Utah Open Source Planet

I am sure there is something metaphysical going on here…but I am not sure what.

Negative File Delete

I’ve started watching a new summer show on Fox: Mental.  It is has been somewhat intriguing thus far.  It is, however, formulaic:  Dr. solves problems in an “hour”, but can’t solve his own problem(s) during a season or ever on the show. (Think House, another Fox show … which I enjoy because Dr. House is such a jerk.) [You can catch both shows on Hulu.]

In the second episode of this inaugural season of Mental, the two residents are sitting down for lunch in the hospital doctors lounge. As Dr. Suarez sits on the couch next to Dr. Artis, the camera pans to catch the coffee table in front of the couch and this is what we see:

If you didn’t catch that, here is the screen capture:

You may want to click on the image to get a better view, but check out the book.  That’s right …. a 1997 Que, Special Edition of Using Microsoft Visual InterDev.  Now I know there are Drs. out there who have development skills.  In fact, my kids’ pediatrician is one.  He and I have talked about his hacking on his office’s Patient and Records system, customizing and writing extensions.  But why would any prop or set person drop a 1997 Visual InterDev book in this scene?  And even worse the book was horrible, I had it at a previous job. You don’t have take my word for it, check out the reviews on Amazon.

Over the past few weeks I have had the chance to do a couple of presentations.  One at UTOSC on Enterprise Document Management and another as part of the Alfresco Developer Series on building VMWare Appliances with Alfresco.

Links to the slide decks are here and here.

A recording of the VMWare Presentation can be found here.

We are at the first soccer practice of the season. It is awesome to see the vast improvement in Taylor’s and Andrew’s ball handling abilities and listening skills over last year.

Taylor is a bit more serious about playing and Andrew is doing quite well even if he is a bit distracted.

They both have school friends on the team. Andrew gave one of his friends a great big hug when he saw him. Taylor has one of his best friends from last years team and first grade class. The coach is quite serious about the game, which I really like. It is still very early to tell if this will be their sport. One can only hope.

UPDATE:  I am now the assistant coach.

We just finished upgrading our home server. The migration, while it took time, was rather easy. I combined our separate blogs all under a Wordpress MU install to simplfy maintenance. One thing that I am happy about with the upgrade, besides improved performance, is that the iPhone wordpress app now works. I had errors connecting before. One thing that helped in configuring the app is improved error handling in the latest version. The initial release would always just die when trying to connect with no errors. I tried sniffing the connection, but unsuccesfully.

As I contiunue to use the app, I’ll update you on to what I like and don’t like. For now I’m happy!

I keep meaning to post more on the things I read, listen to and watch.

I watched the dramatization of the play My Boy Jack by David Haig.  It is the beautifully told story of Rudyard Kipling and his son Jack.  Jack was extremely myopic, but wanted, like every other young man his age, to join the war effort.  Kipling did all he could to help Jack become an officer after Jack had failed to get in twice.  Jack was declared missing in the Battle of Loos. It was nearly two years before Jack was declared KIA.  It was after this that Kipling wrote the poem My Boy Jack.

My experience with Kipling and author authors of WW I literature goes back to working at the BYU Library.  I was asked by Librarian Robert Means to help create a web site to go along with an exhibit he was putting together as an Anthology of World War I Literature.  While the web site is nothing to yell home about (I was just learning),  the content is great.  I’d recommend anything found on the site.

Errands run, kids in bed, and Krull On Demand. Finally, sometime to put some thoughts down about building the Alfresco Appliance.

Some of what I write here refers back to when I original put together, the first version of the appliance. Some is from revisiting it for this release.

Choosing a distribution

I started playing with building an appliance right about the time that Ubuntu announced their Jeos distribution. I have a strong preference for openSUSE and would have liked to have built the appliance on it. (LimeJEOS answers my concerns, and I am excited to give it a spin. Just a few more things to move off my plate before I can devote time to it.) I tried several different distributions: Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Puppy Linux, Zen Walk. I liked some, was optimistic about others, and disappointed and frustrated with a couple.

What I wanted was a distribution that provided me a small lightweight base, and gives me the ability to add just the packages I needed to run my application. Most of these came in close to what I wanted, but due to dependencies, grew to be much larger than I wanted. Some didn’t even provide me with a nice clean way to get the applications I was dependent on. Those I dropped immediately. Those with decent package mangers got pluses. I wanted to be to keep base packages up to date.

This brings us to Ubuntu Jeos (Just Enough OS). It gave me the size, the packages, and the manager that met my base criteria for a distribution.

Getting Started

While the base install is already fairly small, there still are many packages that I was going to need and not need. This takes some time, but go through the installed packages and identify what you aren’t and are going to need. Make a list and develop a script to remove the ones you don’t need. Another to add the ones you need. You may like to have some of the packages around while developing your appliance, but when you go to deliver it they may add more weight than what you would like, or give tools that just aren’t need by your appliance, or your end users. Keep them installed until you are sure they aren’t needed any more. My list includes: man pages, wireless-tools, sound packages, laptop packages, different editors, hardware utilities, etc. Your list will vary. Sometimes you may want to force remove dependent packages if you know their functionality is not needed. Don’t be afraid to take them out.

I know my list is not perfect, but over time it will improve. Some of this will come with trial and error. Don’t expect to get it right the first time.

Once I narrowed the package list, I started to add my dependent packages. Some of these could require you to re-add removed packages. That is why I suggest leaving packages installed until you have all your dependencies installed.

One of the cornerstones of an appliance is zero configuration. You want people to be able to just deploy the appliance, start it and use the appliance. In the case of Alfresco, it needs Tomcat to be started at boot time. For this I needed an init script. (Mine can be found here.) I use the init script to start Tomcat, start needed services, and perform runtime configurations.

Alfresco is a web-based application, so I need a way to provide the URL needed by users to access the application. For an appliance this can be changed from install to install. There are several ways to handle this, eventual, you will want to have a static address or use Dynamic DNS to update IP to name mappings. My appliances is primarily for evaluation. It is not really ideal to play with DNS or static IPs. I have kept the implementation simple, I’ve created a script that updates the /etc/issue file with runtime URL. (The script I use is here.) The major issue I faced was when the script was to be run. I placed the script in /etc/network/if-up.d. I fully expected it to be run when the interface came up. The script did run when I manually ran ifup. But it didn’t run in every case, especially the most import, at boot time. I tried several different things to work through this. I added a reference to the script into /etc/network/interfaces using the post-up directive. (in openSUSE, you would add a POST_UP_SCRIPT=”<name of your script>” to the interface file in /etc/sysconfig/network and put the script in /etc/sysconfig/network/scripts). This added a bit more power, but did quite fix my problem. I finally narrowed it down to udev. The interface was being brought up by udev, but when /etc/init.d/networking is run, it runs ifup with a -a option (all interfaces marked auto). The problem with this is if the interface is already up, the associated scripts won’t be run. I haven’t found an appropriate fix for this yet. (Any ideas?) So I just disabled the udev rule for the network interfaces . rPath has a good solution for this, they change /etc/issue file in an init script. I like this idea, but didn’t want to write another init script or pollute my existing alfresco init script with this.

