I’m finally doing it. Packing up and leaving 1and1.com as a hosting provider. I’ve registered gurufoto.net on A Small Orange, and I’m starting to move content there. It’s currently a work in progress, but it is progress. At the moment, the SSL cert is self-signed, which I apologize for, but I’m working on getting a properly vetted and secured cert, at which point I’ll put in ModRewrite rules and make everything SSL all the time.

See you there.

Prosecutors with the US Justice Department disagreed. In a filing asking the Supreme Court to review the case, they said citizens have no reasonable expectation to privacy in their movements from one place to another.

Isn’t it nice when the US Government decides that the Fourth Amendment isn’t really useful anymore?

Good to know that my UPS works:

`Good to know that my UPS works:

`

Managers, please, when you consider doing a reorganization, keep this in mind:

We trained hard – but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing. And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing inefficiency, confusion and demoralization. –Gaius Petronius, Arbiter, 1st Century AD

It’s as fitting now as it was two thousand years ago, which itself is an interesting observation on organizational behavior, but it has a more practical (and personal) impact: my unit was reorganized recently. Luckily, we seem to have survived the shift, mostly because our new boss is quite reasonable and wants us to succeed in our current projects, as well as bring us up to speed on the longer term goals of the new unit.

However, we’re only recently back up to full speed at work – we lost months of man-hours to the re-org. Being short staffed to begin with, this has set a lot of projects behind that we are scrambling to catch up on. I hope we can keep going the way we are, and not get re-org’ed again this Fall.

I’m waiting for paychecks to land this month before spending more money, but the plan is to consolidate everything into a multisite WordPress installation on A Small Orange. It’s going to be somewhat of a challenge getting everything back out of pixelpost and into a WordPress site, but pixelpost is dead, and I really don’t feel like writing my own photoblog package. I’m tempted to setup two domains – leaving gurucollege.com as my blog, and [something] as my photoblog. Which leaves me wanting for a second domain name, and a script to help pull pixelpost images, comments, etc out and dump them into WordPress.

I’m happily taking suggestions for both.

Consumer-grade cell phones suck. Especially the free ones that come with your plan, effectively subsidized by the obnoxious rates carriers charge for voice, data and SMS traffic. We’ve been having problems with our Nokia 6350s (at work) that we use for automated Nagios alerts over SMS – the phone locks up or powers off, and the only fix is to drive to the data center and manually reset the phone. Fun.

Recently, another group at work let us borrow a pair of seriously cool MultiModem® GPRS Wireless Modems – in essence, serious grade “cell phones” that talk to the computer over a serial port. They don’t have the ability to do sound, which limits usefulness as a phone, but they are full on AT command set serial modems that can send SMSs. They act as a drop in replacement for gnokii and gnokii-smsd, which we use for automated Nagios alerts, and they can be reset from the command line. We may even be able to use them to replace the analog phone lines we use for our alphanumeric pagers, which would save us a couple grand a year in phone line costs.

I’ll keep posting here with comments and updates.

There are so many reasons I hate Acrobat Reader, so this post is really one of many, but… if you install Acrobat Reader, you are required to use it to view PDFs in Safari. It used to be that you could disable this “feature”, but in recent versions of Reader, this has happened:

There is no way to uncheck that box. Thanks, Adobe. I’d really prefer to use the PDF viewer built into the browser, and not nuke your plugin every time Acrobat Reader gets a security update.