I had to go into work today, to replace apache on the production intranet server.

I'd arranged to do it after 10am today.

I woke up about 8.40am, crud, I meant to get up earlier. I got up, and got ready, and left a bit after 9am.

It was a really overcast, crappy looking day.

I got fuel on the freeway as usual, and kept going, nothing at all interesting on the freeway today.

About 2/3 of the way to work, I got past the clouds, and it was actually nice and sunny.

At the end, between the freeway and the highway, there were a couple of cops setup RBTing southbounders.

I kept going, got to work. I parked in the shade next to the building, no one to complain about my parking today :-)

I went in, I had the DBA's 24 hour access card, so there was no issues getting in all the doors. It was now 10.20am, not too late.

I got to my desk, and I started to do some work. It was really hot, the airconditioning wasn't on. I moved one of the fans near my desk, and kept working.

I was expecting a lot of issues, but it went well.

I was able to compile a new apache, and it started fine, got caught by the fact I configured it as a user, so it defaults to using port 8080, instead of 80, fixed that, it's all fine now.

I went about compilng php, I found the sources, and the sources for pdflib, patched the php source, tried to compile it, but it couldn't find libjpg or libpng or something.

I grabbed the sources for those, compiled and installed them, no problem. Went back and configured php again, it worked, compiled it, installed it.

It was now just after 11am.

I setup the symlinks for the content, looks fine. Tested the cgi-bin stuff, oops, broken.. found the stuff was sitting in the old cgi-bin directory (which I'd backed up) so I copied them across. I might change that to a symlink at some point.

I setup a virtual host for the stuff I'm writing (the whole reason I'm here, so it works), and put the content in.

Hmm, broken images, and it times out when trying to query oracle, and it can't find the oracle home directory.

Oops, I forgot to upload the images, that was easy, I checked the oracle tnsnames file, the service name I'm trying to use isn't defined, fixed that.

I remembered dealing with the oracle home directory issue before, I had to define it in the apache startup script, I went to edit that, and found that it was the standard script, with references to tomcat, so I got all that out, and tried restarting it, but it still didn't work.

I checked the startup script again, and found it had the wrong path to the apache binary, oops, missed that one.

Fixed it, restarted, and it was all working now.

I was even able to query the database now.

I then realised I didn't have any of the other stuff I've written my code around, I tried to compile imagemagick, but after waiting a long time for it during the compilation, it had an error, and spewed megs of useless error messages.

I decided to cheat, and I tarred up the imagemagick directory from the dev server, copied it across, and untarred it.

I tried to test it, but had errors about the libraries not being found when I tried to run commands at the command line, it took me a minute to remember I needed the LD_LIBRARY_PATH set properly, so I just queried it in the browser, and it was working now.

I checked the apache error log, and saw that it was missing tiffinfo, and because there was no output from that, it thought everything was jpegs.

I found the Solaris tiff package, and installed it, worked, then everything was working.

I found a bug in my code, it allows conversion of these silly images they have in there, that are a standard a4 page wide, but can be 50 feet long, all as one page. It doesn't work very well when you try to convert that to a pdf page.

I'll have to fix the logic at some point, but I'm not doing it now.

It was now just after midday, I went across the road to the cafe, got a sandwich and a drink, on the way back to the building, I noticed the sun was now in a different spot (as to be expected), but now my bike was in the sun, oh well.

I went back in, ate, did a few tests, it looks like everything's working, so I grabbed my stuff, and left just before 1am.

It was pretty toasty out now, I started to head back home.

A little way from work, some idiot started to change lanes on top of me, I was impressed, it was a reflex action to swerve away, my thumb was going for the horn button, and I was about to hammer the throttle on to get out of there, all done automatically, before I was even thinking about it.

Then the guy saw me, and decided not to change lanes, so I just continued on, after leaving him behind.

I was wondering if the cops would still be RBTing, and if I'd get pulled over, but when I got there they were gone.

I got off at the usual exit from the freeway, but instead of going to the supermarket and coming home, I decided to go to jaycar and get a keyboard extension cable to fix the Model M that's still in pieces.

I went across the ridgeway, it's pretty good when you don't get stuck behind some slowass.

I went to jaycar, bought a cable, $8, and a straight cable. Still a bit rich, for what it is, but I was at least able to get a male -> male cable, so I've got a spare length.

I got some fuel, and then I came home.

I put the washing on, taking the chance with the sun out.

I worked out the cable colours in the extension I bought, and soldered it in to the keyboard. I plugged it in to one of the pcs, tested it, worked fine. (I'm using it to type this).

This keyboard doesn't have any LEDs on it, but there's a pin header on the controller pcb for them (I guessed). I put the meter on the pins while pressing caps lock etc, and found that 5v comes through on the pins.

I grabbed an LED, put it across different pins, and worked out what each of the pin pairs was. At some point I might solder some LEDs in it.

Aftet that, I mucked around with the new tivo a bit more, managed to select the right stuff in guided setup, and get it indexing some data. I don't know why I bothered, since it's got a 2gb disk in it, and that gives about 1/2 hour of recording.

I need to get a brand new big disk for it, and I also need to modify it, to add the extra audio inputs, so it can have 2 non rf devices attached (since the tuner is a US, useless here tuner).

I'm going to see The Beatnix again tonight, at Terrigal. I need to make sure my trousers are dry, get ready, take off, and get some dinner on the way to my mate's place.