Lots of small things

Yesterday was a mixed bag of activities. I started with LinkedIn and found some former co-workers. LinkedIn has made improvements over time; one of them is the "people you may know" widget.

I reviewed e-mail messages, discarding some and filing others.My plan is to use my inbox as a list of actionable items; other items are either filed for future reference or tossed. I'm not always good at filing messages immediately.

I updated my resume on the ACM job board site. I fixed a few small errors and changed my description, using a style borrowed from a former co-worker on LinkedIn.

I review the job boards for ACM, craigslist, CrunchBoard, guru.com, and Jobster. CrunchBoard is interesting; it has few jobs but they are unique and not listed on other boards. I found a really good skills match (version control administration) but the job is in San Francisco.

Getting technical, I dug in to bash and RPM files, looking for the "db_recover" program on the SuSE install CDs. I found it, using the "rpm" command and a bash scriptlet that did the heavy searching. Once installed, I fixed the Subversion repository on //grendel whcih let me resume development on //mylene.

I also adjusted PHP on //grendel and now I have session support in PHP. This lets me move forward with PHP and dynamic web pages.

I met my friend Larry for our traditional Monday lunch. We had a good conversation about current technologies and up-and-coming tech. Larry is pushing for mobile applications on iPod and BlackBerrys, and I think there is something there. I'm staying with the old-school web technologies for now, since I can learn them at low cost and need them before moving to mobile applications.

And finally, the hard disks and cables arrived for //delilah and //delwood. They came late in the day and I did nothing beyond verifying the contents of the box. With this hardware I can put an operating system on //delilah (//delwood must wait for the CPU heat sink bracket). My plan was to install Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) on one and Fedora Core on the other, to gain experience with other distributions. I think I can get an Ubuntu CD at tomorrow's CALUG meeting; I will have to download the Fedora distro.