Inner Drive Software

The ParkerCam is such a hit (Anne refreshes it more than I do, it turns out), I replaced the ailing, sunburned, five-year-old Intel camera with the same model that I use for the Inner Drive webcam. It's easy to see why; here's the "before:"

And the "after:"

(The new camera is so good, if you open the bottom image in its own window you can read half my programming library.)

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Alas, the new camera and I had a disagreement initially. It's a Logitech QuickCam Orbit that I'm running through Sascha Keller's VisionGS Webcam software. I had to reduce the thread priority of VisionGS to get it to play nicely with my computer. And I have Microsoft Index Service turned off until I shut down the Webcam, because it was taking every available processor cycle. The Index service sometimes repopulates its database after an unexpected reboot, and There were also several reboots involved. I also disturbed poor Parker's sleep a few times commenting *ahem* on the installation process.

</Geek Stuff>

It's working now. And if Parker moves we'll see if the face- (puppy-) tracking feature works.

The great infrastructure project is nearly complete. Everything is now done, except for upgrading the last old server to Windows 2003. It even looks better.

My previous post brings up, tangentially, our naming scheme. For years I bought only Gateway computers, and for no reason I can remember, named all of them something to do with cows—but in German.

We are now rebuilding the next-to-last server in our great infra-restructure project. Since the first step in blowing away a server is to restart the server, I got the Windows 2003 "why are you doing this to me?" dialog box. Now, the comment I wrote has ceased to exist due to reformatting the system partition; so what was the purpose of this comment?

Rebuilding an entire set of servers is tedious. I'm now in the phase of trying to determine the least security required to run all my web applications. This involves testing a feature, finding out that Windows Server 2003 R2 has blocked it, looking at the event log, loosening the security setting the tiniest bit to fix it, rinse and repeat.

So, this isn't a real post. It's just a test of the blog engine. Or...maybe it's both...

We've now got our new application server running, and we're moving all of our Web applications over. The new server uses Windows Server 2003 R2, which has tighter security than the previous version, and that has slowed us down a little bit.

I spent more than 8½ hours yesterday reconfiguring the Inner Drive network. I think other guys might have taken no more than an hour to do this. I do software; routers and DNS and DHCP and DSL are all hardware problems. I really don't enjoy doing hardware stuff but I'm glad I did it. Because now I know how.

The changes vastly improve our network topology, and will help when we install our new web/app server later this week. In the past, we used a Windows Server 2003 machine to bridge between our public interface and our private network. The server ran BlackIce Defender as a firewall, which means, as astute readers will notice right away, evil packets got all the way to the server before the firewall could have at them. The same server also ran our Websites, Exchange, and was the Active Directory catalog master.

Having all of these services (did I mention DNS as well?) on the public box is asking for trouble, as I found out.

I am not happy today.

Our Exchange server crashed in a maddening fashion. The Exchange Information Store can't log in, nor can our admins get to the Active Directory snap-ins on the affected server. Apparently the security database got damaged when the server rebooted after a critical update. It's going to take us probably three days to fix the problem, partially because we've got client work to deliver before we can really care about the email outage.

In related news, I'm reading a new book:

I got into a conversation with a colleague about project management. I have sometimes found myself on a badly-managed project; so has he. As a matter of fact, he's just left one. He sent me this post-mortem, as an object lesson in using caution and listening to your gut when taking over a project already underway.

The continuing saga of the absent-vendor clean-up took a slight turn today that makes a lot of sense to me. The customer decided that, instead of spending 3 or 4 days re-writing a complex feature that doesn't work very well, I should spend 2 days getting rid of the feature entirely and replacing it with an editable list.

I had an interesting time today convincing a client that I had, indeed, fixed a defect, because the client kept getting an error message even though I wasn't. Once I got the client to send me a screen shot of the error message, I was able to fix it within two minutes. Any guesses why he got the message and I didn't?

Despite having programmed computers since before many graduate computer science students were born, no one ever actually taught me how to program. Being self-taught, I missed some of the fundamentals. Actually, I missed a lot of them, and every so often one of two things will happen: most commonly, I simply won't know how to do something that a first-year CompSci kid born during the administration of a President I voted against (or worse, voted for) picked up in her first class; less commonly, I will feel bad about this.

Continuing the sad trek through my client's abandoned application, today I have to figure out what this procedure does.

CNet raises an interesting problem: what happens if you die without telling anyone your passwords? It could be a real problem for your heirs:

"He did not keep a hard copy address book. I think everything was online," said [San Francisco poet William] Talcott's daughter, Julie Talcott-Fuller. "There were people he knew that I haven't been able to contact. It's been very hard."

"Yahoo (his e-mail provider) said it wouldn't give out the information due to privacy laws, but my dad is dead so I don't understand that," she said.

One solution is to use a secure password storage facility, like Bruce Schneier's Password Safe, and then put the master password in trusted escrow like a safe-deposit box or your attorney's office. Of course, you'll have to keep up with this, because you'll change your master password at least every three months, right?

Last week, my puppy Parker chewed through a laptop power cord. I ordered the wrong adapter, which I didn't realize until I opened the package. So I got in touch with Dell by email to request an RMA and shipping instructions.

Here's the great customer service part.

I've been helping a client get a custom database application working for a while. The previous vendor never quite completed it, then got testy when the client brought me in.

There are two unbelievably bad things about the vendor's data design that I want to share.