Chasing Nuts

The time is now 9:45 AM and I am sitting at DTW waiting to catch a flight to MSP. I am on my way to Minneapolis to attend a dear college friends wedding. From Minneapolis I fly out to OSCON! You know how you always forget something when you travel. Well, I got to the airport and realized that I managed to leave my Knoppix Hacks book at home. So I guess I just missed my second opportunity to have Greenfly sign my book. Doh!

While at OSCON I plan to attend a bunch of sessions in the database and Perl track. I am also taking some technical training sessions on Slony-I and Request Tracker. I use both tools daily and thought I know them pretty well I home to learn what I have been doing wrong and find out how to use these tools to their fullest. To be honest I am really excited to learn more about request tracker and ticket systems in general.

In other news I just about went postal waiting for Gnome to get started up the other night and installed KDE back onto my system. Ahhhh its nice to be home again where the pretty pixels and blazing speed roam! What was all that crap about change being good?

I typically do not blog more then once a week but I have made a promise to my self to blog every day I am traveling. I have already enjoyed looking back at past writings and hope that writing every day on the trip will be something I can enjoy now and when I look back. I also figure it????????s a good chance to work on my writing skills which could always use some sharpening.

This weekend was a little crazy for me but I finally made it a somewhat late to hackfest that Kattni hosted. Thanks again Kattni, it was a great time. Why there I did not do very much hacking. I instead decided that it was time to take another look at Gnome. Maybe it was the Gnome cake or all the Gnome folks around. At any rate I fired up apt-get and installed Gnome in on my laptop. To make sure I really used it I even went so fair as to uninstall KDE.

It is now some five days later and I have to say that painfull as it was I am warming up to Gnome. I have to thank harshy for helping me get started and tweek Gnome when I first installed it. I have figured out how to make icons to all my network shares and have found some thing I like about the spacial file manager. Switching from Konversation to Xchat was easy and painless. I always have used gaim so I did not switch my IM apps. I have not burned a CD yet but when I do I have Coaster ready for that job. Though I have exclusively used KDE for years Gnome seems to do things the way I expect them to be done

I really wanted to avoid criticizing Gnome but I have to say something about speed. I was always told by people how big and bloated KDE was. I some how had the impression that kdeinit was like an anchor dragging all my apps to a glacial pace. Perhaps I had not herd this recently but I just always had this notion that KDE was slow but pretty. I really was way off on this one! Gnome is hands down slower on my Fujitsu P series laptop. Everyday I have tried some tips and tricks and now mater what I do Gnome is slow. I wish I knew how to fix it because the speed might be the single reason I move back to KDE.

Even with the nasty speed issue I plan to be patient with Gnome and will wait to do anything until I use the new version of gnome on breezy.

I think Stefanie summed it up in her e-mail very well:

Thank you to everyone that was able to attend our party on Saturday. As adults we officially reverted back to the college fraternity party days..you crazy cats killed almost 3 kegs, 200 jello shots, a few cases of beer and I lost count of the empty liquor bottles. It was a very eventful and entertaining evening…many of us saw the sun come up this morning, quite a few of you found new “friends” in the crowd, the cops made a few uninvited stops by the house (who knew you couldn’t let off fireworks at 1:30a, they didn’t have any sympathy either for the fact that I lit myself on fire lighting those damn things) and of course we had a few that couldn’t quite hold their liquor (thank for at least not puking on my carpet!)

Thank you, thank you, thank you to Beth and Aaron for spending the entire weekend at my house helping me prepare. Thank you to Regina for coming early to properly lay the food out. Thank you everyone that brought food/alcohol. Thank you to Lori and the twins for providing some of the live entertainment…the rest of the entertainment was provided by Jason who walked full stride into the closed doorwall and of course every single person that missed the step going down from the deck into the house! Not to be outdone though, I did provide some of you a little entertainment, when, with the help of Geppert..I too face planted in the living room!

Well I knew in time it would come to this. I had to admit this week that digital cameras where not just a fad. For ages I kept telling my self that film was so much better. I still like my film camera with manual everything but I realized it has one major problem. I never take any pictures with it. With that, I spend some Amazon gift certificates and and prochased a digital camera.

I decided to go with the Canon PowerShot S410. My mother and uncle both have this little camera and I have to say it takes great pictures with its all glass optical lens. The other nice thing is the durable stainless steal case and compact flash card. I like CF because I have a few devices that use CF already.

So what does this meant to you readers. Look soon for some more fun and photos coming to my blog.

So I am working on the next code release for Autoweb and it was time to push it out some schema changes to our testing Slony setup. Last time I tried this I ran into a few problems. Mainly there was an error about a trigger the slave could not find and the slon processes on the slaves panicked. This time was again the same story I decided to dig into the SQL file the developers had put together when I saw the problem. We where doing many inserts and updates in the sql file on tables with triggers.

In slony all the triggers are disabled on the slave so you really can not do anything on the slave where you need a trigger or it will fail. When you push a SQL file out with Slony it would be just like you ran it on the lsave it self. So I leaned something I really should have know ages ago. If you do a schema change and push it out with Slony do not do any updates, inserts, or deletes. Just make the schema changes first, then on the master with your new scema in place do your updates, inserts, or deletes.

I am kicking my self hard for not figuring this stuff out sooner! Now I know and hopefully the next schema change will not be such a battle to contend with.