gonewest

I discovered a factoid the other day that is a good excuse for a new unofficial holiday: on October 14, 1978, Jimmy Carter signed a bill that made home brewing legal for the first time since Prohibition.

I’ve been looking on the web but I can’t find a specific mention of the bill and Thomas apparently does not go back that far. I’ll keep looking and post the specifics if I find them.

In the meantime: every October 14, should you be a drinker, be sure to hold up a home brew (OK, something from a brewpub will work if no home brew is handy) and give a little thanks.

The blog was down for most of this weekend (not that it really maters since I haven’t updated it in a week or two :-) ) but everything is back to normal now. I finally dived into a gentoo emerge early Saturday that I expected to cause a couple of problems and have only just gotten everything straightened out.

I use the Linux Gentoo distribution for my server OS and like it very much. It is a source based distribution that gives you more control over how your system is built than many other distributions and lets you keep most aspects or your system up to the nearly bleeding edge with a simple emerge –update –deep world every now and then.

The down side is that once in a while an update will have an unexpected problem or will require some manual intervention (i.e. database format conversions) to keep everything working. This weekend, I did an emerge that I had been putting off because it would rearrange the Apache web server configuration files and require me to do fix them by hand to get the blogs back in order. It just so happened that the Mysql update to the 4.1 series (5.0 is masked which means that I can upgrade to it but it has not been well tested by Gentoo developers yet) was in order as well which required me to do some more manual work to get the database (the blogs store their content in Mysql) back into a working state. An unintended victim of the work this weekend was Postfix, my mail server, because I have it built with Mysql support and removing the old Mysql version libraries broke the Postfix executables until I got around to having the package recompiled. I think I’ll kick off a revdep-rebuild before I go to bed because there are a few other packages that have been broken to one degree or another due to recent updates (maybe I should just put that in crontab to fix up library breakages on a regular basis).

I had originally planned on getting SpamAssassin setup on my server this weekend (the Mac email reader has a great spam filter but I would rather attack the problem at the server so that I am not chained to it for all mail access), but now I guess it will have to wait for next weekend.

The vacation is almost over and I will be flying back to San Diego tonight. I hate to leave family and friends so soon but, to be honest, I’m also glad to be getting out of Memphis and back to San Diego where every day seems to be sunny and 75