In retrospect I probably shouldn’t have expected to hit the ground running when travelling with a one year old. Dealing with one’s own jetlag can be bad enough, but dealing with another person’s increases it all exponentially. I’m quite pleased, then, that I got as much done as I did last week. I’m particularly grateful to the proprietors of Sparrows and Madcap for their tolerance of my hours of wifi usage.
The main phase of the big wordpress/government consultation project for Digital Public is wrapped for now. There’ll be a little more work on that after Christmas once it’s been fully put through its paces, but for now it’s good to have that off my plate. Work on the Greenbelt management system is settling down to just tidying up a few loose ends. Drapno launched with a party I sadly had to miss. And I can finally stop and think a bit and do some much needed admin.
That’s why this afternoon involved many console windows. Over the years I’ve become responsible for a lot of servers and I’ve been working hard to reduce the amount of time it takes to manage them. I’ve got a loose assembly of parts that ( munin for activity monitoring, god for process monitoring, pingdom for a few key sites, capistrano shell for applying updates, apticron to keep on top of package upgrades) that are working pretty well, but a good chunk of today was spent bringing a few configurations in line and upgrading some packages to make the system hang together better.
The other big activity at the moment is business planning. I’ve never really done much of that, but after a hectic year it seemed sensible to look back through the past months’ projects and accounts and get a better sense of where the work’s coming from, what areas I want to be focussing on, and how best to grow things in 2010. I’ve got some vague ideas but looking at the data may reveal some things I’ve missed.
So between that and some much needed cleaning up of side projects (it’d be good to get on top of all the wordpress plugins I’ve released this year, really put my Palm Pre through its paces, etc) this won’t really be a week off. But it’ll be enough of a change of pace that there won’t be a weekly update next week. Maybe the week after.