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People: anubis, fatcat, goldm1ne, lostangelino, mythicalbox, superfly

The following blog roll shows an aggregate of all users on our system.

by Mitchel Constantin on 8/31/2010 12:30:20 AM

Jumping on the bandwagon

Hate to say it, but I'm not a fan of the new Digg makeover either.. also before the makeover I was getting disappointed by the lack of intelligent and positive energy on Digg.. anyways..

Hello Reddit, I think I like you.

<3, the mythicalbox

by Mitchel Constantin on 8/15/2010 10:58:49 PM

"decision block"

this is what i'm calling the unintentional friction of daily life.. decision block does not necessarily mean a complete stop of forward movement, but rather it can be nearly unnoticeable by all parties involved.

i have found that when alone i can get more accomplished then when i'm attempting to work with someone in an equal manner of shared responsibility,
however, if I work long enough with someone and we both have background in the task at hand, you can eventually get more done by working with someone else. there will be a warm up period however. this could last weeks, or months.

i really need a graph to demonstrate this..

by Mitchel Constantin on 8/9/2010 5:01:08 PM

The Fullertonian

We were very glad to have the Fullertonian post about our Slum Circus Art Show last Friday night. Here's a scan of the article:

Thank you to Mark Stouffer and Alex Stouffer of the Fullertonian!

Ahh and you may notice the new Lebanese place is in the scan as well.. Yummy.. Very Yummy.

by Henry Hernandez on 7/23/2010 1:01:12 PM

Wheres my Email

SO when we upgraded our servers someone forgot to keep me in the loop. Seems like i got no email, I cant even login to our domain at work. LOL

by Mitchel Constantin on 7/9/2010 1:16:12 AM

More than a beast

Exchange 2010 requires two servers! A Hub server and an Edge server. The Edge server has to be running Windows Server 2008 but not connected to the domain.

This is nuts! I'd say it's just another way for them to sell another Windows Server license. The purported reasoning behind the second server is to "minimize the attack surface". This is GREAT but how about just making your product secure enough to point to the internet? We don't need a sandbox on a separate machine. Especially when we want to expose the web interface to the internet that's sitting on the other server connected to the domain.

by Mitchel Constantin on 7/6/2010 11:17:25 PM

Virtual Infrastructure!

We had a good day for Weavver today. We've been struggling to expand our internal network to support new team members and projects. Even one server to run Exchange would have been great. (Exchange 2010 is a beast, it requires two Windows Server 2008 x64 machines/instances). With no free 64bit servers we were quite excited when a client donated a newer Dell server to us!

Today I picked up the server and installed VMware ESXi on it, uploaded a Windows 2008 ISO and a prebuilt VMware image of Vyatta Core 6 to experiment with later. I configured the server in a RAID 5 (with 3 500GB hard drives it came out to roughly 1TB!). The server also has 8 logical processors and 8GB of RAM!

Once the server was ready Joan and I headed over to Corporate Colo (the data center) and replaced an old server (R.I.P. Duck) with the new one. This was his first time to our colo. :) On site, we installed the server, reorganized the network a bit, documented a few things, and upgraded the firmware on our 48-port Netgear switch and m0n0wall router. All in all the process took about an hour and a half.

What a great day! I'm looking forward to experimenting and building new projects using the new server.

by Mitchel Constantin on 5/27/2010 5:10:23 PM

Single threaded Windows Forms

System.Windows.Forms has a huge flaw. You can only update form controls from the main UI thread. The following code shows an example of how to handle this safely and asynchronously:


// set up for the background thread
private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
     // client.progress is the event that we want to watch so we can update the user as things progress
     client.Progress += new EventHandler(client_Progress);
     System.Threading.Thread t = new System.Threading.Thread(new System.Threading.ThreadStart(DoCheckOut));
     t.Start();
}

// start the background thread
private void DoCheckOut()
{
     client.CheckOut(new Uri("https://svn.weavver.com/main/"), @"W:\Projects\temp");
     SharpSvn.SvnUpdateResult res;
     client.Update(@"W:\Projects\temp\", out res);
}

// set up your delegate to match the event name/arguments
public delegate void client_ProgressDelegate(object sender, SharpSvn.SvnProgressEventArgs e);

void client_Progress(object sender, SharpSvn.SvnProgressEventArgs e)
{
     // InvokeRequired tells you if the current context is not thread safe for manipulating the UI
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by Mitchel Constantin on 4/7/2010 12:10:26 AM

Cisco Routers..

