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November 2002 Archives

November 1, 2002

The TTC.

  • After speaking with my brother, I've realized that the TTC isn't only raising rates .10 because of the Sheppard Subway line... They're actually raising them for a number of other reasons, outlined here. It cites increases in inflation, fuel and hydro costs as well as a 3% wage increase.
  • The TTC did ask the province for $8M to help with increased expenses, but the $8M wasn't to cover the .10 increase, it was to cover the difference between a .10 and .15 rate increase.
  • Whatever the case may be, there are lots of people who are finding it more worth their while and convenience to take their cars rather than the TTC to where they have to go. Whether the blame for that falls on the lack of subsidy from the provincial government, or on the TTC's shoulder remains to be seen, but it sure doesn't make traffic on the DVP any better. :(

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on November 1, 2002 8:30 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

    November 5, 2002

    UT2K3 Patches.

  • Well, back to work tomorrow for a few days. Played UT all day, somehow... And re-organized the computer room. And cleaned the bathroom. :)
  • I've updated ut.enfusion-group.com to the latest patches, apparently there were 3 to bring it up to the same patch level as the full retail version. Doesn't seem to be any noticeable difference, but it's up to date nevertheless.

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on November 5, 2002 9:18 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

    November 15, 2002

    FreeBSD and RedHat 8.0.

  • Now that rogue is behind our firewall, with absolutely no services exposed to the outside world, it's fallen a bit behind the times. Still running RedHat 6.2, with no updates and/or security patches in ages, it has still been running kernel 2.2.20 with IDE patches. With five hard drives, and 135GB of data storage, fsck takes the better part of 30 minutes to run on an unclean shutdown. I finally bit the bullet the other day, and decided to risk doing an upgrade from RedHat 6.2 to 8.0, having had luck with the workstation upgrades I've tried. The upgrade worked without any problems! Now running 2.4.19, with ext3, and better SMP support, there's actually quite a noticeable difference. Now to get around to upgrading wolverine...
  • After testing out UT 2003 on a VMWare FreeBSD machine, and making sure that it works using BSD's Linux binary compatibility mode, I decided to reinstall mystique down at Q9 and put FreeBSD 4.7 on it. So last night, it got reinstalled, and is now running FreeBSD and the latest patched version of UT2K3 dedicated server for Linux. There aren't many people playing, but the load averages on the box are lower than they were before. I'm still getting used to BSD, it's a fair bit different than Linux, but I'm liking it so far. It's got a much more consistent feel to it than Linux does.

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on November 15, 2002 10:53 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

    November 19, 2002

    Patches and pictures...

  • Just coming off of overnights, finished an upgrade of Geeklog on the front page, from 1.3.5sr2 to 1.3.6. I also noticed a while back that when logging out of Geeklog, users weren't getting logged out of Gallery as well, which is a bit of a bummer, since there's no log out button. Fixed that, there's a new patch that works with the latest versions of Geeklog and Gallery, at the bottom of this page.
  • Finally finished scanning the wedding photos, I scanned most of the proofs/photos we had taken professionally by Phat Dog Visuals. Take a gander. It took quite a while to scan all of the photos, and get them online.
  • Been reading all about BGP4 in all its glory, in Internet Routing Architectures, Second Edition. Thinking of running Zebra on all my Linux machines, putting them in their own subnet, and having them all exchange routes via IBGP. No, really. ;)

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on November 19, 2002 11:59 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

    November 28, 2002

    Dogs have bad dreams too!

  • Every now and then, at night time, Lucy our dog has symptoms of what seems to be bad dreams... She cries, and breathes irregularly and twitches, until we wake her up. Last night, as I lay awake, I thought, maybe she's dreaming of fighting with Rogers Technical Support representatives who keep telling her that she's an idiot because her problems don't really exist! After all, she is a smart dog, she probably knows more about IP networking than most front-line techs at Rogers do!
  • As I struggle with my latest quip with Rogers, I thought, should I even bother commenting on my website? Is it even worth it? It's the same waste of time and lack of knowledge everytime, and who really cares? But it's a good laugh, so I decided I would.
  • For the last few days I've been noticing really slow speeds either through Rogers web proxy, or via NNTP. Through the web proxy, I get a max of ~30kB/s, and without the proxy configured, I get the upper end of my cap, which is about ~120kB/s. For NNTP on the other hand, I get ~5-15kB/s.
  • So for lack of anything better to do, I called Rogers and asked about the problem:

    (me): I'm experiencing really slow speeds through your web proxy and via NNTP. About ~30kB/s with the proxy configured, and if I unconfigure it, I get about ~120kB/s. For news, I'm getting anywhere from 5-15kB/s.

    (rogers): Have you tried to configure your news client not to use the web proxy?

    (me): NNTP clients don't use web proxies, they're for two different services...

    (rogers): Oh yes, that's right. Well, if you have better speeds without the proxy configured, then don't use the proxy.

    (me): Well, that doesn't help my NNTP download speeds.

    (rogers): What are you downloading via NNTP?

    (me): Anything from alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 for example, or even headers...

    (rogers, after a few minutes): I've just tried downloading a file here from the news server, and I didn't have any problems.

    (me): Well, I don't expect that you'd have any problems, seeing as you're on the Rogers corporate network...

    (rogers): Well, sir, if you're still having problems, I'd suggest that you email your problem to internetsupport@rci.rogers.com.

    (me): What can they do for me that you guys can't?

    (rogers): They have access to tools and utilities that we don't.

  • So I sent email...
  • And my speeds still suck.
  • Forums at the Residential Broadband User's Association point to the posting of the new Harry Potter movie as the culprit behind the slow speeds of late, at least over NNTP.

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on November 28, 2002 11:59 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

    November 29, 2002

    TTC Enthusiast's Website!

  • A co-worker of mine pointed out recently that there's a website devoted to TTC enthusiasts. From which subway trains are the coolest, to what features are absent from present day buses...

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on November 29, 2002 8:19 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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    About November 2002

    This page contains all entries posted to adrian's home in November 2002. They are listed from oldest to newest.

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