On Wednesday afternoon, western BC was hit with a powerful storm that knocked out power to over 100,000 households and businesses.

We were one of them.

Thankfully, our utility power was restored almost 21 hours after it was cut on Wednesday afternoon (12:20 PM in my system logs), but that left us with no heat for a night. Brrr. Cold.

Thursday evening was fairly boring with no Internet access, but I made good use of our treadmill and home gym while patiently waiting for the Internet service to be restored. I checked up on my router periodically, but I gave up at 11 PM and went to sleep.

I got up this morning to check my Internet service. Still nothing. I attempted to reach my server from work and finally got a response back!

Forty-eight hours and two complaints later, that is.

Our workplace was another nightmare. I recorded over twenty-five power outages from 12 PM to 4 PM on Wednesday. One computer without UPS power failed to boot up, after it rebooted itself several times in a row. The system registry had become corrupted. However, I had it up and running within a few minutes. In order to avoid such problems in the future, I placed a call to our distributor and ordered two APC 1200VA UPS units. That’ll keep my co-workers and I productive, while keeping me from pulling out excessive hair.

It’s all good for now, but Environment Canada predicts that another powerful storm is headed our way. Hopefully, we are prepared this time around.

I mentioned that statement at work a couple of months ago.

A co-worker looked up and said, “Please don’t say that.”

Well, it’s true. With the recent housing boom in Abbotsford, we’ve had explosive population growth. With people come vehicles. With vehicles come traffic. With traffic comes congestion. Congestion leads to frustrated drivers. Frustrated drivers lead to road rage.

That’s where it’s at now. There’s more and more road rage on Abbotsford streets. Honking horns. People making a left at intersections when the light is red. People tailgating ever soo closely, leading to even more frustration.

Abbotsford used to be a small town, and the roadways were not designed for such large volumes of traffic.

So, I thought, ‘What’s being done about the increasing traffic flow?’ I saw traffic analysis black boxes on the major routes I take home a couple of weeks ago. That means the local government has acknowledged the problem and has used the traffic analysis boxes to serve as a form of statistical proof.

No solutions yet, that I can see (except on a couple of overpasses). Hopefully, the traffic signal timing will be adjusted at major intersections to allow for longer delays during peak traffic hours. As for roadways, existing ones will need to be optimized for the increasing traffic flow.

I just hope the roadway architects take some notes from our US counterparts, as they have done a terrific job of designing roadways for future growth. For example, take the Interstate 5. Not many individuals know that it was designed for fast evacuation of cities in the event of an nuclear attack. The idea may have seemed far-fetched when the Interstate 5 was constructed, but you can bet the extra planning has paid off.

On October 26, the Ubuntu team released a new version of Ubuntu, 6.10 (aka Edgy). I waited a couple of days for them to work out any last minute bugs, and decided to proceed with the upgrade today.

In the Ubuntu 6.10 / Edgy release notes, Ubuntu recommends the following procedure to upgrade from Dapper to Edgy:

# apt-get dist-upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade

That will not work. Why? Because sources.list needs to be updated first (and apt-get update needs to be run beforehand).

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I just got back from the CIS mentorship meeting a couple of hours ago.

It went well, but I must admit I felt a bit out of place being the youngest person there. Nevertheless, it was a good opportunity to meet everyone involved in the program, especially after communicating via e-mail for a couple of weeks.

Topics at the meeting were diverse, ranging from how the IT sector is hot (and CIS / CompSci enrollment is low) to how some students expected to earn $100K right after graduation. We shared a few laughs after that one was brought up. For students reading this, don’t expect to move to management right after you graduate. Start low and work your way up the corporate ladder.

As for numbers, approximately 15 students have signed up for mentoring, and I mentioned I’d mentor a couple (besides my cousin).

Overall, I feel that the mentorship program appears promising for current and prospective CIS students.

It’s been crunch time at work. That implies 100% dedication to work, late working hours and excessive coffee intake. Tim Horton’s and Starbucks ought to have frequent drinker cards. In all, it’s been a rough three weeks, but I guess I’m content with the outcome of my latest creation. I won’t disclose it here for confidentiality reasons.

In other news, it was inspiring to read that Google snapped up YouTube for an incredible $1.65 billion USD in stock earlier this week. Based on the amount of traffic that YouTube generates, I can only speculate what Google intends to do with YouTube. I bet VC firm Sequoia Capital was very content with their ROI. All eyes are now on Yahoo, who may consider purchasing Facebook in the not too distant future.

That’s all for now.

Once I had Ubuntu Server 6.06.1 installed on my new web server, I quickly realized it needed several changes before I could put it online. Hence, this is the first installment in a series of blog entries to help others configure their systems.

If you installed from a CD-ROM and have a working network connection to your Ubuntu system, you should update the sources.list file used by apt-get so that your system won’t prompt you to insert the Ubuntu CD-ROM each time you install a new package:

1. Log in to your system via the console.
2. Run the following command: sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list
3. Add a # before the following line (use cursor keys to put cursor in front of the line and then press i, followed by #) :

deb cdrom:[Ubuntu-Server 6.06.1 _Dapper … restricted

4. Save sources.list by pressing ‘Esc’, followed by the following sequence of characters to write the file and exit: :wq

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My web server was down for most of yesterday, for reasons out of my control.

I shelled in only to see one error message upon restarting the Apache web service: Segmentation fault. I checked the last few lines of Apache’s error_log only to see many more errors related to the same problem. It’s one of most dreaded messages one can receive on a Linux box, aside from the dreaded ‘kernel panic’.

A segmentation fault usually means one of two things in the Linux world: a software fault or a hardware fault. So, I set out to determine what the underlying cause was.

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