Plans for the Future

One of the things that I want to do is provide some Alfresco branding to the appliance. I also want to create some more production ready appliances that use MySQL and point at an external virtual drive to store content and the indexes.

What is Missing

One of the big things that is missing in a management interface for the appliance. rPath provides a very nice extensible web-based administrative interface. It is extensible both for function and branding. But it is rPath specific. I’d like to see an open source cross distro solution. One that was not only extensible but adds CIM based management features. This would make it easy to administer the CIM instrumented applications on the appliance, but also could allow it to be managed externally, but CIM enabled management tools. This would allow the appliance to play nicely in the data center. This is something that Xen is working toward.

Update: Those who downloaded the appliance, may have noticed a packaging problem (ie part of it was missing! :()  I have fixed that as well as done a little tunning and a few modifications.  I’ll post about those later.

Available now! I’ve just finished the latest evaluation version of the VMware based Alfresco Appliance built on the latest Alfresco Enterprise release 2.1.2. This is a full 30-day trial release. It comes with the core Document Management Repository and Web Content Management pre-installed.

This is based on my previous work using Ubuntu Jeos. (I am, however, keen to try out LimeJeos based on openSUSE.)

A couple notes:

• When it first starts, Alfresco will take a few minutes to come up fully. It is creating the initial DB. Subsequent restarts are quicker.
• This is an evaluation appliance. So once you start it, you have 30-days before the trial expires.
• When the appliance first starts it will ask you if you copied or moved the appliance. The correct answer is moved it.

Look for other (community) appliances in the next month or so. I also have some RPMs for Alfresco Community in the works (using the openSUSE Build Serivce). I’ll post more this evening about what I learned since the last time I built the appliance.

Today is World Autism Awareness Day, and as the father of an aspie, I’d like to encourage everyone to take a moment to learn a little more about Autism. 1 in 150 children are diagnosed with Autism.

There are some great resources out there to learn more about Austism:

• www.autismspeaks.org
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome

Wired had a great article in February. CNN is doing a full day of coverage. And the Sundance Channel will be showing Autism Everyday.

My sons have fallen in love with PC Gaming.   (They play Wii and XBox, but not with the same obsession as PC based games.) They used to just play the flash based online games from websites they would visit (cartoonnetwork.com, nickjr.com, etc.)  Then their uncles introduced them to StarCraft and WarCraft.  And they are hooked.  One of the nice things is that I have been able to recycle some of my old games (RollerCoaster Tycoon, Sim City 3000, Nox).  It has been fun seeing them explore these new virtual worlds.  Taylor is super excited about the upcoming release of StarCraft 2 and dreams of one day working at Blizzard.  Andrew wants to be a game designer.  Everyother day they ask me how to write programs.  These conversations lead to discussions on basic algebra, physics and even Object Oriented Programing.  (Anyone interested in providing pre-release games for them to test or review?)

Today I thought that it would be fun to install one or two games on my machine for those times that I need at little escape.  Big mistake.  I installed a First Person Shooter (Return to Castle Wolfenstein) and within 5 minutes knew why I stopped playing.  I loved first person shooters.  I used to play network games with the guys I worked with at the Courts.  It was a great break from work and a fun team building exercise.  From time to time I would get a little motion sick.  But today I got very motion sick.  I am still suffering from a huge headache playing the game brought on.  The quick jolting motion just seemed to much for me.  Man I am getting old.  Maybe if I take some motion sickness pills next time…..

My flight out of Islip was delayed for weather.  Once we hit the gate in Atlanta, I had two minutes before my connecting flight to Salt Lake was to leave.  Needless to say, I didn’t quite make it.  I hate the Atlanta Airport.  I always have.  I have yet to have a connection in Atlanta where first and second legs were both in the same terminal. (Try running with two kids in a double strolle, with all their carry-on, plus your own across 2 concourses.  Not fun.)

So they put me up in a Comfort Suites.  Not the nicest place, but it is a bed.  Up at 5:30 to get my shuttle back to the airport.  Now waiting for seat confirmation.  I want to be on this flight.  I am ready to be home.  It is funny, I can complain about the noise the kids make…all the time….at home.  But these trips bring home to me that I wouldn’t want it any other way.  The quiet of the hotel gets to me.  I love being able to sit down and have one of the kids to talk to.  I love in the morning have Olivia come into my office, give me a hug, and ask for breakfast. I love talking computer games with with boys, or playing Go with Taylor. I love having Adrienne next to me.  I miss her the most.  It will be good to be back home.

On a plane, to New York, via Atlanta. On the way in, they were rebooting the in-flight media center. I was happy to see them running Linux. I tried to grab a picture, but it was at the end of the boot. This one of those rare conditions you want a reboot to grab a picture

I’m going to try to hit on a couple of topics, mostly dealing with system inefficiencies. (I think I understand some system inefficiencies…I worked as a Systems Analyst for the US Federal Courts…let’s just say they are ripe with them.) These were all exposed during a visit to my local pharmacy.

Pharmacy

Here is a suggestion to streamline my interaction with you:

First, you are a huge nation wide chain, with interconnected systems, to allow transfer of valuable data between locations. This is awesome. No matter where I am in the country, if I need a refill of a prescription, by answering a few questions I can get that needed chemical for whatever ails me. But your work with my personal information is…well…dismal. I myself have not had to have a prescription filled in quite sometime. But I am a father of 6. I need lots of drugs for sick kids, and their mother. Pregnancy has never treated her well. It has, in half of the cases, been a violent, near death experience for mother and/or child.

In the last three years we have moved 3 times (across the country, across town and across the valley). There have also been three job changes, and three insurance changes.

