Weekend Wrap Up

Just in the middle of some mod_perl programming for my design contacts. One of the contracts I did work for them a while back has come back with some changes and enhancements, so I am doing that for them, of course 🙂 It’s nice to be back to this project, my code is mostly readable, and easy to get back into. There are some design changes I’d like to make, but until I have a bit of a lull, and the pure love of mankind to do it all for free, when there is other billable work waiting in the wings, it’ll have to wait.


This weekend was not too bad. Went to a LAN party at Feyd’s place with Cat5, Derf, and a bunch of other folks I didn’t know. Kicked ass I have to say, I am glad I haven’t lost the twitch game touch. A day of pop, chips, pizza, movies, and tons of Quake3 action can’t be beat. I’ll be having one of those at my place soon, say, mid-feb?


With the help of Wim‘s PostgreSQL notes, the discovery that techdocs.postgresql.org has the complete text of Practical PostgreSQL online, and a bit of experimentation I finally got the security of PostgreSQL on ufies properly done, or at least, done so that everything works and I don’t annoying emails every day with “error: no password given” messages.


My computer, now tested in the realm of doing actual work, is performing nicely. There are only a couple of strange things wrong with it.



  • Shutting down normally doesn’t mark the superblock on the raid5 array clean, so when I boot up I get to sit for an hour and a half while 160G of raid5 parity is rebuilt. Shutting down the array with raidstop /dev/md1 works properly though.
  • For some reason galeon won’t let me backspace in text area fields. I’m writing this now in opera because it’s a real pain in the ass to use the arrow keys or ^b,^f,^k etc to edit typos.
  • I can’t for the life of me figure out what app acme controls for the next/prev/play/stop buttons on my keyboard. Not xmms or rhythmbox that’s for sure.


While I have been evangelizing DBIx::Recordset lately, and using it, I have elected not to use it on my current project. Since all the pages are drawn dynamically, I can’t afford the cost of speed. However, in the future (note above about love of mankind) I will probably convert the utility functions, admin pages, etc, to use it, instead of having to rewrite the number of “?”‘s in my SQL.