The Old Dog Barks

There’s plenty of money sitting in bank vaults going unused. The political will to borrow it doesn’t exist, is all. Instead we’re paying attention to fools like Jim Bunning, and, to be fair, whichever person(s) in the White House was responsible for tragically low-balling the stimulus bill to the tune of a half trillion dollars.

Part 2: Somehow, I’m guessing people wouldn’t be concerned about the Berkley students 2nd amendment rights if one of them brought a gun to a protest. But protesting is okay if your white, rural and middle age. Any other demo and your just uppity and selfish.

Freedom of speech is important only insofar as it permits you to listen to words others would prefer you didn’t hear.

I just get the private life almost set on the rails and what happens?

Of course a weekend fucking someone else’s problem panic project at the PCP over the weekend.  Just finished that sucker about five minutes ago and I need some sleep.

Work at this and other sites will begin on Monday I promise!

In Washington DC they may be running out of toilet paper but they still have the New York Times. Why do we read so much from upscale bloggers about rushing to the store for supplies and finding empty shelves but so little about the plight of the homeless and poor? Did the poor, because they had nothing better to do, stock up in advance?

One reasonably prominent Libertarian blogger and Law Professor (Ilya Somin at Volckh) even made a comment that the only place left to get salad was at Trader Joe’s. Well cry me a river!

I had just wrapped up the tear your hair out phase of my latest project at the PCP and thinking of a small celebration when the cell phone started to ring.

Now I have my oldest Grandchild in the hospital having her gall bladder removed at the age of 12 and news of some serious household disorder in my Son’s family.

Afraid that I will be going silent until some of this gets resolved, sometimes the old Grandpa Bear has more important things to growl at.

Now if I can just find the number of that shyster Lawyer that went to school with me!

UPDATE:

Granddaughter released from ICU at zero dark thirty Thursday morning.  Release to home possible as soon as late afternoon.  She will be coming home minus her gall bladder of course, so some lifestyle changes will be in order.

Update The Second:

Granddaughter is at home and resting comfortably.  Physical Therapy is ongoing from a multiple small incision incursion and going well.  The Medical crisis is past tense, the other I cannot comment on as I am not privy to all the facts.

Suffice to say that Daughter has requested that I not come to the state as that would be a problem for her Brother.  I fear that she is correct.  Means to influence the situation are however in the works thanks to people on this site.

Grandpa Bear shall find a way!

Update the Third:

Granddaughter is doing wonderfully well and Son is set up in his new abode.  The emphasis now is something our readers may have heard before.  Logistics, Logistics followed by Logistics.  Cameras and telephones and wheels are in the works!

Keep the Grandpa Bear at a distance, no one wants to see the inner Dog released!

Update the Fourth:

All is now in place as well as can be expected!  Granddaughter is well and healing rapidly (Physical Therapy excepted, who does not gripe about that) and living conditions have been settled.

I have to scrounge a computer for the Son (ie, put the parts together and ship) and the burn phone for Granddaughter is on the way.  Maybe tomorrow the muse might return and I can do some writing.

My creative skills tend to focus narrowly in times like this and writing was not the point of focus!

I have to apologise to all and sundry for not being here much lately, blame the PCP.

I have been stuck with a project at work which is right down my alley but, has turned out to be a freaking pain. Simply put I have to get an application running on a release of an OS I do not like, not the OS per se just the particular release. It is a combination of customer desires and supportability of the application.

What I have been fighting is services interfering with each other and the community has helped a lot. The maillists for the open source crowd are a wealth of help, even if some of the replys are sarcastic. I think I have this whipped.

Tommorow on the second of Feb I will go for a full trial run, if it works to project moves over to the application programmer and I fall back to a support role. I just want this 800 lb gorilla off of my back!

Cross your fingers folks.

I usually make do with my complaining over at Never So Few. That was in the old days. With another site to keep busy I figure to do more of my grousing over here. Unlike grouse — grousing is never out of season. Like many of my rants this one is about computers, but in a rare change of pace does not involve “The Linux.” This time it was my windows machine, the one I do the vast majority of my work on, that started giving me trouble. And then worse, it neared to die!”

A little over a week ago I started getting errors when exiting programs. The error message said that the program, and more than one of them, could not access the memory at a particular location. That was the extent of it and the comp kept right on working as soon as I closed the error window. No big deal as I had installed a very large graphics program recently and thought that it might be the problem. But I was wrong.

Last Monday I went to start working and the machine wouldn’t even boot. It said I was missing a simple PCI bus driver. I try again and it does boot. I try to connect to the internet and the system freezes and I need to hold in the power switch to shut down. This does not look good but I try booting one more time. This time the comp says it recognizes new hardware and asks me if I want to install a driver for it. Sure, why not. I hadn’t added any new hardware so the driver if it was actually required should be on the system. It wasn’t, or at least the operating system couldn’t find it.