My insurance company knows I have dependents and knows their relationship to me and it would be valuable if you did too. If you did, I wouldn’t have to expend valuable time each time I go to you for you to update insurance and address information. If I come in and tell you I have an insurance change, instead of changing it for just the individual I am filling a prescription for, ask me if this change needs to be applied across all the dependents (and myself) in the system. It is a simple enough database transaction across the records. It would be easy enough to even allow for the use case, where I need you to exclude changes to specific individuals. But over all, you get to cut down on the 20+ minutes I wait while you update an individuals records.

Ugh, this irks me. I am the owner of this information. I am an authority on this information, use my knowledge and my proximity to you at this point in time to update your records and improve the overall customer experience. I am willing  to spend the time with you to do this once so I won’t have to do with each visit I make.

The insurance company

Now I am grateful to have insurance, and while the insurance I have now is not nearly as good as what I have had in the past, I am more grateful to have than to have not. However….I trust you, insurance company, magnitudes less than I trust my physician (especially my children’s pediatrician). I understand that you are trying to save me money, by saving you money. But, if my Physician, who I know and interact with, prescribes medication for my son to help him stay out of the hospital, saving you (and me) money, don’t second guess his recommendation and tell me I have to get a different prescription because you think that I should have one drug before I can have another.

You are a nameless, faceless machine. I have no trust relationship with you. You have in interest in my well being that keeps you in the black. But your primary interest is in your bottom line. You provide a valuable service. Thank you. But my physician is someone I have built a relationship of trust with.  He take the time to help ensure my health and well being. When I see him outside of the office, he takes time to say hello and ask about me and my families well being. He has earned my trust so that I still drive through two different cities to see him.

You are a phone number, a card, a PO Box, a deduction on my paycheck, and a different voice each time I call for information or try to dispute your denial of my care. Please learn to trust my physician and maybe I will learn to trust you.

I’m going to try to hit on a couple of topics, mostly dealing with system inefficiencies.  (I think I understand some system inefficiencies…I worked as a Systems Analyst for the US Federal Courts…let’s just say they are ripe with them.)  These were all exposed during a visit to my local pharmacy.

Pharmacy

Here is a suggestion to streamline my interaction with you:

First, you are a huge nation wide chain, with interconnected systems, to allow transfer of valuable data between locations.  This is awesome.  No matter where I am in the country, if I need a refill of a prescription,  by answering a few questions I can get that needed chemical for whatever ails me.  But your work with my personal information is…well…dismal.  I myself have not had to have prescription filled in quite sometime.  But I am a father of 6.  I need lots of drugs for sick kids, and their mother.  Pregnancy has never treated her well.  It has, in half of the cases, been a violent, near death experience for mother and/or child. 

In the last three years we have moved 3 times (across the country, across town and across the valley).  There have also been three job changes, and three insurance changes.

My insurance company knows I have dependents and knows there relationship to me and it would be valuable if you did too.  If you did,  I wouldn’t have to  expend valuable time, each time I go to you, for you to update insurance and address information.  If I come in and tell you I have an insurance change, instead of changing it for just the individual I am filling a prescription for, asking me if this change needs to be applied across all the dependents (and myself) in the system.  It is a simple enough database transaction across the records.  It would be easy enough to even allow for the use case, where I need you to exclude changes to specific individuals.  But over all, you get to cut down on the 20+ minutes I wait while you update an individuals records.

Ugh, this irks me.  I am the owner of this information.  I am an authority on this information, use my knowledge and my proximity to you at this point in time to update your records and improve the overall customer experience.  I am will spend the time with you to do this once, so I won’t have to do with each visit I make.

The insurance company

Now I am grateful to have insurance, and while the insurance I have now is not nearly as good as what I have had in the past, I am more grateful to have than to have not.  However….I trust you, insurance company, magnitudes less than I trust my physician (especially my children’s pediatrician.)   I understand that you are trying to save me money, by saving you money.  But, if my Physician, who I know and interact with, prescribes medication for my son, to help him stay out of the hospital, saving you (and me) money, don’t second guess his recommendation and tell me I have to get a different prescription because you think , that I should have one drug before I can have another.

You are are nameless, faceless machine.  I have no trust relationship with you.  You have in interest in my well being, that keeps you in the black.  But your primary interest is in your bottom line.  You provide a valuable service.  Thank you.  But my physician, is someone I have built a relationship of trust with.  They take the time to help insure my health and well being.  When I see them outside of the office, he takes time to say hello and ask about me and my families well being.  He has earned my trust so that I still drive through two different cities to see him.

You are a phone number, a card, a PO Box, a deduction on my paycheck, and a different voice each time I call for information or try to dispute your denial of my care.  Please learn to trust my physician and maybe I will  learn to trust you.

I’m going to try to hit on a couple of topics, mostly dealing with system inefficiencies.  (I think I understand some system inefficiencies…I worked as a Systems Analyst for the US Federal Courts…let’s just say they are ripe with them.)  These were all exposed during a visit to my local pharmacy.

Pharmacy

Here is a suggestion to streamline my interaction with you:

First, you are a huge nation wide chain, with interconnected systems, to allow transfer of valuable data between locations.  This is awesome.  No matter where I am in the country, if I need a refill of a prescription,  by answering a few questions I can get that needed chemical for whatever ails me.  But your work with my personal information is…well…dismal.  I myself have not had to have prescription filled in quite sometime.  But I am a father of 6.  I need lots of drugs for sick kids, and their mother.  Pregnancy has never treated her well.  It has, in half of the cases, been a violent, near death experience for mother and/or child. 

In the last three years we have moved 3 times (across the country, across town and across the valley).  There have also been three job changes, and three insurance changes.

My insurance company knows I have dependents and knows there relationship to me and it would be valuable if you did too.  If you did,  I wouldn’t have to  expend valuable time, each time I go to you, for you to update insurance and address information.  If I come in and tell you I have an insurance change, instead of changing it for just the individual I am filling a prescription for, asking me if this change needs to be applied across all the dependents (and myself) in the system.  It is a simple enough database transaction across the records.  It would be easy enough to even allow for the use case, where I need you to exclude changes to specific individuals.  But over all, you get to cut down on the 20+ minutes I wait while you update an individuals records.

Ugh, this irks me.  I am the owner of this information.  I am an authority on this information, use my knowledge and my proximity to you at this point in time to update your records and improve the overall customer experience.  I am will spend the time with you to do this once, so I won’t have to do with each visit I make.

