Before & After: A Tale of Data Cabling

Saturday, I tackled a beast.

It wasn’t anything of insane epic porportions, and in reality it only took a couple hours but I felt like sharing.

The picture on the far left is of a clients data rack (after I removed the non-functional and abandonded equipment). Long story short, this is what happens when you don’t have a clear plan, or a single person to make decisions.

There were more problems than the obvious mess:

• Troubleshooting connectivity problems with this tangled mess can make a grown man cry.
• With so much extra cable in such a tangled mess, your chances of Alien Crosstalk goes up, which ultimately means poor network performance.
• The weight of the unsupported cable puts kinks in the cables at the plugs, as well as can damage the connections resulting in poor conductivity (again, ultimately poor network performance).
• Its not apparent (and took me nearly an hour to fully navigate) but the switches on this rack (and there are 5 in use) are daisy chained together, which means that the network had severe bottlenecks, as well, if a device in the middle of the chain were to fail, everything below it would stop working.

The simple solution, get the right sized patch cables for the job. In my case, I was able to layout the equipment in such a way that I could do just about everything with 1′ patch cables. I also re-structured the topography into a star with the switch at the very top of the rack acting as the center of my star. It does unfortunatly mean I still have a single point of failure that could take down the network, but if any one of the other switches fail only devices connected directly to that switch will go down, so I see it as an improvement. Rebuilding the topography also means I don’t have the same bottlenecking problem I had before. Internal traffic now has a maximum of three hops, as opposed to the potentially 6 hops in the prior design.

I’ve asked the client to keep an eye on things, see if the improvements are actually noticable or not. They han’t had any serious problems before so I won’t be supprised if the changes are not readily noticable to the end users. If they do though, it’ll be in the voice quality of their VoIP phone system. At the moment on busy days they get a noticable degredation of the voice quality, and without QoS capable switches there isn’t anything I can do besides hope the drop in packet loss due to the rebuild is enough to subdue the problem until I can get new switches.

Turning 25

I don’t know what there is to say. I’m older. I got some awesome stuff. I went on a treasure hunt. Enjoy some pictures from the event . I’ll have more info on a few of these items when I get a chance.

Kerry got me a huge BBQ, this thing rocks like you wouldn’t believe!

The sign reads “Beware: Poker Players and Loose Women Are Known to Frequent This establishment” (From Keith)

USB Controlled Missle Launcher. Hell Yes. (From Meghan).

My parents got me a new desk chair, but sent me on a treasure hunt to find it first.

http://www.vimeo.com/1051802

Drupal DKP Module

The Drupal DKP module will allow you to pull data from an existing eqdkp installation and display DKP stats directly in your Drupal setup. Currently this version is very beta, and there are no options. Your EQDKP installation needs to be in the same database as Drupal, and needs to have ‘eqdkp_’ in front of all table names. You can see it in action on guilds website.

Pulls DKP information from an existing EQDKP installation and displays it in Drupal.

Details

Drupal DKP integrates with EQDKP by giving you the following functionality:

• Display current standings
• Display loot distribution
• Display raid history
• Display individual member history (loot, raids etc)

Dependencies

The loot linking relies on functions from the drupal_armory module, which is located at http://losmuertos.houseofbob.net.

Installation

1. Download the module archive and expand it (you’ve likely already done this).
2. Put the ‘dkp’ folder in your modules directory. Since the /modules/ folder is typically reserved for Drupal core modules, as of version 5.x you should create a sites/all/modules/ directory and put uploaded modules there.
3. Go to administer > site building > modules. Check the ‘Enabled’ box next to the module and then click the ‘Save Configuration’ button at the bottom.
4. Go to administer > users > access control and make sure you set the permissions up, otherwise nobody else will be able to view the page.
5. Go to administer > site building > menus and create add a menu item (typically in your primary links). The name and description are arbitrary, but the path needs to be ‘dkp’.

Configuration

There are currently no configuration options available.

Known Issues

• The wow_armory plugin has many known bugs and is officially unsuported. You may find that item names (typically ones with symbols in the name) will not link properly. This is a bug of wow_armory, and there is nothing I can do. The workaround is to enter the item ID in EQDKP instead of the name.

Frequently Asked Questions

What do I do if my eqdkp tables start with something other than ‘eqdkp_’.

You’ll need to go through the dkp.module file and replace every instance of ‘eqdkp_’ with whatever your tables start with. I hard coded the table names because I built this module for personal use, I never planned for it to be release to the public.

What do I do if my eqdkp database is not in the same location as my drupal database.

Because I built this module for personal use, I never planned for this. Without making significant changes to the code, its just not possible.

Anything else?

That about does it – enjoy!

A Sign?

HD-DVD & Blu-Ray. In the end the battle between the two formats will conclude when dual-format players are readily available and studios start choosing whichever format is cheaper to manufacture.

But for now there is a battle, one which HD-DVD seems to have at least gotten a jump on. What evidence do I base this on? Its hardly scientific, but head over to Amazon and search for the regular DVD version of “Planet Earth”, or just click here.

As a quick side note… Blue Planet is an incredible series that takes you everywhere on earth, and its truly amazing to watch in HD.

Anyway, back on topic. The basis I have for my “HD-DVD is winning” argument is this, scroll down a little on the page and you’ll see the section that lists “What customers ultimately bought after viewing this item” and you’ll see that 7% of people ultimately bought the HD-DVD version, and 4% ultimately bought the Blu-Ray version.

Scientific, hell no… good enough for me? Of course.

That is all.

New Car!

No, not for me. For Kerry!

Last night, we signed the papers for a 1999 Volkswagon Passat GLX. Its a really sweet car with all the features – Heated Leather Seats, Dual Climate Control, Power everything including passengers seat, sunroof, 8 speaker sound system, 190hp V6 with 206 ft\pds of torque. Everything.

