obstinate.org

I hired some new people a few weeks ago, and I am pretty excited to have a great new crew on board. Samy is also actively recruiting this perl developer from Flint, MI and had him in town for the weekend to see if he was interested in moving to LA. Samy, Giselle, Matt, David and this dude Noah from MI all hung out last night and geeked out while playing guitar hero. We talked mostly about security. I debated that rainbow tables were uninteresting to work on, and Samy explained how he found an undocumented heap-overflow in the authentication code in MySQL 4.1.12. After I got a bit tipsy I went onto silc – nologin and started bantering at old friends.

We talked about projects that we had been working on, and I realized that there is some really interesting non-work (and some work) code that I have developed over the past bit that is quite interesting. Considering that I teach a 3-day course on integrating IP PBX’s I figured I might make some of it release-worthy and begin posting it, better that than put it to waste.

Huzzah!

After having my halides in for a few months, all of the corals I have had have been doing very well. The LPS’s have been doing great with the exception of the Candy-Cane that kept getting buried by the gobies, I relocated him up onto the rocks but he lost a few heads.

We had a bit of a  hot day, and the tank got up to about 88F(!). Now I noticed that both my Orange Plating Monti and this other unnamed purple SPS bleached in small spots. It seems like the Moniti may be filling in that area with fresh (brown?) polyps but it is hard to say, there was definitely some damage.

I am looking on craigslist for a chiller – I have found a few JBJ models that will fit under my stand. I am hoping to get something in the 1/5th HP range to keep everything super-cool. My tank runs about constantly at 82F and I would like to take that down to 75 ideally. When I end up picking up a chiller I will also pick up a new return pump to drive it.

In other news – an acquaintance of mine was done with reef tanks and offered me her 12 Gallon stocked JBJ nano-cube. I was delighted to take everything, but I wasn’t sure about another reef tank. I ended up putting all of the livestock into my reef tank. The inventory included:

• Hawkfish
• Red-spotted Goby
• 1x Mexican Turbo Snail
• 8x Hermits
• Live sand (I put this into an old orange juice carton and put it into the sump)
• Live rock (also in sump)

I then ordered picked up some substrate and cleaned everything up. I still need to pick up some 8k bulbs and possibly a new return pump and then I can start seeding it with some plants and get it going. Thinking about bringing it to the office, we will see.

With the above stuff I also got 3 new 5-gallon buckets, bringing my count to 5. I decided to use 2 of them for RO and start topping off with RO water. I have already seen the positive benefits of this due to the total lack of cyano that use to be rampant.