The insurance company

Now I am grateful to have insurance, and while the insurance I have now is not nearly as good as what I have had in the past, I am more grateful to have than to have not.  However….I trust you, insurance company, magnitudes less than I trust my physician (especially my children’s pediatrician.)   I understand that you are trying to save me money, by saving you money.  But, if my Physician, who I know and interact with, prescribes medication for my son, to help him stay out of the hospital, saving you (and me) money, don’t second guess his recommendation and tell me I have to get a different prescription because you think , that I should have one drug before I can have another.

You are are nameless, faceless machine.  I have no trust relationship with you.  You have in interest in my well being, that keeps you in the black.  But your primary interest is in your bottom line.  You provide a valuable service.  Thank you.  But my physician, is someone I have built a relationship of trust with.  They take the time to help insure my health and well being.  When I see them outside of the office, he takes time to say hello and ask about me and my families well being.  He has earned my trust so that I still drive through two different cities to see him.

You are a phone number, a card, a PO Box, a deduction on my paycheck, and a different voice each time I call for information or try to dispute your denial of my care.  Please learn to trust my physician and maybe I will  learn to trust you.

Saw this at northtemple.com.  Shared the link with the other Alfresco Solutions Engineers.  One of them shared back another tool, XRAY.

Ah, the power of javascript.

In July, Adrienne and I were up in Park City, for a weekend without the kids.  We stopped at a bookstore…yes we like books…and found a LEGO advent calendar.

It has been a big hit with the kids.  One that I hope will become a family tradition.

What are things that you do during the holidays, to express your, or your families inner Geek?

From Rands In Repose:

Here is an audacious goal for your resume: to get you to a point in your career where you no longer need a resume. It’s the point that in your chosen industry people know who you are and what you are capable of. And they want you doing it at their companies. [link]

Amen.

When we started discussing names for Parker we ran through a bunch. We tried to figure out if we could continue on the mnemonic device that we stumbled upon with our kids names, TACOS (if you go by what we call them) or JACOB (if you go by given names): Taylor, Andrew, Cameron, Olivia, Sawyer or Jared, Andrew, Cameron, Olivia, Benjamin. But there just wasn’t anything that sounded right.

We agreed early on that we liked Parker, and had settled on Mathew Parker. About a month ago, Adrienne came to me with a suggestion, earlier this year I lost my grandfather, and Adrienne suggested that we change the name we had chosen so that we could honor my grandfather. It wasn’t a hard decision. We hadn’t told my step-grandmother about the decision to change his name. I got this forward, written by my step-grandmother, to me by my mom today:

I was so moved to learn that Jared and Adrienne named their son Parker Forrest Ottley. Jared has always been so good about keeping in touch with his Grandpa. It means so much that he has honored his Grandpa in this way. Please tell him that I love him.

This is short notice, but we have another Alfresco training class this month.  This will be an excellent class, getting down into the details of designing content models, configuring the web client and a bonus section on configuring custom dashlets (Dashlets are like portlets on the My Alfresco Dashboard).   The 2-day class will be held in Reston Virginia.

The class will be taught by Louis LaFontisee, our Global Education Manager.

Content Modeling & Web Client Configuration

The Content Modeling & Web Client Configuration course builds upon the skills you learn in the System Administration course, enabling you to configure Alfresco even further.

Full course information »

Another good day.  It started a little off, Parker is severely anemic.  They want to avoid a transfusion, because of the complications that could accompany it.  Double this with Adrienne also being anemic.  She received another two units of blood.  That helped her perk right up.

Parker’s pediatrician thinks that he could be coming home soon.  He may be going under bilirubin lights tomorrow for a bit.  He is started to look a little jaundiced.  It is highly likely that he will be coming home this weekend.

Adrienne’s doctor discharged her tonight.  Now the tough part begins: getting her to stay off her feet.  We went straight from hospital a to hospital b to see Parker.  It was the first time she had a chance to hold him.  I thought I had taken a movie with the camera, but it doesn’t look like it saved it.  Adrienne was able to feed Parker.  He latched right on.  They were worried that he would not have developed his sucking reflex yet.  He ate for close to 20 minutes.  We will go back tomorrow a couple of times for feedings.  In the meantime Adrienne will continue to pump for him.

Cameron, Andrew and Olivia were still awake when we got home.  (Olivia keeps running into the bedroom to say “I love you mommy!”)  It will be a big surprise for Taylor and Sawyer tomorrow.

Adrienne just discovered two staples that were left in her.  We tried to remove one with tweezers, I was trying to convince her to let me use wire snips to pop the staple in order to pull them out.  She is not to keen on that idea.  One of the two is a lot tighter, so she just wants to go see her doctor tomorrow to have him remove them.  It’s too bad, I think it would be fun to pop them out with a pair of needle nose pliers and wire snips.

It has been a great day for Parker (and Adrienne). Parker was taken off of the CPAP machine this morning. He is breathing on his own and doing well. He is eating (through a tube) and keeping it down. Tomorrow his pediatrician will take over his care from the neonatologist. I went up and spent some time with him this evening. He looks a lot like Cameron. He has spikey hair and lots of it. We finally have a length for him: 19 inches. If he went to term, he would have been out biggest baby. We are hoping that he will be home by the end of the week. I have updated the pictures on the gallery with ones I took this evening of him.

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Adrienne is also doing well. She got two more units of blood, but they took the IV out (of her right arm) after they finished. She is still getting liquids by IV (in her left arm). I took the kids up to see her today. They were all happy to see her and I know she loved the company. The doctor has put her on more pain medication. It is painful for her to move around. The doctor said that it could be months before she is fully recovered. He also indicated that if she continues her upward trend, the earliest she could be home would be Wednesday. It will be nice to have her home.

Around Noon today (Sunday, Dec 2) I took Adrienne (34 almost 35 weeks pregnant) to the hospital with abdominal pain.

At about 1:35 pm she gave birth to Parker Forrest. We know that he is 6 lbs., but not his length yet.

First Mom: Adrienne’s uterus ruptured and her placenta and the baby had moved into her abdomen. Five minutes longer and I would be writing this as a single father of five. She lost about half of her blood volume. She is on her second transfusion and probably will need a couple more. She is in shock, and they are treating her accordingly, but is stabilizing.

Now Baby: The Doctor’s are saying that we should name the baby Lucky, because he really is lucky (read miracle) that he is with us. He is not out of the woods either. He will probably need a transfusion as well. He lost blood when he involuntarily moved from the uterus to the abdomen. He is being moved from the hospital where he was born to one where they can have him on a ventilator. We are not sure how long he will be there, but he will be there for at least a few days.

