Tom's Insights - Week of 12/31/01

Week of December 31st, 2001

Most Recent : January 03/02
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Wednesday January 02, 2002

Yep, it's been awhile... even Roland's started calling me a "year-noter". Heh.

I trust everyone had a happy and relaxing holiday season. We sure did. Twas a tad hectic around here Christmas morning, but that's kinda expected with a two-and-a-half and seven year-old. Goes with the territory you might say. Of course it might have something to do with the toys we bought the kids this year. Landon got a Tonka fire truck. It's over three feet long, has a motorized ladder, goes foward and back (motorized as well), and makes lots of noise -- it's even got a backup alarm. Danielle got a fancy aluminum scooter. Our house is not very big, so you can just imagine the pandamonium given it's too cold for the kids to play outside. Landon's racing around the house fighting fires and Danielle's scootering; frequently into her brother.

Between last minute shopping, wrapping presents, minding two feisty kids (Danielle's home until the 8th), cooking, and socializing, I haven't spend a lot of time at the computer over the course of the last 10 days. I did, however, manage to get several "maintenance" items taken care of.

I cleaned up my /home directory on hydras, burned a pile of stuff to CD that I didn't need taking up HD space, and did a bunch of generic year-end housecleaning.
I found a spare IDE HD in my cupboard, so I resurrected phoenix with it; this will be my RH 7.2 test box. I have some material to write that needs to be based on RH 7.2.
I ran out of HD space on my notebook (was half XP, half Linux), so I dug up a copy of PartitionMagic 7.0 and removed the partition. I was amazed and baffled as to how I could run out of HD space until I looked closely at some of the games I put on the system of late. One in particular (Ghost Recon) takes up over 1 GB of drive space. Yikes.

In addition to the above, I've been reading up on using PHP and MySQL in the context of hosting a web site. I think I'll make a move to a "Slashdot-style" site sometime in the next month or two (like Moshe's). I haven't figured out all the implementation details yet, cuz I don't yet know how to do some of the things I want to do -- at least not with PHP/MySQL. I'll get there eventually.

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Thursday January 03, 2002

Very busy (and fortunately, productive) day. I'm still wading through some email, but I've got all the business-oriented stuff read and dealt with. I also managed to get some research done today, and couple Samba-related (3.0, alpha) items explained such that I understand now where the problems lie.

Tonight I updated my RH installation with fresh compilation of GCC-3.0.3, a new kernel (2.4.17) sans a bunch of fluff, and straightened out some configuration issues. Next I compiled and installed MySQL (3.26.47 I think -- whatever the latest stable is), followed by Apache 1.3.22, followed by PHP 4.0.1, topped off by PHP-Nuke 5.3.1. By the time the dust settled, the whole process took about six hours, but this time was a little different for me: I installed *everything* (except the base RH installation) from source. I now have a fully functional "Slashdot-style" web front end ready for some content. I'm impressed. The structure is PHP based; the back-end is a MySQL database. Next task is to figure out how to pull content from another site using . Anyone?

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Friday January 04, 2002

Mmmm. This is my second kick at a post tonight... the first I typed (thought I saved), and when faced with a pile of dialogues, closed them all blindly. And closed (without saving) my post. Bleh. Thank goodness I'm persistent.

I'm well thanks. The weather is spring-like (just a few degrees below zero for most of the day). The kids are being kids. Our household, overall, is in a typical state of pandamonium -- which just means all is well and good.

For the second night in a row I spent the evening at the keyboard working on my "developmental" web sever, primarily learning the in's and out's of PHP and the various structures of PHP-Nuke. We're getting there:


	http://142.165.167.15/index.php

It's both envigorating and frustrating learning a new layout tool that's extensible, powerful, and sometimes non-intuitive. As I said, I'm getting there. The site is a long way from "going live", only because I'm trying to find seamless ways to incorporate what PHP-Nuke has to offer with what I had to offer in the archives of my "old" site. Little steps, as they say...

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Saturday January 05, 2002

WOW! Thanks to the many people who wrote with kind words and comments about my new site design. I truly appreciate the enthusiasm everyone's showing. And here I thought I had lost the majority of my readership over the past few months... Nice to know the spirit of learning and change is alive and well in the world. As noted yesterday, I'm far from done (ie, ready to shift traffic to my new site), but the email I've rec'd over the course of the last 12 hours has definitely given me the impetus to spend the time necessary to get my new house in order and ready for occupancy.

Design issues aside, one of the key reasons I'm hesitant to move my web services over to Phoenix is because I don't [yet?] trust the system itself. Some history: Phoenix is a dual 433 Celeron system donated to my a year ago by Robert Morgan. About three months ago, after a power outage, it refused to boot the SCSI HD -- it gave me a cryptic error about the bus termination being inadequate. After two days of futzing, I came to the conclusion that it was the SCSI controller card. Over the holidays my friend Bill and I were mucking about with systems and I discovered that if I put the SCSI controller from Phoenix in old Donovan, the system booted without error or incident. Mmmm. Yet when I took the same complete HW configuration out and dropped it into Phoenix, the system again gave me cryptic errors. So we finally ended up putting a spare IDE drive in Phoenix, configured everything up, and got RH 7.2 installed without incident. All was well and good -- or so I thought. When I was compiling and configuring GCC, Apache, and PHP the other day the system would, every now and then, spontaneously reboot. HUH? Now that everything's installed and running it seems to be doing the job, but I don't trust the system to serve 24/7. It's not just me, either -- I host sites for other folk, and I don't want them phoning and asking why no one can access their webs. I'm sorta playing things by ear, but I suspect the MB took a hit during the power outage and needs to be replaced. We'll see. In the meantime, I'll continue to play, learn about PHP, and refine my "alternate" site for a spell. Feel free to check out my progress when you're so inclined. I'll leave it a "live" work-in-progress for the the time being.

If you need a giggle, check out Dave Barry's column from the Miami Herald. I think we've all been there a time or two; the only difference is Dave's crafted the experience into a humorous tale.

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