Dale Miller

My early morning was spent under clear, still air, with the stars shining brightly above. The moon made her presence known but didn’t overpower the distant suns. It’s always nice to look up at the stars and contemplate what might be out there.

However, the calm of early morning gave way to the workday. The email upgrade was not without its problems, though most of them were minor. The worst seems to be that the latest web client is incompatible with old Macintoshes (OS/9 or so). There are, of course, people on campus still using that operating system. I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for them, but we have to try to make something work, because we don’t have a clear support policy.

The other issue I found (that isn’t common knowledge yet), is a strange one — when using the web interface, if a message is of mime-type text/html, all anchors which have the construct ‘.e’ will have the ‘e’ removed, thus changing www.ualr.edu into www.ualr.du. It only happens in the link, not the displayed text, so something very strange is going on in the bowels of the system. The message is stored correctly on disk, so it’s simply something in the display. Extreme strangeness. This one is going to Sun tomorrow.

Mark recommended “Yakitate Japan” to me for entertainment. I just finished episode 7. It’s an anime series about bread. Yes, bread. Well truthfully it’s about people who deal with bread, but there are a number of bread-related segments contained therein. It’s almost enough to make me want to learn to bake.

I have lost power 5 times in the last 48 hours (but only for about 5 seconds each time). It’s a good thing that my computer is on a UPS, but unfortunately my DSL modem and router aren’t. I must do something about that.

The mail system upgrade went well, so far as I can tell. Of course as with any software/hardware change, the bug we didn’t find will be discovered sometime tomorrow morning, probably by someone important. :)

Convoluted bash command of the week:

echo `ssh mfilter “/opt/exim/bin/exim -bp | grep ‘K ‘ | wc -l”`+`ssh mfilter2 “/opt/exim/bin/exim -bp | grep ‘K ‘ | wc -l”` | bc

Oh, I broke a streak this morning. For the previous 5 days I’ve had my morning shower by bright moonlight. That’s just fun to do. There are only a few times of the year that I can manage it. In midsummer the sun is up by the time I have my shower, and in the winter it’s too cold. So the couple of spring and fall months I can enjoy shower by moonlight I like to take advantage of it. I suspect by Monday the moon will have shrunk too much. So, I probably won’t have the opportunity again until March or April.

I’ve intended to sit down several times today to write, and finally managed to.

This week has been tiring, but mostly in a good way. I’ve kept rather busy at the office, and that’s not going to change any time soon. Jennifer’s last day was Friday, and we took her out to lunch. I’m going to miss her, and not only because it means that I’m stuck doing all the windows administration until we hire someone else.

Choir was good Thursday night, but I was home late, as usual. So Friday I started off a bit sleepy. Guil wanted to go flying after work and invited me along. I hadn’t been in a small plane in years. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it. It was also fun to just be a passenger and not worry about having to fly the plane. I like just looking out the windows. The big jets are usually too high to watch things on the ground. We flew up to Petit Jean, back to Little Rock where Guild did a couple of ILS approaches and then back to the hanger at North Little Rock. I once again got home late, and thoroughly exhausted. I spent much of today sleeping, just trying to catch up.

The major campus email conversion is tonight, and it has already been started. No problems so far, and I don’t really expect any. It’s just time-consuming (mostly waiting on slow network connections). I thought about getting things started and going out to dinner but decided that staying home relaxing would be better for me (not to mention my finances and waistline). I’ll probably go out tomorrow for lunch and maybe hit a couple of antique malls. I haven’t done that in a while.

The bad news — I’m worried about Oreo. She doesn’t seem to be doing well. She’s been rather listless the last few days, and seems to be limping a bit when she first starts walking. I need to get her an appointment at the vet to see what’s wrong, but I already have my suspicions — arthritis. She’s just simply getting old. I hate that, but it happens to all of us sooner or later.

