Fast Forward 8 Months

So again, I have criminally lapsed in my posts on this blog. Since that September post, I left my previous job at the University of Georgia, had a nice 2-week backpacking trip through Europe away from computers and familiar faces, and returned in mid October to begin work for the man a large technology consulting firm, based out of the Atlanta office.

I'm currently on a 6-month 10-month project for a federal government client, spending 4-5 days of the week in the greater DC area, working as, to my dismay, a "Windows Desktop Engineer." I've been able to grab a few server tasks on the side, and the role has afforded me some valuable experience with Windows Server 2008 and Active Directory, however I find myself a good distance away from where my true interests lie: Linux servers and virtualization technologies.

At work, I've learned a good bit about GPO authoring, Active Directory 2008 configuration and management, Ghost Suite 2.5, Windows Server 2008 implementation of DHCP and DNS, enterprise-level IT, and the nature of consulting.

In what little time I have at home every few weekends (I tend to spend weekends in different cities or staying in DC), I've been playing around with Windows Server 2008 and Active Directory architecture in a virtual environment. Since leaving UGA, I had to forfeit my VMWare Workstation license, and thus have been learning to use Sun's VirtualBox. Aside from the networking, I've found that many of the standard features are comparable to VMWare Workstation.

In the coming weeks, I hope to have the opportunity to play around with Xen virtualization and KVM in Linux. More on that later!

Up to Speed

So over a year after my last post, I figured it may be time to reinvigorate this blog. For whatever poor soul happens to stumble across this blog, I apologize in advance for its discontinuity, potential esoteric jargon perhaps only discernible to myself (I tend to occasionally make up words), and its unscientific approach. Honestly, I am using this blog more for my own personal benefit than anything else, as any other intended use seems fruitless and narcissistic.

That being said, this past year I've been keeping busy finishing up school, work, and side projects. As hinted by the title, I've been monkeying around with a bunch of different projects since the end of that MIST directed study in Adobe Air. Some of the projects I've undertaken, finished, or abandoned in the past year are as follow:

• Built a new Desktop at home after my crappy video card crapped out (who'da thunk)
  
  • AMD Athlon 64 X2 Brisbane Dual Core 2.7GHz
  • Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2HP AM2+/AM2 780G HDMI Micro ATX Motherboard
  • 4GB DDR2 800 (PC6400) Dual Channel RAM
  • RAIDMAX Hybrid 2 RX-530SS Power Supply CrossFire ready
  • WD 500GB SATA II HD 7200RPM
    
  • WD 320GB SATA II HD 7200RPM
  • NEC 16x DVD-RW
  • ROSEWILL CD-RW/DVD-R
  • ATI TV WONDER ELITE
  • Windows Vista Professional Yeah, yeah, I know...
    


• Installed Gentoo Linux Kernel 2.6.24 on Dell Optiplex GX270
  
  • Apache 2.2.1 compiled from source
    
  • MySQL 8.42 compiled from source
    
  • PostgreSQL 8.3.3 compiled from source
    
  • PHP 5.2.6 compiled from source
    
  • Gnome 2.20.3
• Reengineered SMIS web site
• Reengineering Atlantatrains web site
• Learned well-formed DOM manipulation with AJAX (no more innerHTML!)
• Update of UGA Franklin College OIT Project Log Tool
• Using pdftk to generate and fill PDFs
• Using AutoSuggest for AJAX autocompleting forms
  
• Projects completed for CSCI 4300 Web Programming Course:
  
  • XSL style formatting
  • XML Schema and DTD
  • Created a simple ticketing system in Ruby on Rails
  • Created a simple bulletin board using Java servlets and MVC
  • Basic ANT build file syntax and usage
    
• Scriptaculous sortable
• Prototype AJAX handling
• Set up and experimented with Subversion and TortoiseSVN on RHEL5
  
• iDeneb OSX dual boot abandoned

Future projects that I hope to document using this blog include (but are not limited to):

• Setting up OSX within VMWare Workstation (I hear its a doozy)
  
• Playing with netBSD, freeBSD, and freeBSD jail within Vmware
• Installing Oracle Express within a VM
• Monkeying around with Sun's VirtualBox
• Potential Projects Courtesy of Microsoft DreamSpark:
  • MS SQL Server 2008
  • MS Virtual PC
  • MS Windows Server 2008
• Java servlets and Struts
• Apache Modrewrite
• Continue learning Regex!
  

Only time will tell how disciplined I'll be in documenting these projects, but hopefully I will be!