waking life

i spent a rather frustrating day working on a new server a client got in that they want to start buying in larger numbers to phase out the older machines they are using. currently they are using mostly dual Xeons with a gig or three of RAM and have ~4TB of disk. they are looking to replace them with dual and quad Opterons with 8-16GB of RAM and bringing their storage up to 12TB. unfortunately this first set of hardware was a bit of a dog. the BIOS has a bug that prevents proper loading of a 64-bit OS with more than 4GB of RAM; 32-bit OS? no problem. but that kind of defeats the purpose of investing in this sort of hardware. the disk arrays (2x5TB of usable storage) have a unique problem of the drivers not wanting to allow 64bit addressing limiting one to 2TB partitions. hopefully i can work around all these problems (and next time hopefully the client won't go off on a shopping spree without getting me to do some due diligence for them). oh well...

i'm looking at what it will take to kconfigize nearly all of KControl. this will be a useful step for a lot of reasons. not least among those reasons are making KDE even more sysadmin friendly as well as providing us with a catalog of settings that should make KDE4 a bit easier to do.

i'm working on a design for a new KDE app that will make it trivial to back up, reset and restore KDE settings and data. the idea is to have a file that a KDE app can install into a standard location, much like we do with KConfigXT files, that registers all its configuration files and bits of data for this application to help the user manage. i have been playing with XML files for this, but am beginning to come to the conclusion that tagged data simply isn't expressive enough, at least not without becoming clumsy.

settings such as found in kicker or kmail are non-trivial and at times reference other files. i've thought about extending KConfigXT (something we need to do for KDE4 anyways) but that's not enough, since not all the items that need to be referenced are in KConfig files. it seems that it may be easiest to support a very simple, small and limited macro/scripting language that is run through an interpreter embedded in the back up app to located the necessary resources. perhaps these little scriptlettes could be embedded in structured XML files, but i don't think i'm going to get away with just plain XML.

gah.

and i'm also staring at Lyceum, which i need to finish soon.

and my right wrist has started to act up a bit, which it hasn't done in a few years. stupid tendons. if only i could get one of those mechanical hands like Luke Skywalker had. and a light saber.