Anyway, she couldnt drive it home last night because its not insured, but today we are going to get the insurance and when she gets the car Ill take pictures of it, for now all I have is the one picture that the dealer had on the web.

On Top of the World

I would like to take a quick break from cleaning up the house to praise Becca and her Lasagna that she broght over last night! It was delicious. We all used the new patio furnature too, so that was cool.

I had a great week, and the weekend looks to be just as good. I had Monday off for the holiday, see the post below about that though. Tuesday was back to the daily grind at work, but in the afternoon I got invited to go golfing, to take a couple of our clients out to improve our relationship with them. Why me? Because the clients were IT personel so since Bill and I are the “IT and Infrastrucutre” design team at EDC we were the ones who went. But the best part is WHERE I got to go golfing. We went to Edgewood in South Lake Tahoe. The home of the Senior Tour. It is an extreemly nice course, where the rough is better groomed than some of the fairways I’ve played on. I burnt the top of my head, but otherwise had a great time.

Then Thursday I took the day off and went down to six flags with Matt Lockyer, Chadd, Keith and Meghann. We got a bit of a late start and then took a long time getting into the park. I had a little leatherman squirt on my keychain and they wouldn’t let me in because of it, so I had to go all the way back out the car to leave the pocket knife (which if you’ve ever been to six flags, you know its no short walk). Then, we all bought season passes ($70 for a season pass, $40 for general admission, so if you go twice you’ve paid for it). We didn’t get our passes all taken care of until almost noon. We then procceded to ride Medusa three times, Vertical Velocity, and Boomerang (which I skiped and ate garlic fries). We also watched their whale show and got soaked on the log drop ride.

And Thursday evening The Usuals played at The Boardwalk, which was another great show. The Owl Club still sounded better, but there were quite a few more people at the Boardwalk, and it sounds like they may be playing there again in the near future.

Anyway, I should get back to cleaning the house up.

“Promotion” & North Carloina

I’ve been with Electrical Design Consultants for a few weeks shy of 5 years, and I strongly belive that it has been one of the best places for me, mentally, socially and financially. When I was hired I was asked to take on some programming and application mantinance tasks, and unfortunatly I never really got out from under it. Until now. I have a meeting Monday with my boss to finalize the purchase of a project management system that will alivate a vast majory of my programming responsibilties, finally freeing me up to design and an engineering internship.

Along with these new responsibilties comes some nice cushy bonuses, like training seminars. The industry I work in (generally refered to as the construction industry, but more specifically the design portion of that) is run, frankly, but a lot of politics. Wire is Wire is Wire, and there really isn’t any way around that. So when a company like Amp Netconnect wants to sell you on using their wire, they do it by a sly means of indebtment that is commonly refered to as “schmoozing” a client. The wonderfull cushy bonus I was refering to above is that now I am the client, and I get to be schmoozed every once in a while.

This is where the rest of the title comes in. Tyco (who owns Amp Netconnect) is flying me to North Carolina and putting me up in the Graylyn Confrence Center (along with a bunch of other people from around the western third states) for an event that includes a tour of their manufacturing facilities, a day of seminars (training/marketing on their equipment and products) and a golf event.

I’d never heard of Graylyn Confrence Center (not sure why I would have), so I went and looked it up online, and below is a picture they have on their site of the facility where I will be staying (I’m still trying to pick up the pieces of my jaw). For a full screen slideshow, click here or the picture below. (I had this slideshow embedded in the post, but I removed it because I thought it might take a while to load on slow connections).

My boss has also put me on the team that will be doing the future Raging Wire projects, so I’m greatly looking forward to that. But for now, I should get back to work.

Today’s the day

The cash is in the bank, the reviews have been checked and double checked and the excitement has built up near insanity.

Today, the Westinghouse 42″ 1080p HDTV LCD Monitor will be mine! With full 1920×1080 resolution, it has the ability to accept 1080p signals making it the most “HDTV” flat-panel you can buy. Making sure I’m ready for the new high-definition disc formats: HD DVD and Blu-ray.

phpBB “Conquering Olympus” Bertie Bear

I support OpenSource projects, but usually by helping with support and development. phpBB is by far the signle open source project I have put the most time, effort into supporting because although its not the most fantastic php application around – Gallery2 has that honor in my books – it is one of the most versitile applications I’ve worked on.

So to show my support for the newest version, soon to be available as a beta I went ahead and ordered one of the Bertie Bears they are selling. I’m not completely sure what I’ll do with the bear, its the second stuffed bear I’ve bought in a month. The first was actually a Build-a-Bear that Amy and I made at the Arden Mall (we named him Safari Jack because we put him in a safari outfit). I’ll see if I can take a picture to post up with the Bertie Bear picture below.

Definatly the Site

Well I thought that knowing CSS, HTML and a little of design principals I could create a MySpace page that was at least decent, showing that at least part, if not all of the poorly done myspace pages were the fault of the owner not the site. My conclusion? Its the site, at least 75% of all shitty designs spur from the fact that you can’t do shit with the design.

This explains why band pages and people who are represented on MySpace but obviously have the resources to make a nice page have totally bone stock profiles, you can’t do shit with it. I spent a good couple hours trying to just clear the formatting they have so I could use my own, but everything is hard coded into the HTML and nearly impossible to overcome not to mention I would have no way of formatting one item at a time due to the total lack of class’s and id’s in the entire site.

I gave up after only getting this far: http://www.myspace.com/indemnity83

I’m going to see if I can develop something that would display like MySpace does, but be nearly completly CSS driven. It would be a good base to start from if I wanted to make a better myspace.