We have a weird issue at work where an import task will occasionally hang waiting for nothing. This can sometimes be harmless, and othertimes disastrous. When it’s disastrous, it causes the main table in our database to be locked, denying other services/users from performing any inserts, or updates, or even selects. This is a big problem… obviously.
This year, all chaos and mayhem is going to break lose. Well, at least that’s the theory. This year the Government decided to bump the DST from April to March. This isn’t too bad, until you start to think of the impact of all the computers having the wrong time. Fortunately, our fearless developers have produced updates. Microsoft have released a number of updates (details here), though a full patch hasn’t been released for Windows 2000, there is a reg hack.
Then there is linux. Fortunately enough, two of my boxes have already been updated. Those are driven by Debian, and probably got updated as part of a security update that was installed. The unfortunate thing is that two of my boxes are not updated. This is because they are Gentoo, and I have only been deploying security software updates. This didn’t include updates to things like GLIBC which is where the time libraries are deployed from. However, some time during the last 6 months or so, the Gentoo team decided to split time management out of the glibc libraries into their own ebuild called sys-libs/timezone-data. This is good for issues like this, however from a mention on the Gentoo Forums, it may require a certain glibc version that I probably don’t have. So looking around, I found that you can actually do the updates manually. I stumbled across this little gem. The unfortunately issue with this is that the zdump, and zic applications are bundled as part of the sys-libs/timezone-data package. You have to love circular dependencies. Off to find a solution…
Technorati Tags: Tech, linux, gentoo, DST, Microsoft, Windows, Work
Being pretty much stuck on Windows due to the tools I have to use (Outlook, Visual Studio, SQL Enterprise Manager), I find that developing home stuff a little bit of a challenge. Sometimes I’ll SSH into one of my development boxes, and work from there, but it becomes a bit of a strain jumping around code. So I turned to Eclipse. It’s a massively extendable editor.
The problem comes when trying to commit code changes for some of the projects I’m on to SourceForge. SourceForge use CVS over SSH. This requires a secure connection to the server before the CVS connection can be established. This is a relatively easy task with the help of putty, and these instructions by Stefan Wehr. The instructions are a little out of date, but easy enough to adapt to environmental changes. For example, the SourceForge CVS names are now project.cvs.sourceforge.net.
I can now manage all of my projects on Windows, and if I finally get the chance to get off of it, I can simply move my repositories.
Enjoy…
Technorati Tags: Windows, Open Source, Eclipse, Putty, CVS
Recently I’ve felt this urge not to work at all. I’m not sure why. I think it’s just a case of procrastination. I have plenty of things to do, though some require after hours work (switch upgrades, new rack PDUs, etc) which I normally enjoy doing. However, I’ve not been feeling too appreciated at work recently, and its partially coming from the fact that our dev/qa environments were moved to the corporate environment. While this should make me happy as it’s one less thing to worry about, in the last two weeks, we’ve had about 6 or 7 outages, and a constant slowness. I’ve practically had my hands tied on resolving the issue as I have no access to any of the corporate networking equipment.
I’ve had several people comment on the stability of the two environments since they went to corporate compared to when I was managing them. I think I had maybe 2 or 3 outages in 2 years (both related to RAID controller failure). That makes me feel good in the fact it shows people do notice the work I do, even if they don’t initially notice it. It also reminds me that I am now unable to diagnose any issues, let alone attempt to fix them.
I guess it’s less procrastination, and more rebellion to the fact that I have the ability to help, I’m just entirely cut off from being able to help.
Technorati Tags: Work
I hate it when people don’t like what I tell them.
We are currently having an issue with some of our servers caused by a core switch. As they are not entirely sure what is wrong with it, they have not set an ETA, which I passed onto the parties affected by this outage. The problem is, they evidently didn’t believe me, and decided to ask other people. Why do people insist on doing that? It’s incredibly annoying, and makes it look bad on me.
This isn’t the only thing either. I’ve told people in the past that something wasn’t possible for a number of reasons, only to be CC’d in an email at a later point in a conversation with somebody else, as they decided to ask them instead.
Technorati Tags: Work
Well, I took a leap, and upgraded to WP2.1. Quite a smooth upgrade. Of course, I demo’d the upgrade on my dev box at home, and found the only plugin I had to upgrade was the markdown plugin as it generated preg_replace errors. Once upgraded, all was smooth sailing again.
Technorati Tags: WordPress
Some people cannot drive. I had somebody reverse into my car whilst driving out of the carpark yesterday. Fortunately no bodywork was damaged. Just got to get my alignment fixed… again as she hit my wheel as I was turning to avoid her.
