03.30.07
Posted in Funny Stuff, Life at 12:56 pm by Stoner
“To err is human” or to put it another way, no one is perfect. I’m certainly far from perfect, I freely admit that. I screw up all the time, but at least I’m not this dumb.
After watching that video, I pondered what my reaction would be if I were there to watch it as it happened. I think…no, I definitely would fall over laughing for a good 5 minutes or more. I would be rendered useless, unable to lend assistance or seek help for my fallen homo sapien as my laughter would echo the hallways after witnessing such pure, utter stupidity.
What’s the most funny “people being stupid” act you’ve seen?
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03.28.07
Posted in Technology, Linux, Hobbies at 9:09 pm by Stoner
Got three “projects” going on right now. Need to get my RTC module from Sparkfun soldered to my Gumstix, need to get my Linux system talking to my Olympus DS-330 voice recorder and get kdelibs built so I can try out Amarok.
I’ve had the RTC module for a while now…just never got around to using it. Well, I cut up a standard IDE cable into a 4-wire strip…gonna use that as my power/data bus. The pads on the boards are clearly marked so it’s just a matter of cranking up the ol’ soldering iron and making it happen. It talks to the kernel using I2C so I need to build the kernel modules and install them. After that, my gumstix should be able to maintain time after power is off. [FYI: the gumstix modules don’t have a RTC so when they loose power, they loose the date/time.]
I was rummaging through a box and found my Olympus DS-330 voice recorder. This was an excellent recorder and would be nice to use it again…this time with my Linux box. For kicks, I plugged the USB cable in to my computer but the device wasn’t automatically detected. This means I need to do some research on how to connect it/configure it appropriately. What I’m not sure about is how it should function with the computer. Should it show up as a mass storage device or a USB microphone or both? With Windows, it acts as a USB mic and the recordings are access through the special software they give you. My guess…it won’t work but I’ve been wrong before.
Finally…Wil Wheaton has been harping on Amarok. Well, since I’m moving my Winders computer to the upstairs office…that’ll mean greater dependence on my Linux box in my office. And I can’t go without tunes! I want to give Amarok a spin but, damnit, wouldn’t you know it - kdelibs won’t build (I’m a Gnome-man, myself.) I already checked the Gentoo bugzilla and someone reported it. I need to track that bug because I can’t build Amarok without it. How annoying.
I’ll post updates as my projects progress.
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03.26.07
Posted in Technology, Linux, Life, Hobbies at 8:01 pm by Stoner
On Sunday, I made a giant pot of chili on Sunday, complete with big chunks of onions, red and yellow bell peppers, deer meat and hot deer sausage, mushrooms and 3 types of beans. I spent over an hour in the kitchen chopping, browning, opening cans, straining, etc. I put in 2 whole fresh tomatoes Denise and I picked up at a local road-side vendor, a can of stewed tomatoes, a big can peeled tomatoes, 2 small cans of tomato sauce and a fair dash of spices. It came out really good so now I have lunch & snack food for the next few days.
Where did I get all my culinary skills? From standing in front of the stove and tossing things into a pot - literally. I don’t have recipes or secret formulas (well, I do but nothing to write about.) I would encourage you to do the same. Don’t plan anything other than a few key ingredients. Let everything come spontaneously.
Today, I finally finished updating my Gentoo system. It hadn’t been updated since I packed it away for the big move in November. That’s 4 months of updates that needed processing. If you’re a Gentoo user, you know that you can’t just “emerge –update world” after 4 months. You need to take it in stages. So, I processed all update up to the kernel itself, recompiled a new kernel, then processed more updates, pausing at key packages. I usually pause at things like udev, glibc, gcc…something very fundamental to the system. I also pause with large packages that take forever to update, like Firefox, X, Gnome, etc. They’re just take an obnoxiously long time to build.
My usual pattern is to update to a certain point, then test the system to make sure things aren’t broken. This time, due to the 4 months between updates, that wasn’t possible because some packages aren’t compatible with others unless they are all updated. Case in point, Gnome. Many Gnome packages are supposed to be updated at the same time. During my update-pause procedure, some Gnome packages were updated while others remained at the lower revision - which means testing is pointless since the different versions will no doubt break things.
In the end, everything updated just fine. When I tested things, everything was snappier and speedier - Gnome menus snap when opened, Firefox and Evolution windows open in mere seconds when launched. I’m very happy. Now I can move this Winders box upstairs and put my Gentoo system on my desk and use it as my primary machine in my office. Life is good.