Me: It is starting to catch up to me. I am working with people to get some stability for the rest of the kids and for me. As things progress I will update you all. At some point I will get some decent pictures to put up for everyone to see.

Update: Parker Forrest Photo Gallery

Mom is doing well. Drowsy and sore, but her bleeding is down to what is to be expected.  Parker is at his new hospital.  He is breathing without a respirator.  He is doing quite well.  I am hoping they will both be home soon.

We are back at the Hospital. Lots of cramping, pressure and a bit of spotting. She is still at 3cm and about 60% effaced. They will monitor of an hour and check again.

UPDATE:  We are back home.  No changes during the hour she was being monitored.  We have to go back tomorrow for her to be monitored for an hour or so again.

At Alfresco we are big users of Skype. Matt has even dropped Vonage to use Skype as part of his primary business phone (Skype plus some other VOIP service). I, on the other hand, have been using Vonage as my home phone for nearly 3 years and am very happy with it. One of the important things for someone who works at home (and is taking care of family while his wife is on bed rest) is staying in contact. I installed the Skype mobile client on my phone. It is great. I can stay in contact while I am taking kids to and from school/activities. It is a bit of a battery hog but well worth it. A week or so ago, I went to lunch with the younger of my kids (those not is school) and Adrienne. (Yes, she is on bed rest, but she can get a bit stir crazy and so I try to get her out of the house once a week for a meal not prepared by me.) While at lunch one of the sales guys IMs me over Skype, that he needs someone to take a call to answer some questions. I mention that I am not near a computer (it is lunch time) and that if the call needs that kind of attention it will be a few minutes before I can get home to call the potential customer. He assures me that it won’t need that kind of attention and then pauses, “Wait, if you are not near a computer…how was I just chatting with you over Skype?!” After a few quick pointers on where to look and I can feel the excitement over the phone.

This conversation reminds me that I ought to check and see if there is an update to the version of Skype I am using on my phone. When I check, I see that Skype has partnered with iSkoot for a new mobile client. This I need to try. It is a complete rewrite, cutting out some of the battery hogging features and enabling things like calls over your mobile line to Skype users. Now I don’t have to worry so much about the quality when I am on an edge network instead of G or 3G network. So I decide this is something worth trying and go to install it. Let’s just say that the install process left much to be desired. After a lot of tries, I finally got it installed. I haven’t tried it since, but I want to say it was a temporary network issue, not that Alfresco hasn’t had our own issues in this regard. Now that it is installed, I am quite happy with it. It is easy to use. Call clarity is good. And battery life….there is a huge change.

If you have a mobile phone, and you use Skype and can afford the data fees, it is well worth it.

Adrienne is back home again.  She didn’t have any contractions while being monitored.  The doctor has extended her bed rest for another two weeks.

The steroid shot she gets always makes her jittery, so it is difficult for her to sleep which invariable makes her cranky. Today should be fun…..

I am in the hospital with Adrienne right now.  She went in for her weekly check-up (Yes…weekly) and now we are here.  She is 3cm dilated and 60% effaced.  She was having contractions this morning, which turned into cramps.  So we are here for another steroid shot and monitoring.  If she has contractions again (she is not right now), he will want to keep her here for two more days.

She will be 34 weeks tomorrow.  If this was tomorrow the doctor would not be trying to stop her labor.  But we are still 33 weeks.  So we are here waiting.

We use Gallery2 for our family photo gallery and we are quite happy with it. For the past day or two we have been unable to login and it has been quite annoying. Password resets wouldn’t work. I kept getting stuck in the password recovery mode, where it required me to enter a captcha along with the password, but never corrected itself.

A little google search helped me with reseting the database password hash. Then a few SQL queries and all was good again.
Here is what I needed to do:

1. Get a new password hash

In a php console (php -a) type:

echo md5(’password’);

copy the hash that is returned.

2. Update the users password in the database.

Connect to your gallery database and execute:

update g2_User set g_hashedPassword=”the_password_hash” where g_userName=”the_user”;

3. Clear the recovered password map

execute:

delete from g2_recoverPasswordMap

You should be able to access the gallery again

It has now been three years since you joined our dysfunctional family.  And a happy three years it has been.  One of the perks about working from home is that I get to see you all when you wake up.  I love how you search me out in the morning and coming running to me with your beautiful smile and give me a great big hug.  I love how excited you are about all things girl: ballerinas, princesses, dolls, but that you can turn around and play legos, star wars and cars with your brothers.  You are the perfect fit for our family. Happy third birthday.  I love you little princess.

Moby posts on his blog about the band James….it’s funny that I have been on a James kick for the past week.

And this:

I have this blog monitored through several different programs: Google Analytics, Feedburner, and Wordpress Stats. Each of these have their own pluses and reasons why I use them. Probably the most interesting and most useful is the search terms used to find the blog or posts on the blog. It can help you refine information on your blog or make you laugh (I used to be on the first page for search results for George Shrinks because of this post).

One of the search terms that came up today through Feedburner was “jeos initramfs“. At first glance, I thought it was because of my post about building a virtual appliance, but as it turned out, they all went to my post about opportunities to help the Alfresco project by providing translations for other languages. The “jeos initramfs” information was actually for a tweet I posted on twitter.

What this provides me, is a place to start learning more of Search Engine Optimization (you can always learn a new skill) and reminds me I need to post the information that I learned when I ran into problems with jeos and initramfs.

Seeing some of the searches that had brought people to my post on Alfresco and Microsoft Office Integration, I thought I would add this little tidbit: The add-in was designed to work for Office 2003, but it can work with Office 2007 as well.

From the Alfresco Wiki:

Although the Alfresco Add-Ins have been designed with Microsoft Office 2003 in mind, they are compatible with Microsoft Office 2007, with the following caveats:

Before installing the Add-Ins, ensure the .NET Programmability Support option has been installed for each of the Office applications you are installing the add-ins for. Normally these will be Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

• The options can be found by running the Office Setup program and expanding the list of available options for each application.
• You may need your original Office 2007 install media in order to add these essential components.

We went to Cameron’s preschool this afternoon for his Thanksgiving program. He has been singing one of the songs for his program all week. It was fun to see it all come together.

The press has been good.  Take a look at what they are saying:

Analyst Blog - Kyle McNabb @ Forresters : http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2007/11/facebook-alfres.html

“Alfresco, which continues to demonstrate a bit more edge thinking in the world of ECM than their commercial counterparts IBM, EMC, Oracle, and Open Text.”

