Month: March 2006

Photoshop seminar

This morning I went to a Photoshop seminar presented by Vicki’s colleague Tom Policano. I learnt a bunch of useful stuff, but there was a problem with the pacing. The first 2.5 hours of the 3 hours seemed to go very slowly (mostly because Tom had to go around and re-demonstrate everything he’d shown on the projector on each person’s computer) and there was more time to practice each technique than I really needed. And then when we reached the last half an hour he realized we had a bunch of stuff to cover and so he just wizzed through it so fast I didn’t catch a few of the things I wanted to learn.

Fortunately he’s got a blog so I’m going to see if I can get him to explain a few things on there.

Got it!

I won an eBay auction for a Garmin GPSMAP 296 and car kit. (New, that would have cost about $1850, and I got it for $1400 “lightly used”.) It’s a little scary sending that amount of money to a stranger via PayPal, but at least the seller is listed as a private pilot in the FAA Airman Registry. That should make it a little safer than most of the fraudsters out there that use a different email address than the one listed with eBay and who request money through Western Union.

Fingers crossed for a successful transaction!

Up and mostly running again

So after a titanic two day struggle, we’ve got my home account moved to a server with a slightly newer version of NFS, and I seem to be running again. Except I don’t have Lotus Notes or Microsoft Office. Which, unfortunately, I really need in spite of the horror of having to use them on a daily basis. It seems that when I decided to blow the machine away and re-install, I didn’t save a precious little “id” file that allows me to log into the Lotus Notes server. The help desk form for requesting help for Notes requires you to specify what your Notes server is, and shows you how you can find it on your Notes screen – which of course I can’t do because I can’t get into Notes without this id file. It also promised that they’ll get back to you within three business days. Rob has warned me that there will be two more hurdles:

  • First they will refuse to help me because they don’t support Linux, and/or because Notes doesn’t run under Linux. Evidently the fact that everybody in our office runs it under Crossover Office under Linux is just a figment of our imagination. Pointing out that this is just an authentication issue and not an OS issue evidently isn’t enough to get them to cough up this file without a fight.
  • Even after they relent and send you the file, they don’t actually send it to you, they send it to your boss. And since my boss never reads his email and his secretary can never be bothered to send me the information when I try to recover my Windows network password (too busy with eBay and Solitaire), I’m not holding out great hope of getting this either.

Bummer

When you or I advertise a piece of used equipment for sale, it means “I have a piece of used equipment, and I want to sell it”. On the other hand, when Aircraft Spruce and Specialty advertises a piece of used equipment for sale, it means “I might get some used equipment some day, and when I do, I’ll sell it to you”. They sent me an email today to say that they don’t have the advertised unit, and don’t know when they’re going to get it, but if I want I can cancel my order.

What’s the point?

Oh well, back to eBay.

It’s the worst day since yesterday

(Apologies to Flogging Molly)

Spent the whole frigging day dealing with the problems I was having with my computer at work. I tried reinstalling the OS (CentOS 4.2) again. I tried replacing the hard drive that was giving errors. I tried installing it on a Dell 700 I had on my desk for testing purposes. Every time I got the same problem – I’d set up a Thunderbird or Evolution account, exit the program and come back in, and the program couldn’t find the Inbox file any more. Rob suggested the problem might be due to me having SELinux enabled, so I installed it without it enabled. Mike suggested that CentOS 4.3 just came out this weekend, so I tried that. Still no luck.

After a few attempts, I was looking for the Evolution configuration, but I got a weird error when I tried a “find . -type f -print” on my home directory. I didn’t get these errors on a local file system, or when doing it on my home directory on the NFS server. After a bit of messing around, we realized that the problem might be that CentOS is now using NFS v4, and might have obsoleted NFS v2. The server that has our home directories on them is an old SGI running IRIX 6.4 – it’s possible that it only does NFS v2. Tomorrow, Rob is going to look at moving our home directories to a machine running Solaris 9. Hopefully that will fix it.