A Word From Our Sponsor
Okay, I’ve now finally updated to Typo 5.. I can’t say the experience was entirely painful. It turns out that “typo install” doesn’t migrate terribly well in a few nasty corner cases that I hit smack dab in the middle. The solution is to do a fresh typo install and then invoke the database migration manually with
RAILS_ENV=production db:migrate.
The other problem I had was that the last migration script (071fixtags_naming.rb if you are curious) somehow failed (apparently some kind of issue with Ruby/Rails/ActiveRecord and Postgreql). Being comfortable with SQL but not comfortable with Rails, I just commented it out and then did the fix manually. Here is the magic SQL invocation I used for posterity:
update tags set name = replace(name, '.', '_');
Other than the migration update, the new Typo does seem to be better and faster than the old one, although I really need to fool around with it at a time when I’m not ready to crash hard.
Stupid Blog Meme's
Because I just do whatever Corey tells me to do, here is perhaps the greatest waste of my blog’s resources (and that is something). I present “Page 56 of the book nearest to you”:
The rules:
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 56.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
- Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
And my entry:
“We’ve also provided a name field, which gives us a way to uniquely identify a particular shared variable without having to subclass SharedVar for each shared variable we need to create. To create a shared variable, we simply pass a unique name and initial value to the SharedVar constructor, and write the result to a space:
SharedVar myvar = new SharedVar("duke's counter", 0);
space.write(myvar, null, Lease.FOREVER);
“3.2 Shared Variables” from Chapter 3, “Building Blocks”, in Freeman, Hupfer & Arnold’s “JavaSpaces Principles, Patterns, and Practice”, laying amongst the junk on my desk for reasons long since forgotten.
FIRE on fire 2
There is, understandably, a lot of discussion about the economy right now. Eric Janszen’s article in Harpers strikes me as one of the better articles I’ve read on the subject. I find it interesting that he thinks the money is shifting in to alternative energy. It makes sense as a hedge bet, but is so capital intensive I can’t imagine it holds up for long.
UPDATE: Looks like the feds have made their next move. Hold on to your seat belts tax payers! It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
I've Been Robbed. 1
So, tonight I was robbed. At gun point. Fortunately I was not physically harmed, and all that was stolen was my wallet. I was robbed right outside my house which is more than a bit frightening. I don’t much want to go through the details of the incident itself as I haven’t really been able to digest it yet. Indeed, while the whole thing was going on, I was thinking to myself: “I have a gun pointed at me, and I know this is a really dangerous situation and I could die if things go sideways, but I really can’t process that fact right now. Right now I need to focus on remaining calm, not doing anything to surprise or agitate this guy, and giving him my wallet.” I still haven’t really processed the “you could die right now” or the “this really drives home just how vulnerable we all are” aspect of it.
What I have had a wonderful chance to experience is the joy of trying to report all your credit cards, bank cards, etc. are stolen. I think I was able to remember most of what was in my wallet, but that was where the fun started. Without exception, every credit card company I called put me on hold, typically for 5 minutes, once as long as 15 minutes. Just finding the numbers to call was a PITA in a lot of cases. Sure there are numbers on the back of your card, but are their numbers on the company website? Not really. Searching on “stolen card” on the company website wasn’t too useful either. The “contact us” links frequently didn’t have a 24hr number to call to report a lost or stolen card. A lot of the companies I ended up contacting through automated services that first wanted… my card number (hmm… let me get it out of my wallet here… oh yeah, I don’t have that because it was stolen!!!). Eventually I was able to navigate to all of them except my HELOC. Get this: my HELOC card apparently does NOT have a 24hr number I can call to report a lost or stolen card. My ATM card, and my credit card (both with the same company) do, but my HELOC card, which is tied to a MUCH larger credit line than anything else, doesn’t. WTF?
What I don’t get is why there isn’t a button somewhere on all these websites where I can just deactivate my card online. It would save the credit card companies a lot of money in customer service time, and it doesn’t seem nearly as likely to be subject to abuse as most anything else you can do already on these web sites.
The Pilot Is Expecting Some Turbulence Ahead
Unfortunately, the server this blog is hosted on is getting a wee bit flaky (for definitions of “wee bit” that involve “several times an hour”). While it isn’t crashing, it is hanging for several minutes at a time. This appears to be a UML bug, and probably an old one that has long since been fixed at that, but we have limited options in a addressing it for a host of reasons that you truly want to hear nothing about. To further complicate things, my DSL at home has become “intermittent” (the best kind, because it always comes up when you call tech support), so I can’t even host the blog there to achieve better uptimes.
The good news is, new hardware should be arriving soon, and with it an entirely new platform (built on OpenVZ). Cross your fingers and hope that all goes well, and maybe you’ll be able to read more mindless drivel from yours truly Really Soon Now.
