New Coke: The Home Network

We've got some new machines for the inventory:

• 192.168.22.3: IRIE bare metal, an HP Pavilion Slimline configured to run either CentOS Xen or Windows XP SP3 from the RIT CS Department. Running Xen is a preferred configuration, but with one major deficiency: after all driver issues have been resolved, I'm left with a setup that can't play movies and boots flash videos! Bummer. At least it makes a good fileserver.
  
• 192.168.22.48: WinXPSP3 xen cfg, boots under CentOS 5.3 Xen dom0 where everything works fine but network video performance is slow. One minor problem is a clock skew: the system reads UTC time properly from a registry hack, but when the system is left alone for a while, the clock flies ahead by four hours and has to be reset before kerberos authentication can connect to the OpenAFS cell hosted on debunst.rit.edu
  
• 192.168.22.1: The router that needs to do the magic so you can connect to either of those new machines on my home network. It's a Linksys RVS4000!
  
• 74.74.157.120: The public IP address of my home network.

The list of machines at the office needs to be updated, and a service catalog is soon to be extant.
Customers inquiring about the current state of the system: you can understand that the system is currently in use, and that a new shared instance can be provided at your request, but you should expect an expense of $300-600 for a server of similar quality delivered to your location. Configuration is a further expense that pertains to the state of the system, and I earmark this task at $200 per machine. You can run linux, you can resell services, and you ought to, if you like to help people and make money!

Facebook Work

Been contemplating lately what kind of groups and other manners of dancing that I should focus on involving myself with, centering around questions like who exactly is going to pay to fund my continued existence. This is not a question of depression, it's a matter of practicality!

The best way that I can think of to kick-start this process is to update my resume. I've been meaning for a long time to build a resume that allows central maintenance of both a printed and an online format. Second note here is that all of my previous resumes have been focused on providing a long list of technology keywords, and I'm not sure of the benefit of that anymore.

I have used a large number of programming languages and it is not helpful to enumerate them, as I will generally need to refresh myself with a book and some form of homework before I can successfully jump into another coding project. Also from my own perspective, I would rather work with a technology that is new to me than one that I have already struggled with before now, so a list of my own known technologies is almost a "bad seed" for any manager that might seek to hire me.

Also while it's helpful to know a lot of languages, usually programming takes place in one language so it could be quite helpful to regain fluency in at least one programming language before re-entering the software development job market. The neatest target language with the most interesting developer buzz ongoing today is PHP and the Facebook Platform API.

I think I'd better set up another server this evening and see for myself some of what can be done in PHP today. Facebook is an incredibly massive well-ordered database of information on groups and individuals, and I suspect the platform is especially ripe for data-driven applications! Lets get one started, or take a closer look at one of the applications that has already been developed.