Project anti-procrastination

I was going to post a different picture today for variety, but I put it off until too late and have run out of time, so you instead get another shot of the same evening sky as I posted yesterday, if from a different angle and with different composition.

Today didn't work out entirely as planned, although not unsuccessfully. Rather than getting back to zero inbox and properly on track with time management, or working on finishing the packaging from last Friday, I instead tackled the next hot work project. I just found out today that AFS backup restructuring is the next thing on the hot list as I rotate off the hot projects I'm finishing (the WebLogin confirmation screen removal goes out tomorrow evening). So I started thinking about that while walking to the post office to get my mail, realized that I already knew how to implement it, and came back and wrote that down. Four hours of work later, I'm finished with the first draft of the requirements and a technical implementation plan that's sufficiently detailed that any Perl programmer on the team should be able to finish the work.

There's still a lot of project left: allocating the storage, figuring out if we're doing off-site storage replication, setting up a VM with proper access to the storage, writing the code, writing a test plan and testing various scenarios, and so forth. But most of that work can be done by someone else. I suspect those four hours will end up being about half of my total contribution to the project, and on the day that I was told to start working on it. That's a good feeling, and will mean more time to work on interesting things later.

(For those who are curious, we're getting away from backing up AFS via Tivoli because the tapes and the Tivoli storage are extremely expensive for reasons largely internal to Stanford. We get very, very few restore requests for AFS, so due to that and due to other economics at Stanford, doing vos dump full and incremental to a bunch of NFS-mounted disk that can be replicated off-site ends up being very attractive for us. We're probably going to replace our backup system with that.)

Tomorrow, I suspect I'll be working on the things I was going to work on today: getting back into time management and finishing the packaging work. Tomorrow evening, I do WebLogin upgrades, the confirmation page removal, and KDC upgrades. Then the rest of the week looks nice and open.