Wednesday, March 22, 2006
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). ΒΆ 4:24:00 AM
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). ΒΆ 4:24:00 AM
