life, in snippets

It’s getting cooler, now, and the cats therefore love my presence at home. They even forfeited the privilege of their ongoing fight, and curled up on my bed today. I was Most Impressed with their self control.

Then again, one can’t underestimate the selfish traits a cat will display, and the care it will take to get it’s own ends.

BossNo2 had to go into hospital Monday. It was a routine procedure, but his absence meant I got to play phonemonkey as well as my usual work. I don’t mind. His place is nice, I get to natter at his cats – beautiful, all of them, confident, well cared for, loved to pieces. Gorgeous gorgeous animals.

The interesting challenge of the moment involves the Big Project that was the torment of my life last year. Now, I get to make it go in a real life environment. WebBoss dropped off a couple of rack servers for me yesterday – so that I can build them up as my testing servers initially, and rebuild for production when I’m sorted – and, for once, I feel like I’m doing something productively useful.

This system, when working properly, will save work a bunch of time. The idea is sound, but I’ll admit my execution of it is lacking in places. But, at least I know that it’s far from perfect. I’ll happily accept suggestions on tightening it up. And I know my bosses, and they will offer said suggestions. Probably in far more quantity than I really want…

Alongside that, I’ve been fighting a fire with one of my servers for the last couple of weeks. It’s running a bunch of moodle sites, for various customers. Two? Three? Weeks ago, WebBoss told me about a bunch of trouble this server’s been having. Needing continuous reboots, hanging, generally being a right sod of a box.

Research, help from Colitis, and hanging out at the Moodle forums has narrowed down the problems. One, the Apache configuration was… interesting. That fixed, and memory use has dropped dramatically.

The second issue relates to one of the inbuilt Moodle functions. See, it has an inbuilt chatroom. Which is great for student<->teacher conversations, and what-have-you. What isn’t so good, is that by default, the configuration hits the server for refreshes every 5 seconds. Not so bad for a small group of people. Multiply that by the various sites we’re running, some of them under quite tough load, add the Apache issues, and boom, toasty warm server.

I have her under control now. It makes me feel all warm inside, knowing that problem was there, that I fixed it – with help, yes, but I fixed it – and know how to go about fixing the remaining issues so that it won’t happen again.

You know what? I’m enjoying this job.

Image from emciem

Oops. Or, Thou Art Dumb. Or, Thou Shalt Not Make Typos when on Live Servers.

And how did our intrepid heroine learn this lesson?

For the geeks, thus:

crontab -r != crontab -e

For the non geeks:
Deleting something important (namely, the thing which performs routine jobs on a mission critical webserver) is NOT the same as editing it.

And a question.

Why in the name of all things holy does crontab -r not ASK you if that’s what you actually meant to do?

I didn’t wake up till past 11am, this morning. Now, it’s something past midnight. I start work at 8am, but I can’t sleep.

I got an email from Nay, today. It’s amazing. Something is going right with her treatment, she’s taking a creative writing course, she’s got her computer connected to the ‘net, she’s learned how to use email.

She is, of course, upset. I was her only remaining friend in the faith. And yes, it’s been tough being her friend. Her anorexia meant I never wanted to weigh her down with my concerns. I merely tried to bolster her as and when I could. Anorexia tells her she’s not good enough to have friends. And I’ve tried to prove to Nay that, whatever else is going on, she is worthy of friendship.

And, to Nay, this feels like something of a betrayal. And I can understand that. For me to make this big a decision, and not tell her that anything was wrong? And what hurts, a little, is that… Nay apologised. For not being there for me.

But… maybe I was wrong. Maybe I should have told her. Maybe I should have asked her what she thought.

What hurts most? It’s nothing to do with Nay. But what I’ve realised – I didn’t trust her.

And that hurts.

She’s been my friend for so long. Knows me well, probably better than I realise. And after all these years… I couldn’t trust her? What’s wrong with me?

Nay was the first person I told about my depression. And I knew she’d understand. And she did, and she hugged me and let me cry and told me it’d be OK. A few months down the line, when I bounced over to say Hello! with my hair in a ponytail, long pretty earrings and makeup, she didn’t need to say a word. She just hugged me. But – she’s always had such a strong faith. I didn’t want her to waver at all on my account. Didn’t want her to try and understand. After all. There’s only so much one person can handle. Nay, surely, with her blindness and anorexia and depression and and and didn’t need my problems, too.

So I wrote back. Explained my choices. Explained that I never told anyone about my dithering, until I’d really (albeit unconsciously) made up my mind. Told her that whatever else is going on, I want to remain her friend.

Me? I need to remain her friend. I need to act like her friend.

I need to have more faith in people.