Rants and Revelations

Is it legal to shoot the creators of DebianHelp.co.uk because most of the links on their site open new windows? If not, why not?

Can I at least wound them for the over-use of pink text?

I put my server on the rack today and xen1.xcski.com is open for business. I’ve already moved the Rochester Flying Club and Rochester Association of Family Mediators web sites over. As the DNS changes propogate, I’ll be able to remove the ones on the linode.

It appears that mail is working on the new site as well, so I’ll move the mailman mailing lists over pretty soon. I’ll probably move this blog over there as well. Then comes the hard part – moving the navaid.com application over.

The only sour note is that when I started up the rack, one of the quarter share xens didn’t want to come up correctly. It complained about tons of fsck errors, and I decided to just wipe it and re-install it. I hope that doesn’t happen again. One thing I noticed is that the xen kernel doesn’t have the ext3 module compiled in, and so it’s mounting these file systems without journalling. I’m going to have to fix that.

I tried to take a picture of my gum stitches. I’ve taken better pictures in my life.
Continue reading ‘Wanna see?’ »

I had peridontal surgery this morning. Evidently my bad habit of sticking sharp things into the gap between my upper front teeth has caused the bone to erode to dangerous levels. They cut away the gum down to the bone, scraped away accumulated crud on the bone, applied something to make the bone grow again, and stitched it back up. It wasn’t all that bad while it was going on, except the novocaine made my nose numb. But now it’s done and the novocaine has mostly worn off. And I’ve got the pain you’d expect from having your gums cut open and the bone scraped, plus the stitches are irritating the inside of my lip. The pain killer they gave me is making me feel bleary and very sensitive to movement, and doesn’t seem to be doing anything about my mouth. And I can’t eat anything that involves “incising” with the front teeth for two weeks.

This is less fun than I thought it would be.

Still muddling along on the project mentioned in Rants and Revelations » Stress, stress, and more stress. My boss wants my bit to be test-able and demo-able by the first of the month, and I’m not sure I can do it. I don’t think the other bits are going any better. The Chinese team have delivered something, but we can’t test it yet until my bit and Tony’s bit are finished. Kris is working on a bit that we were going to farm out to the Chinese team, but we decided it would be faster for him to do it than to try to explain it to them. It seems that in order specify the requirement in sufficent detail that you could just hand it over to a foreign team, you need a formal language. And the formal language we know best and can produce fastest is Java.

In added aggravation, just as I was turning into the parking lot at work this morning, my muffler started dragging on the ground. A quick examination seemed to indicate it was just the strap hangar broke, which is exactly what it turned out to be. Cheap, but time-consuming and annoying.

Meanwhile, the peridontist is going to be fixing my front teeth this Saturday. He says they have to make an incision in the front of my jaw, scrape out crud, and put in something to make the bone grow back. He says I won’t be able to “incise” for a couple of weeks.

Saturday is also the day when we have our MoveOn.org Call For Change party. I have a bit of a mental block against making phone calls to strangers thanks to an incident from my childhood, but maybe I can just play host.

On Monday, my 1U server goes off to the colo. I just got the network settings, so sometime on Sunday I have to take down the server and set up the networking.

Once again, my favourite airport is under fire by idiots with axes to grind. And oshawapilot takes them on. Go get ‘em, tiger.

Let’s say that around 8pm you noticed that your linode is suffering from a lack of memory. And so you decide that the Mailman processes have gotten bloated and need to be restarted. So you do an /etc/init.d/mailman restart. And let’s further say that as you’re heading off to bed 2 hours later, you still haven’t gotten any messages from any of the mailing lists on that server.

Do you

1. Assume that everybody suddenly got real quiet, and head off to bed without a second thought? or
2. Assume that the restart didn’t actually restart, and send a test message to one of the list-request addresses, and when it doesn’t come back, do another mailman restart?

Because last night, I did the first one, and didn’t do the second one until this morning. Which is why on these graphs you’ll see no activity for 11 hours, and then suddenly a big spike.

Sorry, people.

In other news, today I’m wearing my Enemy Combatant t-shirt to mark the death of American democracy. Well, it was nice while it lasted.

My “new” used 1U server is here. It’s a 1U VA Linux 1220 with two 1GHz Pentium IIIs, and 1Gb of RAM.

