i'm not a morning person

really. course this morning my eyes popped open at 4:30am and i gave up any chance of actually falling back to sleep at 5:00am. since i haven't been doing a lot of speed recently i figure i'm probably still jet lagged from my recent flight to warsaw, poland. (i got here sunday afternoon.) it was pretty bright out at 4:30am and when i was walking to the bus stop at 5:30am the sun was already well above the horizion. there was a surprising number of people out so early, although i did manage to find a seat on the bus. the bus ride to work was about 40 mins and it was much nicer than the one yesterday at 8:30am. (that bus was standing room only, very hot and stuffy, and got stuck in multiple traffic jams.) well, it's time to get some work done so i can get out of here (the sun offices in warsaw) and get over to grandma's place.

backyard work and lots of pics

so the past two weekends have been spent mostly doing a lot of work in the backyard, and today i uploaded lots of photos.

the oldest photos that i uploaded were from our tour of marin sun farms, which is where we get most our meat, eggs, and whole chickens from. i also have some woodworking related photos. you can check out the zero clearance insert and router table that i built for my ts2400 table saw here. i finally glued my bench together, and ronda even snapped some photos of me mixing shellac flakes. thrilling, eh?

so i spent the past two weekends removing an old large brick bbq from the backyard so that we could plant more stuff in the garden. my landlord wanted me to save most the bricks, so i did, but the removal processes involved a 20 lb sledge hammer and produced a lot of rubble. the concrete and re-bar reinforced foundation was the biggest pain. i didn't photograph the bbq before removing it, but you can see the lack of it and piles of rubble here. with the bbq removed, we have some more room for planting stuff, so you can see photos of the garden here, here, and here.

dead tired

the weekend was ok. i actually assembled the bench that i've been working on for what seems like forever. i also kegged my first all grain batch of beer. i thought i fucked it up by mashing it at too high a temperature, but in the end it seems to have turned out ok. sunday night me and ronda went to dan's place where he smoked some salmon on the grill. it was really tasty and now i have to try adding trays of wood chips to the bbq to recreate some of that tastiness. today i finally managed to bike into work. the weather has been fine for it for a while, but i'm a lazy ass and motivating to actually bike into work is hard. course, now that i've finally done it i'm dead tired. i forgot how much fun it is to bike into a strong headwind while coming home and struggle to go 9 mph.

not really dead yet...

well, i haven't died just yet. although if you actually check in on this blog you might have though otherwise. this post is mainly just a waste of space to say "i'm here" and provide pointers to some photos that i've uploaded. there's some pics of me, ronda, and a couple friends at an overpriced weird bar in sf. there's some woodworking dross. then there's the end of the year holidays with xmas in florida with ronda's family and new years in la with mine. And just in case that isn't enough, early on in this year i went to a fucking great show at the independent that features two of my favorite bands, the pine box boys and the devil makes three. well, that's probably enough irrelevant shit for another month.

tis the season for hate

so what happens if you hate xmas shopping and decide to get it over with online in one night? well, the next morning when all the companies you bought crap from open up they all start charging your credit card around the same time, then your credit card company freaks out about all the transactions thinking that they may be fraudulent so they start denying them, this in turn causes all the vendors to suspend your orders. so then you have to call your credit card company, assure them that everything is ok, then figure out that they were lying to you when they told you they only denied one transaction (because you have email from multiple vendors saying you are having payment problems), and then you have to contact all the vendors and tell them to try transactions again. now i hate chase too. merry freakin xmas.

slimserver battle

so i spent most this weekend struggling to upgrade the slimserver software on my home server. i'm running solaris nevada and of course it doesn't have all the little perl extras and super recent versions of mysql that this software wants. also, to complicate the process, i don't want to install this software as root (the way it expect to be installed) so that it can go around and upgrade/overwrite random components of my system that will then break the next time i upgrade. so i spent quite a while figuring out how to install this bugger into it's own directory and user account.

so here's the gorry details about how i finally got this working:

- run the following commands as root:
---8<---
zfs create export/home/slimserv_v6.5.0
cd /export/home
ln -s slimserv_v6.5.0 slimserv
groupadd slimserv
useradd -d /export/home/slimserv -g slimserv slimserv
chown slimserv:slimserv slimserv_v6.5.0
mkdir /export/home/slimserv/playlists
chown slimserv:slimserv /export/home/slimserv/playlists
su - slimserv
exec zsh
. /export/home/edp/.envrc
gtar -xzf $EDPHOME/install/archive/common/SlimServer_v6.5.0.tar.gz
mv SlimServer_v6.5.0/* .
rmdir SlimServer_v6.5.0
mkdir -p XML-Parser-2.34/Expat/hints
cat > XML-Parser-2.34/Expat/hints/solaris.pl <<-EOF
\$self->{INC} = '-I/usr/sfw/include';
\$self->{LDDLFLAGS} = '-G -L/usr/sfw/lib -R/usr/sfw/lib';
EOF
cat > slimserver.sh <<-EOF
#!/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/bin:\$HOME/mysql/bin
export PATH
exec ./slimserver.pl "\$@"
EOF
---8<---

- modify Bin/build-perl-modules.pl
---8<---
+       'XML-Parser-2.34' => {
+               'Makefile.PL' => join(' ', qw(
+                       EXPATLIBPATH=/usr/sfw/lib
+                       EXPATINCPATH=/usr/sfw/include
+               )),
+       },
+
'DBD-mysql-3.0002' => {
...
!               for my $cmd (qw(curl wget)) {
--- 142,144 ----
!               for my $cmd (qw(wget)) {
---8<---

- as the slimserv user run the following commands:
---8<---
./Bin/build-perl-modules.pl
mysql=mysql-standard-5.0.27-solaris10-i386.tar.gz
gtar -xzf $EDPHOME/install/archive/i386/$mysql
ln -s mysql-standard-5.0.27-solaris10-i386 mysql
mv ./MySQL/errmsg.sys ./MySQL/errmsg.sys.original
cp -p ./mysql/share/mysql/english/errmsg.sys ./MySQL/errmsg.sys
---8<---

- as root create /var/svc/manifest/site/slimserver.xml and then import
it and enable the new slimserver service:
---8<---
svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/site/slimserver.xml
svcadm enable svc:/network/slimserver:default
---8<---

- configure the playlist directory in the slimserver by going to the
slimserver web page and then selecing:
Home -> Server Settings -> Basic Settings
and setting: PLAYLISTS FOLDER to /export/home/slimserv/playlists

home additions

so this past weekend we made some changes around the house. there's a new pony picture, a small xmas tree, and an old german cuckoo clock (which i spent most the day struggling to get working) . the pony picture was a bday gift for ronda and the clock was actually a really old one that i grew up with which (i think) my parents were finally happy to get rid of.