January 26, 2007

I got to sleep in just a little this morning which I needed. After we got home from the party last night I had an entire server build that had to be done before I could go to bed so I was stuck staying up working until midnight so that I could turn the server over before going to sleep. It was nice to have the work done but it made for a long evening. I got up around a quarter after seven this morning. I have a bunch of scheduled work that starts at nine so I really have to get moving and get into the office. No wiggle room today. The work had originally been scheduled when I was doing the early morning shift but then when that got changed the work was a little on the early side.

Today’s interesting tidbit: When gas-lighting first came to England in 1807 (Pall Mall was the first gas-lit street in London – Wyoming, New York was the first gas-lit village in the United States) people were so ignorant as to how gaslight worked that they believed that pipes carrying gas would be hot and were afraid to touch them. Much like computers today, gas-lighting was a “hot” technology that people had a hard time comprehending. I wonder what technology will displace computers in the future and people will think of computers like we now think of gas-light – so incredibly obvious that we can’t understand not understanding it! It has only been two hundred years (officially as of this coming Sunday, the 28th) since London began to be lit by gas and yet people from that era were so far behind us in understanding the world around us that they thought gas pipes would be hot. Think about those implications.

Today was super busy – so busy that I had to work through my usually peaceful Friday lunch. I had to spend most of the day on the phone with major migrations going on all day. While on the phone I did get to keep up well with my regular Friday backlog (from working at home on Thursday) of RSS feeds and magazines. I made it through several magazines today and I am ready to get another load of them from dad next weekend. I am on course to have none left by next weekend when Dominica and I go back home again to Geneseo and get the mail. Dad has new books waiting for me as well that have arrived since the last time that we were home.

I spent most of the day with a pretty bad headache. Not a headache so painful that I couldn’t function but enough of one that it was just a continuous dull, throbbing behind my eyes all day and I really did not want to spend any additional time today staring at a computer monitor. By half past four I just couldn’t take the overhead lights anymore and decided to go home before I got too sick to be useful at all.

I got home and felt better after about two hours. I laid down for a while and sort of took a nap. I took an Excedtrin (and then it was gone.) Dominica got home and we ordered in some Domino’s so that we wouldn’t have to go anywhere tonight. We watched quite a few episodes of Monarch of the Glen while I did quite a bit of work installing Fog Creek Software’s FogBugz software tonight. Yesterday I put in several hours attempting to install it onto CentOS 4 without any luck. That was a huge amount of work that did not pay off at all. CentOS is not officially supported but it was a crazy amount of work to figure out whether or not I would be able to get it to work. It was very disappointing as I did not want to have to switch to a different, less enterprise, distribution but I am stuck apparently. Solaris 10 was suppossedly an option but I don’t currently have a Sparc64 server running Solaris 10 ready to install it on. And unlike the x86 distributions I can’t run Solaris 10 for Sparc64 in a VMWare virtual machine. Solaris for x86 can be run that way but that operating system isn’t supported either.

So tonight’s project was to install Ubuntu Server 6.06 LTS into a VMWare Virtual Machine and then to install FogBugz onto it. I had a lot of learning to do as I have never really used Ubuntu or its parent Debian hardly at all before. So I had to learn a lot about the whole dpkg and deb system and the apt automated package management system. That took quite a bit of time to get working as well as I can use rpm and yum. But now I can use that pretty well. Getting FogBugz installed still proved to be rather a chore. It took me several hours to get FogBugz installed but finally, after several emails to Andy complaining about what a pain that was, I finally got it working. I never got eAccelerator working although I did get it installed. So that is a project for later this weekend. But I am very happy to finally have FogBugz up and running. Later this weekend I can start really seeing if it is going to meet our needs going forward.

Dominica and I didn’t get tired for a long time (although Oreo was ready for bed sometime around eight!) We ended up watching almost the entire season of Monarch of the Glen Season Five. We tried to get sleepy drinking some wine. We drank a bottle of Seneca Shores Blueberry Amulet which was still good even though we have let it stand for far too long and have moved it several times. After that didn’t work we also opened a bottle of The Little Penguin’s 2005 White Shiraz from Australia. This is our first ever white shiraz (which can be safely said to be Australia’s version of the California White Zinfandel.) Zinfandel and Syrah (aka Shiraz) are both very deep red wine grapes (along with the Cab Sav and Cab Frank) and making a white wine with them is a bit untraditional (and generally considered very passe) but the blush wines that result can be a lot of fun and very drinkable no matter what the wine snobs say. I can drink a varietal Cabernet Frank with the best of the wine snobs but I also can enjoy a tasty blush when it is done right. The Little Penguin White Shiraz is fun, drinkable and a good recommendation for occassional wine drinkers and anyone looking for a change from the 1980s “pop” wine White Zin. If you aren’t afraid of what the California wine crowd is going to think – check it out. You might be surprised. You will probably want it chilled but I like it room temp as well.

It was almost three o’clock in the morning by the time that we finally went to bed.  And still we weren’t all that tired.  We watched all but the final episode of MotG before turning in.  I am sure that we will finish it up tomorrow evening.  Tomorrow during the day I have rather a bit of work that needs to be done for the office so I will be quite busy.

Since we stayed up so late I managed to actually get our FogBugz issue tracking system up and running online – a major achievement for one night of work.

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