It’s about time! Ok, So my new job at infopia is a little crazy, and I am busy beyond belief. Whoa, I didn’t expect that. It is Saturday and I am, actually, at work. We have a convention this weekend for our customers to come and learn where our software is going in 2006, and what we are doing to make their lives easier. Woo. So, I have been here as an Infopian, and currently I man the front table at the convention handing out packets and name tags, but really, I am important to this company.

During the month of January, I wrote most of the help system files, and have worked on configuring and testing our new Ticket Support System. I also did millions of odd jobs around to help other people out. One of the things I am going to work on, though, is keeping a status report for my own purposes so I can justify my activities for the month.

Infopia is a really nice place. Now that I have a decent understanding of the software, I have been given a few clients and I provide the support. I will eventually be the first contact for the users to speak to to get some support on the software. I don’t know everything, but I know enough to be dangerous. I suppose that I’ll be pretty good with the software rather quickly.

In a side note, I have a webpage that I would love to work on today, except my server is down and I have no remote access to it. Bummer. I downloaded a web management program called Gunther. It is a wiki style system that allows quite and manageable solution for web page. It doesn’t have many bells and whistles, so I am adding functionality to the Gunther system and will be releasing the patches I build on my system. Check it out, if the server is up, at www.themaskedcrusader.com.

Gunther is built completely in PHP, and currently has no interaction with MySQL, where as mediawiki does use MySQL. I think I am going to add some more functionality and scripting to Gunther, and then attach the back end into a database rather than directory. Gunther currently works using a apache writable directory to store information. The help center on SourceForge makes it look like it hasn’t been updated in quite a long time. So, instead of editing this one, I might be writing my own similar version and submit it to sourceforge. It is quite a cool system, and it supports subscript, superscript, tables, bold, itallics, and a lot of other stuff that MediaWiki allows, but not a lot of cool features that I want to add. I use live-expandable menus (much like the poetry section on my Xanga Blog) for menus, so that is a function I am going to add. I am going to add some other javascript tokens such as page count, no-right-click and true photo embedding. Currently you can add a graphic to Gunther, but you can’t add captions or wrap text around the picture, so those will be additions… This sounds like a lot of fun.

My web server at www.themaskedcrusader.com is Fedora Core 4, but in a month or so when FC5 is released, I’ll be migrating the system to that. I run the software on an Athlon XP 2800+ with a Gig of RAM, My main operating system is Windows XP, but the FC4 runs in INIT3 on a VMware Virtual Machine. To take up less ram, it runs using the VMWare Player and as soon as I can afford the upgrade, I want to run it on the VMWare ESX Server. THe ESX Server is AWESOME… think ZEN with steroids. But the price is also very steep. VMWare GSX Server is going to be a free license in a month or so, so I’ll be migrating from my puny VMWare Workstation 5.0 to an awesome VMWare GSX Server then.

For those that are not familiar with VMWare technology, check out their website at www.vmware.com. The workstation (currently version 5.5) allows you to install and run a different Operating System under another. For example, I can run FC4 from within Windows XP using VMWare. The GSX Server is the same thing, only enterprise grade… soon to be for free – It must run it’s virtual machine from within the atmosphere of another operating system. The ESX Server (~* oh yeah *~) is it’s own operating system, and you can run two full operating systems concurrantly on the same CPU. This is very similar to the Old MAC PowerPC, where you could run both Windows and the MAC OS on the same machine.. THe PowerPC had an optional add on board with intel instruction that allowed Windows to run. Well, when you run “Virtual Machines” from within VMWare Workstation, the virtual system “knows” that it is running in a virtual machine and, though it’s nice, it’s not optimally running because it can “sense” the virtualization that’s going on. Well, aparrently the ESX Server is so awesome that each operating system can’t “see” the virtualization and therefore, runs optimally as if it were the only thing installed. Both run simutainusly. nice. Anywho, I gotta get goin. I’ll add more tomorrow.