So, I found a way to download, burn and install Fedora. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal but I’m roaming house to house until Rose and I find somewhere to live. I survived Iraq with Fedora 8 and I really wanted to try out the latest. I really enjoyed 8. It was stable and served me well on my journey.
But, being the geek I am, I couldn’t resist but install the latest and greatest. And, two days later, I have no regrets. I can honestly say that this is the best distribution I have tried. I used Ubuntu 8.10 as soon as I got home to see what had changed on the Debian front. I wasn’t all that impressed. While it operated smooth, it was missing a few bits which I really wanted. It was lacking the latest OpenOffice.org, Mono and Eclipse and it excluded the Empathy IM package which I wanted to try. It also didn’t have a ready-to-go NetBeans installation in its repositories.
One of my biggest hurdles I have come across since taking on Java is really getting my head wrapped around the OOP (object oriented programming) idea. Most of my previous experience with visual basic and php was procedural programming. Because of this, my mind is stuck thinking in those terms.
All the e-books I have been going over describe OOP as something that “should” be easy to grasp. A class is a classification of an object. An object is a noun, like a dog, that can be described attributes or fields: four legs, two ears, two eyes, brown, tail, etc. A method is how that dog interacts with other objects: playFetch(), catchFrisbee(), peeOnLeg(), etc.
The other day I was contacted by a Cpt Miller with the Connecticut Army National Guard (CTARNG). It turns out that the entire CTARNG uses the program I wrote called Active Directory UserMod Assistant. Cpt Miller needed some modifications made to make it work in his environment. I was able to help him out with his mods. It was a bit odd getting a request like that in Iraq. He didn’t know I was here but it was nice knowing that the program I wrote is helping out the Military.
I’ve been having a strange issue with a PCMCIA card on my wife’s computer. Every time the machine is rebooted, you are required to “Scan for Hardware Changes” in device manager.
It does not automatically detect that the PCMCIA card is still plugged in. After searching high and low for a solution, I thought about seeing if I could write a script that would automatically run a hardware scan at logon.
I finally got around to a new release of Active Directory UserMod Assistant -> adumass.
This was a major release as it fixed some pretty serious bugs and also greatly improved the UI and back end code. I also added a few functions for data validation.
Thanks to all those that have helped and submitted support requests. The next version should have a translation pack for those users that want to help with translations.
I ran across a great cgi:perl script for running anonymous proxies. Its called CGIProxy. I have to find creative ways of getting around the different blocking mechanisms while I’m on more locked down networks. Having a little personal proxy running in a few places helps.
If you have trouble finding it, I’ve been successful locating builds through its alias: nph-proxy. There are some unsavory types running the code out there, so be cautious with what traffic you send through somebody else’s network/proxy.
I’m finally getting my systems ready for my upcoming deployment. Today, Fedora 8 was released. It took me a bit to find an FTP server that had actually sync’d (ftp.fi.muni.cz). And once I did, I was surprised to find it still had a bit of bandwidth to give. The mirrors have progressively become bogged down throughout the day, but I got my copy. No bittorrent at work so that’s my only option.
So, I am constantly looking for ways of automating tasks. Too many admins do not take advantage of scripting and scheduled tasks/cron. Just this last week, I was implementing a new print server. Besides just building up the new server, I wanted to actually offer the users something new and useful.
I’ve been wanting to setup a network pdf printer for quite some time. I have played around with setting up a network PDF printer using cups. However, we seem to be so MS centric these days that I decided to use PDFCreator’s print server. It was really a piece of cake. Just install the server portion, setup the service, create a share and watch the PDF’s spool.