At the TIES Technology Leadership Camp being held this week I will be doing a presentation titled “Issue Tracking and Forums: Open Source Tools For Technical Support”. The description is “See demonstrations of two free, open source tools that make technical support easier: Request Tracker, a web- and e-mail-based issue tracking tool for logging, assigning, prioritizing and resolving tech support requests, and phpBB, “bulletin board” forum software that gives technical support staff a virtual place to discuss common support issues.”

I’ll be writing more about the tools we use at Hopkins, but for now, here are links for more information.

The issue tracking software we use is called RT: Request Tracker by Best Practical, LLC. Point your browser to http://www.bestpractical.com

The on-line forum software we use is called phpBB. Point your browser to http://www.phpbb.com

I’ll add some excerpts from my presentation at a later time.

–Pete

I was driving to Hastings yesterday morning and I played a new song that my wife had suggested I get. Every once and a while, a song will grab my heart and move me to tears. This song is one of them. Here are the lyrics. I highly recommend you get this song. You won’t be sorry. In fact, it is available on the iTunes Music Store, which is where I bought it. Check it out.

Letters from War
by Mark Schultz

She runs to the mailbox
On that bright summer’s day
Found a letter from her son
In a war far away

He spoke of the weather
And good friends that he’d made
Said I’d been thinking ’bout Dad
And the life that he had
That’s why I’m here today
And then at the end he said
“You are what I’m fighting for .”
It was the first of his letters from war

She started writing
You’re good and your brave
What a father that you’ll be someday
Make it home
Make it safe
She wrote everynight as she prayed

And late in December
A day she’ll not forget
Oh her tears stained the paper
With every word that she read

It said I was up on a hill
I was out there alone
When the shots all rang out
And bombs were exploding
That’s when I saw him
He came back for me
And though he was captured
A man set me free
And that man was your son

He asked me to write to you
I told him I would oh I swore
It was the last of the letters from war

And she prayed he was living
Kept on believing
And wrote every night just to say
You are good and you’re brave
What a father that you’ll be someday
Make it home
Make it safe
So she kept writing each day

Then two years later
Autumn leaves all around
A car pulled in the driveway
And she fell to the ground

And out stepped a captain
Where her boy used to stand
Said mom I’m following orders
From all of your letters
And I’ve come home again
He ran in to hold her
And dropped all his bags on the floor
Holding all of her letters from war

Bring him home
Bring him home
Bring him home

My wife is out of town for work this week so it is just me and the dogs. I just finished watching the weather on KARE 11 TV and their chief meteorologist was showing the current doppler radar image. It showed a line of thunderstorms moving into our area. There was nothing severe predicted, but lots of rain, thunder, and lightning. About 20 minutes after that, there was a big lightning flash and then the lights went out. They’ve been out for about 20 minutes now. Fortunately, I have battery powered emergency light in the front entry and a rechargeable flashlight in the kitchen.

I’m now upstairs, laying in bed with a couple of candles burning, a couple of lightsticks glowing, and a partially charged laptop battery. Hopefully the power will come on again soon.

It seems like we lose power at least once or twice a year here. When we lived in Plymouth, I don’t remember ever having a power failure.

Note: The laptop gave out moments after I wrote the last sentence. The power didn’t come on until the next morning at 6:30 AM.

–Pete

Tonight was the Commencement ceremony for the graduating seniors at the school I work at. This is the fifth one of these I’ve worked. We have over 5000 people attend the event, which is more than we can sit in the Lindbergh Center, our Athletics complex. To help alleviate that situation, we have a “remote” broadcast that people can watch for free on the big screen in our theater. My job is to set up the projector, audio, and lighting in the theater for this. It isn’t very complicated, and I get the benefit of sitting in an air conditioned room.

One of the other jobs I do as part of the event is to walk around and take pictures of as many of the staff as I can find. Several other staff people do this as well. Afterwards, we gather the pictures together and then do a quick slide show of the event the next morning at the annual staff breakfast. It is a great way to blow off a little steam and we always get some memorable pictures.

