The Green Hills of California

[mdlbear]

They may be small compared to other mountains, and the weather in California may be warm compared to winters elsewhere, but there was still snow on the peaks this morning. It was still there as I drove home, the white domes of Lick Observatory floating among the clouds on a raft of white snow. Below the snowline, the grass on the hills is green.

Walked 2.5 miles today, which makes up in part for missing yesterday completely. Things have been busy this week at work, getting ready for a week of visitors, demos, and posters next week. Most of them will be there Tuesday and Wednesday; hopefully I'll be able to get away most of Thursday. And Consonance starts Friday. I'm not ready!

Managed to get a crude but effective data-entry form mostly working; I'll have it finished this evening. Then we can start mailing confirmations and URLs to the people who preordered Coffee, Computers, and Song! during the last two months. The development process for the form was pretty simple: take the existing printable form, which I had developed in HTML, add form input elements where appropriate, and write a really simple CGI that just throws the data into a flat file. Writing the file is the only part still unimplemented; I'm thinking of using a hash of the customer's name or email address as the directory name, and making numbered transaction files under that.

The fileserver is still freezing; there's a Debian install in my near future.

Comments

Re: Unix?

[mdlbear]

Linux; currently the Debian distribution. The same hardware was working fine under Sarge (the current Stable); I upgraded to Etch primarily to get more recent printer drivers and spamassassin rules.