A Day Late

I finally got around to upgrading my Movabletype installation to 2.64. I followed the upgrade instructions and everything went smoothly, at least as far as I can tell. I’ve enjoyed using Movabletype from day one. The interface is nice and the various available templates look good too. I’ve been meaning to do more customization on my template so my blog doesn’t look like a whole bunch of other Movabletype blogs but I think I’ll probably end up losing all the aesthetic value if I do. The nice thing is it’s easy to backup and keep iterative versions of the template, so if when I screw it up I can restore a previous version. It’s a well designed product and I really need to get around to making a donation.

I went back up to Heber last night to the same spot Dave and I fished the night before. It started off slow and I was getting worried I’d go 2 straight nights without a fish but luckily things turned around. I was planning on waiting till Saturday to go back up, but yesterday was such a nice day and I kept thinking about all the fish we saw and decided I couldn’t wait.

I saw a snake as I was walking to the hole, I hate snakes. Fortunately it didn’t look poisonous, none the less I gave him some space. So I get to the spot and I spent probably about 2 hours trying different types of nymphs (green drakes, golden stoneflies), which I had heard were working well. After two hours with not so much as a bite I decided it was time to try something new. I knew there were fish because they were rolling and jumping all around where I was. I decided to change strategies and try a dry fly. I had a “stimulator” fly Dave gave me the night before and decided to try it out. After rubbing some floatant on the fly I pitched it out and about the fourth cast a fish rolled over on it. I was so stunned I stood there dumb founded (this was my first experience using a dry fly). I yanked back on the pole and snagged him for a second then he was gone. Even though he got away watching him jump up and grab that fly was still awesome.

The fish were still rolling like mad so I kept working the area. At one point I turned around to look at something, and while I was distracted a fish must’ve grabbed my fly cause I had a nice brown trout on when I turned around. I reeled him in and finally got him close enough to lift out of the water. I grabbed my line just above where he was hooked and lifted him out of the water while I reached around with my left hand to grab him. Just as I closed my hand around him he started flipping around and my line snapped, plunging him back into the river. I was disappointed but it was still nice to get a nice fish on the line and get him in (almost anyway). Sadly enough he also took my only stimulator with him (there’s gotta be a joke in there somewhere).

I had another dry fly similar to the stimulator just a lot smaller so I tied it on and started casting again. It wasn’t long before a nice brown jumped out of the river and grabbed it. This time I was ready and I set the hook. I knew I had a good fish just by the fight he was putting up. At one point, when he was still about 20 feet out he rose up and jumped out of the river again twisting and turning trying to throw my line. It was like straight from a movie. He put up a great fight and this time I was careful not to raise him out of the water by my line before I grabbed him (to keep the stress on the line down). Once I got him out I realized what a nice fish he was. I was so awestruck that I forgot about my pole and dropped it in the river. Luckily it didn’t reach the swift part before I realized it was gone. I’d guess the brown was about 18″ or so and he was very thick and heavy through the body. He also had a nice set of developed teeth (browns are carniverous) and some nice large red spots over his body. I was tempted to try and get my camera out and take a picture but I wasn’t prepared to risk dropping it (the camera). I thought about keeping him but since I didn’t have anything to club him over the head with (I think smacking him with my forceps would’ve just pissed him off) I reluctantly decided to let him go.

That’s about the point the activity stopped. The fish stopped jumping so I tied on a sanjuan worm and tried it for 15 minutes or so with no success. I figured they were done for the night so I called it good. So, some things I learned: 1) I need to buy a net, reaching into the water while balancing the pole is a pain and it’s easy to stress the line and snap it. 2) If the fish are jumping like mad, don’t run nymphs along the bottom, take advantage of it. 3) Dry fly fishing can be a HELLUVA lot more exciting than nymphing. Watching a fish rise out of the water and grab your fly is a rush. 4) My casting is improving, it’s getting a lot easier to present the fly how I want it.

During one of my breaks I did take a few snapshots of the area. For those interested, here they are:

Looking up stream (I didn’t realize my pole and line were in the picture).

