Idling User

Gentoo is a great distro and, despite what many think and say, it’s easy to maintain if you have the right tools. And, well etc-update just isn’t quite the right tool for maintaining your config files. Its too clunky, error prone and not very forgiving at all. I’ve been using dispatch-conf for a few weeks now, with the rcs support turned on so I get versioned config files, and I love it. I haven’t lost a config file or broken a working config yet. Yay! Its a wonderful and much welcomed improvement over etc-update. The Gentoo Wiki has an entry to get you started managing your config files with ease. Enjoy!

I’ve been back and forth between tabs and spaces for code indentation in recent years. My exposure to Python lead me down the path of spaces, while in the past I had stuck to tabs in my PHP, Perl & Java. When its my own code it’s fine to use whichever I feel is right at the time; I’m only possibly bothering myself. But when working on a team project with coding standards, that doesn’t cut it. Of course, my editor isn’t always set right given the task requirements - a not so bad problem for 1 or 2 new files but a huge pain for a few dozen new files. I learned about a pair of tools that made the conversion process so much easier: expand and unexpand. They simply convert from tabs to spaces and back, with the added functionality of being able to handle tabstops - a key feature that have put these tools in my permanent toolbox, where a simple regex in vim, sed or Perl would not have done the trick. Ain’t the CLI grand?

I’ve been running MySQL 4.1 on Gentoo on my dev machines for a little while now without any major hangups. A few people have asked me how to get it emerged because they got hungup by the masks in Gentoo whic prevent them from emerging 4.1 and they gave up after the usual ~x86 keyword failed. The usual trick of adding “dev-db/mysql ~x86″ to your /etc/portage/package.keywords still applies. But then it is still masked. And this is the key: add “dev-db/mysql” to /etc/portage/package.unmask. Voila! Enjoy.

P.S. Mind the messages from emerge about updating from previous versions of MySQL. And, of course, don’t do this on a production box without testing it first .

Yes, that dirty word. MS SQL Server. Never thought you’d hear that one here did you? Its been about 6 years since I’d last touched the beast, and of course I’m loving every minute of it.

I was handed a DB to work on that I should have been able to attach right into my instance. No problem. Except many of the objects were owned by users in the newly attached DB that didn’t have a login on my instance and this was a problem. And, well, wouldn’t you know, there doesn’t seem to be a way to assign a login to an existing DB user, at least not without dissecting the system tables. Go figure.

I found this little SQL script from Scott Forsyth and David Penton handy in resurrecting my orphaned tables quickly w/o manually running sp_changeobjectowner over and over. Now they’re happily owned again and healthy. Scott and David, you rock. Thanks.

Our twins were born last month on Valentine’s Day, Zoë at 5lbs. 2oz. and Theodore at 6lbs. 9oz. Well, its more than a month later, and I’m blogging about it between feedings. Not only that but I’ve converted from Movable Type to WordPress. Oh, what fun that was! Really, it was. The most satisfying part was generating the mod_rewrite rules to convert all my old archive urls to my new shortened human-friendly semantic urls using a variation on other’s published methods and formats.

Enough about this blog stuff, let’s talk babies. They’re awesome. Theo is incredible cute as he sings his songs, chugging away at a bottle or looking around at the magnificent ceiling from the comfort of his bouncy seat. Zoë is an angelic perfect little girl. Innocent, gentle, calm and content in most any situation. Theo is the eater, always demanding more from his milk slaves, IMMEDIATELY!, but he takes his sweet time in finishing the bottle! Zoë is much more easy going about eating, but she’s quite speedy… far faster than Theo. The two of them are so very distinctly different!

The best thing about them is how happy they’ve made Amy and me. It’s gonna be a heck of a ride!

I had a nasty problem w/ libtool failing because it was looking for the old 3.3.4 gcc version of my libstd++.la instead of 3.3.5. After many hours of mucking around with things trying to find a fix or fix it myself, I finally found this thread which answered my problems:
    http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=279136&highlight=libtool+gcc+fail

Basically, running “fix_libtool_files.sh 3.3.4″ did the trick. Argh! Hope that helps someone else.

There are many other things to write about… like our new house and the babies that are to arrive soon… but this blog takes a back seat to all of that. :-/

I’m a Zend Ceritifed Engineer. My paper Zend Certified Engineer certificate arrived in the mail today. I actually took the test back on July 1st during the beta and got word of my passing by mail a few months later. Now Zend is providing the means to authenticate your certification online so I decided to put up the logo linked to my info. Nifty.

I think it is appropriate to resurrect this infamous photoshopped picture today as last night Charlie officially made his first kill. For a week or so we’ve been tormented by a mouse stealing our food and driving Charlie nuts by leaving scent trails around the apartment. His chase even left Charlie on top of our dining room table when we arrived home the other night. Well, the hunt came to a close last night when Charlie cornered the mouse and turned it into a pile of bloody mouse guts. Unfortunately, I was not there to photograph the event, but I imagine it looked something like the scene above.

Comment spammers suck.

So, the ultrasound was great. It took a little while longer than we expected because those little ones were being slightly camera shy when it came to some important shots. I’ll take care of that as soon as they’re delivered! It was really cool to see them rolling around, sucking their thumbs and waving at us.

So, we waited through this whole process of measuring their little craniums, brain segments, arms, legs, hearts, etc. while we anxiously awaited the most important news of the day… their sex! The technician was “very sure” that baby A was a boy and “80% sure” that baby B is a girl! Awesome! No matter what they are, I’d still be high as a kite. It was so fun just to see them dancing around!