I’ve recently set up Cacti on my home office network for monitoring bandwidth usage, system load, memory usage, etc. Cacti is a phenomenal tool that allows you to create graphs for these various SNMP functions. I’ve been using Safari quite a bit lately, since discovering Safari Stand. But from the moment I set up Cacti, I noticed problems with Safari not loading the graph pages properly. It would report errors when trying to get the images, and often only 1 or 2 images would display, and even then, they were usually cut off. At first I thought I just needed to restart Safari, but that didn’t resolve the issue. Firefox has no problem loading the Cacti pages just fine, so it does not appear to be a server issue.

Perhaps I’m experiencing what this guy was experiencing. It sounds familiar, anyway. Now I won’t go so far as to say Safari sucks like he did, but it is frustrating that I can’t rely on it to display my network graphs. Anyway, if anyone else has experienced this, or perhaps knows of any fix for such problems, sound off below in the comments.

I just wanted to post this link here to a blog entry from Shaun Grove’s Blog regarding what he calls “event-driven church”. His thoughts mirror my own thoughts on the subject, though I’ve never really articulated them as he has done so well in his post. My denomination gets several honorable mentions throughout his post, and I think Shaun observed correctly, that the Seventh-day Adventist church has fewer problems when it comes to event-driven church. I think it is somehow easy for us in the SDA church to avoid the event-driven philosophy of doing church, but perhaps this comes too easily. Praise and worship on the scale of the larger, event-driven churches must have its place, no? I believe the key is praise and worship that truly comes from the heart of one who has been redeemed and understands what an unbelievable gift that is. Praise and worship must come from a true desire to give praise to our Creator and Redeemer. If this is forced, I doubt that it’s any more pleasing to God’s ears than the most half-hearted hymn-sing.

I just wanted to write a bit of praise here for AppleCare today. Yesterday, I noticed that my PowerBook’s power adapter had stopped working. It appeared to be a worn cable. I take good care of my PowerBook and accessories, so it was really just a matter of two years of solid use. Anyway, AppleCare said they’d replace it, but the replacement part wouldn’t arrive for 5-7 days and that I wouldn’t be able to track it. Well, as it turns out, they shipped it overnight via DHL and they did send me a tracking number. I was very pleasantly surprised to receive my replacement power adapter about 24 hours after my call to AppleCare. Let’s hope they keep up the good response as I enter my third year.

After recently deciding to strike out on my own professionally, I’ve had to do some test-driving of some software that’s designed to make running a small business easier. I tested the following software:

• iBiz
• TaskTime
• Daylite
• Studiometry

Each piece of software has its own qualities, of course, and they are not exactly equivalent in their feature sets. I was primarily interested in CRM functionality, time management, and invoice generation. After taking a reasonable look at each, I ended up purchasing Studiometry. Studiometry was more expensive than some of the other options, but certainly provided more functionality. It has really made tracking multiple clients and projects very easy while providing a very flexible invoicing / reporting mechanism. I’m really digging it, so far.

I’m probably only one of 3 people crazy enough to run Tiger Server on Beige G3 hardware, but I figure I’ll post this for those 2 others that may find this helpful. I recently applied the 10.4.5 update and was disappointed to see that my screen blanked upon reboot. As I am running VNC server on the box, I connected remotely to it to discover that the video was indeed messed up, even in VNC. I had been avoiding the “Patched RagePro” driver provided by XPostFacto because I had seen some artifacts when using it before, but the update has forced me to check that checkbox in XPostFacto to get any video. Of course, if I happen to notice too many artifacts, I suppose I can always install the 10.4.4 driver.

BTW, for anyone who may be curious about performance of Tiger Server on such old hardware, it’s really not that bad. I mean, it’s useful for browsing, email, testing, etc. I actually use it as a backup server. It runs Bacula backup software and backs up my network computers to an externally attached FireWire HD.

I went backpacking this past weekend with several good friends, David Benton, Phillip Paul, and Bruce Boggess. We traveled to the Big Frog Wilderness, right near the Ocoee River. Our hike led us up the mountain Friday night and we camped down in a valley near Rough Creek Saturday night. It was a great weekend and a great hike. I took my dog Tennyson with us and he had a great time. He was a bit of a nuisance sometimes, as his nose gets him in trouble, but he is a great trail dog. David has put together a great map of our hike and pictures from the weekend. Thanks Dav!