–Pete

This past weekend, I brought the new mower out to a friend’s farm to help him mow some of his “acreage” since he hasn’t been able to buy a big mower of his own. On Sunday afternoon we were just finishing mowing when the mower ran out of gas again. We had been mowing off and on for around 8 hours all totaled and things had been working great. I topped off the tank, jumped on and fired up the mower. I managed to drive about 5 more feet before it stopped running. Puzzled, I went to start it and it wouldn’t turn over. Really puzzled, I climbed off and tried to pull start it. I couldn’t even pull it over. Now I was worried. I hadn’t checked the oil all day.

I quickly pulled the dipstick out and was relieved to see that there was oil on the dipstick. I wiped it off, reinserted it and the pulled it out again. It was clean. Totally clean. I had run the mower out of oil. The engine had seized. I was crushed!! First off, I was crushed that I was so stupid as to not have checked the oil at least once the whole day. Granted, you wouldn’t expect it to use that much oil, but I didn’t even check it. I was also crushed that I seemingly wrecked my mower’s engine, and that was going to be costly to fix.

I pushed it back to my friend’s garage and explained to him what had happened. He’s pretty mechanically inclined, so he suggested something we try a quick fix and see what happens. He refilled the crankcase with oil. It actually did have oil in it, but only about half as much as it should have had in it. Then we pulled the spark plug and squirted oil into the cylinder. Lastly, he removed the flywheel cover and attached a breaker bar to the flywheel nut. Very gently, he pushed on the breaker bar until the piston broke free and began to move freely again. He slowly push the flywheel around with the breaker bar until the motor had gone through the combustion cycle about six times. Then, he put the spark plug back in, and fired it up. Would you believe it? It actually ran!! I thought it was a goner for sure. Now we’ll see how long it lasts. It obviously uses a little oil, so I might have to consider rebuilding that motor.

–Pete

A couple of weeks ago I attended an auction at the City of Independence City Hall. The auction was all farm and garden equipment. One of the largest categories of items at this auction was lawn mowers and garden tractors. I’ve been interested in getting some kind of lawn mower for quite some time in hopes that it would speed up the process of mowing my yard.

As I looked at the huge array of garden tractors, I new that all of them would probably go for around $500, which was considerably more than I really wanted to spend. There was one that caught my eye though. It wasn’t a garden tractor. It was a riding lawn mower — a John Deere model 68. This machine was far from new, but it looked like it was quite functional. I climbed on and tried to start it and was unable to get it to even turn over. The battery was dead. It did have a pull start, but it was an eight horse motor, and quite difficult to pull. I looked long and hard at it and decided to bid on it when it came up for auction.

When it was finally time to start the bidding for it, the auctioneer started the bidding at $500. He waited for at least 30 seconds and nobody bid on it. You have to keep in mind that the group was mostly farmers and country folks. They were interested in a tractor, not a riding mower. I finally spoke up and said, “I’ll give you $100 for it.” Another man in the audience paused and at the auctioneer’s prompts, agreed to give $110. I immediately countered with $120. After almost a minute and no further bids, I was surprised to hear the auctioneer say, “Sold!”. My $120 had bought me a mower!! What a deal! When I got home, I looked up on the net what the price of a new mower similar to that would be for John Deere and it came out to be almost $2200 retail. That $120 was a steal, if it ran. I still hadn’t seen it run.

When I got home, I was showing it off to my neighbor and he said, “I’ve got a booster battery that we could use to jump the dead battery.” He brought it over and connected up the booster. To my delight, the mower started right up and ran quite well. Since then, I’ve used it to mow my lawn a couple of times and also hauled it out to my friends farm and used it to mow his acreage a couple of times. It works great!!