WOW.. I should have remembered this one from the last time.

UPGRADE THE FIRMWARE ON YOUR CISCO ROUTER before trying to do anything with it!

The new management interface is so much easier and better designed and has features that were missing in the old UI.

On that note.. remember to check for an upgrade to the firmware on any device when you first buy it and then periodically after that.. They really should automatically upgrade with an option to "opt out" when you first configure the device. That's good customer service folks!

p.s. A special thank you to roddie on #freenode of the Cacti project for his assistance.

Edit: I'm specifically referring to the ASA5505 and ASA5510.. Both came with the old 5.x firmware.. upgrading to 6.2 made a big difference

by Andrew Picazo on 3/18/2010 2:05:19 PM

Delivery to the following recipients failed. Oh no!

Diagnostic-Code: smtp;550 5.7.1

Exchange is another headache of mine…for the last couple of months we have been getting errors of emails bouncing back…none could be resolved and only conclusion we can possibly come up with is earth link. (only domain giving us issues) BUT today was a different story. msn and hotmail was giving us issues…for the last two hours I could not figure out what was going on… I checked….

1. Event viewer, no errors
2. Hub transport setting
3. Send connector setting
4. Mx lookup

And NADA…I came across a online tool.. mxtoolbox.com….WOW..funny thing.. it told me the domain was expired….lol…
For now on I will always check the domain first….

by Andrew Picazo on 3/17/2010 2:04:18 PM

Blog numero uno!

Where do I start... hmmmm? Let’s start with network documentation! Network documentation is a great tool for network professionals regarding network documenting, diagramming, and management. We all know the importance of proper network documentation, but most of us have never been taught proper network documenting (including ME) and diagramming techniques. Without these fundamentals the task of documenting a network or updating existing documentation may seem overwhelming. It can be a constant drag to update but is very important for anyone including employees, managers, etc.
I even forget at times where certain devices are located on our network. So with that said remember to ALWAYS Update you documentation.

by Mitchel Constantin on 3/14/2010 6:53:37 PM

Radio 2.0 advertising models for Radio 1.0

I've been a long time fan of the Tom Leykis show and have been following his Facebook and MySpace updates since he went off the air during the recent crisis with the economy.

Through following his updates I was excited to hear that Tom would be back on the air soon with his "Tasting Room" show. He decided to sell advertising space on eBay I took the opportunity to bid for them so we could advertise our services. I figured a bid set to $500 max wasn't too much for 10 spots at 60 seconds each. I refreshed and waited for the time to run out. We won! $305. A steal for advertising space on the radio.

Later Tom touched base with me (I was very excited to get a call from him!). We spoke for about 30 minutes and Tom talked to me about how excited he was for his new venture and how he was pushing new boundaries by selling radio advertisements using the internet as an ecommerce tool with the goal is to sell the advertising space directly from his website. The obvious advantage of this model is bypassing the "car salesman" attitude of "Radio 1.0". Using this model you get an exact definition of the product you are buying and you get it at a fair market price.

A quick review of Tom's services:

Tom and his team has been very quic...

