But shyness can stop you...
Cluck, cluck, cluck.
Yes, I'm still a coward. Not going to see S. until next Wednesday, and the following few weekends are going to be pretty busy for me.
Next weekend (04 Jun & 05 Jun), I have a party to go to on Saturday, then I'm driving to Maryland on Sunday, so I can work in my Company's other datacenter for the day decommissioning hardware and prepping it for shipment back home.
The following weekend is a maybe, but the one after that is going to be a nightmare. Holed up with several of my coworkers for all of Friday and Saturday trying to do a proof of concept test for our Disaster Recovery environment.
Last night's party was pretty fun. Went to a place called Keans. There were about 12 of us there. There was spilled beer, inappropriate conversations, office gossip...all the good stuff to make a night drinking with coworkers fun.
I've been drafted for next week's party to be the blend master again - apparently word got out.
Fine with me. I get to drink booze, I'm cool.
--------------
I've spent today immersed in code and working with Jay on trying to get it to interact with his environment. I spent at least 6 hours over the last two days getting pissed off at a program called Mutt. Turns out the problem wasn't actually in Mutt, but rather in IBM's packaging of it for our environment.
Mutt is an Open Source email program. What makes it nice for us is that it's small and allows for MIME encapsulation of files from the command line in a UNIX environment.
I had to do this earlier, so, I'll briefly explain what MIME encapsulation means.
Email is all built on top of sendmail. Sendmail is designed to work with text only - it's a very old protocol. It's also designed to just send a flat body of text as the email. Modern email is far from this, hence, MIME encapsulation.
When you add an attachment to an email, when that message is sent, the attachment is processed through MIME to be converted to a text stream, with some special text in the stream to denote where it starts and ends. Modern email clients will then read in this text stream, see the special text, then send the gibberish that follows it into a MIME program to convert it back to the original file.
All nice and tidy.
Unfortunately, Mutt's MIME implementation was garbling the file. It was an 800k gzip file, but it was getting massacred in transit. I finally tracked it down to a missing file in IBM's packaging of the program - mime.types. I found a copy of the file and put it where the Mutt documentation said it should be - /etc/mime.types.
Still didn't work.
Put it into the home directory - it worked then.
Ah, HA!
Went on a hunch and put it into the weird place that IBM places their code, and, *voila*, it worked!
6 hours wasted because IBM didn't package a stupid file and they wanted it in another place than the standard.
Ought to charge them for expenses...
Now, I've been sitting with Jay for 3 hours, trying to get this program to interface correctly - so far, no good. We get sporatic success, but then it comes crashing down like a flaming turd.
--------------
So, let's sum up.
I'm a cowardly System Administrator who can't get his shit to work.
Joy.
Yes, I'm still a coward. Not going to see S. until next Wednesday, and the following few weekends are going to be pretty busy for me.
Next weekend (04 Jun & 05 Jun), I have a party to go to on Saturday, then I'm driving to Maryland on Sunday, so I can work in my Company's other datacenter for the day decommissioning hardware and prepping it for shipment back home.
The following weekend is a maybe, but the one after that is going to be a nightmare. Holed up with several of my coworkers for all of Friday and Saturday trying to do a proof of concept test for our Disaster Recovery environment.
Last night's party was pretty fun. Went to a place called Keans. There were about 12 of us there. There was spilled beer, inappropriate conversations, office gossip...all the good stuff to make a night drinking with coworkers fun.
I've been drafted for next week's party to be the blend master again - apparently word got out.
Fine with me. I get to drink booze, I'm cool.
I've spent today immersed in code and working with Jay on trying to get it to interact with his environment. I spent at least 6 hours over the last two days getting pissed off at a program called Mutt. Turns out the problem wasn't actually in Mutt, but rather in IBM's packaging of it for our environment.
Mutt is an Open Source email program. What makes it nice for us is that it's small and allows for MIME encapsulation of files from the command line in a UNIX environment.
I had to do this earlier, so, I'll briefly explain what MIME encapsulation means.
Email is all built on top of sendmail. Sendmail is designed to work with text only - it's a very old protocol. It's also designed to just send a flat body of text as the email. Modern email is far from this, hence, MIME encapsulation.
When you add an attachment to an email, when that message is sent, the attachment is processed through MIME to be converted to a text stream, with some special text in the stream to denote where it starts and ends. Modern email clients will then read in this text stream, see the special text, then send the gibberish that follows it into a MIME program to convert it back to the original file.
All nice and tidy.
Unfortunately, Mutt's MIME implementation was garbling the file. It was an 800k gzip file, but it was getting massacred in transit. I finally tracked it down to a missing file in IBM's packaging of the program - mime.types. I found a copy of the file and put it where the Mutt documentation said it should be - /etc/mime.types.
Still didn't work.
Put it into the home directory - it worked then.
Ah, HA!
Went on a hunch and put it into the weird place that IBM places their code, and, *voila*, it worked!
6 hours wasted because IBM didn't package a stupid file and they wanted it in another place than the standard.
Ought to charge them for expenses...
Now, I've been sitting with Jay for 3 hours, trying to get this program to interface correctly - so far, no good. We get sporatic success, but then it comes crashing down like a flaming turd.
So, let's sum up.
I'm a cowardly System Administrator who can't get his shit to work.
Joy.
posted by Pat Marshall at 17:21
2 Comments:
July or June on the dates, Elmo?
On which dates?
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