March 2004 Archives

Just an update on that small claims court case that Iodynamics was involved in.

The plaintiff gave us two opportunities to settle with him before he filed an appeal in response to the judgement we were given on 11 March.

We felt no need to settle with this guy and told him if he didn’t want to pay us the amount determined in the judgement, then he should go ahead with the appeal.

On 24 March, I got this e-mail from him:

Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 00:55:45 -0700

Doran,

  I filed my appeal papers today, so I'll see you again soon.

Today, we got a check from him, dated and postmarked 23 March along with a note (also dated 23 March) that says, “I’ve decided to cut my losses.”

What’s up with that?

Of course, this is the same guy who, after we tried to get him to cough up some of the dough he owed us and drop his case to avoid our countersuit, replied with, ”I smell fear.”

The unexpected check

Now we just need to see if it’s any good. :-)

Just ran across this story on The Drudge Report. WebMD is reporting a new drug that may prevent Type-1 diabetes.

So, if it all works out, this drug could be a vaccine for those at risk of developing type-1 (insulin dependent) diabetes.

As someone who already has type-1 diabetes, this is exciting to me because it may allow me to undergo a treatment which revitalizes the ability of my body to produce its own insulin without the risk of the immune system attacking the insulin-producing cells again.

WebMD has another article about stem cell research and a possible cure for type-1 diabetes. This article talks about stem cells in bone marrow as being a possible source for creating new insulin producing cells in the body.

An interesting quote from that article:

A stem cell can become an insulin-producing cell in just 10 days, [researcher Seh-Hoon Oh] adds, "thus providing an accessible cell source and a simple method for the cellular treatment of diabetes.

Inspired by a recent blog entry by Eric, I decided to have fun and post my own “Where I’ve Lived“ post. Prepare to be completely and utterly bored out of your mind.

I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah.

I’ve lived in:

• Granger/West Valley City, Utah (Age 0-16)
• Hyrum, Utah (Age 16-18)
• Logan, Utah (Age 18-20)
• West Valley City, Utah (Summer and Fall when I was 20)
• Logan, Utah (Age 20-22)
• West Valley City, Utah (Age 22)
• Salt Lake City, Utah (Age 22-23)
• Logan, Utah (Age 23-25)
• Eagan, Minnesota (long Summer internship - Age 25)
• Logan, Utah (Age 25-26)
• Hyrum, Utah (Age 26-31)
• Sandy, Utah (Age 31)

I currently live in Riverton, Utah.

I couldn't sleep. I tried to sleep, but I couldn't. I think it was primarily because I was too hot. I just spent a couple hours soaking in the bathtub and finishing the American Beauty DVD on my laptop. A few days ago I decided it was time to watch this film with the audio commentary on. It took me three viewing sessions, I think, to watch the whole thing.

I really enjoyed the commentary. It was done by director Sam Mendes and writer Alan Ball. Most of the commentary was Mendes with the occasional chuckle or expression of astonishment by Ball.

American Beauty is probably still my number one favorite movie. Some of my friends jokingly say it's because I can relate to one of the plotlines in the movie which involves an older man (Kevin Spacey) fantasizing about his high school-age daughter's best friend (Mena Suvari).

Ha ha.

But, really, this film is about honesty -- every aspect of it. Some people aren't honest with others. Some aren't honest with themselves. Some people are too honest. Others aren't honest enough.

In addition to honesty, there is this message -- that probably should have been hidden better -- that there is beauty in everything... even death.

This film was a bit controversial when it came out because it depicts or implies a number of social taboos including:

• Sexual relationships between an adult and a minor
• Extra-marital relationships
• Child abuse
• Illegal drug use
• Illegal drug use by children
• Illegal drug peddling by children
• Dysfunctional families
• Very dysfunctional families

You look at that list and you think, "Good heavens! Who in the world would want to see a movie like this?!" But when you see the film these things are not rubbed in your face. They're presented in an honest, believable, non-sensationalized way. These kinds of things could very well be happening in any seemingly normal suburban America neighborhood and American Beauty is honest enough to admit it. The film doesn't condone these things, but it doesn't condemn them either. That's really not the point of the film.