While driving home after choir last night I encountered one of the odder bumper stickers I have seen. It was red letters on a white background which read “Someone I love was murdered”. I’m not quite sure why someone would wish to share that sentiment.

Sun Java Enterprise System Messaging Server (formerly Sun One Messaging Server (formerly Iplanet Messaging Server (formerly Netscape Messaging Server))) is a paranoid beast. I’m trying to get a new system up and running and copying the mail store from the existing system via rsync since a full copy takes 5 days. Once I had it initially populated I can bring it up to date in about 4-6 hours. So I have been doing an rsync almost continually for the past three weeks in preparation for the cutover this next weekend. I realized last night that we had a problem. Messages which were marked as read on the old system were still “new” on the new system. This wouldn’t do at all. Was I not copying something I should? No, the flag is in the message store, and that seemed to be correct. So it must be in the internal database, right? Well, there is a nice “reconstruct” utility to bring the internal database in sync with the actual message store. I ran it (in several permutations), to no avail. It would correctly add/delete messages that were/were not in the store, but had no effect on the unread flag. Okay, I knew that if there was no database, I could do a mass reconstruct and everything should be good. So, stop the server, delete the database, start it back up, and do a reconstruct. No difference!!

Reading a bit, it seems that every time quantum (I’ve forgotten the period) the server makes a backup copy of the database, in case it is corrupt on startup. Okay, stop the server, delete the database, delete the backup copy, and try again. Still no difference!!

Digging through yet more documentation, I find that not only does it make a backup, it archives a copy of the database in another part of the directory once a week for 3 weeks. If the primary and backup copies are bad, it goes to these archives. Arrrrgh! Okay, delete the database, delete the backup copy, delete all the archives, restart the server, perform a reconstruct. Miracle of miracles, everything works as advertised. I don’t think I have ever encountered a product that was quite that paranoid about cached data. Everything there can be rebuilt from the information in the mailstore.

Oh, and it would be nice if the reconstruct utility checked the unread flag, but that’s something for me to send to Sun as a bug. I needed a fix before this weekend.

I’m sure this post means little to anyone but me, but I needed to rant.

Today was a pretty good day. We had a water leak from an air conditioner that was throwing water under the raised floor in the computer room. That’s always fun to clean up. No damage done, but it’s always a bit of a mess.

I am ready to load the LDAP for the new mail system this weekend. I had to write a program to do a little tweaking on the ldif, but I think that’s all finished now. Things will hopefully go smoothly from here. Jay is working on prettying up the web pages from the default ones Sun supplies. I think they will be done in a day or so. Now the only thing left is to try to design/write a page to manage sieve rules. The one that Sun supplies quite frankly stinks. I think rather than try to tweak it we’re just going to write our own. I don’t know if it will be ready by this weekend, but it doesn’t really have to be. That’s new functionality that I would like to give them, but it’s not required.

I had a nice light lunch, and a fairly light supper, and then ate far too many chocolate chip cookies. Eh, tomorrow is soon enough to diet.

Elements from this morning’s dream:

• Taking Ashley to the office with me — sans cat carrier. I don’t remember why I thought I needed her there, but I did. And it was Ashley specifically, not just any of the cats..
• Going to work nude. Apparently in my dream universe this is okay, but I try to avoid Jeannie (our CIO) because she doesn’t like it, even if she can’t do anything about it.
• Parking in lot 13. Why I would do this is a mystery to me.
• Stopping by the UALR garage. We don’t have one, but this isn’t my first stop there. I remember it from a previous dream.
• Seeing a white cat that I had dyed orange. Also from a previous dream.
• Driving Mark’s car rather than my own, although the controls were the ones from my car.

That’s most of what I remember at this point. I need to start jumping out of bed when the alarm sounds so I can write down more.

DSC01399
Originally uploaded by Dale Miller.

There are times I want a really good digital camera (or, I suppose I could just start shooting film again). This is one of those times. Trying to shoot the moon at sunset and expect to have the colors in the sky come out right…