Every now and again, I get on a creativity kick. It’s not always an artistic type of kick, just creative….

Today I’ve decided to finally shut down a trusty server. It’s been the office firewall for 4+ years, happily chugging away on an old HP desktop, running Gentoo linux.

$ uptime
08:44:48 up 267 days, 17:51,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

It’s currently been running for nearly a year. It’d be double that if we’d not had an issue with a snake, and the office transformed. Before that, it’d been running without issues for nearly 2 years, where the failure before that was caused by a PSU fan failure.

It was recently phased out with some network reconfigurations, and is no longer needed…

Good night lestats.

Bill and Theresa will probably get a kick out of this, especially as they seemed amused by stories of my son’s (mis)adventures when we took them out for dinner so long ago¹.

Apparently the folks at Microsoft get bored from time to time, and knock out small handy tools, but never really announce them to the world. Here is one called “RichCopy”. Mentioned on the TechNet magazine this month, the name hints at what it is… An improved copy/move utility, with lots of options. The cool one I have been after for a long while… threaded copy. Check it out… lots of cool bits and pieces.

Courtesy of the::unwired, news of YouTube’s new mobile client for Windows Mobile, and Symbian clients. I must say, I’m rather impressed. Blazing fast searches, nifty scrolling, and pretty damn good video quality too. Have it deployed on my Motorola Q9h, works nicely. Only issue I’ve uncovered is the search box, but I believe this is an issue with my phone, as the backspace key acts as the “back” button for general navigation too.

You can get it too at http://m.youtube.com.

I’m a little bit of a photography fan. I might not be great¹, but I do enjoy playing around with the gear. A few weeks back, Joe McNally announced a new book. I took advantage of Amazon’s pre-ordering, and snapped one up. It arrived today. Now to get reading…

A while back I mentioned my new toy¹. Along with my new toy I got a handful of accessories, which included a nifty cradle, which allows the phone to be docked with the standard, or extended batteries in it. It has the added bonus of having a battery slot at the back for charging whatever isn’t in the phone.

One of the LinkedIn groups, Nagios related, I am on recently had a discussion about monitoring WHOIS servers, and checking for a certain response. This is just a small exercise in some simple bash scripting, reading input, output, and passing exit results.

This is a stupid one that had me baffled today. I am writing a weather app for my Windows Mobile phone¹. I was defining some custom classes to handle the various different portions of the weather. For example, temperature can be readable in Celsius, or Fahrenheit. So I built a custom class to handle both. I was stumbling on a weird issue of type conversion when I didn’t think there should be one.

If you’ve never caught John Stewart on Comedy Central, it’s worth a watch. He did a funny on twitter.