I really enjoyed Mendes' commentary. It's obvious he's very proud of this film (Mendes won best director Oscar and Golden Globe awards for it). He doesn't pat himself on the back or anything like that. He just points out very cool nuances that other cast or crew members did. Like the way the light reflects off the corner of Thora Birch's during a close-up shot as she's watching television or the way Conrad Hall lit a window at night to make it look convincingly daylit.

Anyway, I love this film. My only disappointment is that Mendes talks about the outtakes from the film in the commentary, but there are no outtakes featured on the DVD.

Here are a couple of shots Mendes' commentary enlightened me on:

A now buff Lester (Kevin Spacey) is perplexed at Angela's (Mena Suvari) reaction

Jane (Thora Birch) watches Ricky's movie intently on the television. Mendes points out the beautiful reflection of light in the corner of her eye.

Mendes points out how Colonel Fitts (Chris Cooper) is almost always in the dark shadows... just like his character.

Alright. I'm probably cooled off somewhat now. I'm going to go try to go back to bed.

And here’s an evening picture of the lights. Neat, huh?

New lights

Time for a little photo catchup.

SB66 House committee meeting

I attended a Utah House of Representatives committee meeting on February 25 at the state capitol building in which the house Public Utilities and Technology Committee discussed Senate Bill 66 which was state senator Hickman’s attempt to kill the UTOPIA project.

Lots of people from both sides of the issue showed up, but a majority of the audience was pro-UTOPIA (like me).

SB66 committee meeting

SB66 committee meeting

New lights

I mentioned a couple entries ago that I put up new track lighting in our kitchen. Here’s a daytime picture of the kitchen with the new halogen fixtures hanging from the track. I need to get an evening shot so the real effects of the lights can be seen.

You can also see the halogen undercabinet lights I installed in this image as well. Those are connected to a small touch panel which provides three level of dimming much like an ordinary touch lamp.

New lights

Iodynamics’ main server, Castro (we name all our servers after famous dictators), has been running Red Hat 7.1 since... well, since Red Hat 7.1 came out. It’s been a while.

I’ve been wanting to install some bigger hard drives in that server for a while as well. As a result, we’ve been planning on upgrading the hardware and software and I’ve been dreading the operation because I wasn’t entirely sure how long we’d be down, if I should try to set up a temporary server to handle things while Castro was down, etc.

Well, yesterday, I did it. I put in the new drives, built a new software RAID array and installed a fresh installation of Fedora Core 1 on the new array. Then, I mounted the old RAID array under the /backup directory and restored user accounts, e-mail, databases, websites, etc.

I continued restoring services and files last night and today. For the most part, everything’s worked fine. There is one problem and, fortunately, it only affects Iodynamics staff. We’ve used a secure web-based file server application for file sharing and the application (Apache::FileManager) depends on mod_perl version 1.x and Fedora Core 1 installs mod_perl v2.x. Well, Apache::FileManager wont’ work at all with mod_perl v1.x so I had a great idea (or what I thought was a great idea) of setting up a separate Apache v1.3.x server on the server with mod_perl v1.x running in it and run Apache::FileManager on a private port and then use Apache’s ProxyPass directive to have the Apache v1.3.x server handle all the file server stuff.

The Apache v1.3.x and mod_perl v1.x installation and configuration went flawlessly. Once they were configured and running, I could access the file server application via the private port just fine so I configured the Apache v2.x server to do the ProxyPass directive and gave it a whirl.

It was at that point that all the blood in my body drained into my feet.

Well, it wasn’t that dramatic, but it became pretty obvious that I didn’t think about the implications of having both mod_perl v1.x and mod_perl v2.x installed on the same machine: namespace corruption.

