Posts from — November 2005

Moving this site from the “jim” directory to the root of the domain - please update your links appropriately. I’m working on automatic redirects now.

but it’s over now.

Monday — y’know, Gay Christmas — was teh suck. The mail server went down not ten minutes after I arrived; I spent the next six hours working on the stupid thing. Granted, much of that was waiting for database consistency checks to finish, but still. six. hours. By the time I got home I was in no mood for any holiday festivities, or chorus rehearsal, so I fiddled with KDE on the newly-rebuilt laptop and sliced demons.

Tuesday was nondescript. Fall-out from Monday, mostly.

Wednesday was triumphal; I got a snazzy spam filter working, which was more effective than my previous attempted hacks.

Thursday… well, the snazzy spam filter broke things. LOTS of things. To the point that my boss called me in a minor panic — on my cell phone, at 7:40-something (it was early, i don’t remember), shortly after I had finished the first round of morning bathroom routine — to ask me what to do now that the server process “Start” command had failed. Removed the snazzy/broken spam filter, tightened down some policy laxity, set the DNSBL to “kill”, and started things back up. The server is now running more smoothly than it has in years.

Today has been catch-up from yesterday, but I caught up very early. This is why I am sitting here discussing my week with you now, haha.

+++

I should mention that I am closing in on my five thousandth edit on the English Wikipedia, according to Kate’s Tool. Just four to go. Perhaps by the end of the workday today…

Of course, most of my recent edits have been rollbacks of vandalism and warnings on vandal talk pages. Still, 5000 edits is not bad.

I also missed my second Wikiversary, on October 27. But then again, so did all of you. *sniff*

+++

So the netadmin and I are kicking around a massive Idea (note capital “I”): rewrite our employer’s whole customer database system, from scratch, in the beloved powerhouse trio of Apache/MySQL/PHP. It’s a tremendous undertaking, especially given the scale of the existing DB and the reach of its tentacles.

+++

Trying to get Fred to post occasionally. Any assistance y’all all can lend would be greatly appreciated.