It only has a 20Gb IDE drive, but I have a 250Gb IDE drive on order from NewEgg which should be here soon. (It also has a built in SCSI controller, if I ever decide I have more money than brains.) The built in CD-ROM doesn’t seem to work – the BIOS recognizes it, but it won’t boot from it. And after I installed using another CD-ROM (which doesn’t fit in the case properly), it won’t mount drives in the built-in CD-ROM. I’ve emailed the vendor asking if he can send me a working CD-ROM – I won’t write his feedback until that’s resolved. Another weird thing, it won’t boot if I have my KVM plugged into the USB port. But that’s not a great hardship.

It’s also really, really noisy. Can’t wait to send it off to a nice rack space somewhere.

I’ve got a Debian 3.1 base system installed on it already. Now to get Xen installed.

Phil Boyer, president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) has a great response to the latest fear-mongering over the Liddle crash. It’s addressed mostly at Mayor Dailey in Chicago, but also takes swipes at other General Aviation (GA) bashers like Hillary Clinton.

AOPA Online – Enough is enough

You know, for a Republican, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg is a pretty good guy. And he’s also a pilot with more ratings and experience than me. When he says that GA is not a threat to his city, why can’t other people, especially New York Senators and Congresscritters listen to him?

One of the things that Vicki and I have never done is go up and look at the fall colours from the air. Today was a wonderful day, severe clear and not very windy. The leaves aren’t at their peak yet, but we’re there, the plane is there, and we don’t have anything else to do. So when we got back from Buttonville and cleared customs, we headed off again.

I wanted to stay low to get a better view, unlike the flight across the lake, where we kept very high for a smoother ride and better glide distance while over the lake. That made it a bit bumpy. But not unbearably so.

We left Rochester airspace going south at 2500 feet. As soon as we got out of the airspace, I punched my user waypoint for the local wind farm into my GPS, and we headed out to look at the windmills. Not only are the windmills scenic themselves, but they’re near a nice valley. That was good. Then I headed towards Letchworth Canyon and cruised along it down to the famous Upper and Lower Falls and railway trestle.

After that, we cruised back up the canyon in the other direction. Then Vicki had a nifty idea – to go fly over our house. The Rochester airport hadn’t been too busy when we’d come in – they’d cleared me to land while I was still 15 miles out. So I figured what the hell, I’ll ask for it.

First thing is to try to find something that the controller would recognize. I zoomed in the hand-held GPS to try to find a waypoint near our house – I had an idea that we were near the outer marker for the ILS 28 approach. But I couldn’t find anything. So I told him that we weren’t too far south of the southern tip of the Irondequoit Bay – I figured they’d know where where that is because of the seaplane operations there. The controller approved our request, so I descended to pattern altitude, because I knew it would put us below where the airplanes on ILS 28 would be at that point. Vicki spotted our house, and I did a steep turn around it so we could get a good view. After our turn, I thanked Rochester Approach and they cleared me for a straight in to runway 25.

That was really nice. I hope we can do that again some time.

I’m in Whitby at my Dad’s place today. Because of customs, we flew to Buttonville. But then when I told the FBO guy “oh we’re not staying – as soon as we clear customs we’re heading to Oshawa” he just laughed. Evidently I carefully flight planned the trip to Buttonville, but hadn’t even looked at NOTAMs for Oshawa.

Oshawa is closed for three weeks, because they’re repaving both runways. God only knows why they couldn’t stagger them. Hey, oshawapilot, why didn’t you mention this?

I just moved my blog from http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/ to http://blog.xcski.com/. I set up a “Redirect permanent” on the old location, so that anybody or anything using the old location will get automatically redirected to the new location. And for a lot of places that used to hit my blog at the old site (like rss feeders) seem to have handled the transition painlessly. For instance, NetNewsWireLite, which I use on my laptop, updated the subscription information and doesn’t appear to hit the old URL at all any more. Same with the LiveJouranl syndication.

But for some reason, a lot of them haven’t handled it correctly. For one thing, my spam load is down to almost nothing. Ok, that’s a good thing. But I also notice that some RSS feeders, like various “Planet” web sites, see a redirection from http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/feed to http://blog.xcski.com/feed, and feel like they can ignore the fact that the hostname part of the URL is different, and try to fetch the redirection at http://xcski.com/feed, which of course isn’t a valid URL. It can’t be that they have an old DNS cache entry for blog.xcski.com – it didn’t exist until a few days ago. It must be that they’re trying to be too clever, or not clever enough.

