Archives week 5 of 2007

After days and days of work building test cases and testing on database images I ran a "fix a screw up" script yesterday only to find out this morning that the "fix" wound up making the problem far, far, worse. Spent the entire day trying to fix that today.

The problem, it turns out, is ...

We run our home/office access point in WPA encrypted mode. This is, AFAIK the only reasonably secure protocol available in the common Linksys WRT* routers.

It works very well on my Gentoo laptop using madwifi (and has worked well for quite a while now). Took a bit of fiddling, probably 4 or 5 hours, but ...

About to run the fix-up script for an error that's about 1.5 weeks old now. The script generates 337 emails to customers, alters the database in 4 or 5 ways and generally has all sorts of ways in which it could screw up in very public and end-customer-annoying ways.

I've just run a test run ...

Going to attempt to set up a Sugar development environment. The Gentoo installation stuff doesn't work any more (everything is masked out due to bugs/instability now). Apparently it'll run in a Qemu environment that allows for development work. Might be a workable solution if I can mount a directory into the image from the workstation. ...

Tim tells me that the ZODB (Zope Object Database) in which this blog is housed has grown to 12GB, largely composed of enormous amounts of comment spam. He's looking at how to shrink it down to something reasonable, but if that's the kind of spamming rate we're seeing we're going to need some way to ...