–Pete

I just finished watching “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” a few minutes ago. One of the final scenes of the movie, a scene with Frodo and Sam, struck me once again as a powerful scene with a timeless message:

Sam: It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened.  But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.  Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”

We use Microsoft Entourage for our email on some of the computers in this school. A teacher brought me his laptop because every time he tried to look at the items in his Drafts folder, Entourage would unexpectedly quit. Entourage X keeps all of your mail in a database file and after doing some searching on the net, it became apparent that the problem was a corrupt database.

The simple fix in this case was to launch Entourage while holding down the option key. This forces Entourage X to rebuild the database file. In this case, he lost one of the draft emails he was writing, but Entourage no longer crashes!

–Pete

Update: In case that trick doesn’t fix it, there is an interesting piece of software called Entouraid (shareware) that also repairs corrupt Entourage database files. I haven’t tested it, but it looks interesting. Surf to http://www.thepropellerheads.com

The school district I work for is a district in transition. Our infrastructure in the past was based on Windows NT domains. This infrastructure has served us well over the last five years, but we are now in the process of retiring Windows NT and the servers that run it. That is where the frustration is for me.

The main file server I run in my building is a Windows NT 4 box. For anyone who has ever run a Windows NT server, you know that you just about have to plan to take it down once a year and reload Windows NT. If you don’t do that, it will force you into it some time in the future when something breaks. I didn’t have time this past summer to reload all of the software on that server. Now I’m paying the price.

In the last week, I’ve had the server get so mixed up that I actually had to resort to physically turning it off because one process had consumed so much of the system that it wouldn’t respond. This is one of many problems I’ve had with it. The sad reality is that at the end of the school year, that server will be retired. If I can only limp it along until then…..

Pete

A friend of mine recently bought a farm and I volunteered to help him replace some of the fence posts in the pasture. To do this, he was able to borrow a Bobcat to make pulling out the old posts easier. We attached a chain to the bucket of the Bobcat. When we wanted to pull out a post, we wrapped the chain around the post and lifted it out by raising the bucket on the Bobcat. It really made it a piece of cake. What was fun for me is that I ended up doing a lot of the driving it. I had never driven one before, but it only took me a few minutes to get the hang of it.

This particular Bobcat had a feature called “all-steer”, meaning that all four wheels would turn to help you make smooth corners. You drive it with a joystick that you actuate with your left hand. Your right hand also has a joystick, but it is used to move the bucket around. With all the years of playing video games as a kid, this all felt pretty natural to me. In fact, I really enjoyed it. Think about it…. What’s more manly than pulling out fence posts with a Bobcat?

–Pete

I don’t know about you, but I absolutely hate doing taxes. I do my taxes with TurboTax every year. I find taxes hard enough to do even with something like TurboTax. I can’t imagine how people do it by hand. Yuck! The best part of tax season is knowing that my taxes are done, they have been e-filed, and Uncle Sam owes me some money for a change.

On a completely different note, spring has finally arrived in full force. Today was 75 degrees and sunny for most of the day. Now if we could just get a little rain. It has been really dry. There were a number of grass fires around the Twin Cities today as a result.

-Pete

Today must be a day for weirdness in Outlook Express.

I had a teacher who was using Outlook Express 6 in Windows XP Pro to check her email. Checking her email went fine, but whenever she clicked the reply button, OE6 would crash. It didn’t matter which email she was in either. It crashed WHENEVER you clicked the reply button.

After an hour of trying different things, I finally figured it out. The problem was her address book file was corrupt. Apparently, when she clicked reply, the Address Book application (wab.exe) would try to open the address book file and then crash both the Address Book Application and Outlook Express.

The fix: I removed the corrupt address book file from her profile and allowed Outlook Express to create a new, empty one. I then imported the contents of her old address book file (which I had dragged to the desktop). It worked! Outlook Express no longer crashed and she didn’t lose her addresses.

–Pete

I’ve always been annoyed that Outlook Express 6 is tied to Windows Messenger. In the default configuration, when you start OE6, it starts the Windows Messenger application. From my perspective, if I want Windows Messenger to run, I’ll start it.

