starting this for the folks who need it inhouse, they start talking about needing a Windows 2000 server to run some specialized print server for eMatrix, which is what the FTP server was for. So, my boss suggests that we use VMWare for Linux. Brilliant! Of course, most people are running VMWare on a Win32 machine and emulating Linux, but we think outside the box. No problem, I get it all installed and running, though the first time I ran the VMWare PERL script that set up the program, it failed. No reason for it to fail, as far as I could tell, because it ran the second time. Great, so I get it all installed an running and let the boss know. Then, he asks me, so what are we going to manage this machine with? Er…. VNC, I guess.
Right, so I get that setup on the Windows machine in VMWare without a hitch. Getting it installed on Red Hat wasn’t a problem, but getting it running…. Well, thankfully, I finally figured out that the Real VNC website has the answer on a page called Native X display Support. The only thing is I need to edit XF86Config-4 instead of XF86Config. No problem! Now the VNC server autostarts. And the boss asks me if I can get the VMWare session to automatically launch at reboot. Er…. Well, I can see what Google turns up!
What I eventually came up with was a shell script I called “xvmstart” that was as follows:

#!/bin/sh
# Written by JKH on 10-13-04
. /usr/bin/vmware -x /vmcfg/Windows2000Server/Windows2000Server.vmx

(Where vmcfg is where you stored your configurations for the virtual machines. Oh, and if the last line wraps around, that should be a three line script.)
I saved that file in /root/.kde/Autostart and rebooted. As soon as I logged in, BAM! VMWare loaded like a charm. So, now, I had to make this badboy autologin… Er, back to Google.
I finally found a forum that told me I had to edit /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc to set AutoLoginEnable=true and AutoLoginUser=skippy (or, whatever you want to autologin as). KerPlow! A fully automated solution brought to you by Linux, Google, VMWare, VNC, and me, the Network Geek.

I love my job!

Yes, Google Print.

“What does it all mean, Mr. Network Geek, sir?” you ask? Well, your Uncle Jim will tell you. It means that Google is scanning every book they can get their hands on and entering them into a great big database so you can search them. Of course, when you find what you’re looking for in that book, they’ll offer up links to on-line retailers where you can buy said book, but that’s to be expected, isn’t it? What it also means is that you can make sure that any book you want to buy has what you’re looking for actually in it before you buy it from Amazon.com
or wherever. Speaking as someone that’s bought books he later regreted spending money on, this could be a very, very cool thing.

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.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading!

Though, I have to admit that I haven’t actually read Learning the Bash Shell, I have used it quite a bit in the last week working out my menuing solution. Of course, I know that I can never go too far wrong with an O’Reilly book, but still this one was worth it’s weight in gold this past week.
Okay, so I know I’ve been going on and on about this, but still, it really is a great solution. I had to write a script that was easily updateable, simple for the end user and could be dynamic enough to serve an entire world-wide distribution. I came up with the basic menu and the script to TFTP it over from a remote location with help from Google. But, then we needed to parse an IP address without using anything more than GREP and native tools (i.e. no SED or AWK). How to do it? Pattern matching that I learned from this book. Then, we had to read in the date, without access to the DATE command! How’d I do it? Again, parsing information using pattern matching I learned in the book. Oh, and a bunch of other things, that I also read in this book.
So, in short, though I may not actually read the whole thing through, I will use this sucker as a reference for quite some time.