Tom at 16

Week of June 24th, 2002

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Friday June 28, 2002

So much for consistency and routine this week... Monday it rained most of the day. Tuesday dawned sunny and HOT. Yeah, and thanks to the rain, muggy. The heat wave continues (high nineties, low hundreds) with no end in sight. Fortunately, we have air conditioning, but by mid-afternoon it can't keep up. I'm not complaining, however; our lettuce is growing like wildfire in the hot sun ;-)

It's also been a busy week at work. I had two new projects projects approved, with more on the horizon. If things continue as they are, I'm going to have a very busy summer. Which is good. Busy means employed, and Tom likes employment.

As you probably know by now, the OpenSSH developers released version 3.4 late Tuesday. I installed it on Hydras on Wednesday, and this time around privilege separation works as advertised under AIX (under 3.3 it did not).

This afternoon we're busy preparing for a trip to Vancouver. We leave tomorrow AM; we'll be back around the 10th. Due to my current workload, it's going to be a "working holiday" for me. Actually, there's nothing about going to Vancouver that I consider holiday-ish. The city's grown too big for my tastes, and trying to get anywhere involves major effort. But has something she needs to attend next weekend, and the Granparents want to see the kids. So I agreed to drive everyone out under the condition that everyone leaves me alone to work.

In preparation, I'm currently in the process of reinstalling Gentoo on my notebook. I need two systems that "talk Linux" for some project research I need to do, so I'll use my notebookas one and pack along my development server as the second. The reason I'm using Gentoo is familiarity and flexibility. I know how the distro works and where it keeps things. I also like the fact I can customize the system with just what I need and nothing more. This time around, however, I'll build the system up and only apply critical updates. "Emerge Update World" can be a dangerous thing.

I'll be on dialup while I'm gone and only responding to high priority mail, so if you write and don't get an immediate response, as Douglas Adams would say, Don't Panic. I'll post here as time and connectivity permits.

Chow.

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Monday June 24, 2002

A busy weekend at Syroid Manor. We spent the majority of our time outside tending the gardens, cutting the grass, and generally putzing about the yard. After a long week in the darkness of my office, it was nice to be outdoors enjoying the sunshine. The weather over the last few days has been perfect for growing: A light rain early in the AM; clearing by mid-morning, and hot (mid-nineties) sun for the balance of the day. The fertilizer we put on the grass a week ago is finally kicking in; it's greening up nicely. What a change from the bleak straw grass that greated us when we first moved in...

I took a few minutes last night to update the two primary programs running on Hydras; Apache is now at 1.3.26 and OpenSSH has been upgraded to version 3.3. This latest OpenSSH release reorganizes man page locations, and improves support for "privilege separation". I'm not fully up to speed on privilege separate yet, but there's what looks to be a relatively comprehensive article here; it's on my reading list for the week.

Speaking of reading, I recieved my summer book shipment Friday: Managing and Using MySQL, Programming PHP, Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL, and MySQL Reference Manual. They're all O'Reilly titles, of course. The latter is a new series dubbed O'Reilly Community Press. It's focus is to transfer key online documentation sources to print.

I'd best get happening with my day. I'll check back later if any significant arises.

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