Hacking on...

Finally got a "case" built for my fanless X-terminal, based on this one. Basically it's just two slabs of plastic: solid black on the bottom and translucent grey on top so you can see all the blinkenlights. Pretty cool-looking, especially when stood on edge, and of course completely silent. I could listen to it all day. I stupidly drilled the first batch of holes wrong, because I was using a piece of foam (one that came as padding under the MB) as a template. Dumb bear. The second time around I used the board itself. Plastic and 1/8" drillbit from Tap Plastics on the way to work yesterday; the plastic came straight out of their scrap bin.

The boards for my new gateway arrived yesterday. I got the daughterboard with three 10/100/1000 ethernet ports (not that I need that kind of bandwidth yet). It's in my Morex Venus case for the moment, but it's likely to end up in a custom rackmount. The main reason for doing this is to reduce power consumption and noise in the server closet; the current gateway is a 500MHz K6, and there's just no way to find quiet CPU fans for Socket 7 anymore. (Quiet 40mm fans exist; there just doesn't seem to be anyplace around here that sells them.)

TGIF

It's been a long day, but reasonably productive. Woke up at 5am (about an hour and a quarter earlier than usual). Had the devil's own time getting chaoswolf out of bed in time to get her to school -- she seemed depressed, but she might have just been up most of the night. Especially since she came home and promptly went to bed. I hope that, if there's really something wrong, she'll tell me or the flower_cat. Inquiring minds...

Spent much of the afternoon helping a consultant install GForge, the open-source fork of the software that runs SourceForge. We spent a lot of time at it yesterday, too. The most recent Debian package seems to be considerably older than the most recent version of PostgreSQL, and failed miserably. So we've been doing it by hand. Spent all our time today banging our heads against a problem that turned out to be a mismatch between the port PostgreSQL was actually listening on, and the one that GForge's programmers thought it was listening on. (headdesk). Actually, since it looks as though GForge agrees with /etc/services, it's probably a typo in Debian's hacked-up PostgreSQL config file.

I need to get some tracks down this weekend; there's also quite a lot of assorted work around the house that has to get done before Hotel Starport opens for guests on Wednesday. (Hint to guests and out-of-town visitors -- we can't pick you up at the airport if we don't have your flight info.)