I Guess I'm a Sysadmin Now

I know it's been a long time since I've written. The reason for this, I'm telling myself (literally!), is that I've been working 9-hour days with a 1.5 hour commute (each way), and as a result I have about an hour a day to myself. (Being on the train, as much as I might expect and hope that it could be productive, relaxing time, doesn't count.) Weekends now feel like an indulgence, but I can at least be grateful that I'm starting to learn *some* respect for the amount of time that I do have. Funny how we can never appreciate it when we've got too much of it. Well, no need to beat myself up about it. At least now I have much more money than I need. :D I still don't think I've processed that yet--or I've processed it far too quickly to notice.

Anyway, what's new? I have been working for more than a month now, which shocks me even more than the fact that I seem to be getting pretty good at it. I understand a lot of our system now, I'm actively participating in keeping the new features of our system consistent and bug-free(ish), and I'm tackling duties above and beyond my job description. The most difficult of these has got to be the fact that I'm now the office sysadmin. I've never been very good at networking, and as a result I've never done it much (or maybe that's the cause). But who else was there to do it? *Nobody* here is a network guy, and I just happen to be the guy with the most time on his hands. And the fact is I do have a lot of theoretically knowledge of the domain, and I've always claimed to be a fast learner, so there are worse candidates. I'm not sure whether I could realistically say no--at the very least, I had to give it my best shot. And if I succeed, it'll at least look good on my resume.

As a result of this thinking, I've almost come to embrace the position. It's not without friction--I had, and still have, a *lot* to learn about networking. And there's this additional little inconvenience that I can't work on the network when anyone's there... meaning I have to stay late, meaning I have to lose sleep. But that only makes it clearer that I'm going above and beyond, so hopefully my efforts (and my successes! And my failures...) will be quite visible. Tonight, though, I think I may have succeeded at something. The new firewall box gave me a *lot* of grief, but I'm pretty sure I got it working, and what's more, this time I didn't walk away from it with my fingers crossed. After several weeks of bashing my head against this, I feel like I've passed a watershed (and a *successful* one, this time!). I really think I understood what I was doing. And if I can get it working the rest of the way, it will all have been worth it.

The Joys of Linux

I'm taking a course on Python this semester. I'm really excited about it; there really is no other word for it. I'm sure that my excitement over something as simple as, say, simultaneous assignment, won't be easily conveyed to non-programmers or even anyone besides myself. Nevertheless, the new toys in Python, and particularly the new paradigms (I have never dabbled in functional programming before now, but the potentials offered by yield and generators are making me positively giddy), are very exciting.

The course is just now migrating to Python 3, so in a sense it's good that I didn't get started with the language until now. Unfortunately the default Python documentation (http://docs.python.org/) is for 2.6.4, so it's very easy to get tripped up by outdated information. In a yet more sinister turn, Ubuntu itself uses 2.6 by default! I didn't think this was much of a problem at first. A bit of Googling eventually schooled me in the proper use of update-alternatives, and soon I had set the default python command to call python3. But then the problems came.

The first sign I had that something was wrong was a big red "do not enter"-style notification at the top right, telling me that the update manager wasn't working. I won't go into the details, but I tried all I could to fix it, and somehow I fooled around with dpkg to the extent that GRUB now displayed my install as "Debian". I had all but given up, and I was on the verge of reinstalling, when I booted up today and realized that Dropbox wasn't running, either. Running dropbox in a terminal gave me some strange error, which seemed to hint that the contents of the file were text, not the binary executable itself. So, on a hunch, I opened up /usr/bin/dropbox in a text editor, and what do I see?

#!/usr/bin/python

The dropbox script was formatted for Python 2.x (it was Unicode strings causing this particular error), and my messing around with the default python command was what caused my problems. Evidently the update manager also relied on Python, because resetting the default command back to 2.6 allowed the update manager to run again, and at the moment it looks like everything's going to be okay.

UPDATE: Everything was not okay.

Relief

I finally got all my mouse buttons working in Linux. And no, I'm not going to bitch about how unhelpful Linux was this time... I'll leave that task to the simple fact that I've had this laptop for almost a full year now. Granted it mostly worked correctly, and the only thing I was missing specifically was that the back/forward buttons didn't work in Nautilus. But it's nice to have it working fully again, and even nicer that I found a comfortable solution.

It didn't take me long to abandon the "supported method", which is to install imwheel and edit the settings by scratching arcane figures into stone tablets. Fortunately I was quick to find an alternative called btnx, which has a (gasp!) graphical user interface. Although it's not exactly shiny, and it was probably just a lucky break that it supported my mouse, it was simple to use, fully-featured, and worked the very first second time. (It didn't say it had to run as superuser, and didn't warn me, either... it just failed when I tried to save the settings.) But the interface was nothing less than I expected--a straightforward "click the button you want to edit" process. One limitation I think it might have compared to imwheel (I haven't really searched for it, though) is the ability to have different settings for each program. Fortunately that's not one of the things I want to do right now, but hopefully it'll be supported in the future.

I wouldn't exactly call this a glowing recommendation ("Ubuntu: Its inadequacies aren't entirely unsurmountable!"), but it's the closest anything in Linux has come to "just working" in quite a while.