HalfLoaded.com

So, I am posting this everywhere and I now realize why new parents are so annoying. Last night, at 11:52pm, nearly 15 hours into labor, Rose gave birth to our first baby. She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Rose had a pretty hard labor. Everything was progressing pretty quickly until baby decided she couldn’t make it down the birth canal. I am being blamed for her big head but I don’t really care now.

The doctors had to do an emergency cesarean section because of mom’s fever and baby’s heart rate. We were all scared but everything went smooth and she came out crying and breathing on her own.

I don’t know how I am going to leave her or her mom in six days. It will probably be the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Sorry about the broken comments. I updated the back-end of the website due to some security concerns and forgot to replace some of my php code. They should be working again. I’ll try not to do that again ;)…

Here are some links for our upcoming deployment…

• 2d LAAD Bn Photo Albums
• Contact Me
• MotoMail - Send letters via e-mail
• Multi-National Forces West - The command for Al Anbar Province, Iraq (Good source for news. The part the national media doesn’t tell you)

I fixed the comments so everybody should be able to leave comments without logging in. There is an anit-spam measure asking a simple math question before the comment will be allowed. I hope this allows more people to post comments.

So, my sister is going to have another boy. She sent out an e-mail today announcing the great news. I have no doubt he will be just as awesome as my other nephew, Hunter. I really hope I will be home to meet the new addition to my family before I leave for my deployment. Congrats Jess (and Sean, Lotus and Hunter!)!

I finally got around to the latest version of adumass. This was a major release as it fixed some pretty serious bugs and also greatly improved the UI and backend code. I also added a few functions for data validation. Thanks to all those that have helped and submitted support requests. The next version should have a translation pack for those users that don’t habla englais.

So, I am pleasantly surprised with Fedora 8. This has to be the best release yet. So far, the only thing I am missing is Cinelerra. I’m having some dependency issues with the freshrpms repository so I guess I just need to compile from source. The only other issue I have had is with NetworkManager-vpnc. Removing NetworkManager and reinstalling it form the development tree fixed the issues. I check the changelog and it looks like the fixes should make their way into the tree.

Other than those little things, everything works like a top. I am constantly amazed at the quality of software put out by the community. It’s too bad more people don’t see what OSS does and can do for them. I can’t thank the community enough. With their help, I’m able to do everything I could ever imagine on my pc (and more). They are the ones who have and will be helping me keep in contact with my family while I am deployed to Iraq. Thank you!

I’ve been constantly perplexed by the poor performance of the latest wordpress version. Today I finally got an error letting me know that my Bad Behavior plugin had banned me from logging in. At that point, I got pissed. My credentials were cached but for some reason, it identified me as a bad host. A quick rm -fdr on the damn directory fixed that. And, low and behold, all the performance issues I have been experiencing were fixed. Note to self, before bitching to your ISP, check all your bases to make sure it wasn’t something you were doing.

I just ran across a great cgi:perl script for running anonymous proxies. Its called CGIProxy. An easy way to find it around the net is to google: nph-proxy. Also, here is a link to the home page for the beta version: CGIProxy Beta.

So, I can finally start getting my systems ready for my upcoming deployment. Today, Fedora 8 was released to the masses. It took me a good 15 minutes to find an FTP server that had actually sync’d (ftp.fi.muni.cz). I was actually surprised to find it still had bandwidth. As the morning has progressed, the mirrors have progressively become bogged down. Sucks for them! I got my copy! I hate to leech but I can’t use bittorrent at work so I guess that is my only option.

My goal is to get a steamlined Fedora 8 install setup with all the perf tweaks I can. This is going to be my home away from home while I am gone so I want to get it setup as nice as I can. I am going to try putting a lot of software on it so I can evaluate the many applications I have never had the chance to.

It’s time to burn a DVD. I’ll be writing about Fedora 8 a lot so stay tuned if you are interested. BTW, the hardware I am running it on is a Dell D610 w/ 1.5GB RAM and a 200GB 7200RPM disk. Nothin’ too out of the ordinary.