Illusory Follies

Things have been busy, busy, busy in the Pacific Northwest. Work has been keeping me running. Lots of neat stuff getting done but it’s wearing me down a little bit. Not much new on the tech front. I’ve been trying to get password maintenance issues resolved. I’d really like a crossplatform method of encrypting a password database. The best I’ve found so far is KeePass. It works on Windows quite well. There’s a linux port that supposedly will compile on Mac if you have the patience to compile Qt. I don’t. Well maybe, but I haven’t gotten around to it. I also spent some time trying to keep my Dad’s network up and running. There were Exchange Server 2003 problems that led to more and more problems which led to several hours staying up late troubleshooting a remote East Coast server. Not easy, but I ended up getting it working sometime around 4:30 just as I was leaving for work. We really need to either give in to the Evil Empire and install Windows 2003 (which will work better) or just embrace our destiny and install Linux. It’s frustrating how even small companies get into such a locked mindset regarding certain features (which are specific to Exchange Server 2003). Ah well…

I just registered a new website at andrewflanagan.info. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it up and running ASAP. The concept is to use it as a CV site per the recommendation of my friend Bill. Even though I’m currently not really looking for new employment, it can never hurt to publish your CV. We’ll see how that goes.

On other fronts, I’ve been keeping up my study of German with Saturday morning classes most weeks. I’ve been getting into the grammar a bit and feel comfortable reading short children’s stories but still have a hard time speaking the language.

I’ve also been trying to work on slogging through the MCSE and MCSD books. My hope is to get my certification in both areas by the year’s end. We’ll see how that goes.

More later… I gotta hit the sack…

It’s been a slow day for me so far… I’ve been trying to fix up some functionality in my .NET applications for work. Mixed results — I’m uncovering as many bugs as I’m fixing but at least things seem to be progressing. Currently I have two applications — one is running as a Windows Service. The second is monitoring this program and using remoting calls to retrieve statistics and get information in real-time as the process runs. Previously, if the Service was not running, the monitoring tool would hang for a while as it tries to do the remoting call and fails. To get around this issue, I have the Windows Service create a Mutex… The monitoring tool then checks this Mutex — if it exists, it knows (or at least can reasonably expect) that the remoting call will work.

This works except that the monitoring tool needs to be able to be located on any machine in the local network (not necesarily the same machine that the Windows Service is running on). I’ve just got to figure out how to do that. If any of my imaginary blog readers have any idea, please send me a [real] email. Thanks.

So, I think I’ve had a long enough break from blogging and am ready to give it another go. Not much is new in my life tech-speaking… I’ve been busy working and have spent a little bit more time working with some different Linux distros and some new software packages. Overall, I’ve mainly focused on keeping up at work and  spending time with the family (it’s harder with the little guy around now). We’ll see how this goes…