Busy, CMS & Subs Wow what an incredible and busy day. Actually the last few days have been both incredible and busy. I did some playing around with Samba + LDAP. I must say it was quite fun and eye opening. Testing out some possible tools for use in both LAM, and phpLDAPadmin. I like the interface on the later much much more, but the previous apparently has system home directory account creation / deletion. I might have to write something up myself to do that, but it should not be difficult. LDAP admin seems to also have built in support for Kolab2 users which is ++nice. :)

I have done some extensive hacking / problem solving with horde as of late. I did submit a bug report when iTip mail invitation links error out with a Kolab integration because there is no IMAP connection when you click the link. It was just accepted today. I also spent some hours trying to chase down what could be a bug related to daylight savings time. Events created after April 2 seem to be one hour ahead in the invitation and acceptance on the attendee side, but remain fine on the event owner. I'm going to wait until after the DST roll over to see what happens.

I problem solved for clients today, wrote some feature additions for another client the last few days including some new statistics graphs ... (jpgraph is ++cool). I had meetings, which went very well and there is lots of work coming down the pipe. That's uber good news for me. I didn't take any sort of liking to my tax bill last week. I'll get over it, and money always helps.

Aaron and I recently got rejuvenated to put some effort into our CMS. I won't speak before the egg is cracked, but there are some reasons for us doing this, and they are really HUGE. Better init, i18n, better CSS / templates in the DB, new configuration ways, moved to SVN from CVS, better layout. I'm excited. With everything else I'm not sure how much time I'll have ... Aaron has been putting in much more work than I these last few days. We do have an opportunity which could lead to me doing tons more work on it ... which is super cool.

Today I went to Macs at lunch and picked up a sub from Subway. I got a little scratchy card and won a free 6" sub. Neat. The other have of the scratchy is a code for their website. You log in on line, and punch in the code. You then get to play this cool little flash game where you build your own sub. You get to pick the bread and cheese, all the meat / veggies, and the condiments. Then you drag and drop the sandwich into the toaster oven to see if you win a million bucks. I ... Alas ... Did not today, but maybe next time. I quite enjoyed the little break from reality and got to pretend I work at Subway. Nifty. Well ... off to my web meeting.  ¶ 6:06:00 PM 0 comments

  Solaris, CSS Web Sites & 3 Muskateers Holy time batman ... it's been more than a month since my last blog. Maybe this will make Aaron happy now. ;-) Blog damnit! You need to Blog. Sorry I can't keep up to your pace of sometimes 3/4 a day, but I try. Maybe I just don't have as much to say as you do. Or maybe people just don't care as much about what I say. ;-)

So ... Solaris is fun. Not really. I've sort of adopted a big system. Two locations, combination of linux boxes, and some sun boxes running Solaris. Let me stress that these are not _new_ systems. The whole beauty of *nix systems is stability, and the reason for some uptimes on these of 3.5+ years. That's HOLY CRAP impressive. It also means that tricks of the trade to do things that have been picked up over the past say ... 4 years (lets be slim on that time span), are not possible. Old kernels, small disks compared to today's 600GB standards. So I can't use external drives through USB ... and a colleague suggested external SCSI maybe, promptly followed by a smirk. Lets just remember that killall does something completely different on Solaris than on linux. No I did not learn that the hard way.

Remote shell access is always a nice thing. It took some time to learn the network, and how to get from a to b to f to j to c to x. That's quite a few hops sometimes, and let me tell you it makes me appreciate the good things in a sys admin's life. One of those things is bash. I'm not sure if Solaris uses ksh as the default shell ... I can not figure out for the life of me why anyone would ever use that shell ... I guess old habits die hard. Maybe I've just become accustomed to things like tab completion, and up arrow history. I caught myself a few times still in a ksh, starting a bash shell, then tailing a log. Now because I wasn't too careful in my keystrokes, it seems that CTRL-C held a little too long really angers me. It stops tailing, but then proceeds to kill the bash shell, and I'm back to square -1, with no history, or tab completion, and I go back to where I was through a few commands. Lets just say chsh is your first friend to make on a Solaris box.

So throw in a few weeks of shell scripting some automatic maintenance, trouble shooting sendmail problems, fighting SPAM, testing out a new Horde Stable release with Kolab, and redoing my entire year of accounting (Damn the BC PST!). Time just rolls on past.

I embarked recently on a web project. We needed to take a web site, and change a few things around, maybe add some content, menus etc. We needed to maintain a style that was agreed upon in the past. So make it look the same, but change it all around too. Simple enough right? Once I got a copy of what had been done, my toes dipped into the frigid cold water referred to as imaging websites. I couldn't believe what I found. Sure it looked alright, but there was absolutely no textual content. 0. -%. Everything was images. From the pictures of people, to links, to actual web content ... just png or gif files painted over top of each other. Seems to be done in front page or something ... messy. But hey ... it looked alright. *rolls eyes*.

I spent about 12 hours chopping up images, playing with layouts, and CSS. I hate playing with CSS. There's nothing really challenging to it ... it's simply frustrating. There's nothing really creative to it, you just have to figure out all of the odd ball ways to make it paint your pretty picture that way you want. Next throw in IE being braindamaged, and having to add a set of properties to work around IE. Lets move things around by the pixel to line them up, lets try and figure out why each browser positions them different, and how to handle that ... bah. I understand the benefits, and you can do some really cool things with CSS, but the frustrating development time is just not my cup of ginger root tea. At least with tables it was quick and simple to develop.

I also recently rediscovered a like for 3 Muskateers chocolate bars. I haven't had one in _ages_, since I was a kid probably. I saw them at the 7/11 a few nights ago and grabbed one. yummy. Does anyone remember Malted Milks? They were really similar ... like a cross between 2M and Mars bars. It was like the perfect intermediate. Good thing chocolate is O.K. for vegetarians (well I'm _mostly_ vegetarian ... I still consume the odd chunk of animal flesh ... but those Burgers the other night after a few pints of beer didn't feel the greatest the next morning).  ¶ 4:24:00 AM 0 comments