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03.21.07
Posted in Political at 7:09 pm by Stoner
Came across this story today, about Delta Airlines CEO Gerald Grinstein. He has been working to bring Delta out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy and now that they’re set to do that, he’ll be retiring. Usually when a CEO of a major corporation retires or leaves (or gets fired,) they get blessed with a huge compensation package - the Golden Parachute.
Gerald has bucked the trend. He has refused his compensation package, a sum of about $10 million. Instead, he asked that the funds go to scholarships and hardship assistance for Delta employees, families and retirees - the people who were really affected by the bankruptcy. His statement in the article is wonderful: “Corporate pay packages have gotten out of control.”
I’m not saying that CEOs aren’t worth it. Some are very good and deserve the compensation they receive. Others are lame ducks that deserve to eat dirt.
Thank you, Gerald. You get a gold star.
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03.20.07
Posted in Technology at 2:11 pm by Stoner
When I originally set up WordPress, I disabled comments because I didn’t want to deal with users in the database (safer for me and you) and comment spam. Well, I’ve implemented 2 plugins to help with both issues.
WordPress comes with the Akismet plugin but required an API key from WordPress.com. I went ahead and registered for a username, which gives me an API key. My concerns about it are two-fold:
- how effective is it at combating comment spam
- how resource intensive is it to the server
The first concern is obvious. I detest spam in all its forms. The second concern is due to the community atmosphere of Freeshell.org, where this blog is served from. Freeshell.org provides more bang for your buck (as far as shell accounts go) and there is a definite attitude among the users to “play nice” with each other, including resources used by CGI scripts (CPU and memory consumption.) So, we’ll see how server-friendly Akismet is.
I installed the OpenID Comments for WordPress plugin to get around having user info in my database. This plugin allows you to use an OpenID (think: single sign-on for web pages) to authenticate for posting comments. You get to speak your mind and call me names while my database stays relatively clear of your personal data. Yay.
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03.17.07
Posted in Technology at 10:39 am by Stoner
I would like to take a minute to thank Arthur Sicard for his most wonderful invention, the snow blower. In past residences, I’ve only had to shovel maybe 10 feet of side walk and around the car. At our new house, we have a driveway that isn’t very long (50 feet from the road to the turn-about) or wide (about 12 feet wide along the drive with the turn-about approximately 20 feet across) but the real bugger about it is the incline. Our house sits down the hill from the road (if I look out my living room window, I’m eye-level with the road.)
Our first two snow falls only amounted to an inch or two each so shoveling wasn’t necessary. The third snow fall was 1.5 inches of snow followed by 1.5 inches of ice. That’s a lot of heavy lifting. It took me over 3 hours to get the enough of the drive way shoveled so my wife could get to work (I didn’t shovel out my side of the drive because I had no intention of driving to work for the next 2 weeks so I piled snow there.) My back was screaming in pain and I just collapsed on the couch for a while when I was finished.
Shortly after, I was talking to my father on the phone and the subject of shoveling snow came up. He said that he had a snow blower that he hasn’t used in years. Well damn, when the snow melted, Denise and I packed an overnight bag into the Blazer and drove to my parents house! We returned home with the aforementioned snow blower. Now, two snow falls later, I’m a much happier person. It takes less than an hour to clear the turn-about and drive way of snow and my back isn’t ready to break (pushing/pulling the snow blower up and down the incline without slipping is still tough going.)
So, thank you Arthur! You, sir, rock!
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03.15.07
Posted in Funny Stuff at 7:30 pm by Stoner
Every decade is identical in some respects:
- the music radically changes
- something is done in excess
- many people continue to live in that decade 30-40 years later
- many people try to deny that decade happened in their lives
The first important decade in my life was the 80’s. Ah yes, big hair, Rubik’s Cube, heavy metal, the Power Ballad…it was excellent. I was taken on the trip back to the 80’s when I stumbled upon the “home page” of Jeff Spicoli. If you were at least in your teens when the 80’s started, you know exactly who that is and why he’s so important. The movie was pretty much spot-on for the high school scene of the 80’s.
Another movie set in the 80’s is The Last American Virgin. While the two themes are universal (teenage boys trying to get laid and teenage love), this movie always comes to the forefront of my mind when I think of the 80’s. Why? I think it has to do with the movie’s ending message: fairy tale endings are only found in fairy tales.
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03.14.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:54 pm by Stoner
Ficlets is a site where one person can start a story and others can contribute to it, whether a prequel to the story or a sequel. I found it through Wil Wheaton’s blog. I’ve seen this before and a lot of folks do it with their blog. I like Ficlets because they made it pretty brain-dead simple to use. Other bonus features are the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License for the site’s content and OpenID authentication.
