Diary of a Network Geek

Okay, so it occurred to me that I might have lost some subscribers.
That’s why there was a bit of finagling to get to this page for some of you. See, a whole bunch of folks who read this blog use aggregators, of one kind or another, and not all of them may have corrected for the format change. Well, that only occurred to me last night while I was futzing around with other stuff. So, I hurried about and made some changes that should not only let everyone know that I’ve changed things here, but how to get to the “new” site. At least, that’s the idea. In a couple of days, or weeks, I’ll get rid of the index.html page that redirects folks to the main blog. Before that, though, I’ll get rid of all the other faux indexes (indexii ?) which should let all my faithful readers find their way to my new home. (You know who you are!)

Actually, that brings up a point. How many readers do I have here? I have no idea. I average somewhere between 2500 and 3000 hits per day, depending on the measurement tool used, but I only show two subscribers via Bloglines. Now, I know my future-ex-wife watches this blog, even though she seems to have dropped her subscription to it via Bloglines, so that makes three of you. And, allowing for the fact that I probably only have 250 to 300 “unique” visitors per month, according to another reporting tool, that leaves somewhere in the neighborhood of 247 readers, of some kind, unaccounted for running around out there. (See, I not only managed mathmatics, but I didn’t end the sentence with a preposition!) So, where are you all? What are you all doing here? What brought you here? Why do you come back? Inquiring minds want to know! And, I do, too.

“Always look on the bright side of life.”

Being alone, especially at this time of year, makes me introspective, and, considering everything else that’s going on, I’ve been even more introspective than normal. I always try to find the good in things and people. It’s not always easy, but, still, I try.
Last night, I found myself thinking about a book I read at the suggestion of my wife: Perfume by Patrick Suskind. It’s a story about a man who imagines, remembers, and “sees” the world via scent. He becomes a famous perfumer, hence the name of the book, but also falls into despair and pain. But, what I took away from the book was a sense of enjoyment, especially of the sensual world. Last night, thinking of the book made me remembe not to take the little pleasures for granted. (In this case, the feeling of nice, cool sheets with a medium to high thread-count.) If not for my wife, I never would have gained that insight.
And, there are other things, too. I’ll always treasure her wonderful cooking. I used to love to cook, and I’m sure I will again, but I’ll never cook the way she cooked for me. It’s something I will always remember with a smile.
Trying to figure out how she did things on websites improved my own HTML crafting ability. I’m sure I’ll never be as good as she is, but, then, it’ll never be my “bread and butter”, either.

Most importantly, however, is the fact that my wife is responsible for my renewed interest in my personal spirituality. If not for her, I would never have started working on that part of my life. Ironically, I never thought we saw eye-to-eye on that particular subject. As far as I know, she’s pursueing her own spirtiality, in her own way. It’s a very different path than mine, but I’m thankful that she seems to be in a place where she can explore that. For her sake, I hope it’s something that she maintains. I know that if I didn’t keep asking spiritual questions in my own life, I’d surely be dead now.

So, despite the pain and the sense of loss, I can still find things to be thankful for in all this. I’m grateful that can still find some of the profit amongst the loss.

Okay, I’m not totally sure why…

But, it’s still cool. My darling wife mentioned an interesting website in her blog yesterday: TextImage.Com It let’s you take images and convert them to text, html, or “Matrix”. So, if you want an old-style, gigantic sig file, convert a favorite graphic to text and include it in all your e-mails! Or, for an interesting effect on a webpage, ditto, only to html. And, well, I don’t think I’d ever actually use the “Convert to Matrix-style”, but it’s still cool.

So, what the heck, it’s Friday, go check it out!

On Google, at least.

For the longest time, I was the #1 hit on Google, when you searched for “CNE Resume”. But, now, I’m not. If you do a search, you can see that some bottom-feeding scum-sucker has illegally pirated my page to manipulate himself into the top postion. When I looked at the source of the page, I see my entire HTML code that I so carefully crafted to optimize my page for the engines. If you notice, there is now a copyright at the bottom of my resume. So, now it’s explicitly clear that this low-life scum-bag has violated Federal copyright law by illegally reposting my copyrighted material. So, should I send a “cease and desist”? Should I hire a lawyer to do it? (I know a few and could probably get one to draft a letter cheap.) I’ve even thought about being less than morally upright and hitting the nasty, little bugger with some DNS Spoofing. But, of course, that might have legal ramifications, so, I won’t. Still it was nice to contemplate…

Anyway, if you want to help me out, loyal readers (reader?), link to me. Check Google once in awhile and click on my valid link. In the meantime, I’ll be updating my page and working on my keywords!!