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by Romeo Galvan on 3/12/2010 2:02:08 PM

Progress for the big Move

Congratulations to Weavver in finding a suitable location in down town Fullerton to operate from. It is a huge move for the company in the right direction for the future of this company. Many of the employees are really looking forward to the happy hour spots in this primary location. Before we are making the move we are trying to get a few servers to operate, before the relocation. It will prove to be a huge advantage for us and will make the move that much easier. As a person not all familiar with the IT department, it was such an exciting thing to get involved with the development with the project of getting the servers running properly. It took a few man hours to successfully get VMware running on the server and proves to be a good product to utilize. As for the rest of the week, just making sure everything is smooth sailing will account for another month with great progress.

by Mitchel Constantin on 3/12/2010 7:46:46 AM

Signing agreements in an analog world

File this under common sense..

When meeting with another party to sign an agreement, whether it be at Starbucks or another location, it's important that both parties take away a copy of the signed agreement. Usually when doing this online, one party would sign the agreement, scan it, e-mail it over, and then the remote party would do the same and when done at the office you can simply use the copier.

When you aren't going to have a scanner or copier near by just make sure to print two copies and bring them both with you. Problem solved. :)

by Mitchel Constantin on 3/11/2010 8:44:56 AM

Walls

Actual physical walls are important.

*Will flesh this out later.

by Mitchel Constantin on 2/17/2010 1:18:40 AM

Generating an XMPP SSL certificate using a GoDaddy wildcard SSL cert

Okay, the following are some quick notes to help anyone else in the future.. Hopefully I got this right:

The trick for me was to match the same certificate used for XMPP to the one I'm using for IIS6.

1. Sign up for your wildcard SSL certificate on Godaddy.com (or get a single domain cert). Following that:

a. Go to IIS on your server, right click your website, go to Directory Security, click server cetificate, prepare your certificate request.
b. Take your request to GoDaddy and generate the certificate.

** I paraphrased the IIS install instructions.. GoDaddy has plenty of helpful instructions to walk you through this.

2. Now we need to generate a PEM file. Since GoDaddy only gives us a CRT we need to convert it to a PEM file to use with ejabberd. A PEM file is a combination of the cert generated by GoDaddy and your private key (which by this point was automatically generated and stored on your server). Go to RUN on your server and open "mmc".

3. Go to File -> Add/Remove Snap-in. Click add and then choose Certificates then Add. Click OK.

4. Browse through the MMC\Certificates tree.. I found my cert under Certificates\Personal\Certificates. Right click your domain here and follow ...

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by Mitchel Constantin on 2/13/2010 2:41:17 PM

Using Nagios for peace of mind

NUnit is a great way to test software during development.. but in our case we needed a way to test things in production. We are providing and supporting a lot of internet services and that means monitoring servers, capacity, processes, software, etc. These are all things that NUnit doesn't do.

Nagios provides this peace of mind and when you're a network administrator there is nothing better than being able to sleep at night! I learned about Nagios years ago when working in the datacenters in downtown LA. We would manage hundreds (thousands?) of servers and constantly had people calling in to have their servers rebooted. I don't think the place ever moved over to Nagios but through some research of my own I found it and fell in love.

So after getting our chat server running this last week we realized that it didn't seem to be staying online. This was easy to fix, as I only needed to enable the service to automatically start up when the server restarted (windows updates!! grr!).. This uncertainty of the stability of the service led to the immediate task of updating Nagios to monitor the XMPP ports and ensure us that ejabberd was running.

I tasked the interns with the job of adding the extra checks to Nagios on Friday. The key thi...

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by Romeo Galvan on 2/12/2010 5:58:34 PM

SVN THIS!

Well it was another fun filled learning day at Weavver, as Henry and I got the chance to do some file committing using SVN. The process took longer than expected, but it came out just right. The more time's the process comes our way the better, as it will come naturally just like the two guys in the office making all that hot air. Stay tunned till next time, same bad time, and same bad channel.

by Mitchel Constantin on 2/12/2010 3:20:52 PM

But you're 5 feet away!

So we just added public chat services to Weavver. This was a long time coming. I'd been researching it for years and always would run into one road block or another... Well it's working now :).

