I just spent about half an hour upgrading this site from Monaural Jerk v0.5a3 to v0.5a4 without once disrupting service. How slick is that, eh? The only visible changes are the “Powered by” indicator and the updated RSS/RDF links. Everything else is just administrative geekery.
Now that I’ve updated this site, it’s time to seriously think about getting one or two others upgraded…
So I went out to dinner with Lil’ last night. That was a lot of fun, as it always is, but that’s not what this post is about. See, when she arrived at the office to pick me up she sent my phone a text message to let me know she was “Here.”
I’ve been getting a repeat of that “Here” message every hour since. Apparently, Verizon’s SMS delivery system has gone utterly insane and thinks I haven’t “picked up” my message, or something. Argh.
And when I say every hour, I mean every single hour, all night long. So my phone beeped to let me know a message had arrived, then gave me the nagging “c’mon, pick up yer damned message” beep every couple of minutes after. This woke me up all damned night. Maybe I’m overtrained, but usually when I get an SMS in the middle of the night it means one of my servers has gone wonky at the office, so I can’t just ignore it. Besides… the beeps are annoying. Every hour I rolled out of bed, grabbed my phone, turned on the backlight so I could see the message, grunted in disgust, deleted the message, turned off the backlight, put down the phone and rolled back into bed.
So here I am, not yet having had a decent night’s sleep. Today should be fun fun fun, eh?
One of those little side projects I’ve been working on in my spare moments for, oh, the last three months is a replacement for the server formerly known as Mihoshi. She’d been in service longer than four years, actually, originally built to be the chat server for KNRK. She took on other duties in time, and with the demise (twice over the course of three years) of the chat room her primary function became that of a file transfer depot and Cacti host.
Problem is, she was getting old and slow. Big (physically, not in terms of capacity) old slow hard drives and a puny old processor were impeding her ability to take on new tasks, and I have a slew of new functions I want to use that box for. So I started prepping Mihoshi’s replacement, known as GXP. (For the record, ever since we lost the ability to use kgon.com for in-building subdomains Mihoshi has been known to the outside world as GXP… but that was just an emergency stopgap name change.)
And because I’m an insane dork who can’t just do things the easy way, I built the new machine around a Linux distribution I’d never seriously tried before: Debian.
I will say this: The apt-get system is the cat’s pajamas. Hell, half of why I tried Debian is because of how much I’ve recently enjoyed using apt-rpm on my Fedora installs. I was able to apt-get everything I needed to make GXP happy, including Cacti itself. Now that’s impressive. For the first time I haven’t felt the need to hand-roll Apache, PHP, MySQL or any of the library dependencies just to satisfy my obscure requirements. Damned nifty, that.
Yesterday it came down to crunch time. Corporate wanted a special new project, and I was the logical guy to implement it… but the machine I wanted to implement it on wasn’t ready yet. So I made it ready and flipped the switch. Oddly enough, almost everything transferred with complete ease. I didn’t drop any data, lose any configurations or piss off anybody who uses that machine for vital business purposes. (This doesn’t count Cacti, which I’d been wanting to reimplement from scratch anyway. And yes, it is working better on the new box.)
I even got to learn how to implement and administer phpBB, which is most assuredly quite the nifty message board system. It has some minor quirks, but generally it’s quite straightforward from the administrative side. Very nice.
Not all eleven-hour workdays are bad, see?
Among the features I haven’t yet restored to this website is the SETI@Home status indicator. On a whim I decided to check up on my progress…
Results Received: 5247
Total CPU Time: 6.910 years
SETI@home user for: 4.869 yearsYour rank: (based on current workunits received)
Your rank out of 4952071 total users is: 43476th place.
The number of users who have this rank: 7
You have completed more work units than 99.122% of our users.
Whoah. I’m in the 99th percentile, baby.
So, who else out there is doing SETI@Home still, and how many results have you cranked out? While we’re at it… who’s interested in joining a new group? (The Torps have sort of had their day… most of us still in it are just there on account of inertia. And it’s not like Zaph is putting out another version of Cthugha any time soon. Le sigh.)
(Even if I am #2 out of almost 40 Torps members in total results processed, and am within a couple hundred of taking the lead. Ahem.)
Yep. Just another indicator of my sheer unsufferable geekiness. Y’all can deal, I’m sure.
You may have noticed this website taking rather long to load, lately. I finally got to the bottom of it: Turns out the PHP version of the Blogroll display code was adding eight full seconds to the processing time for the journal script.
Well, to hell with that, eh? So I switched to the Javascript version. Voila!
Oh, this solution also fixes the exact same problem with Lil’s blog. Imagine that.
This morning, like most mornings, my routine began with rolling out of bed and kicking on the computer.
No, I’m not kidding, but I am exaggerating a bit. I really just use my big toe (sometimes right, sometimes left, depends on mood) to depress the power button.
And wouldn’t you be depressed if a big toe came out of nowhere to squish you every morning? Thought so.
Hmm. You shouldn’t let me go off on weird tangents like that. Back to the story… I checked my email as usual. What was unusual is the proportion of email inbox contents between my new and old addresses. Main address? The usual dozen or so missives, all but two being spam. Old legacy almost defunct address? More than sixty messages… all of them bounced spam!
The hell?
Until this morning, I didn’t know what a “Joe Job” is. Consider me edu-mah-cated. And annoyed. I mean, who the hell would use that address for anything? Argh. (Mind you, at least they didn’t use my current address!)
Also consider me inspired (at long last!) to get GnuPG installed on my home computer. From now on, missives from my main address will be signed. (Okay, as soon as I can make the same thing happen on my computer at work… which shouldn’t be all that tough.)
My public key is right here, thanks.
Signing my emails won’t prevent another Joe Job scenario, but it will allow me to state with much more authority which emails are really from me and which aren’t. This makes me happier. Dammit.
