planning is good
So, three interesting things happened at work in the last 2 days.
First one’s that my purchases got approved. So we’ll be running legal licenses of WinRAR, and we’ll be getting 2 more copies of Creative Suite 2. Both of these are good consequences, but the biggest consequence is that we’re getting a pair of new machines. Reasonably high-end, not insanely so, but reasonably. p4 3.2’s, 1gb ddr2-533, x300 dual-dvi video cards, 160 gig sata disks. Nothing too flashy, but pretty good setups. And I’ll get to do some moderate rearranging soon, because of it. Which is also cool, because I like rearranging. It means making things less unprofessional.
Second one is that I got sick of getting nightly email that said nothing. So I changed my daily maintenance scripts a bit, so they only send me email if something interesting is going on. So, for example, if there’s updates to build, or if someone’s over quota, or if a disk is close to full.
To accomplish that, I ended up writing two small C utilities. I had forgotten … just how much fun it can be writing handy little utils that do precisely what you want them to and nothing else, and do so relatively efficiently.
Last interesting thing happened just today… my boss comes up to me and is like “I think we need to put access controls on the subversion repositories for these projects” and fires off a list of 4 or 5 projects that have been sitting open for a while. The consensus is, apparently, not to trust these new research assistants with access to pretty much anything that could be remotely sensitive. Not sure exactly why, but it’s understandable … they both have a slight shadiness to them, and we’ve been burned before trusting research assistants.
Anyway, so the boss was like “is that possible?”. And I got to show off that I’d already solved that problem in an efficient and elegant way, added about 20 characters to a file, ran htpasswd2 to create a password hash for her, and showed her the finished access control system before she even got a chance to wander off and do something else.
I figured that it’d be necessary at some point, you see, so I did the most generalizable authentication scheme I could think of without totally rebuilding the lab in a different way.
It’s nice being able to respond to problems with mature, tested and already-deployed solutions, you know?
Life is good. Except for the tiredness… but I’ll be doing something about that in a couple minutes.