Contrary to the lack of posts on my blog, I'm still alive. I apologize for not writing much, but things have been so busy lately.
At $work, I'm working on rolling out a forklift upgrade in a lab environment that involves:
- Upgrade our application servers from Solaris 9 to Solaris 10.
- Upgrade Java from 1.4.2 to 5. Yes, I know that 5 is already EOL, but our API vendor runs on Weblogic 9, which is constrained to Java 5.
- Speaking of Weblogic, upgrade that from 8.1 to 9.2.
- Upgrade our ecommerce API from version 6.x to 10.x
- Upgrade our Apache frontends from 2.0 to 2.2 - Done!
- Implement a couple of Nginx boxes as a static HTTP servers, allowing our Apache servers to focus proxying and URL rewriting.
All of this of course needs to happen in parallel with the normal firefighting ;-) Oh, and I'm trying to get Puppet up and running in the lab in all my free time.
On the other hand at $home, I've been doing a lot of work with Drupal. I'm working on designing a photography site for a friend. Heck, I've even had some code committed to the node gallery contrib module!
I've got two books I've yet to crack open, Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual, and Pro Drupal Development. I'm trying to read through Pro Git, and Pulling Strings with Puppet.
All of this productivity came to a screeching halt last Friday, when I got my Motorola Droid. The best part about my HTC running Windows Mobile was that it kept me in the dark about how fricking cool a real smartphone can be!
As part of my new addiction to my phone, I caved in and signed up for a Facebook account -- don't worry, I didn't give them my email password, so no one will get any spam. Feel free to hit me up though! I have to admit, the sheer number of users is impressive; but it's the percentage of those that are actively using it every day that is incredible.
So, stay tuned. There's a lot of good posts coming - book reviews, a Droid/Android review (with an SA POV of course), and who knows, maybe some Drupal related stuff.
Recently at $WORK, we had to come up with budget proposals for next year. We knew that we were going to outgrow our current Checkpoint UTM appliances by holiday next year, so we had to buy new hardware. We just had to decide which hardware. While I'm capable of building a Linux/*BSD firewall on my own, I frankly don't have the time to mess around with updates and compliance documentation. We need an appliance, and for our needs, Cisco and CheckPoint are about the only options for us. We switched to the UTM appliances from a pair of Cisco ASA 5500's a few years ago. However, after examining the pros and cons of both, I recommended we switch back to the ASA platform next year. Read on for my decision making process explained.
I bit the bullet and jumped on a sweet deal on a latest-gen 17" MacBook Pro late last week. It was a refurb, and I was too cheap to pay for quick shipping, so Apple told me it wouldn't ship for 5-7 business days. Whatdya know, they were on-the ball and shipped it out early. It arrived at my desk on Monday. Normally this would be good except that I'm almost 400 miles away from my desk, and won't be back until Friday! Arrrggghhh!