I tried cleaning up the mess I had made to no avail. In the end (after 2 hours or so of trying), I ended up uninstalling the perl RPM and all the Perl module RPMs, doing an rm -rf on the /usr/lib/perl5 directory, and then reinstalling Perl and all the Perl module RPMs as well as mod_perl v2.x. After that, I was back to having a functional web server, but the file server application still didn’t work.

I’m still not sure what I’m going to do about this. I could use another Iodynamics server as a dedicated Apache v1.3.x server and run all stuff that requires mod_perl v1.x on that server, but I’d rather not.

So, my best (male) friend Chadd did a wonderful thing for me today.

There’s was a film made in 1998 or so called π (That’s “pi” for you symbollically-challenged people).

This accoladed indepedent film is about a rogue mathematician who is doing some wild research into detecting and tracking mathematical patterns — specifically in the stock market. His research makes him the prey of the government and a fanatical sect of hasidic jews.

The soundtrack to the movie is out of this world. It’s a continuous mix of ambient/techno tracks interspersed with soundbites from the movie. I had the soundtrack on CD and loved it but then it got lost — along with nine or ten other favorite titles — when I lost my CD wallet a couple years ago.

I’ve managed to replace most of the CDs that were in that wallet. I had high-quality rips of most of them anyway, so I could still listen to the music. For one reason or another, however, I didn’t have a rip of the π soundtrack. I kept my eye out for it at music stores and used CD shops, but never saw it and started looking for it online. I quickly discovered why it was never showing up in stores: it’s out of print.

This made me sad.

There were some online vendors selling this “rare,” “collectible“ soundtrack CD online for upwards of $50 and I probably would have eventually broken down and spent the money. Luckily, I didn’t have to.

Chadd has a subscription with some Russia-based online music site. Everything’s legitimate, from what we can tell; He’s not one of these crazy music-swapping criminals. He found the π soundtrack on the site and downloaded it for me. It was in MP3 format and was encoded at 192kbps (a pretty high bitrate).

He told me about this download today and let me get to it to download it to my machine. As soon as I started playing the first track, I had shivers going up my spine and a big grin on my face. It’s quite a reunion — me and π.

Listening to the soundtrack makes me want to watch the film again. This is one film that is definitely “projector-worthy.” That is, I could set up a video projector and watch it on a big screen. Apparently, the band owns a projector now. Maybe I should ask Thom about getting my grubby hands on it and inviting him and some others over for some movie-watchin one night.

That’d be fun.

I finally got around to putting up the track lighting in the kitchen tonight. This involved bellycrawling in the attic space between the roof and the vaulted ceiling because I had to put in a new electrical box. Then, when everything was done, there were no fancy halogen bulbs to put in the lights.

I went to 'Smiffs' and to 'Wallow*Mart' but neither had the bulbs I need.

It looks cool even though it serves no purpose at this point.

I e-mailed a friend of mine who wanted to know what the story was on this court case. Upon reviewing my e-mail to my friend, I realized it was a good summary of everything and it deserves to be posted here.

A friend of ours asked us to help a friend of his get his record company website up in 2002. He wanted us to do it cheap as a favor. Like... $500. We told him he couldn't have any kind of secure ordering for that little money, but we'd encrypt order data and e-mail it to him encrypted (i.e. PGP) so at least part of the process would be encrypted.

So, the client changed a bunch of stuff half-way through the process, balked at the cost to make the changes and then demanded we use PayPal (which we probably should have considered). We told him we'd be happy to set up his site to use PayPal if he'd just pay up his unpaid balance ($519). He refused and said he didn't understand why we didn't just spent the "5-10 minutes" to "install" PayPal on his site.

When we wouldn't back down, he told us to take the site down. We never got our money.