Chatting is a funny thing.. I set up a chatroom for us to communicate internally on our XMPP network (burningman@conference.weavver.com).. The guys think it's funny because they are only a few feet away from each other. Using chat in this fashion though adds some major benefits to our work. Getting them into this groove will also help when we start working with the community remotely.

1. First thoughts become asynchronous.
We can fire off something to the chat room then easily go back to another task while waiting, or continue working.

2. Everyone can continue using their computers at the same time.. Let's say we are looking up a topic.. that's 3 people Googling simultaneously vs. one.

3. We can listen to music, and do whatever makes us happy in our work environment.

More reasons I can't think of right now...

Alright.. so they just gave up and started chatting in person.. I think it's going to take a few tries to get the workflow down.. but we're on the right path. :)

Cheers!

by Mitchel Constantin on 2/5/2010 11:26:49 PM

Remote Debugging

What is the #1 programmers excuse?

"It works on my machine!"

Remote debugging is an easy way to check why your program isn't performing as expected on a remote machine.

In my case I deployed a simple program to our web server and couldn't figure out why it was crashing.. so with a little bit of research I was able to learn this:

1. The Visual Studio CDs/DVDs come with a set up package called rdbgsetup.exe on them. Deploy this to your web server.

2. Set up security so you can remotely connect to the tool. The easiest way is to run the tool on your server/remote machine under the same account name as your local machine. NOTE the domain does not have to be the same, but the password does.

3. Start up the debug tool on your remote machine and then in Visual Studio browse to Debug -> Attach to Process.

4. Change the qualifier name to the IP address of the remote machine. Be careful here, in my case I couldn't figure out why Visual Studio wouldn't connect (there was no firewall in the way!) and realized it's because my remote machine has multiple IP addresses and the remote debug tool was not listening on the ...

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by Mitchel Constantin on 1/28/2010 8:43:13 AM

Why is Weavver a for-profit entity?

I chose to make Weavver a for-profit entity because I believe that a company that is driven to make a profit is one that is driven to succeed.

I have noticed many open source projects that have been abandoned or were side-projects of the original developers. In wanting to help drive the open-source movement, we believe that it requires constant loving attention to be given to each project....

by Henry Hernandez on 1/26/2010 10:59:33 PM

Late to the Party

So i forgot to post Last Friday. Not much to Say other than it hailed like a mother. Like a typical southern Californian i stared in awe as the wonder that is mother nature showered Mitchell with a refreshing dose of roof water. LOL. to bad i didn't capture it on video!
Weather Shenanigans aside. i did Learn something on the fateful Friday. I installed tortoise. What is Tortoise you ask. its only the most wonderful tool on this planet. Ok, not really, but its great its a must for anyone collaborating on projects. it helps keep track of changes made to a websites code. provides version. and it will email you all the changes. We also enabled IIS on vista or at least tried. Something tells me we all need to get certified before we pretend to know what were talking about. Not much in terms of tangible results but a fun day nonetheless.

by Romeo Galvan on 1/15/2010 6:04:58 PM

JAVASCRIPT The Next Generation

As the wide world of programming keeps stomping me into the ground. The learning curve seems to be an ever ending tidal wave that will suck us to our dumb. As bad as I make it sound the challenge is for us to overcome and since were working at Weavver it will be easy to overcome. BOOYA!

by Henry Hernandez on 1/15/2010 5:17:58 PM

The Learning Curve

So in order for me to get a better grasp of CouchDB I need to have some basic knowledge of Html and Javascript. No biggie ?! Well Actually um Yeah i have almost no knowledge due to the fact that for the past Six years all I've been doing is desktop support. So I went to purchase my first for Dummies book. I'm at the create your first web page Portion so Here goes.

Hello World I'm Learning HTML to Learn Javascript

Why Well that's simple i just cant do anything with CouchDB other than install and upload files, if i don't learn Javascript. And to learn Javascript one needs to understand Javascript. So yeah i have to sit here and write a couple of paragraphs of mostly drivel on my part but its OK it all part of the learning process. Everything is going to the cloud. Someone needs to manage it. I have one heck of a learning curve.

