Decided to finally get this stupid thing back up and running… You can just tell I’m an avid blogger, can’t you?

Posted by jarod as Uncategorized at 11:35 pm

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Well, its now official. My family is going to pack up and sell our house in Maple Valley, Washington, and move to the Westford, Massachusetts area, because I just accepted a job at Red Hat…

Posted by jarod as Linux, Red Hat/Fedora, Family at 12:53 am

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I must be the world’s laziest blogger… But hey, maybe I’ll make up for it today with some seriously hot blog-on-blog action (or something), covering ALL categories I’ve got created for this blog thingy…

Family

So, me and my family are indeed over on the Atlantic side of the United States now, living in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, just below the Massachusetts/New Hampshire border. Preston is 4 years old now and as crazy as ever, Kyla is almost 14 months old and walking/running all over the house now. We’re all looking forward to our first New England winter so we can do some serious sledding, skiiing, snow fort building, snow man building, snow ball fighting, etc. We never got more than a few days of snow every few years back in Seattle… Still need to get a snow blower or something, so we can dig our cars out once the whitewash hits…

Baseball

I had surgery on my right shoulder two weeks ago to repair a torn labrum and various other bits I managed to damage somehow. The doctor basically reattached stuff in like four different places in there. In theory, I’ll be able to throw like I used to by the time men’s league ball starts up again in the spring. Our team is already one of the favorites for league champ next year with some new guys we picked up this offseason, and we’ll be just that more nasty if I make a full recovery (didn’t pitch at all last year, could hardly throw at all). Lots of rehab working coming up, still not supposed to do much of anything with the arm, but definitely looking forward to having my arm back.

Preston is trying to make up for my inability to play ball right now. He started playing t-ball at the local indoor sports complex a few weeks ago.

Red Hat/Fedora

Dude, I work for Red Hat. I love my job. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is shaping up quite nicely. Of late, I’ve been busy beating on kdump, the new kernel crash dump mechanism we’re shipping in RHEL5, helping to whip it into shape on all supported architectures. Of course, a disproportionate amount of time has been spent making it play nice on non-x86/x86_64 architectures (i.e., ia64 and ppc64), but its been quite a bit of fun just the same.

On the home front, I’ve got this nice new fibre data pipe to my house, courtesy of Verizon FiOS, which just became available in my area. Got myself a business package with 5 static IP addresses so I can run whatever I want out of my house. That being the case, I moved my web and mail server back in-house after 6 months of having them hosted at a friend’s colo. The entire wilsonet.com domain runs on Fedora Core 6 boxes in my basement right now, with email services provided by the open-source edition of Zimbra. One of the projects on my todo list for this winter is to finally get around to setting up Asterisk, complete with tie-ins to Zimbra…

In some of the spare time I don’t really have, I’ve also been working on getting some amusing new packages into Fedora Extras. People love eye-candy, therefore, they love beryl, which is almost entirely into Fedora Extras now…

MythTV

On the MythTV front, I managed to get a Fedora Core 6-based version of Fedora Myth(TV)ology out within the first month of FC6 landing, a vast improvement from the roll-out time on the FC5 version… All my Linux boxes at home are now running FC6 (though RHEL5 is going to make an appearance shortly too). Whether or not Fedora Myth(TV)ology morphs into something RHEL5-based remains to be seen… (Maybe a custom rebuild, a la CentOS, but called Myth Enterprise Linux, with a release codename of “Blanc” or “Gibson” or “Torme”)…

Oh yeah! I keep forgetting that I really need to plug the book on MythTV I helped write. A few months back, Hacking MythTV hit the book shelves. I actually just got a copy myself a few days ago. Nice looking book, full of MythTV goodness. Go buy a copy of Hacking MythTV!

Posted by jarod as Linux, Red Hat/Fedora, Baseball, Family, MythTV at 2:05 pm

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Ooh, gonna be fun tomorrow… Traditionally, we’ve always done Thanksgiving at my folks place, since they were almost literally just over the river and through the woods. Now they’re 3000 miles worth of rivers and woods away. I’m 29 years old now, and yet, tomorrow will be the first time I’ve ever cooked a turkey myself. Fortunately, my pops has hooked it up with a dissertation on turkey, stuffing and gravy, and I’ve helped out enough in dad’s kitchen in past years, that I think it’ll all turn out okay. It had better, since we’re having company — my man Jesse, his wife and kid are in the same 3000-miles-from-home boat as we are, so we’re joining forces.

Posted by jarod as Family at 10:58 am

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After a lengthy interval between initial package submission for review and final acceptance, there are finally zabbix packages in Fedora Extras. According to the zabbix web site, it is “The Ultimate Monitoring Solution for Your IT”. I don’t actually use zabbix anymore, but used it quite heavily at a prior job, where I’d also packaged it up as an RPM, so I figured I might as well try to get it into Fedora Extras. Not sure how it compares to some of the newer players in the same space, such as Zenoss, but for what my employer at the time needed, it was better than the alternatives 2 years ago, and has improved a fair amount since then.

Posted by jarod as Linux, Red Hat/Fedora at 11:04 am

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Okay, supposedly, it rains all the time in Seattle, and Boston is supposed to be covered in snow well before Thanksgiving. However, I think my mens league baseball team here in Boston had more games rained out this summer than in I had in all the summers playing in Seattle. Then, to make it more interesting, we still have no snow in Boston, and I turn on Monday Night Football last night to catch the Seahawks in action against the Packers, and did a double-take: Qwest Field in Seattle looks more like Lambeau Field in Green Bay, because its covered in snow. Snow in Seattle before Boston?!? Dammit, I want my white Christmas (so does Jamie), so where’s this New England snow everyone keeps yapping about?!?

Posted by jarod as Uncategorized, Baseball at 11:19 am

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The post is a bit dated, but I hadn’t come across it (or even thought about it) until a friend pointed me to it today: No, You CANNOT Check My Receipt. And They Shouldn’t Check Yours. I’ll have to remember that next time I hit a store with door-monkeys…

Posted by jarod as Uncategorized at 5:16 pm

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