Rantings of a Lunatic

So, I have been maddeningly busy recently as we got a Top Story picked up by CNN.com this week. It was a great opportunity to “stress-test” our server situation. In a few minutes we quickly had our site traffic skyrocket, and we had somewhere around a 2 weeks worth of traffic in about 3 hours. Ordinarily this would have been awesome, but it was this brief high-intensity moment that allowed me to see at least one issue that my predecessors have left me to figure out. It was an interesting few minutes as I noticed an issue with the page not loading exactly as I heard a steadily increasing stream of expletives coming from across the hall. It was one of those moments where I had to diagnose the problem between a handful of different systems and find a solution immediately because we were getting way more hits than we normally would.
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So, today was the first day for our new designer at work, and I am excited. I am looking forward to having Travis around so that there is more time to work on projects. I will be able to work more from a system development side and let him handle the design side. I have to be honest, I am sad to not be using the MBP any more, though in the end I don’t think that its that big of a deal. I have made the switch a while ago to using the Windows box at work, and running the Linux servers, and then using Linux almost exclusively at home. I will need to find a way to do flash development occasionally, however that shouldn’t be too hard. And, maybe it will lead me to step more into the realm of other more web2.0 technologies.

This post has been in draft mode for a week or so, but I finally got time to finish it.
So I was trying to install a web app at work yesterday, and realized that one of my servers, well ok none of my servers, were capable of running the app. The one that I have it running on is not externally addressable, which is why I am looking to put it on one of the other ones. So I went to put it on my #2 box, and realized that it didn’t have the GD library installed. Which is a problem I have encountered before, so I figured I would just install it and everything would be good. This was not the case. First of all, this piece of hardware is an absolute anomaly, because Windows XP is the system the hardware was designed for. As a result of this I had the significant pleasure of figuring out how to get Linux to install onto it. In the process, I ended up going with Debian Testing because it had Lilo support from the install disc, (Grub won’t boot), and it has the 2.6.18 kernel which has a patch for the broken SATA controller in it.
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First, commit credit fraud against me. That will really piss me off. Although that also requires that it get caught, and that the 10 minutes doesn’t start until I find out. If it can be planned in such a manner as to happen after I work a long day doing lots of little tasks that could be done more efficiently except for the will of people who have no true technical understanding of the process. What will really piss me off is if I find out by my card not working as I am trying to pick up my dry-cleaning at 6:57 when the dry cleaners closes at 7. Then find some way to destroy the link between my computer and the internet, possibly burning up the switch between my comp and the router. The key here is for the computer to work 100% just not be able to get on the internet when other computers can get online over the wireless connection. That will only make me angrier. Oh, yeah, that would be a great 10 minutes, and if anyone successfully manages to do this, try to stay away from me for a lot longer than 10 minutes. And to whoever started this “hypothetical” chain of events in motion, I am not happy, and I will fully co-operate with the authorities to prosecute you.