My first blog Post was actually Uploaded by a friend of mine. This second post will be nothing but text as my journey continues the site should improve overtime. Eventually running on couch and features will be added and so forth. I'll update the blog weekly. So my guess is that by this time next year i should be able to write views with ease and be at a more advanced level. What ever the heck ...

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by Henry Hernandez on 1/15/2010 5:05:55 PM

What the Heck is Couch DB!?!

When I went to school the most despised course I took was Database Systems and Designs. Sitting in class I always thought to myself, "Why on Earth should I even learn this stuff, I'm never going to work with databases" Well six years out and tons of jobs later I find myself back where I started. Couch DB 101 for Dummies . So where does one begin?

What I Learned......

First thing you need to know is Couch DB is nothing like MySQL, SQL, Oracle, etc.. These are referred to as Relational Databases. You know Queries, tables, reports, etc.. CouchDB is what is considered a Document Database Server, in which you use Java to write views (query) to Get the information you need. Make sense? Probably not. For those of you needing a more technical overview link is below.

http://couchdb.apache.org/index.html

I'm more of a visual and hands on learner so I found a fantastic video link below http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESDBM9-U804

This Video was a great starting point for me Chris Anderson basically made me completely understand what this database is exactly how it works and what it can do. What I find is most impressive with Couch DB is its scalability and how it can grow and grow and it remains easy to manage. ...

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by Mitchel Constantin on 1/2/2010 2:58:24 AM

Feeling lost

i lost all of my framework due to selling the IP rights
1:15 AM
so i've had to start from scratch
1:15 AM
i feel a bit lost after all these years, slowly getting my footing again

by Mitchel Constantin on 12/30/2009 2:03:11 AM

Why is Weavver a for-profit entity?

by Sonya Contino on 12/9/2009 3:05:00 PM

Visions of Inkscape...

Hello all!

I have recently been contemplating the advantages and disadvantages of an open source program called Inkscape. Inkscape is a vector graphics editor I recently switched over to from Adobe Illustrator. I have made all of my graphics within this along side other open source programs after reviewing and enthusiastically agreeing with the philosophy of open source. Inkscape has many useful capabilities already in its .46 version and the horizon to expand its tools in future versions to meet the general public’s need. But there is also the ability to personalize tools and edit the very inner workings of the program.

The whole reason I fell into using open source Inkscape as my main creative tool in graphic design was because I was, as most twenty-somethings are, poor! Thus the Adobe Creative Suite at a few hundred dollars seemed like an unrealistic option. And let us face it, should we have to pay hundreds of dollars when a designs success depends largely upon the talent and communication of the designer? I believe in my talent enough to not have to overpay for a tool which may or may not be better than the open source/free version.

This is not to say that I wasn’t skeptic or have not found anything wrong with Inkscape, i...

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by Sonya Contino on 12/9/2009 10:10:26 AM

First Blog

echo “Hello World”;

It’s strange how starting to work in a new medium can make you feel like you are being born in front of your peers and teachers. You tumble like an infant through the stages of learning and creation they themselves mastered years ago. It is both exhilarating and humbling.

Now that all that’s off of my chest *whew* I can tell you how it applies to me at this very moment in my life.

This is my first official blog post…EVAH!! I am, in short, super excited and feeling a tad infantile, but confident and proud to be communicating about myself, design and the workings of Weavverville to whoever wishes to read about it!

Me

A little bit about myself beyond the blurb on the Weavver about page then, yes?
I am an artist.

I have recently decided that I cannot and will not fight the need inside me to create whenever and however possible no matter the ending judgment of “greatness and worth” of my time and efforts. I am always proud of myself when I make art and it is something I will improve at my entire life so I don’t mind being imperfect in my methods. What more could I ask for in life than to do something I can continuously learn more about and produce new ideas through!?

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