It seems like I just posted to this site and it’s actually been an entire week.

Lots to do — I’ve been playing around with some new geospatial software (ESRI’s GIS suite). I’ll be writing some add-on functionality to it over the next year for work. Fun stuff but a lot of material.

I’ve been struggling to get printing to work at home. I was trying to use CUPS to share a printer on my Mac. In theory I should have been able to connect to the printer from my Windows XP laptop but it doesn’t quite work. When I was troubleshooting the issue I found a number of people who had exactly the same problem with no clear-cut solution. It’s a feature. I just wonder whether it’s Apple’s or Microsoft’s fault. My guess is Microsoft.

I’ve puttered around a little bit with touching up some webpages as well as correcting some mistakes (I had DNS misconfigured for every single domain on my virtual dedicated server). I added Scuttle to my server so that I can have my own list of bookmarks that are easily retrievable and centrally stored. It’s very much like Del.icio.us but you’re not subject to their ridiculous downtimes and slow connections. I like. You can see it here.

I also got my calendar server up and running again. It’s using PHPICalendar to display iCal files (that I can edit using either my Mac or Mozilla Sunbird). Also pretty neat. I had been running it before but I’ve upgraded to the new version. I also hope to actually use the darn thing this time. You can see it in action here. I need to add my stuff to it — for now it’s just U.S. Holidays. The important thing is that I’ve confirmed it works! You expected me to actually post my boring schedule?

I’m looking into Mac-on-Linux. I just got a new hard drive for my Mac in order to support mirroring the primary drive and I was planning on blowing away the original installation in order to try this out and also to get some annoying issues fixed (from when I dorked around a little too much and messed some things up in OS X). At the very least, I want the ability to dual-boot on my Mac.

All for now,

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…

Last week I attended the Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles. Definitely a neat opportunity to learn about some new interesting Microsoft technologies. Overall, I’m not terribly impressed with how far Microsoft has come. The biggest improvements I think are in the area of the .NET languages (specifically C#). With regards to their operating system (specifically the new Windows Vista and Windows “Longhorn” Server) and some of their new concepts for OS integrated 3D graphical user interfaces I’m more worried than impressed. Almost everything that I saw I’ve seen before. The only thing “new” about is that Microsoft has put all the pieces together. Some of it looks neat, but I don’t feel that overall it’s that great. The demos that they ran during the presentations were SLOW. I have a funny feeling that Microsoft will bring a nice slick new desktop environment (that rivals the look of Mac OS X) and before long people will hate it because of how slow it is and because it crashes half the time. The stability and security of the operating system still seems attrocious. There was some neat stuff in reference to the new Communication Foundation (called “Indigo”) but I’m not sure how revolutionary it really is. It seems like Web Services are easier than before to run but I still have a hard time trusting a 24/7 Web Service to run well on any Windows platform.

All in all — a fun time — I came in 12th out of 400+ gamers in a Farcry tournament that was held one evening. I didn’t win anything, but I came close!