Looking down stream (you can see my car down on the road a ways).

Out across the river.

Across, the other direction.

Fishing was almost perfect last evening. The weather was great, nice and sunny but not too hot and not too cold. The water was nice and clear, you couldn’t ask for a better time to go fishing and it would have been perfect had I been able to CATCH A FISH! What’s worse is my friend didn’t have any trouble bringing them in (I think his count was 4 by the end of the night). I still had quite a few bites and had a few on the line for a few seconds but just couldn’t get them in. I was a little frustrated but I still had a blast. No plans for the weekend so I think I’ll probably drive back up and go again. The thing I need to work on? Setting the hook. Finding the fish and getting bites wasn’t a problem, I just couldn’t set the hook. Unfortunately it doesn’t come as a natural reaction when I see my indicator take off, it comes as an after thought and by then the fish are usually gone. Anyway, Dave found a good spot (better than we had before) so we’ll see what happens.

For those interested I think Dave was using a couple bead head nymphs, fairly large (size 12 or so) when he snagged his fish. I used a bead head green drake nymph (also around a 12) and had quite a few strikes on it. I also had a few on a sanjuan worm. I heard stoneflies are working well also.

I think the pictures turned out pretty well. Unfortunately I forgot to charge the battery before I left so I only got 5 or 6 pictures before it died. Anyway, for those interested here’s a couple more (I took the picture up above also):

Dave settling into his hole.

Stoneflies are out (I saw quite a few of these on the rocks)

I’m planning on driving up to Heber tonight to do a little fly fishing. I haven’t been for a few weeks and sitting in my cubicle, trying to finish out the afternoon is about killing me. I have a good feeling which I hope will translate into some good fish. I might take my digital camera with me and snap a few pictures. Taking a nice expensive digital camera into the river with me might not be the brightest idea. I’ll probably keep it in a zip lock bag tucked away in my vest (high on my vest) just to be safe.

By the way that reminds me. I had an unfortunate experience a couple weeks ago, fishing up in Heber. I was wearing my favorite fishing hat (ok, my only fishing hat) and I took it off to tie on a fly. The hat was in the way so I tucked it into my vest between my waders. Well…I forgot it was there and by the time I remembered it must’ve worked its way down and fallen into the river (I imagine it’s floating somewhere across deer creek reservoir right now). What was a real kick in the teeth was I bought it at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Indiana about 5 years ago. I loved that hat. It was even reversible! It was a nice tan color on one side and black with dark purple stripes on the other. It was sad to see it go. I even tried visiting the IMS online gift shop, but alas no fishing hats. So if anyone happens to come across a water logged, probably nasty looking fishing hat on the reservoir, let me know.

I was renewing an SSL Certificate through Verisign for one of our web servers at work, today. I can’t believe how much it costs to get an SSL certificate from a popular root certificate authority these days. Verisign is running about $250.00/year for theirs. I assume the other “big names” are similar. I found one that uses a fairly popular root certificate for $49.00/year. That’s quite a bit better but I’d still like $10 or less a LOT better. Maybe linux has spoiled me, I dunno.

I guess I just have a hard time with paying for authentication. It’d be nice to have a non-profit “open” organization that could publish free or at least cheap certificates but that’s probably not very likely. Actually creating a certificate is relatively simple and cheap but the issuer has to go through certain processes for verifying the certificate request is valid and authorized. Not to mention protecting the root private keys. Of course, the price you’re paying for a Verisign certificate probably has a lot more to do with a trusted reputation and less to do with the cost of issuing the certificate.

For people like me, who want secure communications on their personal server, justifying an expensive certificate(s) is hard to do. We’re basically left with 3 options: 1- Don’t implement SSL, 2-Generate self-signed certificate(s) or 3- find the cheapest issuer you can. Anyone who’s tried to post a comment on my blog knows I’ve done the 2nd option but it has it’s disadvantages. Specifically nasty error messages about the certificate not being from a “trusted source.” I imported the certificate into my root certificate store so I wouldn’t get the message but I wouldn’t expect everyone/anyone else to do that. It bothers me that anyone who tries to post a comment on my site receives an error message so I’m thinking about getting a cheap certificate or turning off the SSL requirement for the /cgi-bin folder. Since I’ve blown quite a bit of cash on toys lately I’m leaning toward the latter. I dunno, we’ll see.

