I’ve been on vacation this week, not only from work but from everything else.  It was enjoyable to get away and not pay attention to much of anything, although I didn’t go anywhere.  I built a new computer to replace my current main server, and I’m almost done getting all the files and programs set up on the new one.

It’s amazing how much time you can waste fiddling with little stuff.  As an example, I use a Python script called StormSiren that monitors for National Weather Service alerts and sends a message to my phone via email.  When I was setting it up on the new system I noticed that it failed the sending test, since my ISP now requires authentication before sending emails through their SMTP server (this also means that the version on the current server isn’t working and I hadn’t noticed).  StormSiren uses a Python mail library to interface with the SMTP server, but while the library had a login method, StormSiren didn’t have any code to call it.  I’d never done Python programming before, but in an hour and a half I added new code to add configuration questions to the “wizard”, store the ID/password in the config file, and to call the login method before calling sendmail.  I also uploaded the diffs to the SourceForge discussion forum.  I suppose I could have opened a bug report, but it didn’t seem so much like a bug as just a new feature. 

Anyhow, I was so eager to get away from everything that I forgot to put up the “Back In A Few Days” sign on this weblog.