Tom at 16

Week of November 25th, 2002

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Friday November 29, 2002

It's a blustery day in the hundred acre wood today... The good news is that the wind's from the south and unseasonably warm. The temperature early this morning was a pleasant 35-40 F, and the forecast calls for the weather to continue through the weekend. A nice treat considering our location and the time of year.

My back is somewhat better this morning. I'm only 60% crippled, which is a whole lot better than yesterday's 90% ;-) I still can't bend at the waist and every now and then I'm hit with excruciating painful muscle spasms, but I'll take what I can get. My challenge over the next few days will be to find the right balance between sitting/lying quietly, and moving around enough (and gently enough) to keep my lower back at least relatively limber. If I sit too long, it's painful to get mobile; if I push it or don't give my back the rest it needs, I aggravate the problem.

I finished up Managing and Using MySQL, 2nd Edition last night. An excellent, well-written reference/guide for anyone looking to implement MySQL in a variety of scenarios. Highly recommended. This weekend I plan to spend some time working through some of the code examples and roughing out a table structure for my Web site. I'm hoping to have at least a functioning prototype in place before year's end. Whether or not I can meet my goal of "going live" January 1st will depend largely on how quickly I grasp the many nuances of "the holy trinity": Apache, PHP, and MySQL. That and how quickly I can transform conceptual structure and layout to working implementation.

I feel a spasm coming on -- time to move.

Have a pleasant Friday...

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Thursday November 28, 2002

I have a muscle in my left lower back that is either weak or damaged or scared, and about once a year I do something (usually stupid, but unconsciously stupid) to aggravate it. Last night I was packing Landon around over my shoulder and when I off-loaded him onto the couch I bent/twisted slightly while supporting his full weight in the crook of my right arm. The end result is that this morning I'm close to 90% crippled. Getting from a sitting position to my feet is a five minute process punctuated with excruciating spasms from my lower back. I can't walk; I shuffle, very slowly, very carefully, trying not to touch my feet down in such a way as to aggravate my back. I can sit for about 10 minutes before feel the muscle start to throb. If I adjust my position, even slightly, it takes me a good ten minutes to find another position that doesn't hurt. In short, Grand Bother.

I go see the doc and set some muscle relaxants, but I don't think I can get in the car and I'm not willing to risk the effort at this point in time. Yes, I know. Find a comfortable position lying flat on my back and give the muscle a chance to heal. Uh-huh. While Landon runs amok around the house (Leah's at work until 1:30). Sigh. It's going to be a long day.

To my 'Merican friends: Hope your Thanksgiving is peaceful and full of laughter. Me, I think I'll go tackle another chapter in my Java book.

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Wednesday November 27, 2002

Good Grief... And there it was, gone -- my day, that is. I started at 5am, it's now just after 10pm, and it just dawned on me I hadn't done a post yet today.

Here's the highlights (as near as I can recall; things are starting to get a little fuzzy on the edges for me at this hour):

I spent several hours on the phone sorting out the firewall at the office. I can now connect remotely to Genesis via SSH. The bandwidth sucks, I have to wait for my keystrokes to catch up so I can ensure the command I'm typing is accurate, but I can access the system.

I've been reading voraciously all day. I worked my way through a 200 page PDF on some of the nuances of the portal software I installed last week. I'm two hundred pages into Managing and Using MySQL, 2nd Edition (Reese, Yarger, ' King; O'Reilly). While my focus of attention will be IBM DB2 7.2 over the coming months, I recognize I lack some key RDBMS fundamentals which I hope to gain by hacking on MySQL in my spare moments here at home. I'm also two chapters into Teach Yourself Java 2 in 21 Days, Third Edition (Cadenhead and Lemay; Sams). My goal is certainly not to become a competent Java programmer in 21 days, but I need to understand enough of the language's structure to troubleshoot administrative issues arising from the portal software -- which, in case you hadn't guessed, utilizes Java for almost all its add-ons / program extensions

Mozilla 1.2 final was released late last night. I now have all my machines updated (there's RH 8.0 RPMs available if you're so inclined).

JEdit Pre6 is out and now running on all my machines I do any kind of editing on. Pre6 is a little faster than Pre5, some of the little interface niggles present in earlier versions are gone, and there's some new plugins available. I'm still tinkering with Emacs, but if I have to do any serious HTML/XML work, JEdit is still my editor of choice. Recommended.

In my absence last week, Mulberry 3.0 for RH went from Alpha5 to Beta9 (3.0 for Windows and Mac OS X went gold two weeks ago). Beta 9 now sports a "final" feel to it, complete with some new splash-screen graphics. Very nice. I'm impressed. I live in my email client all day, and Mulberry certainly gets a "cold dead fingers" award from me -- even in pre-release form.

Cheers... time for some much-needed sleep...

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Tuesday November 26, 2002

Good morning. I returned home from Indy Saturday afternoon, a day later than expected. Frankly, I'm still not sure what time zone I'm in or which way is up, so please excuse any typos or grammatical faux pas...

Last week was an "adventure" to say the least. The days were long (at least two 18+ hour marathons), extremely focused, and at times highly stressful. Original plans gave me five days to set up and configure two servers, one a Celeron-powered backup server, the other a dual Xeon "front line" server loaded with some very complex portal software. The servers were a piece of cake. I started early Sunday morning and had both machines up, updates applied, configured, secured, and tweaked by about 4pm. The software package destined for the production box consumed the rest of the week and difficulties caused me to delay my trip home by a day in the hopes the extra time would allow me to complete a "clean" install (ie, no errors or WTF's). I was 99% successful. Hopefully I'll be able to steer through the remaining problematical 1% this week remotely.

The "Big Kahuna" Xeon system (dubbed Genesis) was a delight. It's a Dell PowerEdge (PE) 4600 with dual Xeon 2GHz processors, 2G of RAM, redundant power supplies, and three 36GB 10,000 RPM SCSI drives in a RAID5 array. Yep. FAST. The PE is big, heavy (~80 lbs), and brimming with craftsmanship. The fit and finish is excellent. I'd just love to have one of these puppies sitting in my office to play with. Unfortunately, $7000US is a little outa my budget. Besides, I don't have any place to plug it in. Firing up the dual power supplies would in all likelihood plunge our whole neighborhood into a brown-out.

I ended up going with Red Hat 8.0 on both boxes. Initial plans called for me to use 7.3 due to listed requirements set out by the portal software, but using 8.0 didn't present any problems and made my life a whole bunch easier in the long run. I could get 7.3 to install -- sorta -- but I had to fight to get the embedded RAID controller drivers to work properly. Then there was the 40-or-so updates I needed to apply to 7.3 to bring it current. 8.0 was a slam dunk. Insert disk 1, click through the setup dialogs, fill in a few network pertinents, and in less than an hour I had a fully updated and configured base OS. I gotta hand it to the developers at Red Hat -- 8.0 is the only "dot.zero" release I've ever used that is polished, refined, and works as advertised out of the box. Having said that, I would have loved to throw a copy of Gentoo on Genesis for the pure thrill of watching those dual Xeons compile XFree/QT/KDE ;-)

Guess I'd better get my butt into gear. I've got 1500+ emails to scan and about 50 pages of notes from last week to sort and organize.

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