I was working from home today and the Vande-cat helped me solve a bit of a problem. Y’see, for a while I’ve been working on setting up some software for our web development group. Apache2, PHP4 and SVN 1.13 for you geeks out there, but that’s not terribly important.
What was kind of important was setting up the default preferences to rather specific settings. Setting up a shell script to do it would probably be a trivial undertaking for a seasoned *nix hack, but this was the first time this particular English major had done something like this. And it wasn’t going well.
I’d set up a script to go through the configuration file line by line, looking for keywords and replacing the settings with the ones we needed. And it was sucking up a storm. It’d change things in the config file’s comments instead of in the config file itself, it’d screw up the file permissions. All sorts of bad things.
We really needed this to be working, and soon, so I decided to work from home, well away from any of the office distractions. So there I was, sitting on the couch, frustrated with the script, but with a happy purring cat curled up next to me on the couch. It was nice, bright and sunny, so some of the snow and ice on the roof melted and slid off, down the porch roof and onto the walk outside.
This scared merry hell out of the little kitty.
She took off like a rocket, scrambled up the back of the sofa and took off to hide in the bedroom, knocking the thermostat cover off the wall on her way out.
Now, my Wife and I had been talking about that thermostat, trying to figure a good median temperature for the house since we could never seem to remember to turn it down when we left for work and back up when we got home. So when the cat knocked the cover off, I thought to myself, “Well, I know we’ve got a newer thermostat downstairs. I suppose I could just put the new one on the wall instead of replacing part of the old one…”
“Wait a minute.”
So, after giving the little kitty scritchies and k-words, I ditched my old script file and just wrote one that swapped out the old configuration for a new one. Then I replaced the thermostat.