Tech learnin’

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Well, things are not going well on the employment front, but at least I’m still learning things.

To wit:

  • JSP Yeah, I did a bit (day or two) of this about a year ago when I was investigating Epicentric, but never followed up on it. I’m following up a bit now, still don’t “know” it, but am writing JSP pages and beans. Not well, but am. Step in the correct direction.
  • Perl Again, going back to something I have not done for some time now. See the Quote-A-Tron stuff in an earlier entry (written in Cold Fusion…and then the same thing with a Perl backend. Same data.).
  • Linux Rebuilt the box, have things going very well now, so well that I want to upgrade to v7.1, which I probably will do shortly. Need more memory and another hard drive, however. That might be tricky…..we will see. Hey, got an FTP server installed on the box, so I can now treat the Linux box (if I so choose) as a remote server, so I can do HTML/PHP (etc) development on my Windows box (with a MUCH better editor etc). Way cool. Took a bit to get it working (I had everything correct but for ONE missing package (which, in retrospect, I should have known….).
  • Databases Just in general. Learning more PostgresSQL, more MS SQL Server, getting better at data design (need to learn ERWIN, however).
  • Networking No, not perfect there, but have a lot of boxes available to lots of others. Getting the whole TCP/IP thing much better than I ever did before, because I am BUILDING a network and HAVE TO understand it to make it work. Neat.
  • Hardware Don’t quite know how to characterize this, but I finally broke down and got a switch box. I now control three different machines (my old Pentium Pro, my new Pentium III and my Linux box) through this box so I have only one mouse/keyboard/monitor. Nice to run Linux off my big-ass monitor (21″); the video card — unfortunately — only handles up to 800×600 resolution, so that’s a little BIG, but with the FTP install, I really don’t have to go to the Linux box but for maintenance. So it works. Still need a printer, and networking that puppy will either be 1) Easy, if I an get an IP address for it, or 2) A bitch, and I have to run more cords through the switch box. Probably would make sense to spend a little more to get a network-ready computer, and then flex my networking muscles getting an IP for it.