Well, I made it to the Internet shop, and despite them normally closing at 9pm, I caused them stay until about 9:10, but it was worth it. Today, I managed to respond to just about all the e-mails in my inbox, and this evening during the hour I managed to squeeze in at the Internet shop, I managed to file all the e-mail I responded to off-line in the relevant IMAP folders, respond to all new e-mails, delete all the spam (Spamcop-reporting it is out of the question atm), respond to a couple of bug reports and new problems that came up, and fix a problem with another developer’s Plesk-generated Apache configuration file (I think I fixed it, didn’t have time to check!). So I’ve now managed to whittle my inbox down to just 2 outstanding e-mails, and my bug tracker is down to only 8 outstanding bugs. Whoo!
If all goes well, I should have those bug reports squashed by next weekend, so I can consider pulling the contents of my ‘GNOME sysadmin unhandled issues’ mail folder back into my Inbox, and deal with or delegate whatever I can. I would just love to be back on top of that situation. It’s something I can achieve that I don’t need money for, just a whole load of spare time. Something to keep me busy in between projects. I really shouldn’t carry my day job over into my spare time as a hobby, but I do love doing it, and even though it’s just sysadmin like I’ve been doing for years now, it’s nice doing for a large, open organisation (/community) such as GNOME instead of in smaller, closed environments like ISPs and SMEs.
My main ambition, given enough time to achieve it, will be to finish off my ‘Mango’ PHP application, which is a web frontend to the GNOME LDAP database, aimed at making Christian’s life easier. He probably spends more time than he needs to creating LDIF files and using the ’ldap*’ command-line tools. I just need to get past a problem I’m having getting client and server SSL certificates working on Apache on container.gnome.org, then I can sign Christian (and the other sysadmin team members) certificates and we’ll have a reasonably secure sysadmin interface.
But before I get round to that, the Bugzilla guys are waiting on some Perl module upgrades required to upgrade Bugzilla, and thos is waiting on some PHP modules for something he’s working on, Bonsai/LXR/ViewCVS still isn’t working and there are other things that need doing that are more important than that. Getting a decent request tracker would certainly be a start! Who was it said they’d take care of that? :( If all else fails, I’ve set aside the three days of GUADEC for hanging out on IRC and only working on GNOME-related tasks, such as the sysadmin todo list and fixing up gtranslator CVS HEAD.
OK, that’s pretty much everything work and computer-related off my chest (for now!). Now for some cultural observations and some photos of Thai life down here in the southern parts.
The recent few days have shown a pattern of seriously fierce thunderstorms between around 2pm and 4-5pm. I love the fact that the lightning and thunder here just seems so much more intense in this part of the world, compared to the relatively tame storms of the UK. I found the same in Australia, that the nearer to the equator you got, the more fierce the storms would get. Anyway, I digress. When the storms are over and it gets dark, there is this cacophony of frog noises, intermixed with the crickets and the ‘chakachans’ (loud, squeeling insects which I don’t yet know the English name for). As it gets dark, I start seeing torches flashing across my garden and out the back across P’Chais garden too. The dogs start barking, so I head out with my torch to see what’s going on. I find most of my neighbours wandering around in the gardens, their’s and anyone else’s, with torches and large sacks collecting frogs. Next day, all the houses along the road up to the junction have these dead frogs pegged out to dry in the mid-day sun. By mid-afternoon, they’ve been collected in and are being cooked up in curries. As they’re eating the curries, the next rain or thunderstorm comes over and the same thing happens over again. This is only about the third day, so I’m interested to see how long before they get fed up of eating frog curry. I haven’t tried it myself (yet!).
Another problem at this time of year, in this part of the world, is ‘malairng mao’ (literally translated: ‘drunk flies’), which gather in their thousands at any street lamp, and can be found dead in piles beneath them by the morning. They also have a habit of getting into the house and buzzing around lights, TVs and computer screens etc. I’ve had to retreat with the laptop into the mosquito net to write this. That’s the second reason I’ve found recently not to settle for a desktop machine. The other was that if my phone line goes down again like it has done twice recently, it isn’t as easy to lug a desktop PC down to the Internet shop, especially not on a moped! Oh shit, I’m back to moaning about my laptop again.
Oh, I promised some pictures? Here’s one of Mee in the new hammock I bought her in Samui, and one of the ‘Dook Dick’ and ‘Cafe’ who have been hanging around our place since P’Chai and P’Gea went to Samui. The rest are in the gallery.