A little under a year ago, my boss and I incorporated a company to legitimize all of the side work we were doing for people. Unfortunately, thinks never went any further than filing the Articles of Incorporation.

About a week ago, my boss decided he was getting to the point where he was too busy to worry about it anyway and wanted out. As luck would have it, I was going to talk to him that same day about bringing in another person and getting things off the ground.

Instead, Duck and I are now the owners of HolosTek, Inc.. We've gotten most, if not all, of the necessary paperwork finished, and sometime next week, all of the sites will be moving to a new server. All except two, which will be receiving their own server. Shortly after that, the site redesign will be finished and we'll be up and running completely.

I was working on some graphics for HolosTek, Inc. earlier today and was having trouble deciding which font I wanted to use. The idea for a quick tool to view what I wanted in all of my fonts in a list.

Fifteen minutes later, I had a working tool for doing it. It is available for download here.

I've been working on a bigger coding project off and on (more off lately) for a couple months now. As part of the project, I wrote a screenshot capture utility. Last week, I needed a quick tool for capturing screenshots on another computer, without using Print Screen and a graphic editing program, so I pulled the code out of my big project and put together a quick utility. Took about 10 minutes to put a front end on it.

After a couple of days, I decided I'd polish it a little, although it's still really rough, and toss it out there as open source. The whole thing is written in C# using the .NET 2.0 framework. It uses GDI+ for the capture functions. If this might be something you can use, you can download it here.

If I ever get bored again, or someone asks really nicely, I might even go so far as to write documentation for it. The source code is fairly well documented, but nothing else is.

I built (or rather rebuilt) Satyr a few months ago as a Home Theater PC. At the time though, I didn't have adequate hardware to run Media Center Edition (it requires a video card that supports DirectX 9). The poor box was only running a Duron 700 though.

With the money I got for Christmas, I picked up a GeForce FX 5200 (~$50), the cheapest nVidia card that would support MCE 2005. I also installed an Athlon processor I had lying around, although it will only run at 1100MHz because the motherboard won't support it at full speed. Eventually, the machine will be upgraded more, but I don't have the money to do it yet.

The odd part of the experience was that I'd done something to make the machine fail after switching hardware out. I ended up needing to reinstall the OS to make it stable again, but it's running fine now.

Rachel's computer died on us the other day. It had several possibly unrelated failures. The CDRW died, the video card died (an interesting event in itself) and the power supply died. The video card failure may have been related to the power supply failure, but I can't be sure. Watching the video card fail was interesting though. The card was artifacting horribly. Fun to watch, but bad...

I replaced the power supply and the video card then, but both of them sucked. The card was a GeForce 256, but at least it worked. The power supply (while unknown to me at the time) had a bad fan.

When I went to the replace the video card with Satyr's old card (more on that later), I noticed the power supply (still not properly mounted in the case) was way too hot to touch. After it had cooled, I took the power supply apart and pulled out the old fan, being careful to not electrocute myself. The old fan was hard wired, so I had to tape off the leads I cut and run the leads to the new fan out where the power cords went. It's working fine now, but it scared the crap out of me being inside the power supply.

Griffin (Rachel's computer) is back up and running now with a new (old) CDRW (12/10/32), a working power supply and an ATI Radeon 7000. Also in the process of all of this, I disabled the onboard sound and enabled te SB Live! that had been previously installed. It should run a lot better now.

For the last few months at work, I had been trying to figure out an easier way to correct some problems with our servers. A few weeks ago, I had an epiphany while drivng in my car. The only problem is that it meant I had to recreate our Active Directory. That's never a fun chore.

I spent the next couple of days moving all of the server functions off of Janus so that I could reinstall Windows Server 2003 and set up a new Active Directory Forest. The process normally wouldn't have taken as long as it did, but I was also busy with other things, like the big sale we were having at the time.

After all was said and done, I had a new server, now named FN. I installed the server programs that needed to be there, like Exchange, Sharepoint Portal Services, and a few other things, and was ready to use it. Then I made a mistake somewhere. I believe my mistake was running the Security Confiuration Wizard prematurely.

Shortly after running the SCW for the first time, I discovered that I was no longer able to access any of the file sharing services on the computer. It would access shares from other computers, but none could access it. I even ran a portscan on it to verify and it showed all of the associated ports, and several others, were filtered.

