07.01.2004
Happy birthday to me
Well supposedly anyway 
Back to work this week and life has been busy. The normal combination of politics and stupidity making for an interesting life. One of the good things about what I do is that the technical aspects of it (currently at least) outweigh that sort of crap. Although I must admit some days I do have to remind myself of that fact.
Did some lovely perl scripting yesterday - very simple stuff, just reading in a list of files in a directory and scanning for some keywords. That is the sort of thing that perl excels at (after all “practical extraction and reporting language” does tend to imply that) and it was wonderful to actually sit down and do some scripting again.
I see Apple have released the mini-Ipod even though the price was not quite what was being predicted. Apparently it is as small as a business card but has a nice 4gig hard drive. The specs look very interesting and I must admit it is tempting to look at for car use rather than fitting an in-car mp3/cd player. I’ll have to wait to see what the reviews have to say (and for it to actually get to this country) before thinking about that. For the moment the Zaurus does a wonderful job (with a 512meg CF card).
TIme to start thinking about some computer changes around my place - there is a possibility that I may be able to move into a Linux job where I work and, of course, Redhat Enterprise Linux and Suse are the distributions of choice. I haven’t used Redhat seriously since I did my RHCE at the beginning of last year so I am out of practice a little. I do have a little personal Redhat9 box at work that is a web/mrtg/stats server but I haven’t really done any major sysadmin style work on that machine.
So one of my machines will be converted to a Fedora Core1 box for a month or so (the Fedora Core2 when that comes out) to get back into the hang of dealing with redhat style sysconfig and rpm fun again. That is the problem with debian (even running unstable), it spoils you for most things (ie upgrades etc). I’m just about to do a large apt-get upgrade on my laptop (tracking unstable) which is over 550meg :). Now that is what I call some major changes.
A useful site I found from arstechnica - fedoranews.org. Has some nice tutorials and other interesting articles which should be a nice introduction back into that world.
Now time to go and attend to some backups and file copying.