I woke up about 6am, I got up, thought about getting ready for work, and going, I'd be at work at around 8am.

I went back to bed again, and thought I'd get another hour of sleep or so. I didn't wake up again until just after 9am.

I got up, got ready, and took off for work.

It was quite sunny today, that made it a bit hard to see, since I didn't have my sunglasses.

Nothing at all remarkable on the way to work, got to work at 11am.

I started working on the application I'm developing, was getting somewhere with that, spent about an hour and a half on that.

Some guy from some other section came around, speaking to the project manager, to find out about procedures for accessing the data in the application I'm developing, "when it's down".

Well, it's not going to be down, when the development is all done, there are going to be 2 separate systems, so one of them will always be available.

Even if both systems are down, it's because Oracle is down, and then there's not going to be any alternative access to the data anyway.

The guy was just being beligerant, and I wasn't in the mood for an argument, so I just ignored him, and continued working on the code.

The woman who used to administrate the old system came round to show me some of the schema design she's been doing.

We had a discussion about the table design, and then the project manager came and joined in the discussion, and then once we'd dealt with that, we ended up just having a chat.

We finished that, I noticed it was 1.30pm. I went upstairs to find out if anything was happening for lunch.

Most of the guys were about to go into a meeting, which I wasn't involved in, so I decided that I was going to lunch.

The guy from Orange who's up for a week to fix pcs etc was there, I asked if he wanted to go for lunch, he said he just had to watch something on another pc.

I milled about for a minute, there were a stack of old sparc machines on a desk, some of the old production systems we decommissioned when we relocated.

I was just hanging around, looking at that stuff, when the guy came over, and we went across the road to the cafe.

I was expecting to sit in there and eat lunch, but I'd only ordered a roll, and wanted a drink, so I stood and waited while the other guy ordered his stuff. By the time I got to the counter to pay for a drink, they'd already made his sandwich, take away.

I waited for my roll, and then we went back across the road to the building.

The area outside where I sit is a kitchen, with a few tables, so we sat there to eat, and had a chat.

About 2.30pm, I decided to go back to work. I started working on changing a bit of logic in my code, to enable viewing of some records that have a required field (that acts as a foreign key) missing.

I had to speak to the project manager about that, found out the details that I needed, and then went back to coding.

I managed to make all the changes, do some testing, it looked like it was all ok. I decided not to update production though, in case I've introduced a bug, and not found it.

I'll get someone else to do a few quick tests tomorrow.

I got called up, there was an issue getting to the website as usual. I tried to ssh to the web server, I couldn't do that either. As far as I know, it's because of network issues in the colocation facility where the web server is hosted.

It fixed itself, the web site loaded, and the login prompt appeared, I didn't worry about it, and I got off the phone.

I got called back again a bit later, there was more issues. I checked, and Xsun was running away using 50% of the cpu again.

I eventually managed to kill it off, and then the machine became responsive again, for a couple of minutes. I got off the phone again.

The DBA came to speak to me, and before he got to say anything, my phone rang again, the sysadmin. I answered it, starting talking to him, the DBA said he'd speak to me later, I said I'd come up and see him when I got off the phone.

I'd been looking at the processes by cpu time, not by memory size, the sysadmin (who I was now on the phone to) said that there were a couple of huge apache processes, using 800M of memory each. Geez.

The shell was totally unresponsive, I managed to run the apache shutdown script eventually, and slowly the processes went away.

I changed the configuration, in the httpd.conf there's a setting relating to how many requests each child process should serve before going away. On Solaris, they recommend this be set to a limit, rather than umlimited, like on Linux etc.

I changed that setting from 10000 (the recommended amount) to 1000, hoping that might fix it, and started it back up.

It seemed fine, so I got off the phone. I noticed there were a couple of imagemagick convert processes taking gobs of memory, 900M or something, I killed them off, even "kill -9" took ages to get rid of them.

Damn, I might have to find something else to use, imagemagick is being a real pain.

I went upstairs, it was now just after 5pm, to speak to the DBA, but the sysadmin called me over, the website was still down. I looked, and it was the "mysqladmin flush-hosts" issue again.

I used the sysadmin's sun box, which was logged in, to fix it up.

I went over to speak to the DBA, we started going to see some guy, and then I realised it was the beligerant guy from this morning, so I said there was no point, because all the stuff he was getting at, was a waste of time.

The DBA told me that if he comes to request anything to be done, to make him speak to the manager of the section I'm in.

He then was going to leave, I thought about leaving too, and going to his place, to fix up his adsl that I still haven't done, but there was more work to be done.

I heard the pc guy from Orange speaking to the sysadmin, and another guy from Orange I dealt with to get the DNS for the department sorted out, when OzEmail ballsed it all up.

He was asking if you could boot dos on a linux machine, and being told that you could, since it was a pc etc, and can use a boot disk, then when he finished the conversation, and went to leave, I piped in with "unless it's a sparc machine", I'd like to see you boot dos on a sparc.

He said "what's that [a sparc]?", and we said, "the sun machines over there", which is what he was wanting to use it on.

He needs to wipe the disks in the machines apparently, I wasn't too impressed with that idea, oh well, I'd probably just install linux on them anyway.

