Some days I wish there was a flashing red light outside the men’s room that lit up when some guy did his business (especially at a urinal) and didn’t wash his hands afterword. This is particularly disturbing in a computer lab facility.
Archive for February, 2006
Ever been greeted by something very wrong bright and early in the morning? I checked my email this morning when I got up … no new messages. First thought … oh sh*t … what broke? Checked the mail logs and they were full of errors. Joy. Re-build postfix (after reminding myself what version of berkeley db to compile against). That fixes errors. Thunderbird tells me I have 3 new emails. Oh sh*t … they’re empty! Log into firewall and block incoming smtp for the time being. Check the processes that should be running and discover that SpamAssassin was broken. Determined that I really should have followed the post-install instructions for upgrading perl last night. D’oh. Run post-install scripts while pondering who the hell hard-codes a perl version into their scripts. Restart SpamAssassin and test. Re-enable incoming smtp and test. Send out outage message about the problem (yay, at least mailman still works).
Lizzy made me do it! Okay, not really. She kindly requested that I update my journal so here I am babbling on and on about not much of anything. Okay, I guess I do have a rant to make. It seems that some people are really fond of Chalk & Wire. I can understand that it makes creating ePortfolios nice and easy. At least it makes creating “nice looking” portfolios easy. Unfortunately, they create these online and then they want to put them on CD. So, some people went out and bought an application to download the portfolios on a PC. Of course, they want this installed “as soon as possible”. Unfortunately, asap doesn’t mean much when we have a large number of other “asap” tasks already in the works. So, me being a nice guy and all, I came up with a free solution for the Macs that uses the wget command-line utility. I even spent some time to create a nice-looking GUI for it that even shows progress! I suspect this will be easier to use than (insert Windows app name here).
Well, that’s all for now. Maybe I’ll post more this weekend.
Well, it’s been a little while since I’ve posted. Since I last posted, we’ve put our house on the market. We’ve also searched for and found a new house and even managed to get an offer accepted on it. Now all we need to do is find someone to buy our current place. It’s been frustrating because we’ve had 4 people look at it so far with no bites. From the sounds of it, the house is priced right but we just haven’t found the right buyer yet.
In other news, I managed to get my server updated to FreeBSD 6.0 from 5.3 without casualties. I had a bit of a scare when after the reboot it didn’t want to accept incoming mail, but I figured out that the greylist daemon needed rebuilding to re-link with a mysql library. Hopefully this will alleviate some of the sluggishness I’ve been experiencing with samba. As far as video projects go, I finally got the 2000 and 2001 UW-RF Dance Theatre concerts onto DVD now (were on VHS). I need to dig up more program info for the 1999 concert before I can do much with that one. I’ve started archiving my A-Team episodes from MythTV off onto DVD.
Liz and I went to Bona Casa for an early Valentine’s dinner. We’ll do an actual cozy movie on Tuesday. 
