Windows Server 2003 & Bike motorification

Apparently the community college that I go to signed up for the whole Microsoft Dreamspark program thing, and went as far as to set it up so that you can sign up for said program using just your SSN, and while that is a little bit creepy, I'd say it's pretty cool too so it balances out nicely.

For those of you who haven't heard of MS' Dreamspark program, it's this thing that microsoft has been doing for a few months now where if you're a college student, or have been accepted into a college that supports dreamspark, you can sign up and download anything you want from this small pool of software they offer, no charges at all, just relatively slowish download speeds. It's a pretty cool idea in my opinion, but the software list they offer isn't really much; that's not to say it's not awesome, though. Free (usually expensive) software for download? Woo! But if they offered like, Office07 or 03 & WinXP it would be pretty nice.

Then again, they software they offer is mainly geared towards "aspiring software developers" or whatever. They have: VisualStudio 2008pro, MS Expressions (2007?), MS SQL Server, VisualStudio 2005pro, xna game studio, and last but not least, MS Server 2003 standard. The first thing that really interested me was that srvr2003, so I downloaded it right away. And by right away I mean two 600MB ISOs at 230KB/s.

Once it did finish, however, I opened up VMWare and loaded it in to begin playing with it. First impression: just like windows 2000 server. Second impression: just like windows 2000 server with some new added features and fancier logos. New software is new software, though, and from playing with it in vmware I found a lot of neato little serverish things.

Playing with it in vmware, though, got boring. Running an OS like this on real hardware is oh so much more interesting. Realizing that I don't exactly have many capable PCs around here, I began to stumble on what I would run this on. I then remembered "the valtec," which is a generic whitebox PC that I got from a friend of mine for helping him move. It's not really spectacular- PIII 500, 512MB, 20GB, etc. However, that does *almost* fit into the "suggested requirements" for wndwssrvr2003stndrd, and it easily clears the minimum. After converting those ISOs into warmly burned compact disks I hooked up the valtec booted it up off the first disk. The install went like any other install, except it took an epicly long time, about an hour and a half.

From this I expected that it would run about as quickly, or as not quickly, as it installed. Much to the contrary it runs pretty fast, *nearly* wndwssrvr2000 speed, which I suppose isn't too radically crazy considering it's only three years newer, hee hee. So right now it's got remote desktop enabled, so I can hook right into it from the R61i here with no issues. I've got a web server running on it, but I'm not going to open the port until I have some data to dump there, which may take a while, if it ever happens.


Allllsooooo.... I've been making some great strides in my bike engine-ification project, both in using the engine I already have and in possibly getting a new engine off ebay for $150 shipped. The new engine is looking good because it has nice things, like a clutch and is connected to the wheel by a drive shaft, not a roller. The other option is using the engine I have now, but it needs some work and to mount it to the bike I still need some sort of mounting bracket. Making one of those would probably take longer than it would to get the money for an engine.

Getting back into blagging

So it would seem as though fall was the last time I fired up blogspot and typed anything in. I guess you could say I "eHibernated" through the winter and am just now emerging to type about random stuff once again. A lot has happened, but I'm going to break it down into multiple posts.

Holy pants! It’s a new blog post!

Yes folks, that's right. John is now using the word "blog" instead of "blag". Why? Who knows.

Crap, I don't actually have anything to blog about… hrmmmmm

I'll probably have something later. Come back then…

omg jame!

Kitten pictures:

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2-

 

yay jane :)

Weedeater engine sans muffler

So today I got bored again, so I decided to go outside and work on the weedeater engine, see if I could get fuel to stop leaking around the tank gasket, get the mixture trims set just right, etc. Once I got that stuff done (fuel line needs a new gasket thing) I decided to have some 'fun' and take off the muffler, and run it. It works, but it results in a VERY loud and shakey engine, instead of a highpitched grumble there is a high pitched cackle, and it's almost impossible to control.

I attempted taking a video of it with leTreo650, this is what I got:


Unfortunately, it doesn't sound much different than when I ran it with the muffler on. Kinda bummed about that.

How to burn through GoPhone money in seconds!

I was Googling around randomly the other day, like I often do, and I found Google maps for palm. On a whim, I downloaded and installed it on my treo650, and it runs like a charm. However, it has a little indicator up in the top right hand corner, showing how much stuff has been downloaded. Within, oh, maybe 45 seconds of poking around, it was well above 200k (not sure exactly what it got to). I then realized that I am charged $0.10 per KB. That fun little session of Google mapping cost me over $2!

Not a huge deal I suppose, considering I have about $114 in GoPhone monies, but I don't think I'm going to use google maps anymore...

not cool. (literially)

Well this really sucks. It's October, and it's 84 degrees outside! It should be like, lower 70s upper 60s!

Dang you climate change... *shakes fist*