Fast times..

Time do seems to fly sometimes..

It seemed just like yesterday when we crossed the new year of 2007 and now we come to realize that it has been over 5 months since that date - nearly concluding my third consecutive year in São Miguel, Açores.

A lot has changed and a lot more continues to change every week and maybe this is something I should get used with age, but I keep noticing that each week passes really quickly almost without as an eye blink - althought sometimes I get a bit sad if I don't consider it as productive week, I think most times it is possible to look back at each week that passes and feel that a bit more has been done.

This is also a similar feeling towards my daytime work. Never been working so long at the same place before - worser even to think that I will try to stay here another year without moving away (guess I like more of azores then what I'd expect..).

At the moment I do feel that time simply passes too quickly. My next personal challenge is due within one month - the maths exam to enter university and continue my studies. This will be my second attempt, two months ago I've went to the first exam season but I guess that I've just spent too much time online and less time studying as I should so the results were not as happy as needed..

Now there's a second chance and a whole month to study and understand the dreaded math questions - it will be a though thing since I've never really enjoyed anything about math since kid and always opted to ignore it completely all the way up to high-school to later follow a technical career instead of enginering.

Not that I complain about my current work evolution which is good when comparing to others at the same age in Portugal, but I really want to learn more and keep going forward - time goes fast so I guess all we need to do on this case is move faster than time to actually see it going slower, right? ;)

- Nuno Brito

Proxy confusion

Funny how proxies can make such a big confusion and fuzz to get them working as expected..

Last year I received a proxy called "ixbox" - from a portuguese linux development team (Caixa Mágica), the potential was huge - imagine safely connecting our local intranet to the outside world and allow everyone to surf the web freely.. (5 months waiting to arrive)

Then it was the internet connection - we had installed a dsl line (8Mbps) just for use with this proxy box, but the ixbox only accepted a fixed IP from where it should connect to the web - after some other failed tricks to fix the ip (it would be renewed after some time by the dsl box) we ended up getting a new dsl box which outputed an IP as 10.0.0.2 and finally solved this matter (3 weeks testing and new dsl box)

The proxy machine was a P4 with a cooling vent which was so loud and noisy that I had to disable it to get my brain waves calmed (prefered CPU overheating instead of mental breakdown) - since this really caused stress just by hearing it. (1 day for opening the box and adding a new silent vent which had to be custom "created" to suit the SFF box (small form factor))
Then it was the correct configuration: This was a linux machine which was supposed to work with Active Directory - never such thing I manage to achieve.. Permissions were never working right and the machine had to be rebooted every now for some strange reason to accept users - ended up used a custom created list of authorized users. (5 weeks testing and debugging until it was correctly done)
No manuals or documentation also slowed everything up - had to pratically learn everything myself and even had to guess the root password to acess the machine (luckily the password was defaulted to "admin") and didn't took long to be able to open up the settings console box.

Last but not least is filter mayhem - this box has a built-in filter - but the software is so buggy that the filter often goes crazy and refuses to give acess to users at random hours of the day (funny enough it didn't liked hotmail.com because of the first 3 letters which were also filtered).

After everything I thought it would give me some rest - but the issues because of user's surfing began - machines with all sort of funny popups on the IE tab, flash exe's running on local shares with sugestive names (britneyXXX.exe), complaints about others who spent their work time just browsing "unproper" sites and the worst consequence - heavy downloads from p2p networks made and excessive webcam traffic by msn, skype and other IM's made the whole web acess a lot slower (taking 10 seconds to open up google for example).

I like the idea of sharing Internet on the workplace - it is a tool that brings quality of work to everyone's life, just wished that some people knew the hard times someone on tech support has to pass in order to get it working and view the use others often give to it..

At the moment I'm working to add proxy support for wb and if I had a bad impression about the "easyness" to install a proxy server - I was far from imagining the mess to install a proxy client with poorly documented proxy components to use from delphi. Still haven't learnt enough from proxies - but I also hope to continue learning more about a proxy and setting it up correctly.

-- Nuno Brito

Vista Boot

I'm usually very carefull about backups on my daytime work - ensuring that they are manually done and visually checked instead of trusting on automated backups wich sometimes don't backup as we expect.

But on my home machine (a laptop) I must admit that I'm quite lazy when it comes to backup my own data and I always carry this laptop to nearly anywhere - never really worried much but imagine if someone would ever steal it - worse than losing a laptop would be losing priceless photos of my family events and the source codes for my codings.

Yesterday I decided to do something about this situation and bought myself an external 320Gb drive where I planned to store all documents, photos, music, programs and everything else just in case..

When I got home I decided to partition this hdd and into two partitions, the first with 20Gb and the second with the remaining space. My idea was to also use the first partition as a boot disk for some project like mobileOS wich seems a really good addon for a backup disk.

Used Disk Management from MMC and created the two partitions - unfortunatelly enough that I decided to see what would the option set as "Active" would do to the first partition - my goal was to later disconnect the drive and then re-set C:\ as the "Active" partition..

Started backup of 80Gb worth of data and while waiting I made a skype video call to my wife to help pass the time quickier - we we're talking just fine but suddenly the computer BSOD to my panic... It seems that vista web cam drivers still don't seem to play nice with this windows - it wasn't the first it had occured a BSOD because of this webcam + skype, but this time drive C:\ was no longer "Active"...

Reboot only complained about a missing boot manager - luckily enough I had a rescue disk around and quickly solved this matter - I can only imagine how often these sort of things can happen to people, I'm just happy I understand much better the boot process than some years ago and I can only thank the writers who give support for so many over these forums.

Now "my" Vista is using Grub and I say thanks to everyone who spends time explaing to others how this sort of things is done - Thank you!

-- Nuno Brito