Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Random bits

Missed me? Wondering what I’ve been up to? Ok.

Lots of things. First and most common is migration of this site to Embperl. It started and finished and you cannot even notice a thing! Cause it’s all the same (almost). Only with microscope, Google‘s cache and GNU diff you will notice the differences.

I am very enthusiastic about learning (and relearning) Perl once again. This time I am serious. You can see the confirmation on my node at Perl Monks. I am way up to level 3 (acolyte). Way to go!

Happy coming Easter for all those who celebrate! There are plenty of holidays around for reading and beer consumption. According to my schedule, next couple of weeks promise to be a great deal of fun, including parties, birthdays, books, and projects. Too much for one entry? Ok, I’ll stop. Now that diary submission is working again, I’ll keep you updated.

RT and Mason

Finally, I’ve got a bit of time to get my hands on Mason. I’ve already managed to install and configure it and did my “Hello world!” program. Installation and configuration is extremely easy and mostly consist of Perl modules installation from CPAN. Documentation on the site is excellent, and I have a couple of RT ticketing systems as a reference. Let the fun hour begin!

Configuring Olga’s workstation

I’ve finished configuration of Olga’s workstation. Basically, everything was properly autodetected and configured. I just had to copy games highscores back to /var/lib/games and overwrite /etc/passwd*, /etc/group*, and /etc/shadow* with the network copy of the files. xmms-mp3 RPM had to be downloaded from FreshRPMS.net and installed on her box to fix back the MP3 playback. Couple of symlinks were missing – easily fixed too.

KDE started fine. Gnome though detected a problem with my NFS configuration. Apparently, last time when I upgraded a server from Red Hat Linux 6.2 to 7.2 nfs permissions were not set correctly on /var/lib/nfs which caused rpc.lockd to die misserably immidiately after it printed [OK] for start on the screen. rpc.lockd needs a writeable directory /var/lib/nfs/sm to work properly. The amusing part of it is that I found out about this on Google, which pointed me to an article about a guy who upgraded his Mandrake Linux from 8.0 to 9.1. Heh.

Another fixed needed to be done for Mozilla preferences, since Olga was using a newer version of Mozilla then the one shipped with Red Hat Linux 9. Understandable.

Anyway, the machine is up and running and Olga even likes it. Evolution was not interesting enough, OpenOffice is awaiting it’s turn. All games were checked. 3D OpenGL chess screensaver is configured to run now. Previously she used random rotation method for the choice of screensaver.

Anyway, we’ll see how it goes.