I’m a contract programmer, a damn good one. I’m on a project that is based in Rochester NY, but which also has a programming team in China. Also, because I got this job through personal contact and reputation rather than through a headhunter, I’m very well paid. I’m sure it isn’t an exaggeration to say that the whole China team probably costs about the same as I do.

So my continued employment is probably dependant on being more productive and better than a whole team of Chinese PhDs. And so far, I’ve been doing that. Often the code they produce shows a lack of understanding of the tasks they’ve been set, or of the approach that we’ve been taking with the rest of the code that they have to work with. Although, to be perfectly honest, the biggest factor keeping me ahead of them is the fact that our higher ups are not capable of producing a clear set of requirements – but I can sit down and talk to them and build a clear picture of what is needed, or talk to the other developers and kick stuff around. I can even go to customer sites and talk to the end users. But even so, I feel a continual breathing down my neck.

Right now, we’re on a big push to produce some major new code for a new customer. I’ve been working my ass off. My code “lives” in between the user interface one of my fellow local programmers, and a module that is being produced in China. Fortunately, by working 50-55 hours a week for the last month or so, I’ve managed to keep ahead of both of them.

I’m going to see my daughters this weekend. Life events have conspired to keep me from seeing them for a while, and I need to see them this weekend. Unfortunately, I also have to do a bunch more work this weekend. Assuming I only work my “normal” 10 hours on Friday, I need to do at least 5-10 hours this weekend. That’s going to cut into the time with my daughters a bit.

I’ve got a very sore front tooth. I have a referral to a peridontist about that, since the gum is receeding so far it’s exposed much of the root. But I haven’t had time to go. And this evening walking out the car, my knee locked up in an extremely painful manner – it does that every now and then, and there’s nothing I can do about it except try to hop on the other leg. And now, right now, just to top it off, I can feel a bit of soreness swallowing. Which means that by Monday I’ll having a full grown cold, which means my productivity will be halved.

I’ve decided to go for it.

I’m currently paying about $30 a month for a Virtual Private Server at linode.com. For that $30 a month I get the equivalent of 150Mb of RAM, 4Gb of disk, and a static IP that isn’t on any black lists. I’m guaranteed at least the equivalent of a 150MHz, but up to the maximum of the actual CPU on the machine, which is dual 3.2GHz Xeons.

The applications I run on there, particularly the Waypoint Database Generator, are severely limited by the memory limitations. I don’t come close to using all the bandwidth, and I’m not usually CPU bound. But as soon as that generator starts the memory swapping, it would use up all my io_tokens, and then the application would get i/o bound. The situation was totally untenable until somebody on linode started running a MySQL server and allowed me to use it. But I don’t like relying on this service that might go away at any time.

I’ve discovered that for about a hundred dollars a month, I can put a 1U server on a local colocation service. By going the colocation route, I can put in as much memory and disk space as I want. I still get the other advantages of the linode, such as a static IP and better bandwidth to the rest of the internet. The extra disk and memory means that I can run my own database server without getting swap and i/o bound. It also means I can move some of the disk hungry stuff like my Gallery server and this blog to it.

Yeah, it’s more expensive, but what I’m planning to do is set up the system with Xen. Then I can divide the box up into multiple virtual machines and sell shares. I’m hoping I can sell one share to start, and maybe another later on.

I’ve been perusing eBay, and it appears that $300 or so should get me a machine with 2×1GHz processors, 1Gb of RAM, and no hard drive. Another $125 or so for a 250Gb drive for the machine and another 250Gb drive to keep at home as a spare. Since the colocation site is here in town, I don’t need the ultra-reliability of the latest servers, RAID arrays, redundant power supplies, etc.

Ok, so I have to buy this machine, build it, and start setting up Xen. Then get my applications working on it. I’m also going to move this blog to “blog.xcski.com” and the gallery to “gallery.xcski.com” to facilitate moving them to the colo.

The following Democrats voted for torture, against Habeus Corpus, and for the establishment of an Imperial Presidency. They will never recieve another penny from me, as long as I live.
Continue reading ‘Democrats on notice’ »