My geek thread
 

There has been a lot "geek" talk in the "twitter" thread, so I thought that I might start a "geek" thread to off load that chatter.

I'll go first.

Tonight I am installing Ubuntu 10.10 on my old laptop.

having 7 different threads to twitter in kind of defeats the point.

For example, Eating Status, Drinking Status, Music Status, Geek Status.

Back in the 90's I had a ThinkPad with no cd-rom drive... installing Linux meant swapping out floppy disks for about two hours! Fun stuff.

Oh, the things I did to get my hands on open source back then.... and just look where it got me.

Reading a paper from NIST called "Security Considerations for Voice Over IP Systems".. and finding it interesting.

Its RTC's fault.

Just upgraded to 10.10 on my netbook.

Agreed, but there has been a lot of "static" about the geeks taking over for a while in that thread.

Posting from the "old" laptop using Ubuntu 10.10. So far, so good.

And, yes, I do remember installing Linux doing a floppy disk "shuffle". One Christmas Eve I installed Linux (Debian) on my wife's old Dell laptop for Spawn2 when he was 4 years old. It was a royal pain, but he LOVED it.

Revising a presentation I am giving to the Fossil Energy Program Manager of the DOE. Hopefully this goes well.

This just gave me flashbacks about floppies in general. It was always fun to get a CRC error in the middle of installing a program or copying a file spanned across multiple floppies.

What happens if it doesn't? (go well, that is)

Possibly not getting as much funding for my research next year. I've made some good progress and have some pretty interesting results so I don't think it should be a problem.

I got my BNC connectors and crimping tool today in the mail from the chem dept. Sweet.

Now I just have to teach myself how to use the connectors and the crimping tool. After that, I will be able to hook up the Au electrodes I've fabricated to the box and start doing some voltammetry!

Wait, for what? I happen to work in a um...very...closely related job. Feel free to PM me.

Quel is in DC, the Fossil Energy Program Manager for the DOE probably works in DC.

How awesome would it be if Quel was the Fossil Program Manager?

I work for one of the program managers (as a contractor) at DOE, so I would at the very least know the person he is presenting to (though they may not know me unless it's the one I work for).

I'm fighting a Foxpro database. I'm trying to import it into a SQL db.... but the OLE db driver wont' work with SQL 2008 or W7..... Access crashes too, as does Excel....ggrrr...

I remember getting Red Hat 6.1 "Cartman" to connect to the internet - dial up - via external modem in 1999. I thought I was King of the Linux geeks.

On Ubuntu 10.10 now.

What are the steps, exactly? Can you export the Foxpro db to CSV/txt and go from there?

Sounds like fun... or not..

I'm now an undercover geek following have laser eye surgery earlier in the year.

People are now surprised when I tell them I "work in IT".

A few years back, when I was more interested in security research, I did some of the honeynet challenges. I also did some playing around with tools like VOMIT on the side, pretty interesting stuff...

ok I hate to be that guy, but does this belong in the racing forum?

meh, probably about as much as half dozen others...

That's what I was thinking. I did a similar process exporting SQLite into SQL 2005.

Or wrong version of the driver ? I have 1.00.02 from the base SQL install.
I remember having to install updated versions of other drivers in the past for various ODBC connections.