BOLVERK – Tim's Lousy Blog

I think I’m not having a place to bitch about stuff so maybe the Blog is back.  This will be morphing into a stricly personal site and will include some additional features like an embedded gallery once I upgrade.  My new professional/technical site is hosted at timoudin.com.

Thanks for caring, even if just a little.

This blog is dead, I don’t even know why I bother.  There’s nothing here to see folks, go find some real content.

Cheers.

I’m back.  Back in training that is.  I’ve just done my first MMA training yesterday since the shoulder injury.  There was definitely some discomfort afterward but I did try to take it easy on that shoulder.  I can’t say how good it felt to be back on a mat and training again.  Hell, it was good just to get some physical exercise!

I’m not generally the certification chasing type but I’ve needed a VCP to keep my career going the way I want it to.  I’ve also been attempting to gain more enterprise Linux experience.  I’ve decided to do some Red Hat training courses and take the exams.  I’ve succeed in passing both RHCT and RHCE exams!  I have Red Hat Certified Engineer number 805008649833712 on RHEL 5.

I’ve recently started brewing again after a 12 year hiatus. My first change in brewing styles was to eliminate bottling completely and strictly keg my beer. I started out by first building a refrigerator that could hold two corny kegs and mounting tap hardware. The kegerator was born, we threw a party to celebrate. I’ve brewed a couple of extract batches now, 9 to be exact, but I think it’s time for more. After a bunch of research on all-grain brewing I’ve just today picked up two Rubbermaid water coolers for conversion into a mash tun and hot liquor tank.

One of my favorite brews of all time is Anchor’s Liberty Ale. I’m working on a recipe to emulate it now then will be converting it to an all-grain recipe. Speaking of recipes I’ve also deployed BrewBlogger found on my site. There’s not a lot to see yet but I will be expanding my recipe database as I brew and rating brews as I taste them.

First post of the year and I’m here to complain.

Yep, just blew my summer. On a recent, bright and sunny summer day I took my mountain bike out for a ride and wiped out on a smallish jump. I wasn’t trying for big air but instead was trying to keep the bike on the ground. I admit I think I was going a bit too fast, unintentionally of course. The result was a grade 3 separation of the shoulder. I’m officially out of all sports, outings and driving for at least two months. Bright side is that it’s not bad enough to warrant surgery. I’ve spoken to two different surgeons and have been assured that I’ll experience full recovery, full range of motion and strength.

Looks like all of my weight training and martial arts will go to crap, I’ll be starting from the very beginning again. Crap!

Although this one isn’t mine it’s still pretty hot.

The wife just picked up a 2003 Mini Cooper S with 34,000 miles. It’s in primo condition, the paint is even better than my new car!

Pictures to come shortly.

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It took 3 years but I ‘ve just picked up the car of (this decades) dreams. I sold a ’95 Mustang GT about 3 years ago and have been itching for a fun car that’s a bit more practical in my new state of residence, snowy Minnesota. I finally found the perfect 2003 Subaru Impreza WRX and picked it up!

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I’ve had to look this up far too many times to not document it now. For user with user_id 1, execute the following on MySQL.

UPDATE user SET user_password =
md5(CONCAT('1-',md5('newpassword'))) WHERE user_id = 1;

or this for Postgres.

UPDATE user SET user_password =
md5('1-' || md5('newpassword')) WHERE user_id = 1;

I just finished setting up a machine with a pair of SATA disks using an onboard Promise controller on Debian Sarge. Steps to configure this follow.

1. Installed disks but do not define a RAID in the controllers bios
2. Boot Debian Sarge installer disk, loading 2.6 kernel via linux26 command
3. Partition creation
   • Manually edit partition table
   • Create one partition on each disk for sway, I did not add these to the RAID so this can be defined as swap. The sum total will be available to the OS
   • Create one partition for /boot, define as RAID.
   • Create one (or more) partition(s) to fill the remainder of the disk, define as RAID
4. Create RAID md devices
   • Create a md device for /boot partitions
   • Format with filesystem of choice
   • Mount as /boot
   • Set bootable flag
5. Create additional md devices with remaining partitions
   • Having only one partition to deal with I formatted ext3 and defined a mount point of /
6. Continue with installation after writing the partition table to disk

I prefer to run testing as I’ve only twice had issues and only one of those was fatal. Had my Linux skills been better at the time I might have been able to recover but that was many years ago. After the initial reboot I start to answer questions and cancel out of one. This will provide the installer menu which will allow me to select multiple APT repositories. After selecting the repositories I’ll skip past the software selection screen to just give a bare bones installation. At this point the /etc/apt/sources.list file can be edited for the distribution of choice, apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade and away ya go.