Brian AskerI follow Jesus. Help others follow Jesus. Empower others to do the same.

Students often tell me that Facebook is a distraction to their studies and their faith.  I agree.  It is easy to get sucked into a world of clicking through profiles, photo’s, groups, interesting fan pages.  The hours spent on facebook certainly can be detrimental to ones study habits, not to mention real live socializing.  Some students have even decided to stop using facebook for a week.  One student decided to close his account.  Kudos to them!

In my work, facebook is nearly a requirement. There are some students that I can’t get in touch with unless I facebook them.  Then as if by magic I receive a response within minutes.  I recently posted the announcement of our son’s birth on facebook.  Over the next few hours and days I had hundreds of messages to sort through of congratulations!  It was  a lot of fun.  It demonstrated the power of facebook.

All of this got me thinking.  Read the rest of this entry »

My brother and I finally got around to finding some new hardware for the server. We had several crashes due to lack of memory. My brother found us a PII/233 with 96MB of RAM and next time I come to Brainerd, i’ll be bringing it up to 192MB. It has helped drastically improve the processing of e-mails. Today, I setup bleach, our secondary server to mirror silage, so that in case silage goes down at least some services will remain intact.

Today, after much waiting, I finally got broadband. The first time they came out they wouldn’t install it because I didn’t have a jack in my room. We decided that it would be nearly impossible to run the cable to my room, and decided to put it in a different location. I bought a wireless router, and now we don’t have cables running around the house! It’s wonderful, I can finally be on the internet at the same time as the phone, not to mention the fact that it’s faster!

Well, after spending about 2 months goofing around with different layouts, and updating some of the content, the new look for ASKER.NET is born! Surf Around!

Today, I upgraded silage to the latest version of openSSH, which should now support both ssh1 and ssh2. I opened up a ssh server on port 21 (thereby shutting down the FTP) for about 1 hour. I compiled, and then installed the system logged into the alternative port, and then killed the old server, and started up the new one. All told, ssh was probably down for about 1 minutes, the rest of the services should have been running as normal.

Well, after starting at 9:00pm on Friday night, installing two new hard drives, a new video card, a new processor, and an IDE controller card, ASKER.NET is running again. It is now running a RAID system (in case of hard drive failure, data should remain intact). The video card that was causing problems has now been removed and with the new CPU upgrade (100 to 166) ASKER.NET should run a lot faster too! It took me 3 hours to do all that, and hopefully you will notice the change

“Well, I have finished the implementation of my artificial intelligence project. I implemented an agent that walks around a world, sharpens knives, and talks to people. For assignment #2 I designed what I thought I might Implement. Assignment #3 I actually implemented him. If you want to know more, you can check out http://www.asker.net/cs426/“

Well, Micronet was asked by it’s Internet provider to change IP addresses today, which means I had to change the IP for ASKER.NET and lakewoodfc.com. So, after a few phone calls, and a few modifications, The roll over happened at about 11:40 today, and total downtime depended on when your own DNS server updated. I would estimate that it was down for a minimum of about 1 minute, and a maximum of about 1 hour. Mail started coming in right away, so there was no mail lost. Everything seemed to go really smooth

“After trying a new pop3 (email) server with some difficulties, I found another one. I now have tpop3d installed. This pop server has code in it to defeat the “”DO NOT DELETE”" message and some other features I may implement. That is for IMAP (another email server) users only. This should not affect webmail, or IMAP users. It should provide better support for POP3 users.”

Well, after hours of playing monkey island this week, i finally passed the game! It is definately a fun game. For those of you who haven’t played it, i won’t spoil it for you. However, monkey combat was rather interesting, and so was how you defeat the game.