Monthly Archive for January, 2007

A breather, of sorts

So, after a marathon at work, we deployed our first delivery of the appilcation I’ve been working on since July. It’s an enterprise application, on a private intranet, so no links. However, it’s fair to say that we’ll be getting hits from a wide variety of sources. It should be good to see how well it holds up.

Right now, it’s deployed using the standard-mongrel-rails-stack ™, using 2 mongrel servers, all on one box. Seems to be holding up very well. As a note, moving your session store off the disc and into the database (ARSeession) does wonderful things for performance. Down side: It appears that a Text field in oracle is capped out at 4096b. Which puts an upper limit on an individual session size. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s likely to bite us in the butt at some point.

To top off the deployment exctiement, I’m buying a house. Closing comes in on Wednesday. We’ve already been through and plotted everything out. New appliances are ordered and on their way, buying up lighting fixtures, picking out paint colors … it’s pretty much all done but the installation, which is scheduled for Friday.

So, after about a month, I finally get a chance to breath. So, what am I doing? Refocusing on Dark Sun stuff. Lots to do there, including actually following through on the site. At least that one will be public … ;)

laptopless …

So, for the second time in as many months, my laptop is going back for repairs.  Strange problem, another one of those things that I’m apparently not sure how to google for … either that, or it really is some kind of isolated problem.

What happens is that the backlight on my Toshiba m55 is blanking out on me … when I open the hinge past a certain point.  That’s not good, because that certain point is well below the one where I can actually read what’s on the screen without hunching over and reading over my hands … And, of course, the problem is getting worse.  It gets harder and harder to even get the backlight to turn on.  Happened to me earlier, sent it to the shop, and they swapped out the backlight.  Apparently, that wasn’t the initial problem, because whatever’s wrong worked it’s way through a second one in pretty short order.

So, it’s back in the shop.  Hopefully, this doesn’t take too long.  Otherwise, it’s back to “what’s a good laptop …”  And this one was only 10 months old; not a good record.