FR - Toolinux: http://www.toolinux.com/news/logiciels/alfresco_penetre_le_reseau_social_facebook_ar9854.html

Sweden - CIO: http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.131089

Sweden - Computer Sweden: http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.131387

The article opens with “In five years we’re going to try to remember what the world looked like before Alfresco took over”

UK -Techworld: http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?newsid=10664&pagtype=all

“Newton said that the company had had many conversations with Facebook in developing the integration and he had been told that there was no other company developing a business tool for Facebook … not yet anyway.”

UK - IT Week: http://www.vnunet.com/itweek/news/2203577/alfresco-extends-content

UK - PC Pro: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/139563/facebook-adds-enterprise-application.html

UK - ZDNet: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39290851,00.htm

One of the coolest (at least in my book) things that was released with Alfresco 2.1 (we are actually up to 2.1.1 now) is the Microsoft Office Add-on. It is not just cool because it allows you to work from Word, Excel and PowerPoint directly in Alfresco, but because it is an excellent example of Web Scripts in action. The add-on is actually launching a web browser that hooks into these MS Office Applications. Web Scripts are a powerful integration point for Alfresco. (Search here for write ups on Web Scripts.)

The Alfresco add-in allows you to:

browse the repository

search within the repository

open, save, delete content

access version history and compare versions

transform documents to PDFs

start workflows

insert documents into an existing document (think of a folder with documents that are actually standard response to RFP or RFI questions, you can insert these responses directly into the RFP/RFI using the add-in.).

Alfresco is normally a zero-foot print install on the client side (You use your browser and/or mapped drive into the repository.) But this is really worth the 6MB for the whole bundle.

You can’t go wrong with a cool stache. My own comes and goes. I love it. My wife hates it.

(Thanks to Andrew Sullivan)

Checking this morning, it appears that our sites are up again.  Yeah!  What are horrible weekend for us, our community, customers and potential customers.  If you are experiencing problems still, it could be that the DNS updates haven’t made it all the way around the world yet.  The IP address post I made would still be helpful.

My Sister-in-law forwarded the following to me a few weeks ago. Typically, they go right in the trash. But I just felt the need to respond to it. My response is at the end. (Just to note, I grew up in New Orleans and some of my wife’s family is still there.)

The forward:

How do we pass a law?
Very Fair URINE TEST…

(I sure would like to know who wrote this one! They deserve a HUGE pat on the back!)

Like a lot of folks in this state, I have a job. I work, they pay me. I pay my taxes and the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit. In order to get that paycheck, I am required to pass a random urine test with which I have no problem. What I do have a problem with is the distribution of my taxes to people who don’t have to pass a urine test. Shouldn’t one have to pass a urine test to get a welfare check because I have to pass one to earn it for them? Please understand, I have no problem with helping people get back on their feet. I do, on the other hand, have a problem with helping someone sitting on their BUTT , doing drugs, while I work. . . . Can you imagine how much money the state would save if people had to pass a urine test to get a public assistance check.
Pass this along if you agree or simply delete if you don’t. Hope you all will pass it along, though . . . something has to change in this country — and soon!

My response:

Let us say that, maybe, 25% of the people getting a welfare check are abusing. (Which would be a staggering number [1]). Do you think that this would really save money? Here is how I see it breaking down:

0/ We have increased costs, paying people to collect, process and administer urine tests
1/ We have also increased the illegal urine trade ;-) [2]
2/ Storage of all the data (Just think urine warehouses) [3]
3/ We have people disputing the results (I had a poppy seed muffin top in the waiting room!) Which means more attorneys, more testing, more money!

And what does this result in? Either, you lost all of your cost savings or, you have increased your costs. And who pays for increased government costs? You, and your children, and your children’s children and their children’s children…..

But on the other hand, you have created new jobs and could reduce the number those that need welfare [4]. So it could be a boom to the economy!

This could be just the thing we need to stop the recession we are about to experience.

/me

PS I have *never* had to have a urine test for any of my employers. (White collar workers have it so easy….sitting on our butts, getting fat, looking at youtube, all day long!)

[1] “Since TANF was enacted, the number of people on welfare has declined dramatically. By 1999, there were only 7.2 million recipients, including 2.6 million families and 5.1 million children, roughly half the caseload of the 1994 peak..” http://www.policyalmanac.org/social_welfare/welfare.shtml (I know the numbers don’t add, but they are not suppose to. You aren’t actually suppose to add them. They are sliced representations of he total. )

[2] Additional tests could be run to match urine to an individual. (We don’t need any more pregnant men, menopausal 20/30 year old women, etc ) So, 0/ You could have someone watch them pee (another person you have to pay and monitor. They could be taking bribes, peeing in the cup for you!). 1/ You could DNA test, mouth swab, which you could then type to the urine sample (this results in more tests, more people to administer it, etc. which means more costs)

[3] This might be a good thing. The real estate market is coming crashing down. More companies are going out of business, downsizing, off shoring and near shoring. There could be a lot of [refrigerated] warehouse space available on the market (do you know of any?) It could also be a boom to the construction market, building more warehouses. (I can’t think of any major cities in the US that need major reconstruction efforts at the moment, so the construction workers should be available to build new ones.) There is a lot of land, I understand, available in St. Bernard Parish. But if you built the urine storage facilities down there, what happens if you have another hurricane come through? Just think of all the pee and all the plastic cups! Al Gore would be livid.

[4] There are so many trained urine techs on the dole these days. You could train new ones. But they would need to be urine tested as well. Where could we find them? Oh yeah! The people on welfare, they need jobs, but we just accused them of using drugs (and remember 25% of them are) are we sure we want former drug addicts running urine tests?

We have been experiencing problems with our registrar and DNS.  It is in the process of being resolved.

If you need/want to get hold of someone at Alfresco.  You can use @alfresco.org as the domain for email.

All of our sites are available through their IP addresses:

• http://www.alfresco.com  - please use http://88.208.218.102/
• customers.alfresoco.com and partners.alfresco.com -  please use http://88.208.200.70/alfresco/
• forums.alfresco.com  - please use http://217.174.252.22/

I really can’t think of anything worse that can happen to a company that depends on the internet for their business.  Please bare with us as we get this fixed.  Changes are underway to make sure this won’t happen to us again.

We are extremely sorry for the inconvenience this has caused our customers and potential customers.

Alfresco formally launched its Facebook integration yesterday.   The press release goes into why we think that this is significant and what we think the future of the enterprise and social networking has in store for us all.