My first reaction was, "Oh, it must be the built-in firewall's fault." However, that wasn't even installed at the time. After about five days of beating my head on the keyboard, I finally discovered a vague mention of a similar problem on the web somewhere that had to do with IPSec.

Once I finally figured out that it might be IPSec, I started poking around. To my suprise, none of the IPSec functions are easily accessible. To get to the IPSec configuration in Windows Server 2003, you have to open up the Microsoft Management Console and add the IPSec snap-ins yourself.

Lo and behold, IPSec, probably set by the SCW, had blocked all of the ports for file sharing and for accessing the computer as a Domain Controller. The whole thing nearly drove me (more?) insane, but it is working now. I've gotten the whole building switched over to the new domain and it's running smoothly. I've also reinstalled the other server, but I still have some programs I need to install on it to make it do what I want to do with it now.

I can't sleep because of the cold pills I'm taking, so I thought I'd make a couple of posts. Especially since I've been meaning to post several things, but haven't gotten around to it.

I find it odd some days that I'll find out about a show or get interested in it only after it's canceled. In many cases, it's because I didn't even know the show existed (Mission Hill, Undergrads). In other cases, I watched the show when it first came out, but never "followed up" on it (Babylon 5, or my current fetish, Star Trek: Enterpise). Sometimes I just missed the last couple of seasons (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine).

For the last few days, I've been watching Season 3 and 4 of Enterpise. I watched the show for the first season, and parts of the second season, but then I got busy and/or forgot about it. I've heard from people over the years that it just wasn't that good, but I love it. I'm sorry it was canceled.

There is one thing that I absolutely despise about the show: the title sequence. I don't know whose bright idea that was, but the song drives me nuts. And I've heard it so many times in the last few days that it's really starting to grate on my nerves. But there I was earlier, watching Patch Adams with Rachel, and at the beginning of the credits was that stupid song. I laughed hysterically and turned the TV off.

I've just finished migrating the photo gallery on this site to Gallery2, but I had some trouble getting it running. The integration with PHP-Nuke is still in beta, and I'm not fully convinced it supports the version of PHP-Nuke I'm running, especially with the modifications it has.

I took me about 3 tries to get it working. Eventually, I decided to install the gallery itself into /gallery2 and the integration module into /modules/gallery2 so I could keep them seperated. All of that worked, except for the utility to export the PHP-Nuke users. I had to insert the admin user directly into the database to keep it from giving me errors.

And now I have to release a new version of GeekQuotes (my quotes module for PHP-Nuke). I've been working with the webmaster for DFWLarp.com for the last few days to make it work with older version of PHP-Nuke and MySQL than I run. I should have released later tonight.

Update: It's uploaded now. I also fixed another bug that made it display a database error on occasion. You can download it from here.

I did something useful yesterday, other than just working. Actually, I did a few things, but this only concerns two of them.

Wednesday night, I was making some changes to the natd configuration file on Saturn (soon to be renamed, but that's another story). I made a mistake that I've made several times before. I forgot to add a blank line at the end of the configuration file. Even though there is absolutely no need for it to be there, the code enforces it anyway. To fix the problem, because natd wouldn't restart and I no longer had remote access to the server, I had to drive the ten minutes to work, sit in the parking lot to type 34 keystrokes to fix it and drive back. (I counted the keystrokes involved on the way back.)

I have wireless access that I can (just barely) access from the parking lot (and yes it uses some security), but that still involves driving to work if I make the mistake remotely. This is the third or fourth time I've had to drive to work to fix it in the last 2 years, so I wasn't happy.

When I got to work yesterday morning, I finally sat down with the code to natd. As I suspected, there really is no reason for it to check for a newline at the end. All it does is convert it to a null character (C's end of string character).

I made a quick patch to the file and submited a problem report to the FreeBSD project with my patch. I really hope it makes it into the code because I really hate that behavior. And also because then I can say I wrote part of FreeBSD, even if it is only like 3 lines.

I also submitted an upgrade to a port I submitted a couple months ago. The developer released a small revision, so as the maintainer of the port, I felt obligated. It only took about 20 minutes (and most of that was looking up how to submit a maintainer-update because I'd never done one before.