In Windows XP Pro, there is a group policy you can set to keep Windows Messenger from running at all. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that setting this policy introduces a huge lag when you start up Outlook Express. It seems that OE will pause for 30 seconds to a minute when it is starting up while it tries to start up Windows Messenger. Of course, since that policy is set to keep Windows Messenger from starting, it will eventually decide it can’t start it up and then finish starting up Outlook Express.

After noticing that, I thought I would solve my problem by simply uninstalling Windows Messenger. It turns out that you CAN’T uninstall Windows Messenger from Windows XP. The tools that Microsoft gives you only allow you to hide it, but not uninstall it. That wasn’t going to work either.

Finally, after doing a little searching on the net, I found my answer. If you change the name of the executable file for Windows Messenger to something else, Outlook Express will decide right away that it can’t start it. You now get the best of both worlds. Outlook Express starts up quickly AND Windows Messenger doesn’t start.

The executable file for Windows Messenger is found in C:\Program Files\Messenger\

–Pete

When I was kid, my family went to a resort in Cross Lake, Minnesota called Beacon Shores. The resort was perched high on the shores of Whitefish Lake, a large, clear northern Minnesota Lake. I remember one year when we were there, scientists had predicted a large meteor shower to happen one evening. At about 10 o’clock that night my twin brother and I went down to the dock and laid on our backs at the end of the dock, staring up at the sky. It was so peaceful to lay on that dock with cool night air surrounding us, the sound of waves gently lapping on the shoreline, and the faint smell of wood smoke from the bonfire that the other guests were enjoying on shore. The stars were so bright there — much brighter than I had ever seen since I grew up in the light of the city. You couldn’t help but look at that and be amazed by it. We didn’t see many meteors though…..

Tonight, as I walked the dogs, that memory came flooding back to me for some reason. Today was the first 60 degree day of the year and at 9:00 tonight I took the dogs for a long walk and enjoyed the beauty of the night sky, the joyful panting of the dogs, and the solitude of a quiet spring evening. I was even treated to the site of Venus being right next the moon and a beautiful view of my favorite constellation, Orion.

It is times like these that make it truly a joy to be alive.

Holly, the service dog my wife and I are training for Helping Paws lost a tooth this week. To be more precise, she had a tooth removed. A few weeks ago while she was laying on her back with her jowls flopped open, I noticed that one of her top incisor teeth was shorter than the others. When I took a closer look, it was obvious that it was broken. The little red dot in the center of it told me that it was probably broken down to the pulp cavity. My vet confirmed that. So there were two choices: remove the tooth before it dies and gets infected or do a root canal and then cap the tooth. It wasn’t too difficult of a decision since the tooth is such a small one and is hidden underneath her droopy upper lip. We had it removed.

The vet told us this was a “minor extraction”, but of course, Holly still needed to be put under anesthesia to have it removed. Man! That anesthesia sure mixes her up. When she came home she was staring at the walls, walking into things, tripping over herself and whining. She wasn’t whining because she was in pain, she was just really confused. When it was finally time to go to bed, I put her in her kennel and she laid there and softly whined. The only way I could get her to lay quietly was to sit next to her kennel. So, I sat on the floor and dozed next to her kennel until she was finally asleep. I woke up at 1:30 AM to the sound of her softly snoring. I also woke up with a stiff neck and sore butt!

The next morning Holly was her usual self. You couldn’t even tell she’d had a tooth out. We kept the tooth. It is amazing how big it is.

–Pete

I went to Dale’s memorial service yesterday. It was really quite a nice service. One thing that became abundantly clear was how much this man was loved by his friends and family. He was know for his sense of humor, his passion for cooking, and his passion for helping others. It made me even more sad that he died, because it was obvious that there were many things I would have liked about him had I gotten a chance to get to know him better.

