Basically, I need a smaller laptop. My current one is breaking, heavy to carry around, and most importantly the screen blocks to much of the fire that I am sitting in front of at the moment. Go go back yard fire pits! :-)

Over the past month I have been working full time at the OSL and have been getting quite a bit done which is a very welcome improvement over the school year. I think I accomplished more in the first week of the summer than I did over the entire previous term. I can hardly remember what all I did, but the biggest things have been rewriting our internal inventory app and Xen stuff.

Our original app was written in Ruby on Rails, was slow as heck, and adding stuff required figuring out a new and strange looking language. (And after our experience with trying to run a busy RoR site none of us sys-admins wanted anything to do with it anything in RoR.) Over a couple weeks I managed to plop a new CakePHP based interface on top of the old database, add a handful of new features like automatic database schema upgrades, a simple visual view of each rack, and the whole thing runs a lot faster than the old one did. The app mostly does what we need it to so I've stopped development, any fancier features can wait until RAIV is done.

On the Xen front, I spent part of last week getting the 3.1.0 ebuilds ready to go along 2.6.18 and 2.6.20 kernels! Finally no more 2.6.16! :-) The only significant issue that I know of at this point is that the 2.6.20 kernel will not run as a x86_32p guest on a x86_64 Xen, but since support for that is new to 3.1.0 and the 2.6.18 kernel is working I'm not going to worry about it to much. So unless something significant crops up I'm going to push it all into the portage tree early next week.