Ok, I boot in safe mode and check out what is going on. I go to the device manager and sure enough no PCI bus driver. It knew about the driver but said it was uninstalled. The driver in question came with the system, of that I was certain. I was not sure about what it did other than work with my modem but without it I could not go on the internet. I pulled out the backup system disks and tried to install a driver from the CD. The message said no such driver on the system backup either, Now I am getting worried.

I power up the Linux machine and go to the HP site to find the driver. They don’t have it either. I notice that there are about 90 megs worth of Linux backup files I can install to get the linux system current, after all I had only done that two months earlier, and decide to download all of that before continuing. I did it over night because for me on dialup that takes about 12 hours.

I’m thinking the driver I need might be at the modem manufacture’s site and find out how to read the hardware code so I can tell who that was. I go back to the HP windows machine and now I am having all kinds of trouble booting up. Sometimes I get there but the moment I try to do anything the machine locks. Other times it runs for a minute or two before failing. Booting in safe mode works but I can not use the modem from there.

I tried several different system date restores to no avail and thought about a complete system reinstall. I am backed up pretty well but if I do that I know I have a week of killing the bloatware that comes with a new install and setting all the system parameters to what I am used to. So I hold off go back to the Linux and do some more research.

It seems that the simple PCI bus driver was called on one — and only one — of the sites I visited the simple PCI “Gigabyte” bus driver. And I was getting these unable to read memory errors. Could it be I had a bank of bad ram? I let loose the cover and start pulling ram. After some swapping I can boot up reliably again but I am still getting the hardware found message and am unable to turn on the modem. I can use the system tools though and I get the information I need to go to the modem site.

Back to the Linux and I find what I is the site of the chip maker and that the hardware people are responsible for drivers. That was HP and I already knew they claimed not to have one. But Connextant, hope I spelled that correctly, was kind enough to offer a couple of different generic drivers. I downloaded those onto a flash drive and went back to the win box again. I tried to load the most likely driver and still no luck, then the other and no luck again. I am about to do the dreaded system install when I think to do a manual uninstall of the old PCI driver. After that is complete I boot again and can load the drivers off of my flash drive. Each will load but neither lets me fire up the modem.

In the midst of this with a stable system at least I do a virus scan. A couple more hours, 600,000 files or items and it tells me all is well. I am now really close to that system reinstall but. . . In my searching through the hard drive I find another driver possibility, same name as one of the ones the chipset manufacture provided but with an extra letter – a large X. This was in a folder labeled HP and might be what I was looking for. And it was!!!

I loaded the driver and my modem fired up. I no longer had the simple PCI driver installed but since I am now down to half a gig of memory I guess I do not need it. It seems the mere fact of its presence made it impossible to load the correct driver for a system with less memory. Now I need to go out and buy some more ram but at least the system is working and stable, though noticeable slower than it used to be it is still very usable.

My working theory is that the bad ram was deteriorating and would sometimes work for a while, perhaps only one bit was bad and causing page faults. But now as I say I am on line again. And this was the short version of my rant, I just ran out of steam.

I would like to say that the first chapter of the Fifth Cardoman Novel just went up at the FutureVerse. Talk a look and you might find you enjoy it!

The maintenance scheduled for Saturday 16 2010 has been rescheduled to Sunday 17 2010 due to illness in the house.  At that time every site hosted at Fort Old Dog will go down for a few hours around 3:00 PM MST.

My living room has literally become a Data Center (4 servers, 2 multifunction printers, 2 monitors, 2 keyboards, 4 switches, charging stations for I don’t know how many portable devices and a Partridge in a Pear Tree) the cabling having happened not planned, looks like a freaking Rats Nest. Not to mention the dead server (the old olddog.name) just taking up space.

I need to turn everything off, unplug everything, move the crap and route the cabling in a professional manner. Fer Gods sake I teach this crap. I am like the Auto Mechanic whose wife drives the crappiest junker in town because I am to busy working on other peoples stuff.

Today I am going to take some time to work on mine!

What happened here was my Paycheck Continuation Program, PCP or job to the clueless!

Last Thursday right after sticking Wes with the start of The Devil in the Mirror, my Boss calls me in. It seems we are now bidding on a Government Contract whose info will reside on my Linux Servers at work (Yes plural, as in 5) and they must meet the current Government requirements for Secure Environment Linux hereafter called SE Linux.

I explain that our servers are running on Fedora 8 and that to meet current Gov requirements we would need to go up to Fedora 12. Not a major problem, when do you need it?

Answer, TUESDAY! Now we have a fracking PROBLEM!

Thus since last Thursday almost every waking moment has been involved in doing a four generation upgrade on five servers. This believe it or not is where this site saved my behind as I had fought the same problems here already.

It is 8:30 AM Tuesday the 12th of January and we are Gov compliant! Now having been up most of the weekend I am dying!

We have a minor competitor who works in the same building we do and when I left work there four IT pukes from that outfit were in the parking lot smoking and griping about there BIND problems as they were trying to do the same thing I had just finished.

Now there are about three people in this town I would not piss on if they were on fire, two of them were in that group!

If you think I told them shit, you don’t read our books.

Cross Posted at www.neversofew.com