Took most of the day, but I have my Ubuntu install renamed, joined to the domain, and hosting the wiki that my box used to run. It was interesting transferring my settings and the database over from Windows XP to Ubuntu, but it’s pretty much an identical copy now. There’s only one file or two that I didn’t bother copying over, but those were modified PHP files that had some special handling that, ultimately, I probably don’t need in production anymore.

I need to play with authentication a bit more later and make sure that it’s able to send emails and whatnot, but — overall — it’s been a success.

Anyone know if MS Visual Studio 2005 or SQL Server Tools work in WINE? That would be pimp. No biggie if it doesn’t, though, I’m still ok with dual-booting on my main box for now.

Next on my list:

Fix an issue I’m having with ‘sudo’

Get a VNC server running running so I don’t need to be at the console

Figure out how to connect to Windows boxes via RDC on there

Install Asterisk

I finally am running Kubuntu at the office.  I realized Stu’s computer has just been sitting there not doing anything ever since he left, so I figured now is as good of a time as any to put it to use.

I was blown away by how simple the installation was.  I remember installing early versions of Red Hat back in the day nearly all via command line.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t all without snags… Not the fault of the OS, however.  I spent about two hours trying to get network connectivity — only to discover the system had a non-standard setup which was causing the problem.  The integrated NIC was fried (but didn’t act it).  An add-in NIC was installed, but I didn’t see it when I originally set up the box.  So…. yeah…. Definitely an excercise in futility.

Once the networking part got squared away, though, everything went by smoothly.  I installed MediaWiki and am slowly trying to move the data off of my existing system over to this one.  After that’s moved over, I’ll no longer have anything dependant on my system, so I can go ahead and do whatever I want to that (probably dual-boot Ubuntu and Vista).

I’m still trying to get used to it, though. It’s been years since I’m messed around with a *nix system.  Stuff like having to use “sudo” for commands is still a bit foreign to me, but it’s still fun.  I think between getting more comfortable with Ubuntu and Vista will get me a bit more interested with some of these new projects.

I’m still not quite at the point of wanting to upgrade to Vista at home, though.

I have over two dozen domain names by now. And as of tonight, a new one has been added.

AmishPC.com

Still need to make content for it, but whatever…

I also plan on making some “Amish PC” tech support workshirts for myself at some point.

I jokingly told a buddy of mine I wanted a storefront where people could buy parts… but everything would be made of sticks, rocks, etc. He gave me a buncha’ grief because it is supposed to be AmishPC — not CavemanPC. Hehe. For the record, CavemanPC.com is actually registered by someone… and it isn’t me. Go figure.

So… yeah…. I need a hobby. ;-)

Maybe if I associate myself with “Amish PC” enough, people will stop asking me to help with their computerized ghosts of Christmas Past. The days of Windows 98 and dialup-modem troubleshooting are essentially over, so I guess I shouldn’t complain too much. Being designated The Computer Guy can making things a bit interesting sometimes. But whatever…. comes with the territory, I guess. That being said, I have to remember to call my aunt tomorrow. She’s left a couple voicemails for me over the weekend. Rumor has it, it’s about a Windows 98 pc with dialup-modem issues….

[UPDATE: As of April 2007, I sold this domain for about $500. Wild. Guess I’m not the only one with odd taste in domain names]

I picked up 65 shares of AMD yesterday.  It didn’t go as low as I had hoped, but it was close enough to my target price that I decided to buy.  At one point on Tuesday, it got to $15.16/share.  A year ago, it was at around $47/share.  Ouch.

AMD is still a good long-term investment, though, I think.  Their current financial woes seem to revolve mostly around the ATI acquisition and the ongoing price-wars with Intel.  What I’d really like to see is for AMD to focus less on trying to win the server market and to focus on where they arestrongest at — laptops and desktops.

Will be hard to tell until another year or so as to whether the company can make things work or not.  They have a track record of working with limited capital and being able to turn it around, though, so I’m not too worried.

The hardest thing for me right now is finding some stocks to trade that I can get decent return on in the short-term.  Plus, I need to find some “safe bets” for about $10k soon that I’ll be investing as part of my retirement money….

[Update: I love after-hours trading.  Picked up some shares of Disney at $35.20.  I’m such a dork.  Haha.  Actually, I loathe Disney…. but their stock was just too good to pass up.  It’s going to take more initial funding to get enough shares for it to be actually worth trading later, but I’m game.  Until I get my 401k pay-out, I’m just using play cash anyhow.

It’s funny…  My brother questioned the fact that I have very little furniture and don’t really go out much, while he was coming home with expensive entertainment centers, game consoles, etc.  Yet now that he’s making the same annual salary as me, I’m the one “playing” with a couple thousand in stocks while he didn’t even have cash to buy a jumper cable when his car battery went dead today…. Nice]

I never really understood the Bull and Bear terms used in the stock market until the other night. It just sort of clicked. You ride a bull and you run away from a bear. lol.

Anyhow, I’ve made a lot of progress on my stock app today. Been coding it since around mid-afternoon when I got bored playing WoW. I’m having a blast. It’s really easy to tell when I’m hard at work on something because I’ll have about half a dozen or so instances of Notepad open all showing as “Untitled” in my task bar. That’s typically where I toss source code that I’m working on, where I write my pseudo-code, etc. At the moment, I’m only at 4 instances of it, but that’s after I got through a lot of the framework for it.

Now I’m working on some of the nitty-gritty stuff. Josh and I are arguing a bit about whether to use datasets or arrays for the data used in calculating and then analyzing the moving averages of the stock. Personally, I think a dataset would be the most efficient in this case, but he likes doing things the hard way, I guess, because he was talking about making classes, arrays, etc. Since I’m writing this stuff for me, though, I’ll be using a dataset — thank you very much :)

I’m still looking around online to see if I can find the data I need. I’m not trying to make anything on my own in here unless I absolutely can’t just pull the data from another source online. For non-standard stuff, though, I’m not going to have a choice.

For the moving average, specifically, I’m looking to interpret it as data rather than visually. Actually, I’ll probably do both… But what I’ve found in almost every service, system, etc. is that the trending is shown visually, but there’s no “summary” of it in relation to the price trend. The more I’m talking it out with Josh, though, the more I’m questioning how I can do this… I’m probably going to need to move to another part of the app and revisit the trend stuff once I have more time to get a better handle on the stuff behind it.