Been a bit, no? Anyway, for the past 2 ish year, I’ve worked for Walgreens, as part of the department that develops the pharmacy system, Intercom Plus. BUT! As of tomorrow, Monday January 18 2010, I’ll be moving to the Execution Architecture Group. This is sort of the rock star group of the Pharmacy development groups. I’m also something like half the age of the average person on that team. So, yeah, I’m awesome.

Expanding on a problem I touched on in a previous entry, I want to explore the problem of using software engineering best practices as a student.

As a computer science student, we get told that there are certain things that we should do when developing code. Some are simple, little things, like documenting code as we write it. Some are a bit more complicated but still readily feasible, such as using version control, or writing test cases. However, other things are much more difficult to do.
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I’ve recently been playing around with the VMWare Server, which the folks at VMWare recently made released as a free download. First up, it rocks, but thats a given; VMWare has always been a solid product (and yes, I actually do have an honest to goodness legal license for VMWare Workstation. Alas, I doubt I’ll ever use it again now.) That being said, I encountered a few problems.

1. On my laptop I recieved messages about failure to create COM objects (eg “Unable to create VmdbCore object: Class not registered”). Trying to register the appropriate DLL, vmdbCOM.dll, by hand only resulted in failure and an error code of 0×8007007e. After much searching the net, I found that I needed to register atl.dll. Here’s what I did:
   1. regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\atl.dll
   2. regsvr32 “c:\Program Files\VMWare\VMWare Server\vmdbCOM.dll”
   3. regsvr32 “c:\Program Files\VMWare\VMWare Server\vmappsdk.dll”

   After that, it worked wonderfully.

2. If you want to use the web interface, you’ll need to have IIS installed before you install VMWare Server. If you’re like me and only realize that you don’t actually have IIS installed until after you install VMWare, no worries. Simply install IIS and then use the Repair functionality of the VMWare Server installer.
3. Using IIS 5 on Windows XP Pro, I was informed that the VMWare IIS site was setup correctly, but was unable to start. The solution I found was to stop the Default Site using the IIS manager snap-in and then start the VMWare Management Interface site. My guess is that IIS on XP is crippled to allow only one site running at a time.
4. To access VMWare Server from another machine you’ll need (by default) the following ports open on the server system:
   1. 8222 (For the VMWare Management Interface website)
   2. 8333 (For the SSL encrypted version of the VMWare Management Interface website)
   3. 902 (To connect with the VMWare Virtual Machine Console application)

Aside from those issues, it’s been wonderfully smooth sailing thus far.

I just made public the first version of a bridge between Moodle (a course management system) and WeBWorK (a [mathematical] homework delivery system): http://www2.truman.edu/~pas577/wwmoodle/

This past summer I worked for an honest to goodness company, and as part of that I wrote a bit of code. I think I’ll be posting some of it here shortly.

I’ve mentioned my troubles with the HPT372A (Rocket RAID 1520) before, and since then I’ve done a little more exploring. I found that HighPoint does have BIOS upgrades available for the card, one of which claims to fix a problem very much like what I was having. However, after applying this update, I consistently got kernel panics, using the newest kernel for RHEL (well, really CentOS in my case, but they’re essentially identical): 2.6.9-11.EL. In short, I’ve given this up as a lost cause.

I just pushed some stuff relating to a C++ class I wrote for a small project. Essentially, it’s an abstract class for dealing with configuration files. You extend it to handle the specifics of a given config file’s expectations, but the annyoing stuff is done for you.

Check it out

Last spring I bought an HPT372A based SATA/RAID card for rillanon (one of my boxen). As I recall, it’s the RocketRAID 1520, though I’m not positive. At the time I was using an early 2.6 series Linux kernel, and everything worked just fine. The fact that the card isn’t a true hardware RAID dealie was annoying, but some tinkering with plain old Linux software RAID and everything was working. At some point, I ended up using the 2.6.4 vanilla kernel, and it was good. I then tried to upgrade past that, and all hell broke loose. I ended up getting all sorts of crap from the second disc in the array, namely problems with DMA interrupts. I finally sat down and really started playing with it, trying to figure out how to patch things up. In the end, I disabled “Use PCI DMA by default when available,” and everything works. Obviously, this isn’t an optimal solution, and when I have time I’ll do more playing around with it, and look into the changes between 2.6.4 and now and try to build a good fix for the HPT36X/37X chipset support.

In light of the new release of Wordpress, I’ve redone this site. It’s actually a quite nice package, just enough in all the right places.

Welcome to entropicaccess dot net. People who have been here before may notice a lack of content. Suffice to say, my old host deleted my site. Not for any egregious offense, mind you. It was simply because their staffers don’t know how to read. I clearly said “Do not delete my entropicaccess.net account!” And they said, “OK. clikety-click. All done!” I’d almost think they were BOFHing it, except I don’t think most of them are smart enough. Anyway, the site is back. I did, however, lose a lot of content. Most of it was crap, but some of it had some sentimental value. This is what I get for not making backups, recently. Any way, I may as well continue moving in.