WebAdmin

It�s been a long few weeks since I last wrote here. I had the misfortune of being rather ill, and am just now feeling well enough to get back to informing the masses of my mundane experiences in the world of IT (no no, it’s boring, don’t humor me). However, I enjoy writing here, so I’m glad to be back.

To work first. I have been creating a brand new web-farm for our university. Most of my time is spent in dark mines, where I hammer away at deposits of pure energy, that I then fashion into computing instruments not governed by our primitive physical laws� Ok, it’s two year old Sun hardware, but it’s better than the circa 2000 hardware we currently use.

Our current architecture, which is based on pushing (copying) content to web workers that actually serve the content for our central web server, will remain in place even after the move to new hardware. My co-workers seem alittle miffed that I am not making life easier on them by replacing the fundamentals of the system with a new staging system.

To appease the co-workers, and make the new system easier to administer, I will be removing the push of -most- content out to the web-workers, and replace it with an NFS mount to the servers, simplifying the process of moving content to production. I will go into more detail regarding apache staging architectures in a later post.

-_-

On to other things. I will be moving into the big city in afew short weeks. It has become an ordeal driving sixteen miles into town every morning, and back again in the evening. My new place will be just off Almeda near McGregor. The commute will be only 2 miles! And I’ll be closer to my beautiful girlfriend.

Until then, I have resorted to listening to books on tape during my long drive. I enjoy reading, don’t get me wrong. I especially enjoy reading C. S. Lewis, which is my current author. However, Kenneth Branagh narrates superbly, not wrecking the story with horrible British impersonation of characters that should never be heard, but only imagined. I feel that hearing the story, instead of reading, allows the imagination to wander. When you read a book, your brain is largely occupied with the task of comprehension, which guides the imagination into paths. Alternatively, removing the job of reading from the process allows for a different experience, even from a story previously read. Hearing the words is a welcome change, for now.

I hope to try my hand at writing soon. Perhaps just a short story. I still feel my writing technique is rusty. Rather, I feel I totally lack a technique of my own, borrowing bits and pieces from authors I enjoy reading.

On to shopping! Tiffany informed me that Amazon now has groceries. I promptly filled my �cart� with crap I didn�t need, and went to the check out. I wasn�t really going to buy anything. I just wanted to see how much it would cost with the discount code. So I typed the code in, and hit enter� and the screen said “Thank you for your order”. Holy craps! Who buys 300 bucks worth of groceries at Amazon!! Luckily I was able to cancel the order before it was too late. So that you may comprehend the sheer size of the order, the confirmation email informed me that it would arrive in six -separate- shipments!

PHP is the one thing I have been neglecting. I wrote a nice article about PHP that I still plan to publish here, but my blog design still looks like CRAP. I need to ask Cathy if she has time to whip something up yet. I know she�s been busy, so I won’t gripe. Maybe soon.

Cheers.