UPDATE: I came across a nice site with some comparison information on different certificate issuers.

I really wish I could convince the “powers that be” to get rid of Windows on our servers at work. Over the weekend I migrated one of our drives to a new server. It’s a relatively small drive that all users map to to transfer files. I didn’t want the drive to become just another place for users to store their data so I enabled quota management on the drive. Anyway, I took the drive offline and copied all the data to the new drive (which also had quotas enabled), created the new share, changed the logon scripts and figured that was it.

As an after thought I checked the quota entries on the new drive and wasn’t surprised by what I found. Since I was logged in as and Administrator when I copied the data it changed the ownership on all the files to Administrator (who is exempt from quotas). I didn’t consider it that big of a problem since I could just modify the “ownership” on the 30 or so directories on the drive to the proper users. That would’ve been nice until I found out there is no way to change file ownership on Windows 2000. It’s possible to *take* ownership of files but not change the ownership to a different user. Oh how I miss my chown command. Apparently you can buy the Windows 2000 Resource Kit 1 which comes with a script to change file ownership. Sorry…I refuse to buy something that should come with the damn operating system.

I was reading an article today about the SCO/IBM lawsuit and thought to myself, what if SCO decided to seek a patent on the “Hello World!” code. All subsequent developers might be in trouble, but then again they could modify it to “Hi Universe!” or something. Hmm…that could be considered a derivative work, though. Software development sure is becoming complicated these days.

I was working on a problem at work, today, involving our IBM iSeries (AS/400) database server. It occurred to me that I ought to create an iSeries category and start posting some entries. I haven’t seen any blogs that talk about iSeries servers, but I’m sure there’s a couple out there.

Anyway, today I couldn’t get the “NetServer” on the system to start. The netserver is basically a windows/samba file sharing application for the iSeries that enables Windows and Samba clients to connect to file shares on the server. Yesterday we had to kill the qserver subsystem due to a couple out of control ODBC queries and since that time the netserver wasn’t running. I didn’t notice until I came into work this morning (that function of the server doesn’t get used much). Initially I tried stopping and restarting the service using “endtcpsvr *netsvr” and “strtcpsvr *netsvr” but that didn’t seem to do much. I checked around and learned the NetServer is basically dependent upon two jobs in the QServer subsystem, qzlsserver and qzlsfile. I checked the subsystem (”wrksbsjob qserver”) and noticed the qzlsfile job was running but not qzlsserver. The “strtcpsvr *netsvr” command is supposed to start the qzlsserver and the qzlsfile job starts when the subsystem is started automatically.

After much troubleshooting here’s what I found: I did a “wrkjob qzlsserver” to try and see what was happening to all the start commands I submitted. I found about 10 qzlsserver jobs waiting to be submitted to run in the qpfwserver jobq. For those not familiar with the iSeries or OS/400 the jobq is where the jobs are initially submitted. If the associated subsystem has enough free resources to run the job it moves to the subsystem and begins execution, otherwise it sits in the jobq and waits until resources become available. I checked the qserver subsystem description and learned it restricts execution to 10 concurrent jobs. I checked the status and noticed there were already 10 jobs executing which explained why the qzlsserver job was sitting in the jobq. The qserver subsystem has a variety of system jobs that run, not all of which I’m clear on what their purpose is. I noticed one job in particular, qpwfserv, was listed three times. I’m not sure why it was initially submitted three times when I restarted the subsystem, but it was. Instead of ending the extra jobs, causing unpredictable results, I decided to change the subsystem description, “chgsbsd qserver” temporarilly and increase the concurrent jobs to 15. That’ll give me a little time to figure out if that job should have 3 seperate processes, or if it shouldn’t, where the 2 extra ones came from. After I changed the subsystem description the qzlsserver job moved into the subsystem, began executing and the NetServer was up and running.