Let there be sheet rock. And it was good

Finally I completed moving walls, creating new walls and cleaning up. Now it is time to bring in the sheet rock. It is so nice to start covering up all of the studs and conduit. Everyone in the family helped. And eventually I got quite good at using my Roto-Zip to cut in outlets.

In the next two weeks we hope to finish hanging the sheet rock, tape, mud, sand and paint. With the exception of the stairwell (it will be the last part to be done due to the traffic). We may even be able to start on the drop ceiling if we do not run in to too many problems.

No drive mirroing in XP, no problem

So I had a total system crash. I had two hard drives die on me a motherboard act screwy and I think it was all the power supply. So now that I have replaced all the parts I decided not to go with the on board SATA RAID (As that was the first thing to fail on my last setup). Having used software drive mirroring in NT 4.0 for years I figured W2K was descended from NT and XP is a W2K descendant therefore XP should have drive mirroring.

WRONG!

Though you will find all of the instructions to mirror a drive in the Windows help files, you will also find that you can only use said functionality in the Server flavors of Windows.

So now I was left with finding a way to do this my self. I could have attempted to write something myself, buy a commercial product or find some one else that has done it. I chose the last option.

After some brief research I went with Karen's Replicator. The product, which runs as PTReplicator.exe, can be scheduled to run at various intervals. Once a day seemed to work well for me.

It mirrored my 6 GB of data in only a few minutes. Even better as the software only replaces files that have changed it will run even faster from now on.

The only improvement I would like to see in the product (besides being moved to something other than VB6) is an interface to the windows scheduler (or as a windows service) as the software needs to be running, minimized is ok, to perform the mirroring. I am thinking I can use the scheduler to run the software without having to be logged in.

But as I did not write it, and am too lazy/busy to create on myself, I must recommend it to anyone that needs it's functionality.

Whole house filter and water softener

Prior to commencing my basement demolition I installed a whole house filter and water softener (with pictures).

The water softener was everything I wanted. I no longer have hard water build up in my dishwasher or on the metal components in my bathrooms. It was not that hard to install either. I recommend having a friend that knows how to sweat copper.

To protect the water softener, and all the other components in my house, I decided to install a whole house filter at the same time. Home Depot has them for around $18. The install using the compression fittings was simple, though I would have felt better if we could have sweated the fittings on.

The filter does its job. You can see the particulate that it is stopping from entering my house watter supply. There is just one problem - flow rate. The water softener is rated at almost 9 gallons per minute (GPM). The filter is only rated at 4.5 GPM. This makes for some very interesting showers.

The solution was to add a second whole house filter in parallel. That is to put in a tee and send half the water to one filter and half to another. Between the two of them I now have approximately 9 GPM flow rate. This equals the water softener making it the limiting component for water flow.

This seems to have worked well. Not that I want someone to flush during my next shower but if they do I will still have some water pressure.

Demolition

Demolition has commenced. I now have pictures of the event for all to see.

The basement demo begins

For anyone that has been worried about starting a home improvement project let me say I know where you are coming from. When I moved into my my home my wife and I loved the fact that we had a finished basement but hated the wood paneling.

We discussed attempting to remove it, demolishing it and the old drywall behind it or painting it. Removing the paneling was not going to be an option. It was glued and nailed to the point where any attempt to remove it took paper and sheet rock along with it. We thought we had come up with a novel approach and where going to skim coat over the paneling then paint it. This would prevent the grain and groves from showing through the paint and not require any demolition.

Alas a minor flooding issue pushed our hand. The bottom of the paneling wicked water out of the saturated carpet. This meant that we where going to remove the paneling and drywall and replace the drywall.

We started this last Friday evening. I was amazed at how quickly me, my wife, my two pre-teen boys and a friend of mine where able to remove the majority of the paneling and drywall. There where some areas that required more time (like the stare well) but all in all it was a quick two day project.

One of the advantages of removing all of the drywall is the ability to look at the "bones" of your house. With the wall open I am planning on extending some of the wiring. I also noted some soffits that where built way too big for the ducts they where built to cover. Finally we found that by moving a wall we would gain another 50 square feet or so of "living" space from an over sized laundry room.

I will have pictures posted of the demo soon. So check back when you can.

Media Wiki Special Page - Last User Login

Recently Best Way Technologies implemented a MediaWiki implementation at ProCyclopedia.com for training and knowledge dissemination for ProShip. To aid in tracking the use of ProCyclopedia Danila Ulyanov and I created the LastUserLogin MediaWiki extenion.

The LastUserLogin MediaWiki extenion is a two part solution to tracking the last time a user accessed a MediaWiki instance.

First the wfUpdateUserTouched function updates the user table each time a user views a page. This was necessary to ensure that personnel that used the login cookie where being tracked as well. If this feature is not required the function can be removed and only the last login will be shown

Second the special page shows a sortable grid. This grid shows the User ID, name, email and the last time that they viewed a page (or logged in if wfUpdateUserTouched is removed).

Planned enhancements include making the User ID a link to the users page and adding a link to show a history of pages that the user has viewed.

Farewell to Pope John Paul II

Though I may not agree with the politics of the Roman Catholic church. I want to send my regards to all who morn the passing of Pope John Paul II.