Some highlights:

Employees are increasingly communicating on social-networking platforms – outside the control of the corporate IT department. Corporations must choose either to ban social software use or to harness the potential to communicate more effectively with their community of customers, partners and employees.

From an enterprise perspective, organizations must have the ability to publish to a Facebook audience as effectively as to a Web site audience. From an employee perspective, forward-looking enterprises believe that social networking provides a ready-made knowledge-management platform for their workers, which will increase adoption rates to the levels that knowledge management was always meant to achieve.

Agree or disagree, social networks will/are having an affect on the enterprise.  Phil Windley, pointed out yesterday on BTL, the power in integration between search and facebook type social network platforms.  He said,

Facebook has more than a good record of my personal traits and attributes. They also know about my relationships.  Would you be willing to reveal your social network to Yahoo! or Google? For most of us, the answer depends on what we’d get in return. How about friend recommendations on products?

Imagine a system that knew what your friends were buying and ordered product search results accordingly. You could tweak it, perhaps, with information about who’s recommendation you trusted in what categories.

Now an ECM could also take advantage of this, sharing your content with your friends, and others in your extended networks.  Your personalized search engine could be pulling back content target at your employees, customers and partners, placing content at the finger tips of those whom you trust, associate with and sell to.

I came across these today.  I am a big fan of history and architecture.  At one point, I thought I wanted to be an architect.

I have been working on a side project of developing a Virtual Appliance for Alfresco. My first attempt is here. I have played with several distros (Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, puppylinux, zenserver) trying to figure out the right combination. This first release is based on Ubuntu JeOS as a VMware VM. I need to dig into Kiwi and see if I can build out the same thing with openSUSE. I think that Fedora has a utility to do something similar.

There are lots of things to think about when planning a virtual appliance: size, dependencies, easy of use, what you want end-users to be able to do with the appliance, etc. I have gone back and forth on trade-offs. Initially, I would like to see the appliance as a quick and easy way for someone to evaluate Alfresco. So I stuck with HSQL for the DB. I removed a nice chunk of packages that I would not expect anyone to be using during an evaluation of Alfresco. I think key is keeping them focused. If you are trying to do everything with Alfresco you are bound to get distracted. One of the things that you want with an evaluation is that it just works. While there is a log in prompt, I have the appliance report back, on boot, the most important information they need to try out Alfresco: The URL to access Alfresco. Just point your browser at the URL provided. Everything self-contained.

The VM has Alfresco DM and WCM installed. I haven’t loaded it up with all the cool add-ons, etc. While that would be fun, it takes space, and keeps from the focus: The basic/core functionality of the repository.

I still need to cut down on the size, learn how to better package VMs and make them work under multiple VM managers.

P.S. If you download this and you feel you really need the login credentials and can’t figure them out….let me know I will be glad to send them to you.

We are having Sysadmin and WCM training for Alfresco in Santa Clara, CA, at the end of the month. If you are interested, register soon. Seats will go quickly. (This is probably the last chance for training on the west coast for the year.)

Sysadmin training is being taught by Luis Sala, Senior Director of Solution Engineering. WCM training will be taught the Peter Monks, Director of Services.

System Administration

This is an introductory course for customers and partners who need to deploy a production-ready system. It is a pre-requisite to most other Alfresco Training courses.
Full course information »

Web Content Management for Developers

This developer-oriented course focuses around an installation of Alfresco 2.1E with lab exercises for form development, template development, and deployment.
Full course information »

Just finished another Alfresco in an Hour.  An hour of me talking non-stop about Alfresco.  I should have had a glass of water next to me.

You can get past recorded version of Alfresco in an Hour in the Alfresco Content Community.

(Alfresco in an hour is a weekly webinar that gives you an overview and demo of Alfresco with time for questions at the end of every session.)

I have been cleaning out a lot of papers from University. In them I found a couple of quotes from Miyamoto Musashi. I was first introduced to Musashi when I took a Shotokai karate class. The class was held in the school’s wrestling team practice room (the perfect room for this because of its padded floors.) These two quotes were framed on the wall.

Alfresco is very much about collaboration, specifically collaboration around/with content.  I have written about Alfresco-Facebook Collaboration but the first integration that I saw/used with Alfresco was its integration with blogs.  Alfresco delivers an add-on module that allows you to integrate Alfresco with, by default, WordPress or Movable Type.   The interfaces that the add-on uses are open, and therefore could also be used to integrate with other blog software/platforms.

With the add-on installed, you can designate a folder that contains content (HTML or text files) that can be posted to a defined blog.  But that is not where the strength of the Alfresco integration comes.  The strength of using Alfresco to manage your content comes in the Alfresco feature set.

All of the blog content can be versioned.  During the creation phase/life of your blog articles, the content can be versioned.  If an article is being worked on by multiple people in the system, you can keep track of who made changes and what those changes are.

Content can be managed as part of a workflow.   I have seen potential blog posts from management and developers being passed around for review in email.  There is no accountability in that.  There is no way to track where it went and what comment/modifications are being made along the way.  And it really would stink if important changes were lost in someones inbox.  Potential posts could be submitted as part of a workflow, where the post is assigned to people for review.  As part of the process email notifications could be sent to each person during the process to let them know of assignment, completion of task and final posting of the content. (One of the cool features of Alfresco is that all content is URL referenceable, so an actual file never needs to be sent to anyone, just the URL.  And the URL always references the latest version of the content.)

Content transformation. Content could also start out in one format and be transformed to another by rule.   It is possible that the post could first start out as a Word document and then be introduced into the repository using the Alfresco Microsoft Office Integration. Before content makes it to be published, the Word document could be transformed into a text file.

Alfresco makes it possible for you to create collaborative content, in a collaborative way.  With more businesses starting to use blogs to communicate with customers, being able to manage the content is becoming more important.

We are entering one of my favorite times of the year. Starting today, the Presidential Campaigns will be moving into higher gears. If we thought there was an onslaught before….just hold on to your britches.

This morning I was discussing my disappointment over the results of the elections here in Utah . While I am moderate to liberal in most of my views, I am for School Vouchers. There are just too many things wrong with the education system. That is why my kids go to a charter school with a more aggressive curriculum. My other disappointment was that my neighbor was unable to unseat any of the sitting incumbents in Springvile where I live.
Our discussion turned towards Presidential politics. I like Barack Obama. I like the message. I like the presentation. I like the regal view he has of politics and moving it above the partisan mess that is par for the course today. Will he get down and mean as things get tight? Maybe. But I hope not.

