Finally got around to upgrading the MovableType installation — we’re now running the latest (2.64). At the same time, I moved the data from Berkeley DB’s to our MySQL database, so perhaps things will run a little faster for me when I rebuild.
Got a new flat screen monitor about three weeks ago. I finally set it up yesterday. I think it was yesterday. Bleah.
Right now my sister-in-law (let’s give her a pseudonym: Karen) is coming home from the hospital for up to four hours at a time. That makes life a lot better for everyone involved, but it means that the logistical issues are ever-changing.
My life has turned into a cat-rat-dog puzzle.
We’re actually working now, though, which is wonderful. Right now, I mean. We actually booked half-time for October, even though we started with a couple mediocre weeks.
I’m rambling, but it helps to get this off my chest. Thanks for listening.
Right, my new flat screen. The main benefit is that it’s about three feet away from my eyeballs instead of ten inches. It’s nice to have the extra desk space, but for my farsighted eyes (20:40), the increased distance is the big win.
The old CRT will be donated to our pet charity.
Work is the mind-killer.
Work is the mind-killer.
Sorry; I had to get that out. Now excuse me while I geek out mightily.
Lots of good things happened today. Notably, I was finally able to get my ssh-vpn set up between us and our client, because I discovered pty-redir98. Perhaps I should have been paying more attention in the last 4 years, but I didn’t realize that Unix98 pty’s would be such a pain in the butt.
Also we (read: I) got MovableType set up for them internally so they can use it to document their R&D efforts. Yay. Using MySQL. Yay.
But on the downside, Telus turns out to have lied to me about how much it will cost monthly to set up DSL for the organization we volunteer with. It’ll be $49.95 instead of $34.95 a month. Unfortunately, I got approval for $34.95 a month, and this group is tight on cash, thus tight-fisted. I phoned over to Shaw and got a quote at $42.95 a month, so we’re going with them. But it’s annoying.
Then I opened up the Linksys DSL/Cable Router that I had gotten a couple weeks ago at London Drugs and it turns out I got the wrong kind. I got the kind that is just a firewall-in-a-box instead of a firewall-in-a-box-plus-hub. So I had to get the receipt back — which, since I already have a reimbursal check, means getting it out of the treasurer’s files, photocopying it, putting the photocopy back in the treasurer’s files. Then I left the receipt in the photocopier when I left.
Bleah.
Blogging has failed to develop my political voice beyond the “Yeah, what he said” (link) “plus also…” format. And unfortunately, I have nothing to add to current debates in canon law. And as a final nail in my blog coffin, I am unwilling either to swear or to discuss intimate details of my … uh … “inner” health, as they say on the box of All-Bran.
So I guess I’ll just be confined to spouting off about minor events in my life, just like everyone else.
No more raspberries. Frost is due anytime in the next week. The birds have started flying south, which means that they fly away from here. I’ve only ever lived in a place that birds flew to before. It’s not very fun to have the birds start bailing out, like they know something we don’t.
The cats are starting to shed. For Oscar and Dizzy, our California-born short-hairs, this will be their second attempt to grow a proper Arctic winter coat. Last winter they were afraid to go outside.
Frederick the Attack Cat is now quite well integrated into our household. Yesterday he walked right up to me and sat on my lap. Since this is a cat who hates men and trees guests in the bathroom (a room which has a special place in his idiotic little feline heart), I count this as a big achievement on my part. Or rather, on the part of the ham in my sandwich that Fredrick was trying to cadge.
Here’s a picture of Frederick’s first sortie downstairs. A few nights ago when I wasn’t able to sleep, I was sitting in the living room doing some library work. I noticed a gray cat run up to me, and reached out my hand automatically to pet it. Then I thought, That’s funny… what’s Fenris [the neighbor's cat] doing in our house?. Of course, it turned out to be Frederick, and he growled the moment I touched him, and then ran off behind a chair to hide. Unfortunately, he picked the chair Dizzy was sleeping on, and since Dizzy is big and heavy and still has his front claws (F. does not), he cleans Frederick’s clock whenever they fight. So here’s a picture of Frederick skulking and Dizzy trying to figure out what the growling was about:
Mail is up on trillian now, but not yet for me. I need to sync my files over, and then we’re almost done. I guess just the FTP and WWW servers need to be moved: so I need to d/l and install the patched publicfile. Bummer.
Trillian gets a Sig11 crash in a repeatable place when I try to compile the XEmacs packages. I am hoping it’s just a bug in XEmacs. It would suck to have to ditch this box too. Happens when compiling cc-align.el with r21-4-8.
Set up the samba mounts on trillian today. Also installing necessary software, such as CVS, cdrecord, etc. DJBDNS tools are now installed. Next step is making trillian be the gateway for talking to foreign cvs servers.
Our old server is failing. It has an old AMD chip with the sig 11 hardware error. I believe there’s also some sort of a bus fault where the motherboard kicks off. Possibly also hardware problems with the memory. /dev/hda is failing quickly. /dev/hdc may be failing slowly, or not, but anyway occasionally hangs when I’m trying to write data to it, necessitating reboot.
I have a backup device: /dev/hdb, a CD-RW. When I try to mount it using ide-scsi, the system hangs. Clearly, I am not meant to back any of this data up.
The main inconvenience caused by the hardware problems is that compilation often fails with signal 11. I’ve written a batch script called ‘repeated-make’ which runs make until it finally succeeds, pausing between re-runs. It’s tedious and annoying. But sometimes there are bright spots:
{standard input}:1594: Error: no such instruction: `pus’
No, that’s only an instruction on the Cthulu processor, from HP/Compaq/Digital/Lovecraft.
So I swapped which card was eth0 and which was eth1, and I did it on the low level (module level) instead of the script level. Now after a painful reboot, we have 100BT on the internal interface where it might someday matter, and 10BT on the external interface where it never will. Next: see if we can run the DHCP server now.
Oh yeah, dinner.
Frenetic burst of activity last night: set up MovableType, which necessitated installing Apache, installing some new perl modules, and general fiddling. Now using MovableType as a bad diary.
Almost done recompiling the kernel so we can maybe use the CD-RW for backups, and so we can run a DHCP server. DSL is here but we’re not using it yet.