The Life of a Sysadmin

I've been upgrading my wife's laptop to Lucid Lynx today, and I've finally had a chance to track down one little bug that's been annoying her. On Youtube, flash controls don't work on videos; she can't close ads, the volume/mute controls don't work, and so on. This is a 64-bit machine, but 32-bit flash (natch).

The solution, as detailed here (post 42!), is to edit /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer and insert this before the last line:

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

Restart the browser, and now it all works!

A week ago this afternoon, I started feeling bad: achy, kinda fevery, lethargic. I chalked it up to flu. But then I got these massive headaches. At night I had intense, repetitive, feverish dreams about loading some random .el file in Emacs (no, seriously), and would wake up to more headaches, drenched in sweat.

First doctor said it was allergies or viral; second doctor thought it was bacterial, and gave me a prescription for antibiotics. (I don't usually get second opinions, and I didn't ask for antibiotics, but I've never felt so awful for so long.)

On Wednesday, I stupidly decided to go into work to take care of a few things, and scared a few people with how I looked. I slowly shuffled back to the bus and came home.

On Thursday, I was supposed to go with my wife and kids to Penticton for a weekend family gathering...that was out. I think I'd have thrown myself out the door within a few blocks. They left, and I've been having a sickie bachelor weekend. I started watching "Battlefield Earth" as soon as they left; I lay there on the couch, letting John Travolta's cackle wash over me and laughing weakly.

I watched a lot of movies. I read the Internet. I ate frozen pizza. I upgraded my wife's laptop to the latest version of Ubuntu, and fixed a Flash bug that's been irritating her. I had vague doubts about my choice of career, but I'm putting that down to lack of sleep...haven't had a good night's worth in a week now.

I've been feeling slowly better after starting the antibiotics. And once I figured out I was taking entirely too much acetominophen (I think I was getting rebound headaches), I started feeling even better. For some reason I'm still getting woken up at 1:30am by headaches, but I'm hopeful that'll go.

The family's due back this afternoon. I'll be back at work tomorrow, and I'm glad: I'm pretty bored of sitting on my ass all the time. (I'd be happier to spend more time with my family, but we've got another, longer vacation coming up in OH CRAP three weeks.)

Okay, enough. Go listen to "Volunteers" by Megafaun. (That's why I'm having career doubts. Beard + acoustic music...sigh.)

Yesterday was my first day back after a week off sick...and it wasn't bad, I have to say. It's summer at a university, so that helps, and it was a sunny day like we haven't had in weeks, so that was even better. I'm going off on vacation in three weeks, so I'm focussing now on getting things ready. (I'm asymptotically approaching a full realization of how to plan work over long periods of time...)

There's one big project (LDAP + website + email on four VMs) that I need to hand over to the owners. I found out/confirmed my suspicions that the people maintaining it while I'm gone will be moderately technical, not administrative, so that simplifies things a lot.

There's documentation I need to improve for the folks who'll be helping while I'm gone, including network maps. Ugh...I hate making network maps; it reminds me of web design in its fiddliness (is too a word). But I will do it. (I wonder if using a tablet would help. Anyone have any experience w/that?)

Oh, and DRI...sigh. One of the groups at work uses a protein visualization program that wants to use DRI. Without it, it reverts to a lesser form of rendering that looks like a strobe light. In the X.org troubleshooting guide, they recommend a stanza that looks like this:

Section "DRI"
    Mode 0666
EndSection

I don't like those permissions just on principle. You can put in a "Group foo" directive, which changes the group ownership as you'd expect, and for some workstations that works...but for another does not, possibly because of different driver versions. This is what comes of not having fully automated installs.

And there's son #2 waking up again. He woke up at 5 but was persuaded to go back to sleep. Bad: I was up at 5am. Good: I had time to write this.