If you’re curious, check it out. Each story “clip” is limited to 1,024 characters and if your writing is filled with flowery descriptions and complex ideas that require a lot of explanation to develop, this may be a challenge. I signed up and posted my first story. This should be fun and a good way to exercise the creative brain tissues.
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03.13.07
Posted in Technology, Linux at 8:32 pm by Stoner
One of my biggest and most successful clients is using Redhat Cluster Services to make their MySQL database highly available (using a 2-node Active/Passive configuration.) The idea behind a RHCS cluster is to remove all Single Points of Failure, thus, making a service or services highly available. Well, my client’s cluster had a melt down last summer because of one overlooked item.
A quick background blurb on clustering with Redhat. The idea, like I said, is to remove all SPoF by using as much redundancy as possible: multiple systems (nodes in cluster lingo), multiple power sources, multiple network connections, multiple SAN connections, etc. etc. etc. Even if a node completely dies, the cluster software will failover the service(s) to another node in the cluster. That’s the theory and it works rather well in practice.
So, how did my cluster melt down? Well, there’s this subsystem in Linux called the file system. It is responsible for managing the files and directories on some storage medium, like a hard drive. Well, with a cluster, you can’t put your data on a local drive because if that node fails, the other nodes can’t access the data - so you put the data on either a NAS (Network Attached Storage) or a SAN (Storage Area Network.) In this case, we used a SAN because you don’t want to run MySQL over NAS (well, you can but that’s a story for another day.)
Long story short, the file system on the SAN holding the MySQL data files got corrupted. Please note, this was not a fault with Redhat’s Cluster Services. It did what it was supposed to do: fail completely. Failing over the service is pointless because the data on the SAN will still be corrupted regardless of which node is active. Exactly how it got corrupted, I don’t know. I do know that it was an ext2 file system (I didn’t build this cluster, I inherited it) and it blew up in spectacular fashion. I had to rebuild the file system on the SAN (using ext3 this time) and restore the database from a backup that was about 10 hours old. Obviously, my client wasn’t very happy.
To protect against this type of failure in the future, we set up MySQL replication to another MySQL server, one that was not a part of the cluster nor attached to SAN. If we should have a total cluster failure, it would only take minutes to point their application to the replication server and get their sites back up and running. We could then fix the cluster without doing it hastily. In order to put the clustered database back into full production, we would have to halt the application, dump the data and import it back in to the production database, then fire the application back up - a process that would take approximately 20-30 minutes to complete (the dump+restore time is dependent on the database size, obviously.)
A second solution we considered would be to use a clustered file system (like GFS, Lustre or Veritas.) This does add another layer of complexity to the original cluster itself. The second cluster would require full redundancy of all parts, which means more money spent and physical resources to manage. Additionally, you have a cluster dependent upon a cluster, which makes maintenance not very fun at all.
We’ve been running with the cluster+replication scheme for over 6 months and it’s been very solid. We actually had to fail over to the replication database because we had to perform some lengthy maintenance on the SAN. Thanks to this arrangement, my client experienced less than 30 minutes of total downtime during a 4 hour maintenance window. They were happy, which makes me happy.
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03.10.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:54 pm by Stoner
With those words Queen Gorgo of Sparta bid farewell to her husband, King Leonidas as he left with 300 soldiers. The implication is clear, victory or death - there is no in-between. This was the creed of the Spartan militia and vigorously applied on the field of battle as depicted in Frank Miller’s 300.
What can I say? The visuals are stunning. The same team that brought Sin City to the screen have done a wonderful job with 300. The costumes looked great. I can’t say the sets were great because almost all of them were created through CGI…so I’ll say that the CGI was great.
Gerard Butler *is* King Leonidas, the leader of the Spartans. ‘Nuff said. Michael Fassbender as Stelios was most excellent. His zeal at being in battle and eagerness at finding a worthy death is masterfully played. Tom Wisdom plays Astinos, a Spartan warrior who has never seen battle. His displays unparalleled courage, even knowing that his first battle would be his last.
I have only a couple reservations about the film.
- The Spartan swords looked “too modern” - almost like show pieces. Spartans were masters of warfare and those swords, with the fat blades and jagged barb would have been more of an hindrance on the battlefield.
- The love scene between Leonidas and Gorgo. If you want to show the powerful love between the two, emphasizing the fact that they knew they probably would never see each other again then 10-20 seconds is fine. They drug this out to the point that I was expecting cheesy porno music to come over the speakers.
Fans of Greek & Roman history and mythology: if you are a stickler for details and expect an exact retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae, save your money because you’ll be disappointed. If you like stunning visuals and a story based on G&R history/myth, definitely go see this one.
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