status: drunken master
Wed Aug 23 20:58:26 EDT 2006
DRUNKEN MASTER 501c3 TAX EXEMPT STATUS GYM SLEEP XEN SPAM FRED'S JOEL LINK BUDGET MEETING TIDYING CONTROL PANEL POWER DRUNKEN MASTER The August alumni and fellow traveler reunion had more high points than I have fingers to count them on. Chris Sacca shared some redhat gossip about RPM. Cary introduced his new dog[1], a Labradoodle [2] and also some accidental levity when I found myself lead to the wrong blind guy.(who lives in my building) [1] http://www.guidedog.org/Progserv/guidels.htm [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labradoodle The high point of the evening was Josh Harding's drunken master [3] performance at foosball. [4] After three pints of dark alcohol rich beer, Josh simultaneously held a conversation with and defeated the three people playing against him. [3] http://www.lovehkfilm.com/reviews_2/drunken_master_2.htm [4] http://www.ehow.com/how_16974_play-foosball.html In his spare time, Josh is also our BOD president. Perhaps our next president will be required to defeat Josh at foosball. 501c3 TAX EXEMPT STATUS Mrs Smith said "I decided to take the chance and approve your application." A few days latter we got the official letter. All the money people gave us this year is tax deductible. We are eligible for more grants. We get audited in three years. GYM It has been almost (2) weeks that most of us have been making it to the University's gym most of the time. For now, we're just doing laps. (never less than 4/5 of us in the office now) Tomorrow, we will see a group personal trainer. She will access our physical condition. (more laps?) and train us. The lab bought memberships for John, Kamala and I and paid for 15 training sessions for everyone. The total was $700. So far it has been worth it. I certainly don't have troubles sleeping at night. XEN Rob spent July researching servers. (His work study ran out so he's a pure volunteer, between his hours at CVS). He settled on a solid vendor. [5] and a decent quote. A feature of the vendor is that they test the server with the OS you will install. They did that. It took until Monday. It would take them 11 days to ship the system. [5] http://asacomputers.com/ Matt goes back to school the day after the system arrives. He's the Xen guy. Everyone else has other important projects. We've postponed the server purchase until Matt has a break from school or somebody else is free to take on a new project. By that time hardware will be cheaper and better. SPAM John is finishing up our efforts to improve spam filtering. He's upgraded SPAMASSASSIN and added some new custom rules. This was harder to do right than it sounds. Pinning SA to the back-ports version of SA, was particularly deft. With Manny's help, John's working a script to train the Spam filter on missed SPAM. BUDGET MEETING The meeting with cadre went well. John had the good suggestion that a future VISTA might be focused on fundraising. (duh!) Our finances are at: http://thecsl.org/sys/finance.d/ TIDYING Last Friday, I spent 5 hours cleaning up our system configuration. All the config files and scripts we've added are in CVS. Every night a script runs to compare the files in CVS to the ones on the systems. CONTROL PANEL It looks like setting up a control panel will be a huge effort. The control panel we selected [6] has some issues. For example the lead developer on the bug tracker said something like "the customer control panel is mildly broken and right now not maintained." [6] http://ispman.net/ POWER We lost it a couple times. Once it was enough to drain the UPS, bring down csl-ldap-01 hard enough to corrupt the password database. The backup ldap server was on a bad UPS and didn't come up right away. The university's people were helpful. The contractor was not listening to the university people so we expressed our concerns directly. Setting up the UPS monitoring daemons to do a clean shutdown is pretty close to the top of the priorities. This is the second time we've lost power as part of an upgrade.