August 2007 Archives

Other than a few minor details (cat waking me up at 4am, mis-communication as to where to meet) the trip went well. We ended up leaving mission at 6:30am, and with a fairly steady stream of Tim Horton's coffee, coffee from a greasy spoon in hope for breakfast, a couple of cokes, pringles, and more Tim Horton's, we made the trip in about 12 or 13 hours with really no incidents. I had burned a CD with comedy, a classic Howard Stern show, and some TWiT podcasts that kept me mostly awake.

We finally got in, dropped the car off and then got dropped at our hotel... where we promptly found we were booked in for the night we were leaving (tomorrow night) but not Sunday or Monday night. Gugh!

So walk across the street to the only other hotel within walking distance (a best western) and booked in there for the night. Definitely nothing special, however exactly what was needed, ie: a shower and a bed. However I admit the first thing I did was try to get online and figure out why I couldn't get onto the hotel wifi :)

Then I found an old cheesy sci-fi flick (Imposter) and watched that while watching a really good video screencast on active record in ruby on rails showing me again just how amazingly cool the Active Record library is.

Then I slept till a couple of hours ago, and stumbled and found my way to work. The lady at the Denny's lied when she said "oh, that's just two minutes walk down the road!" when we inquired as to how far our cross street was. We were about a third of the way there when some nutcase in a little red honda screeched into the turn off we were just walking into and then parked in front of us. Thankfully it wasn't an axe-murderer looking for an early morning snack, but D, our guy at the Edmonton office, who was wondering who the two nutcases walking down the road with luggage were when he recognized us. Good thing too, because the promised two minute walk was more like a 15 or 20 minute walk.

So now I'm here, in the office, updating my blog :)

So I have to leave the house to pick up my traveling mate at 5:30 this morning, so I set the alarm for 4:55, which seemed an overly reasonable time to get myself up, throw the last things I need into my bag, throw bags into the car, do a last minute check, etc etc. Ah, the best laid plans and all that. See at around 4:00am my little gray kitten decided that it'd be a really good idea, being it was Sunday morning and all, to come and talk to me, use my beard as a kitten-face-rubber, entice my hands to pet her, etc. She does this occasionally, but I'm not normally having to get up in hour, and not normally a bit excited about going (it being a big long drive and adventure and all).

Oh well, Tim Horton's coffee here I come!

Well, our sysadmin dude in Edmonton has put in his notice, so I'm being sent out there, again, to get as much of a brain dump as possible from him before his last day on Thursday. Based on what he's done and doing, I think we'll need to actually extract his brain and keep it with us in the office. Mental note: remember to pack the saw.

Because I'm a nice guy, I'll be driving Firefly's maid of honor's SUV up (it was in an accident while they were down here from Edmonton, and they left before it was fixed) as it needs to get back to Edmonton too. It'll be about a 12 hour drive, but I have tunes, a map (mental note #2: remember to turn in Kamloops so I don't end up going to Edmonton by way of Calgary again), and bags packed for the flight back.

Leaving at 6:00 tomorrow morning, getting up at 5. Ugh. At least I'll have decent company for the drive up ($othergeek who works with me). Flying back Thursday. Weee.....

Well, that didn't take long. Facebook had their IPO (or equivalent), opened up their API to other developers, allowing them to make annoying little "applications" that let my friends spam my Facebook page with requests for zombies, tic-tac-toe, gaming, jedi knight battles, and other random stuff which I deny (nothing against those who sent it you understand, just not interested).

Today I got this email:

[This guy I know] just gave you a 2 GB iPod Nano. Finally gifts that have value on Facebook. You can say thanks later, but right now you need to claim it. [link to some facebook app]Click here to claim it[/link].

I emailed him of course, asking if he know what this was, and saying that I was pretty sure that clicking the link wasn't going to make a new (real, not image of) iPod Nano appear at my door without me either signing up 10 of my friends, or selling my personal information and possibly my soul (which I am not able to do, as Iambe sold it years ago for some gaming credits on TPL (was that it? temple of the purple lemur or something like that?).

Anyway, turns out it's a combination, give all your personal information and sign up for a credit card, and sign up 10 of your friends. Only US though as he found out after the fact. Oh well, a good try nonetheless.

Anyway, my point is here is another place that is relatively well controlled against spam email, banner ads (via firefox and ad-block plus), and now it's been invaded by a company doing the same things as the givemeafree[ipod|ps3|xbox|etc].com sites, giving stuff away if you sell your personal information and that of your friends.

Not only that, but this practice (which I personally consider a scam) has been approved by Facebook for their directory of applications. I suppose technically it's no a scam, though a couple of investigations show that it's basically a scam.

Bah humbug. I'm going to hide back in my cave now k?

