Weekblog: Day 2 – or ‘That didn’t go as planned’

As the title says, yesterday hardly went as planned, as evidenced by me just getting around to posting at 9:30 this morning.

The Geekery. It is everywhere!
First, the day was full of IT-related geekiness, trying to get SASL authentication working on the the mail gateway for the Greater Homeport Server Cluster. What should have been an hour long setup and fiddling turned into a 6 hour “Learn what SASL is, learn what TLS is, learn how Postfix manages it, learn how Cyrus implements SASL, learn how to set up standard authentication, and learn how to do this all on an extremely busy mail gateway without killing all inbound mail” process.

In the end, we were only partially successful. The main impetus for this setup was making it so Cat and I could send mail from our iPhones without using Googles SMTP gateway (if you have a gmail account, you can use SASL authentication and send mail from anywhere via smtp.google.com. The drawback? Any mail going through that gateway gets it’s From: line rewritten to the gmail account ID.)

We got most bits working, except for finding out at the end that v2.0.2 firmware on the iPhone has a problem with self-signed certificates on TLS-enabled mail servers (but this is only for SMTP connections – Safari et al has no problem with self signed certs. Annoying). One assumes Apple will be fixing this soon, but it means we can’t have encrypted inbound mail connections from the iPhone. Adam has suggested there is a list of certs that free and Apple certified, I may end up going that route.

Oh yeah, and about the project I’m supposed to be working on…
But that’s not what I came here to talk about.

The point of this week’s blogging was to get focused on CONGO v2 and make some progress on getting toward an Alpha release. To accomplish this, I need to get 2 hours or so a night of fairly focused work time.

Last night I failed.

The main culprit? Lack of sleep. I went out to dinner with my mom last night (mm, steak!), and ended up getting home around 8:30. Not too bad, thought I, I still have a couple hours before bed. Flopped down on the couch, had the laptop out, tossed a movie in, and started work and… fell asleep right on the couch. An hour and a half later, I woke up (now about 10;30), was immensely groggy, and decided “Right, that’s it. Bed.” and flopped right into bed, sleeping like the dead til 8am this morning. Total sleep time? About 10.5 hrs. How I feel today? Stiff, but caught up.

Unfortunately, this meant I got only a minimal amount of work done on CONGO last night. I fixed some of the Notes DAO setups, and started work on modifying the ShowRegistrant functions to enable the notes browsing. I’m trying to decide if the Notes listing should be attached directly to an instance of a Registrant, which means it gets populated whenever a Registrant is instantiated. This really only happens on single views (ala, getting a list of Registrants from a search query doesn’t load the entire Registrant, just an index), so it shouldn’t make things too burdensome. It has the advantage of making everything easily accessible if you have the Registrant at hand. Right now a registrant’s attendance history is attached on instantiation (for Arisia, this is perhaps 20 rows, but that’s somewhat unusual). If I don’t embed the list in the Registrant object, I’ll need a second set of lookups and queries when viewing a registrant, which is a little cumbersome.

For now I think I’ll embed it, and hook up the DAO’s appropriately. It’ll make the display logic a lot easier (data is at hand), and if we end up beating the bejeezus out of the database for largish events, I’ll look at optimizing it.

Conclusion
Onward and forward. Today I need to focus on the paying job and finish up an annoying script, hoping to get it audited and approved by the other engineer. Have I mentioned that Perl is not my favorite language? Oh there is a rant pending…