Webmonkey is dead.

Or, at least it’s dying. According to this article on Wired News, almost eight years as the place to go to teach yourself HTML and related web coding, Webmonkey is shutting down. I learned some of my first PERL here, not to mention a lot of what I know about style sheets. Their tutorials made my sad, little web skills what they are today. I still use their reference materials when I’m looking up things like web color codes and special characters, not to mention their very handy Unix cheat sheet.
Well, all good things must come to and end, I suppose. I sure hope my wife puts some of the same kind of usefull information on her section of this website.

It took a year, but I did it!

Did what, you might be wondering? I finally figured out a CGI script for Fantasist.net that I’ve been working on for almost a year.
See, I love words and languages, especially foreign words and languages. In fact, I love them so much that I’ve tried to create them on several occasions, just like J.R.R. Tolkien did. But, since I’m not a trained linguist like Tolkien, I’ve always cast about for help creating the words. I want them to sound authentic, but not be actual words from an actual language. I’d hate to put together words that I thought were quite alien and unique only to find out that I’d insulted a publisher in Istanbul or Delhi! So, I searched for help with that on the web. Boy, did I find help! One of the best places, though, was Chris Pound’s Name Generation page. Chris is a linguist and has made several PERL scripts that generate new words based on input from an existing language. Finally, I could get words that were phonetically similar to an existing language that were new and unique!
But, of course, I wasn’t satisfied with that. I had to go further. What about people who couldn’t figure out PERL? I mean, it’s taken me forever to tweak things and get a good handle on the basics. What about all those potential conlangers who just aren’t up to PERL? My 11-year-old daughter, for instance, has recently gotten into conlanging. How could I make this available for her, without trying to teach her PERL? The answer, of course, is the web. So, I modified Chris’ scripts and played with data until I understood it fairly well. Then, I tried to get it up on the web. I was a miserable failure.
Until last night, that is. I started with a very basic CGI tutorial and started building upward from there until I had a simple form that would give me simple, html-friendly output. From there, it was a simple matter of tweaking the original PERL script, and an html form, until I had a good combination. And, though, I have to work out formatting and style-sheets, here it is at Fantasist.net: WordGenerator.
Enjoy!

Isn’t that an oxymoron?

Anyway, you might have noticed that I have some “new” archives in my blog. What I did, at the suggestion of my darling wife, was to import all my old, pre-blog entries for the Diary of a Network Geek into the new system. It took a little prep work, but it was worth it! Now, I have a single, integrated blog, without any of the old-fashioned, html-only archives. I’ve also done away with the goofy old html links on the side, which are just about balanced out by the new archive links. In any case, it’s done and they’re all in one, easy to manage place now.
So, just for reference, all the archives before September of 2002 are the old, pre-blog archives that I’ve imported. September of 2002 starts the “new era” of the Diary of a Network Geek.

Cool.

Yesterday I made the most wonderful discovery…. Novell AppNotes in Palm format.

I don’t know how long they’ve had it on their site, but Novell has all kinds of stuff in Palm database format. Don’t let that throw you, though, it’s just how the Palm Reader wants documents. I’ve got to tell you, for a Palm geek like me, this is great news! They’ve got everything here that a Novell CNE with a Palm could want.
I downloaded everything from NDS troubleshooting guides to information about testing LDAP. I grabbed an introduction to MySQL for Novell and ton of stuff about maintaining NetWare and NDS. It gives me something to read while I’m waiting for processes to run. It’s really great stuff!
Not everything at the Novell AppNotes site is formatted for the Palm, but a lot of stuff from the past year sure is. I know I’m gushing a little bit, but this really is great for me. I’ve been formating HTML pages for the Palm from Novell’s support database for years, but they never turn out so well. This not only looks good, but someone else did most fo the work!

Well, I’m off to read documentation!

Well, I think I’ve finally gotten this blog thing down. I figured out what was making the entries look all wonky in Netscape and corrected the HTML code in the templates. Then, too, I figured out how to control some of the custom settings for the look and feel of the blog via the style sheet. In fact, I like it so much, I’m going to imitate it for the rest of my website. It’s really just a matter of updating the style sheet for the main site so that it’s similar to the blog. Way back when I started this poor, sad, little site, I planned it so that eventually, when I wanted to make look and feel changes, all I’d have to do is update the style sheet. Pretty clever for a Network Engineer, eh? Now, why, if I’m so clever, has no one given me a job yet? *sigh* Like they say in the Baltimore Catechism, “It’s a mystery!”