Fast forward to November 2003. He contacts us about getting his domain name (which we registered for him). We told him we'd be happy to help him if he paid up his unpaid balance. He threw a fit and said there was no way he was ever going to pay us. We told him we'd help him if he paid us. He said he was going sue us. We told him his domain name had already expired and was picked up some guy in California. He filed a small claims lawsuit. We filed a countersuit to get our unpaid balance.

March 11, 2004: Judge rules in favor of Iodynamics - says we had "the right to reasonable assurance of satisfaction before providing services" — that is, we had every right to ask for payment before doing as our client requested.

The next day, he e-mailed me and told me not to bother sending him an invoice because he's going to appeal the judgement. I suspect he doesn't know you're supposed to have grounds to appeal.

I’ve had a rough day today. Been a little depressed and not motivated to do anything at all.

I probably slept 12-14 hours.

Today was Iodynamics’ day in court.

And what a day it was! In fact, I think 11 March 2004 should go down in Iodynamics history as a day Iodynamics entered a new era of business.

As for the court case, we defended ourselves against our ex-client’s lawsuit and we won our countersuit. I felt quite a satifying relief when it was over.

Incidentally, I met this ex-client for the first time today. I’d communicated with him via e-mail several times, but my partners Mike and Dave were the only ones who had ever met with him in person. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I found him to be a pretty nice guy who, unfortunately, doesn’t know diddly about computers or the Internet — which is what got us into the legal mess.

In other news, two Iodynamics clients gave us bright green lights on substantial programming projects today. This is in addition to another bright green light we got from a new client during the last week for a very substantial programming project. Then, late this afternoon, another client called me to have us build a new desktop computer.

Right here, right now, things are looking pretty good.

Ugh... I’m sick with a cold.

It’s not that bad... just a cold, but it’s enough to slow me down. I’m popping sudafed and ibuprofen regularly because I read an article a year or so ago that this combination of drugs worked better than anything else to keep symptoms at bay. It’s worked pretty well for me in the past.

Hopefully, I’ll get better by Monday. We’ll see.

3G

We met my parents today and had lunch together. Then, we went to J.C. Penney and had some pictures taken in the portrait studio there of Eli, my dad, and me. This was planned because Eli’s resemblance of me and my dad is uncanny. The previews of the pictures look adorable. It’ll be a couple weeks before we get the finished product, but I’ll get them up on the site when that happens.

The hearing for the small-claims case against me and Iodynamics is coming up this next Thursday. That’s something else to look forward to reading about.

Oh, this is awesome news for me and anyone else afflicted with type-1 diabetes.

As reported by Wired News, there is now hope for diabetics in the form of transplantation of embryonic pancreatic cells from pigs. Apparently, because the pancreatic insulin-producing cells are so young, they’re unlikely to cause rejection issues commonly found in transplantation.

Exciting stuff! Here’s the story: http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,62454,00.html

UTOPIA is not dead.

The Utah state legislature passed a much-watered down version of Senate Bill 66 a mere 30 minutes before the close of the legislative session.

If signed into law by the governor, the 18 current member cities of UTOPIA would be allowed to proceed with bond financing as planned as long as they allow for more format public input.

The proposed law requires other cities to hold public elections to acquire bond financing to build a telecommunications system like UTOPIA. I’m not personally worried about that so much because I think it’s going to be at least a couple of years before that happens. A lot will happen between now and then.

In any case, we need to party!

Thanks to ilovebacon.com.

What a frustrating (but still fun) weekend!

Christine’s birthday

Christine’s birthday was Saturday, but I knew Sons Of Nothing had a show scheduled for that day, so I arranged with Christine that we do our birthday celebration on Friday.

For her birthday, I took Christine to see the film The Testaments at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. It’s a film about... well, it’s a Mormon church thing.

I didn’t enjoy it anywhere near as much as Legacy — the film the church used to play there — but I really did enjoy the scenery and prop work in the film.

Christine wanted to have lunch at Panda Express, but we couldn’t find one and we didnm’t want to drive to Sandy, South Jordan, or West Jordan where there were locations we knew about. Because our kids were staying with my mom in West Valley, we went to Chinese Gourmet nearby for lunch. It was good.