I said he could just login, and "rm -rf /" but the DBA asked if that actually wipes the files, or just deletes inodes, and I thought about it, and then remebered that it doesn't wipe the whole disk anyway, it just wipes everything until rm rms itself, and then stops, if you reboot, it's not likely that the machine will boot, but there still could be sensitive stuff on the disk, depending on the order the directory structure gets wiped.

I then said you could boot up a cd compiled for sparc, like knoppix or something else (assuming there is a linux live cd for sparc), and dd the disk.

Ah, there's a stack of Solaris install cds, that should do it.

They also had an old dell server they needed to wipe, this I had no qualms with, I'm always happy to see a windows install get blown away.

He was trying to use the wipe program, it's a bootable disk, but the disks in the server are scsi, and the wipe program/boot disk doesn't have support for scsi.

We logged into windows, but then when he tried to run it, it just crashed. I said that we could take the scsi disks out, put them in a sparc machine, and dd them.

Then I remembered that we could use knoppix in the pc, since it'll support the scsi controller. I went downstairs, got my knoppix cd out of my drawer, went back up, booted the machine off it.

It took a couple of minutes to boot, I think because of all the scsi detection stuff, but it worked, the disks were accessible.

I tried to cfdisk the scsi disk, but was getting permission errors, then I tried to dd to the disk, but the same thing, then I realised, I wasn't root. I su'd and then I could partition the disk, I deleted the partitions.

I found that something like:

yes 0|dd of=/dev/sda

should write a stream or zeros across the whole scsi disk. That was going to take a while (yes was taking up half the cpu, the dd the other half, there's probably a better way to do it though). We stood there chatting for a bit, it was now 5.30pm, and I thought about going home, most of the others had, or were going.

I went back down to my desk, and my phone rang, it was the guy from upstairs (who'd already left before I went up there), he said he'd forgotten to say bye, and would see me tomorrow. I tried to tell him something, but the phone reception was crap, and he couldn't hear me.

It was only some smartass comment, and I don't remember it anyway.

I finished what I was doing, grabbed my stuff and left, it was right on 6pm.

I took off, I got around near the roundabout, geez, the fence on the opposite side is destroyed, that must be where the tanker went over. I went right, so didn't go anywhere near that.

The middle of the road was all burnt, this is where the fire truck had been a few weeks ago, and caused a traffic jam because the middle of the road was on fire, I'll bet it was some idiot with a cigarette butt.

I got on the freeway. It was really sunny, I was having a terrible time, because I didn't have my glasses.

I didn't know what wass going on, I was going 130/140, but it felt like about 70km/h. Perhaps the contrast has something to do with perception of speed, since the last few nights I've been coming back late, when it's dark, with low contrast, going 120 feels like 160.

Anyway, I was about 2/3rds of the way home, coming up a hill, there was a cop car on the crest of the hill, lights on, I jammed on my back brake, slowed right down to 110, went past, the cop had pulled over a ute, and was busting the driver for something.

I went back up to 130, I figure, if the cop's seen me speeding, by the time he finishes booking the guy, gets in his car to chase me, he'll have to go 200 or so, to catchup before I get off the freeway.

I got off, went to the supermarket. It was now about 7pm, and the sun was getting lower in the sky, and now the glare was shocking.

I went into the supermarket, grabbed all the crap I needed, went and paid. It came to more than I had in cash. I used my card to pay, and since I didn't have much cash, I pulled out some.

Duh, I've got all the cash my mate paid me back for his pc from Sunday sitting at home. What a dope.

I went out, and was walking back to my bike. A couple of kids were mucking around on pushbikes and scooters in the carpark. One of them asked me if the bike was mine, I nodded.

He said it was a cool bike, and then asked if I'd sell it to him. For $10. Yeah, I'm sure idiot.

I went about putting my stuff in my backpack, and getting on. All the meanwhile they're asking me dumb questions, what did I pay for it, how fast does it go, is it a Harley.

I took off, and headed for home. I decided to pop in to my mate's place, to see if anyone was there, so I could get my sunglasses, and maybe the soundcard out of the car.

I got there, his car was in the driveway, I parked, went up to the door, he came and opened it, he said he'd be back in a minute, and ran back into the computer, and I could hear some silly game.

He came back, and he asked if I was there to get the soundcard, I said yeah, but mainly to get my sunglasses, they were still on the table, I grabbed them.

The phone rang, he started having a conversation. His cat was on the back of the lounge, I still had my gloves on, so I patted the cat, I think he had a tick on him, he arced up when I touched near it.

My mate came back, I told him I thought the cat had a tick on it.

We went outside, my mate had a smoke, and we had a conversation. After a while, he asked if I was going home to just chill out, and I said I was, since it'll be the first day for about a week I have.

I thought about it, Sunday I was at his place until midnight, Saturday I was out till 2, Friday I didn't get home until 11.30, not sure what I did on Thursday, I think I was out late on Wednesday.

I grabbed the sound card out of the car, and took off from my mates place about 7.45pm.

I got home, put the dinner on, watched a bit of tv. I tried to call my mate in Wyong, his phone was busy, must be on the internet.

I finished eating, blogged a bit, played the guitar a bit, tried to call my mate again, still busy.

It started raining heavily about 11pm. I went to bed about midnight.