Dropping an orbit of electrical energy and closing to my nucleus of geekery, I emit a quantum of light and will perchance illuminate some spectrum of knowledge. Thus is born the Geek Week in Review.
My new little XP server, Deneb, has been upgraded a bit. I stuck in a uTorrent client/server and will likely be serving up some data goodies for my pals in due time. They will include a library of dimensions fit to beat the band. I've decided that's the best way - I can keep it private if I like. uTorrent itself was a breeze to install and behaved exactly like I hoped it would. All I've snagged so far is a copy of Fedora 10 which is likely to be my Linux of immediate choice. I checked out the Wiki entry for a Linux comparison and am going to stick with my Red Hat oriented distro. Previously I had played with Caldera, Yellow Dog and Knoppix, but other than that, it's always been Red Had (and Solaris). I may have at one point got my hands on Interactive Unix but that's when they were still writing it. God, I'm old. Anyway, I'm also going to keep an eye out for Scientific Linux, the distro out of CERN. I want to get on the path of the massive.
I failed to activate my copy of VMWare 6.5 workstation because I can't remember where I left my trial code. I have a full commercial license for version 5 which I bought three years ago and it doesn't work, so I still need to see what's up with an upgrade. In the meantime I'm still searching all of Vault 107 for my original copy. There's also nothing on Oldversion.com. VMWare finally makes sense to me, it's nice to see that everything has matured. I realized that there were actually tools out there to help manage VMs and that's what let me know now is the time. Thanks to the IT people in Cincinatti, who have it going on. My new cultural note is to pay close attention to IT guys with bald heads. I'm thinking now that a bald head is the new gray beard. Maybe I should even use the Anathem term 'Ita'.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to our company getting its VM act together because although I don't mind spending a grand for a hot server, I don't want to fork over for ESX, which something tells me I'm going to need. In the meantime, as soon as I can find a way to guarantee a restoration of my OEM versions of XP then I'll get ESXi between that and the hardware, but that experiment has to wait until next week.
For Deneb, I'm putting together some database stuff, and I've been trying to decide which. Thus far, in the war of the databases, the winner is MSSQL 2K8. That's because for the life of me, even after three installs, I can't figure out how to get the right authentication working for Oracle 10g. I enter a password during the installation and then when I'm ready to start and login as SYSDBA the system doesn't recognize the password. I'm telling you that authentication is starting to get on my nerves, really. I understand that we need security modularized but nobody is making this straightforward.
Still, I'm enjoying what they've done with the import wizard which has always been the best in the business, and I'm just pulling data from everywhere to build up my library.
I got a little bit of a scare playing with Picasa. One of the things I'm doing these days is my annual security / backup and reorg. So I'm changing a lot of passwords, making sure that things are where I thought they would be and general tidying. I noticed that whenever I open Picasa, it updates some of the same thumbnails over and over. So I've had the nagging suspicion that I'm infected and that somebody is marking some pictures to show that they've been here. Maybe changing one pixel and getting a new hashcode out of the file, restamping it with the same datestamp and using it as a marker. Sure, I'm actually that paranoid. So I grabbed SysInternals Diskmon and Filemon to see what was touching what on my drives. It turns out that svchost.exe is touching my private keys, I don't like being touched there. But you can never tell who or what owns svchost, right? Since they were touched after Picasa was opened, I assumed it was Picasa. But it could still be anything. So I looked for a has verification of the Picasa download and realized that Google doesn't provide it. I'll complain about that later. But you can see my dilemma. How can I validate that Picasa isn't doing weirdness through an unhinged svchost.exe (or any damned dll, for that matter)? I got some answers about the updated thumbnails but I'm still a bit unsettled. So next I'll just come up with another way to segregate out securish files that I want untouched. That means putting my PGP keys on an encrypted drive that I keep on my person.
Speaking of security, I realize that I haven't used my OpenId much. I'll keep that in mind.
What else is new. Oh on that VM thing. I discovered Xen, but I'm now pretty sure that it only runs native on Linux. A new acquaintance from DataDomain hipped me to Tunebite which will help me convert all of my DRM'd iTunes mp4s into MP3s and otherwise allow me to run virtual servers with the content I own. If I was a stock market betting man, I'd bet on those guys at DataDomain by the way.
I'm sure that a lot of other things have crossed my path this week, which only goes to show that I should do more of my everyday geekery posts. Especially since I'm insomniac until 2am computing and what not.
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