Similar to the Ubuntu upgrade that wasn't, the MovableType 4.0 upgrade didn't go all that well. The install itself, was amazingly easy... two clicks total, outside of copying the new files to the server (and backups of course). The new interface is.... different, but has some really cool features that someone like me can see as being useful:

• Auto-save while you're typing like gmail does
  
• Quick reply from right in the interface
  
• Syntax highlighting in the template editor
  

The issue really came when I wanted to publish. Seems the template system has been given a major overhaul, and my old setup just didn't fit in. I was playing with the (again, nice and new and sexy) instant-apply style switching system and found that sometimes it just didn't work. It was due to my templates not following the new standard. So ok, easy enough, find the Movable Type 4.0 default templates and copy the new index template in.

That's where trouble started :) I figured out how the main index template works, and how it has sub-templates embedded in it called modules. I faithfully copied these in from the MT site. Then I was prompted to create modules with names like <var _translate='Header'> instead of just "Header", which I did to allow my site to be published. Basically the same issue as this guy.

End result was I managed to find the various modules and templates that were needed, but my site ended up having, instead of proper headers (like "Archives" on the page like I have now) I got <var _translate="Archives">

At that point I restored from backup, nuked the database and re-imported it from backup, and wrote this article. I do have a fresh MT4 install that I can probably move templates around from, but that's for another night.... though I do wish I'd thought of that before un-doing the upgrade!

Bah, another reboot of my file server, another half day lost to fiddling around to get it all back up and working again. I love Linux, but some of the problems I find here and there just piss me right off because there not the ones you'd have in a Microsoft world. Course, they also sometimes come up because of things that don't happen in the Microsoft world^[1], like this one, which was caused by me making a minor (I thought) change to the /etc/fstab file to do with file system mounting. I made it maybe uhm.... 40, 50, 60 days ago? Since the last reboot I think anyway. Since I never reboot this system though, I never saw the problem. Of course, it also was more of a problem because the system has no keyboard or monitor on it, and it really doesn't make my attitude any better when I am crawling around on dusty floors trying to plug a VGA cable into the server in the dark, with the cord stretched to its limits between the server and the only available power plug.

The end result (after getting a system with the root partition mounted read-only) was to remove the 'data=writeback' from the /etc/fstab file, and it's all back to normal again. This took a couple of hours of mucking around though because the only clue that I found (after much worrying that my cobbled together 700G filesystem on top of an odd EVMS/LVM/RAID configuration of 3x120G and 3x250G drives) was a "can't change data mode on remount" error in dmesg. And honestly I didn't see this until I'd already figured out the problem.

Bah.

The only reason I haven't nuked this system and installed Ubuntu on it for a bit more stability is that as far as I know there isn't a "nice" and "safe" way to combine the number / size of drives mentioned into one big partition without some odd configuration like I have.

Course, just buying 3 or 4 500G drives and a SATA RAID card would be a good solution as well.

[1] Dear Microsoft kool-aid friend (you know who you are) - before you call me an idiot and bitch at me, this is obviously a hyperbole aimed at using exaggeration to create a slightly humorous result. Telling me that windows servers are way more stable than Linux servers isn't necessary :)

naked proftpd # grep "no such user 'Administrator'" proftpd.system.log | wc -l 155526

I sooooo hate spambot infested Windows piece of crap machines ran by incompetent operators, and I hate spambot infested linux piece of crap machines ran by incompetent operators. For those of you who don't read geek, the above says that 155,526 login attempts were made to my FTP server from the internet in just under two weeks. These were the ones attempting to login with the default 'Administrator' account that is commonly present in Windows machines.

Click for more linux networking geekyness.

A week or so ago we went out to the Vancouver Aquarium and met up with some friends, and had a nice day wandering around and looking at fishes. Below are some of the results photographically. Clicky-clicky for higher res versions.

Snake from the tropical section.

More after you click....

Great set of text on How to shoot a wedding which covers pretty much everything from choosing if you really really want to do it or not, to final presentation. Very good for amateurs who are getting good enough to be asked as a favor from family and friends.

When a geek's mind sees the solution to an interesting problem is through a twisty maze of corridors, identifies the path, and leaps into a blur action involving cables, spare hardware, and possibly a screwdriver.

Such as seeing the solution to "how do I download this 150G torrent of 'Dr. Who' episodes in a sane method?" is to attach a spare 150G USB drive to the linux server (even if it only has USB1 on it, quickly install Ubuntu in a VMWare Virtual machine, map the virtual machine's network to the unused internet connection from work, and then download, download, download!

Just as an example of course. Sadly it appears that once again I'm not the first person to think of the phrase. I had the same dissapointment when I coined WhoGasm.