Mizblog

It’s Tuesday again. Maintenance day. Yesterday Joel installed and configured phpBugTracker on our lab server. This involved hours and hours of puzzling over why Apache wasn’t responding to changes in its config file (answer: there were two versions of apache installed and guess which one wasn’t running), wondering why php pages were being served raw and unprocessed (answer: php wasn’t installed), struggling to get phpBugTracker to connect to the database (surprisingly, MySQL wasn’t installed either) and a long list of more trivial disconnections and missing dependencies. At the end of the day, it turned out that several hours of hacks and soft links and reinstalls could have been replaced by three config file adjustments. That’s computers for you.

It’s been getting colder. Seems like I write more blog entries during times like this. The dropping temperature seems to put me in a morose, contemplative mood. Watching the world begin to die.

My daughter is fussing in the next room. My wife just walked out of that room and went back in with a tool of some kind. My sense of self preservation is keeping me from inquiring further.