The Lair

Yes, that’s my pretence that I actually understand the French language – either written or spoken. I don’t.

So, I’ve been pottering around getting myself organized for le grande server move. Le grande server, where I have tons of flexibility – but at the price of having to manage most of the services myself. Yes, that one. I hope to depart from my coddled existence at the present host; where backups and server monitoring and all those things are taken care of by professionals – and strike out on my own.

What I’ve discovered is that having done more or less the same thing for any number of corporate entities actually means nothing when it’s your own personal little playpen. For one thing, since it’s my own hobbyist setup – I feel inclined, nay compelled, to push the envelope with new and strange looking configs. All of this leads to a predictably steep learning curve, since I can’t rely on muscle memory and a few years of experience to guide me through a familiar configuration file or three. When some problem crops up (as it inevitably does) I have to peruse random websites, rely on automated translations from languages with non-Latin alphabets (yes. really) and do all manner of frantic sacrifices to the Patron Saint of Setting Up Servers., It’s a strange feeling to be this ignorant and n00bish about the mundane business of setting up a webserver. I’m quite enjoying the experience.

If the webserver on this hobby setup goes down, I’ll probably get a few concerned emails (assuming anyone even notices). If a server at $work had gone down in similar circumstances; it would have probably meant a fair amount of lost revenue or whatever the accounting types use to indicate a very bad thing. Yet strangely, the effort put into making the server as solid as possible is pretty much the same.

Then there is always that nagging feeling that I could have written lots of the code better. Plenty of time to ponder my questionable design decisions in the name of “kick it out the door”, plenty of time to facepalm or headdesk and think “Oh. Why didn’t I do it that way instead?”. A random highlight – I’ve semi-seriously contemplated rewriting in Python (with a side helping of Django). Fortunately for my sanity – I talked myself out of the idea. I think.

Discovered an evil evil bug in MySQL 5.0. The timediff function (which I use extensively for the spiffy little X hours ago messages) is broken. This is going to cause a considerable amount of pain in the near future. I can just feel it.

And yeah, I’m just barely on schedule with the whole move the server business because I’ve started reading comics. Typical.