Back In The Saddle Again
So, xman.org accidentally was left to expire. Any of you domain parkers out there will be disappointed to learn that I’ve now locked it away for the next decade. I kind of feel sorry for Network Solutions given how much spam must have been routed their way. I’m sure mail and other services will continue as per normal shortly.
Back in the Land of the Living
Well, our server crashed today. Weirdest bug I ever saw: we got a kernel oops when smartd tried to get health information from the drives in the 3ware RAID array. One of the drives appears to have malfunctioned, so perhaps that is related. The fragility was possibly caused by running a fairly up to date smartd on a fairly out of date kernel with SKAS patches… but it is far from clear. I need to test this out more to be sure of what the magic sequence was, but needless to say… it’s been an experience.
Wikipedia article of the day
All the discussion of economics today led me to this page.
”..the start of a depression is characterized by unusual increases in unemployment, restriction of credit, shrinking output and investment, price deflation and/or hyperinflation, numerous bankruptcies, reduced amounts of trade and commerce, as well as violent currency devaluations…”
Wow, that sounds terrible. Good to know there aren’t any signs of one of those coming. Have a nice day.
The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day 1
The title is probably overstating it, as it’s not like anyone died or is terminally ill, but the last 24 hours haven’t been the best. I think part of it is how it started off as just mildly bad and then grew progressively worse, so the trajectory just made it feel worse and worse.
So, 24 hours ago, I was sitting at my computer, trying to finish up my taxes. Unlike last year, circumstances and my own procrastination had left things up until nearly the last minute. While I contemplated some of the more bizarre elements of the California Tax forms, and yes we really did pass a law providing tax exemptions for victims of the Armenian genocide, fate’s hand was at work in more than one mysterious way.
First there was the realization that the tax man got me good this past year. Despite truly impressive amounts of money handed his way over the course of the year, I still owed him more, Bush tax cuts be damned. Nearly enough to wipe out the ol’ checking account balance. Not that bad really, but not exactly a great way to get you in a good frame of mind, particularly when you are exhausted and ready to crash.
I woke up in the morning to my son’s usual antics, although he was particularly fixated on a pair of his shoes that had been misplaced over the weekend. He’s a clothes horse (yeah, definitely didn’t get that from me), so not being able to wear the preferred pair of shoes to school is a crisis roughly as significant as when the Soviets tried to sneak some missiles in to Cuba. Fortunately, I managed to find the shoes hiding in the last place I’d ever have thought to look for them, so we didn’t have to nuke Russia. That crisis had put me behind schedule, but I’d almost made it out the door when the phone rang. Stupidly, I answered it. That’s when it became clear that this was not going to be a good day….
It was the collections department for the Pottery Barn. Apparently I’d applied for a Pottery Barn credit card this past October, and then promptly ordered over $3,000 worth of Pottery Barn merchandise to be delivered to some place in Gardena. Now, I have never ordered anything from Pottery Barn. My wife certainly has, but frankly she is more than frugal enough that she’d probably have a fit before ordering that much stuff from them. Beyond that, the Gardena address was the dead give away that this was a case of fraud. The nerve racking bit was that whoever ordered the card clearly had some personal information, so this wasn’t a case of mistaken identity, but rather a case of identity theft. The rest of my afternoon was spent unravelling the Kafkaesque world of identity management, which I’ll write about in more detail once I’ve got my head fully wrapped around it.
My wife was tied up in meetings today, so she came home late and exhausted, and my son was in a fussy mood too. While he’s mostly over the horrid period that was our mid-year crisis (terrible twos be damned, as far as I’m concerned it’s a cake walk compared to 3.5), he does seem to be regressing on a few points, the end result being me having to get him to clean up his mess while trying to cook dinner, feed the dogs, and a few other tasks. I can’t complain too much about this part of my day, because I’m all but certain this is what my wife typically experiences during the hour or more before I get home each day.
After surviving dinner, we slogged through the nighttime routine, and all of us were starting to drift off to sleep… Then my son woke up, and promptly vomitted all over his bed. We scrambled him in to the bathroom as quickly as we could. There was enough stuff in his stomach that despite getting a lot on the bed there was more to spread all over the bathtub. Lovely. “Daddy, I don’t like throwing up.” Yeah, me too kid, me too.
So much for getting to sleep early.
The good news is the day is over, and we survived it almost entirely intact. Here’s to a new day, with less drama.
Free Trees
Your tax dollars at work.
Apparently, you can get free trees through the LA DWP. It is all part of the Million Trees LA initiative. I feel like an idiot for paying a gardener for the trees he installed on my property…