And speaking of chinese food, I’m finally getting pretty good at figuring out how to eat chinese without pushing my blood-sugar through the roof.

Friday night, our family went to Smiths and bought a german chocolate round birthday cake. As I type this entry two days later, the cake is gone and it has only been eaten by us. :-)

Sons of (Absolutely) Nothing

The big Sons Of Nothing show planned for Saturday night at Club Sound (previously known as Club Bricks, AKA “Salt Lake’s dyke joint a few years back”) was cancelled at the last minute by the club. Nobody’s real sure why.

It may have been because of the weather, but the weather (snow) wasn’t anything like it was on 27 December 2003 when the band played there before and still drew a healthy crowd.

The fact is, Thom knew a lot of people were coming. One of the band members had invited a group from her work to see the band and they had confirmed they were coming. Thom had received e-mail from several people, some of which were traveling from out of state to see the show.

And that’s not all. The band had made arrangements for a fill-in sax player to do the show since John Flanders — the regular reedblower — had other committments that night. And, to top it off, drummer Greg had to bail on the show at the last minute because his wife had a medical emergency and had to be transported to an out-of-state facility and he went with her.

Thom lined up a stand-in (drum-in?) drummer for the show... who had all his gear set up on stage before the cancellation announcement.

I showed up at 6:30 Saturday night with all my gear. The show had just been cancelled. The club manager was distressed. She was taking orders from the club owner and didn’t like any of it.

Thom was distressed because there were members of the band and tech crew who didn’t know either because they hadn’t shown up yet or because they had left to run errands and what-not and hadn’t come back yet. Plus, there was the issue of all these people he knew were planning to come to this show...

I waited around while the drummer quietly packed up his gear and Thom got hold of everyone else who didn’t know about the cancellation. Then I gave Thom a ride home.

Thom was adamant he be professional about the whole situation in order to maintain the band’s local reputation as being easy to work with. He told me he was disappointed but he didn’t want to be bitter. I told him it might be okay to be bitter, but to be professional about it... “Be professionally bitter,” I suggested. Then I said that sounded more like someone who was bitter for a living.

All in all, it sucked.

Eli’s sick

Eli has got something — the doctor says it’s probably RSV. This, of course, strikes fear in mine and Christine’s hearts because Lucy spent nearly a week in the hospital on oxygen with RSV when she was just a couple months old. It’s not a fun thing to deal with.

So far, I’d say Eli’s doing okay. I remember Lucy’s demeanor was kind of catatonic at times when she had it. Eli’s cheerful personality still shines through even though he’s sick. He still laughs when we snort at him and smiles or laughs when he sees his reflection.

I just hope it gets better and not worse.

VPN!

One of our NetGateway clients wants to set up VPN services so that some employees may work from home. Because of the nature of their business, it’s crucial the VPN be secure and encrypted.

Because of this, I’ve chosen OpenSWAN — an open-source IPSEC implementation based on another open-source project called FreeSWAN — along with a L2TP daemon to provide compatibility with Windows VPN clients.

I’ve discovered setting this stuff up on the server is no easy task. In fact, I have yet to successfully do it.

Here’s the set up:

In order to work with Windows 2000 clients, you have to use a version of OpenSWAN set up to use X.509 certificates. Because our situation involves the remote user sitting behind a firewall doing network address translation (NAT), we also need NAT traversal (NAT-T) code compiled into OpenSWAN.

Finding prebuilt Linux packages of plain vanilla FreeSWAN or OpenSWAN is pretty easy. Even finding some with X.509 support isn’t that hard. But I have yet to find some that has the NAT-T code patched in.

So, I’ve resorted to compiling from source. It hasn’t been fun.

We were hoping to get this all tested and installed this weekend and here it is 2:30 a.m. Monday morning and I still have no VPN.