One of the things that I found interesting last night was that the Utah Colleges Exit Poll, found that in Salt Lake County, both Hillary and Barack polled better than Guilliani and Romney. (That makes me happy, because I am not a fan of either.)

We started to discuss Obama’s voting record. Voting history/Bill sponsorship is important to me, so I found a couple of links to that information. The last link is to one of my favorite sites, where you can track the money, which is probably even more important.

• http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/o000167/
  
• http://www.opencongress.org/people/show/400629_barack_obama
• http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/index.asp?cycle=2008

There are a few basic ways of using Alfresco in a .NET web application; the web services APIs, web scripts (REST-API) and .NET code calls retrieving content directly from the filesystem.

Your content authors in the Authoring instance of Alfresco, inside your firewall, would create content.  This content would be deployed to a runtime instance of Alfresco outside of your firewall and/or to your IIS servers.  (Publishing to your IIS servers would be deploying static content.)

When creating content under Alfresco WCM, forms are used to collect/enter the content.  The content is defined in a XML Scheme Definition (XSD).  This XSD defines the form  (content model) that the content author uses to enter content.  The XSD is used to create the XML file that holds the content that you are creating.  Applying templates against this XML file you can then create renditions of the content.  These templates can be the HTML Freemarker templates, XSLT or XSL-FO.  The renditions can be full pages, micro-pages, code snippets or render the content in another format, like creating a PDF.

Your .NET web application could retrieve/ use content in a couple of ways:

0/ The Alfresco runtime could be queried via the SOAP APIs. The results displayed in your web application
1/ URL calls to web scripts, which would return XML (that could be formatted as RSS or ATOM), JSON or rendered HTML (that could be a widget, or html with reference to your wire framework) that could be included directly in the page, or wrapped in an IFRAME.
2/ Dynamic calls to static content on an IIS server.  (Content can be deployed to a specific location, and your .NET code could display that content in some fashion. [Reading files by naming convention, filetype, etc.])

The same type of implementation can be use with Java/J2EE, PHP, Ruby on Rails, CF, etc.

• Barack Obama | Congress votes database | washingtonpost.com
  (tags: Obama Barack “voting record” Politics)
• 2008 Presidential Election
  (tags: politics election finance 2008 campaigns president)
• OpenCongress - Sen. Barack Obama [D, IL]
  (tags: Obama Barack Politics)

Adrienne, as some may know, is pregnant. In fact we are a few weeks away from the end of bed rest. (YEAH!) This is our sixth child, fifth boy and the last for us. Adrienne over the past several years has insisted that the chances of having a girl have increased as we had more boys. And yes our fourth, Olivia, is a sweet devilish girl. But numbers five and six are both boys, unless Parker decides to pop out sans equipment. I must point out, while it would have been nice to have another girl, another boy suits us just fine. We love spoiling Olivia, and a household of rambunctious boys is just hours of fun!

Louis Navellier explains in his book The Little Book That Makes You Rich: A Proven Market-Beating Formula for Growth Investing the logical dilemma I faced everyday as Adrienne tried to explain to me that the chances of having a girl increased with each boy we had:

One of the most common emotional mistakes is the “gambler’s fallacy.” That is a tendency to think that when a tossed coin lands on heads five times in a row it is much more likely to land on tails the next time. This supposition is incorrect. The odds of flipping tails on the sixth try are exactly what they were the first five: 50-50. Each flip occurs independently of the others.

I now have a name for what dumbfounded me for years. Silly woman….I love you still.

If you are a multilingual CS, EE, etc. student looking for a way to earn some Open Source street cred, I have a project for you! Alfresco, the leading Open Source Enterprise Content Management System, needs a few more language packs, or updates to existing ones.

To begin, just browse through our list of existing language packs, if you see one that is outdated, or see a language missing, download the base language pack (english). Translate the strings you find there and then submit them as an update or new project on the Alfresco Forge site. You can also join our community network where you can get access to recorded demos, whitepapers, hosted trial, etc.

And if you are in Utah, and interested in a demo/presentation to your user group,  ping me and we will organize a demo for you.

This last week I did something I thought I wouldn’t do. I signed up for a Facebook account. Why? Partly to see what the hype is about. Partly because we are starting to do some work around and with Facebook.

So far, I am OK with Facebook. I haven’t had to experience a lot of the silliness that deterred me in the first place. (throwing food, biting people, turning them into zombies, etc.)

For those of you on facebook and using Alfresco, there is a new Alfresco User Group. (The image is linked to join.)

You can also find in the Alfresco dev tree work that we started on a Facebook-alfresco integration. You can upload and share your content stored in Alfresco with your Facebook friends from within Facebook.

Adrienne:  “What are some of the characteristics of winter?”

Andrew: “Scientist”

or another from his teacher

Teacher: “What do you call  the scientist that studies the weather?”

Andrew: “An artist”

Last week I tried out using glTail.rb against my server and sites.  It worked fine against my default site (www.ottleys.net) However, against the blogs and the gallery, I got back no info.  To fix the problem, I just modified the apache parser expression.

My vhosts  log entries start out with the DNS name of the site.  The parser expression is looking for the client IP address at the start of each entry.  By removing the ‘^’ I was able to start pulling data.

I am at the OB’s with Adrienne.  This is a critical visit, after her fetal fibronectin test came back positive this last week.  I came with my phone, ready to use it as my network connection (that little gem was hidden, I’ll post how to enable it later).  Being able to work anywhere is important.  And seeing that you can spend a lot of time just sitting at a doctor’s office, having an internet connection would be a great service.  That is why I like her doctor even more now.  Besides being a great OB/GYN, they have free wifi. :)

I needed to upload 177 photos into the family photo gallery.  Doing this by hand through the web interface was just not appealing.  Neither was adding another application to manager the transfer.  A quick search resulted in iphoto2gallery. Yeah!  Quick install, easily configured and boom!  Photos uploaded.

It has been just over 3 years since we left Louisiana.  We have registered to vote in Utah and all the others things that you do when you move from state to state.  We are now Utahns.  Albeit a Utah democrat and a Utah independent.  So what do I get in the mail today?  Campaign material for someone running for state senate in Louisiana.  I know I am just one person out of a large number on a mailing list, but the mailing list has my current address in Utah and not that of my first home in Utah, but of my second.  (And lets not forget, there was 7 months in an apartment in the middle of that.)  Throw in there the unknown number of people who have needed to relocate because of Katrina and you have a nice sum of valuable campaign funds that have been wasted on someone who probably wouldn’t have voted for you to begin with.