Woo, another Friday, got to go home.

I woke up, but then couldn't be bothered to get up, so I lay in a bit. I eventually got up, and went to get ready.

I'd forgotten about the fact that the water was supposed to be turned off this morning (like they'd told us when we checked in), but found that it was on anyway.

I had a shower, got ready, had breakfast, packed my bag, and went to work.

I expected the front door to open, when I got there, since it was 8am, but the clock must not be set correctly, or the front door doesn't unlock at 8am, so I had to swipe my card (well, not really swipe, it's an RFID, or prox card or something, what do you do with these? wave them?).

I did some work, and then the new guy asked me about updating the images on the splash screen of the MinView application. He'd updated all the images, but they wouldn't display correctly. I had a look, and found invalid height/width attributes on the img tags in the HTML, so I showed him a pretty easy way to fix it, and left him updating the content.

I got a call from the senior DBA, he wanted me to come and look at something to do with MinView. The script had run to update the images that display the spatial data, but because the spatial data wasn't there, the images were blank.

I went through, and found how to identify blank images, from the file size, deleted them all, ran the image generation script again (since it only generates images that are missing), and then we found that it fixed most of them, but a few came out blank again.

I sat and wrote a script, that loops through, deletes all the blank images, regenerates the missing images, does this about 3 times, and then populates the production system with the new (hopefully non blank) images.

It takes ages to actually generate the images, since it has to go through gigs of spatial data.

While we were waiting for that, the support guy asked us to burn up a DVD for him, so I went about getting some software (because the senior DBA had just got his DVD writer, and didn't have any software for it), and kicked off burning a DVD, but that was going to take a while.

We went out to lunch, we went with the sysadmin, and decided to go across the road to the Indian place.

We sat down, ordered our food, and waited. I ordered a drink, that was lemonade with spices in it. I don't remember what it was called, but it was awful.

After our food was served, we were eating, and the senior DBA saw a guy he recognised getting into a car parked in front of the restaurant, it was Gerry Harvey, the guy who owns Harvey Norman. He got in his Lexus, and drove off.

We finished eating, paid for lunch, and went back to work. It was my time to muck around, I activated "narrator" on the senior DBA's machine, which I'd accidently found the other day, when I pressed the Windows key and the U key.

That ended up in a whole bunch of mucking around, with insults being typed into computers, and announced in boring monotone back and forth over the partitions.

I left them mucking around, and went back to my desk to do some work. I put the script I'd written into cron (finally), and then starting working on rewriting one of the files in the new system I'm writing.

I got a call from the senior DBA, he wanted to leave, which suited me, I'd had enough for the week. I got off the phone, packed my stuff, and started heading back upstairs.

The new guy had asked for a lift (because his car blew up on the way up here), so I told him we were going, and he started getting ready.

I got back up there, the senior DBA was on the phone, so I sat and waited.

The sysadmin told me that he was still getting emails from my new script, when it didn't have to fix anything, because it did a wget, and that was ending up on stdout, or stderror or something.

I said I'd edit the crontab, and set it to redirect to /dev/null. I went to do a "crontab -e" to fix it, but accidently typed "crontab -r", and silently destroyed the crontab. Eep.

I asked if the senior DBA had a copy of it, for that documentation he was writing, about the crontabs on all the servers, but he didn't.

We grabbed one off one of the other servers, and I went about putting that back in, and then we emailed the colo guys where the server is, and requested that the crontab be restored from the latest backup.

We left the building finally, wasting I don't know how much time on that. On the way home, the senior DBA was called up by the contract DBA, about the blank images problem. Apparently he'd worked out what was causing it.

It took about 4 phone calls to get through this though, because the phone kept dropping out.

I got dropped at home a while later, went in, watched tv, and blogged. I found something to eat for dinner, watched a bit more tv, and then went to bed.