After the service I did get a chance to finally meet his husband Jeremy. Jeremy was a really nice man and I feel bad for his loss. They were apparently only married for a short time before Dale died.

–Pete

Those of you who know me, know that I’m heavily involved in a non-profit organization called Helping Paws. The mission of Helping Paws is to further the independence of individuals with disabilities through the use of service dogs. This is a mission I strongly believe in. Because of this, I’ve done lots of things for Helping Paws over the last seven years, including my current role as the Vice President of the Helping Paws Board of Directors.

The past several months have been a time of transition at Helping Paws. Our Director of Development for almost five years decided it was time to move on to other opportunities. We spent several months finding a worthy replacement, which was a difficult task. We found our replacement in a man named Dale. Dale started on March 1. Today I received a phone call that Dale had unexpectedly died this morning. I was stunned. He had only been with us for a week.

I have to admit that I’m sad on multiple fronts. As a person I feel awful for Dale’s partner and their families. I can’t even imagine how hard this must be for them. My thoughts and prayers are with them as they deal with this dark time in their lives. As a Helping Paws board member I’m saddened that we will never get the opportunity to work with an individual who had so much to contribute to our organization. Even though we knew him for only a short time, he had an impact on all of us. Now we have the unenviable task of finding his successor. Wish us all luck and pray for Dale’s family.

Today I did something I don’t do real often: I bought a different car! The car I currently drive has over 110,000 miles on it now and it is getting worn out. We went looking at new cars today with the intention of just looking. Wouldn’t you know it, right off the bat we found one that seemed perfect and seemed to be the right price. It is a 2001 Honda Civic EX coupe. It is the first car I’ve ever had with a power moon-roof. I think I’m going to love it.

Today I went and saw Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ. To make the statement that it was quite a film is a horrible understatement, but never-the-less it is true.

As you are probably aware, this movie chronicles the story of Jesus’ last 12 hours of life on Earth. The thing that struck me the most about this film was how much hatred there was for him. There’s been a lot in the press about how people think it is anti-semetic and how it is going to stir up new hatred between Christians and Jews. I don’t understand that. What I saw was not something that I would blame on Jews. To me it was more about corruption and human nature.

The brutality of how Jesus died was unsettling. I don’t know enough about Christian theology to be able to tell how much of Mel Gibson’s film was Hollywood and how much is based on the theology of Christianity and the practices common during Roman times, but if what he portrayed in the film is anything close to the reality it is truly disturbing. He was beaten and tortured and when it seemed like they could do no more to make him suffer, they nail him to cross and leave him to die. I can’t even imagine being in his shoes. I can’t even imagine being in the shoes of one of his family or disciples either and having to watch that. I can’t even imagine humans being that cruel to one another.

There is more I want to say about this movie, but it will have to be in another entry.

–Pete

If work with large numbers of computers, you are always looking for ways to automate things. Scripting and batch files are your answer!!

In the Windows world, one way to do this is to write batch files. Batch files are a special type of text file that is filled with DOS like commands. I just wrote a batch file today for one of the servers at HHS. This particular server is running a proxy server for the high school. For some reason, the log rotation is not working properly on the server, so it is just logging continously into one great big log file. As you might expect, this file gets huge fast! Right now I don’t have time to troubleshoot why the log rotation stuff isn’t working (especially since I’d have to take the server off line during the school day, which isn’t an option). So instead, I wrote a little batch file as a work around. The batch file stops the proxy server (which runs as a service). Next it moves the log file to a different directory. Once the log file is in the new directory, it starts another little program that renames the log file so it contains the date and time as part of the name. Finally, the batch file then restarts the service. Obviously, the best solution to my problem is to figure out why the proxy server program isn’t able to do rotate the files like it is supposed to, but my little batch file mimics the behavior quite nicely. The last step is to get the server to run the batch file once a day. To do that, I took advantage of the Windows Scheduling Service. I simply scheduled it to run the batch file once a day, every day, at 11:59 PM.

By the way, the batch file ended up looking something like this: