Rants and Revelations

The DVD drive in my Powerbook has been a pain in the ass. It frequently refuses to eject a disk in the drive completely, sometimes showing me just a sliver of the disk which if I’m sufficiently alert I can grab before it gets sucked back in, and sometimes refusing to show anything before it acts as if it had just been re-inserted and mounting it again. Last time I took it to Apple, they replaced the drive under Apple Care, but said that because the laptop’s case has a bit of a dent in it, next time it happens they’re not going to cover it because it’s probably caused by damage to the frame of the case. (Yes, I admit I’ve dropped the laptop a few times. Being a geek means being hard on equipment.[1])

I got a couple of multi-disk audiobooks for Christmas, and I’m in the process of ripping them to MP3 so I can listen to them on my iPod. But in the 6 disks that I’ve ripped so far, I’ve had the computer pull the “Here’s a sliver, and there it’s gone again” trick several times, it’s locked up ripping a track once, and iTunes has gone into a “Not responding” state 3 times. I’ve had to reboot three times so far, two of those times I’ve had to use the power switch to reboot because iTunes wouldn’t quit. This last time I rebooted it, neither Finder, iTunes, nor Disk Utility will recognize that there was a disk in the drive. But it’s there, all right. I can just see it if I pry the disk slot open a little. Oh well, time to reboot into OpenFirmware and try the eject command there. But if I remember the last time correctly, that won’t work either. And then it’s back to the Apple store to price out a new case and frame for an “obsolete” Powerbook.

In other stupid news, I use SpamKarma2 to protect this blog against spam. I also recently started to use Akismet, but I think SK2 does a good job so I’m reluctant to switch entirely over to Akismet, in spite of the fact that SK2 isn’t actively maintained any more and doesn’t work well with the OpenID plugin. Every day SK2 is supposed to send me an email telling me how many spams it caught since the last report, and whether any have a score between 0 and -20 (which means it flagged them as spam, but it’s not 100% sure). I click the link, look at those doubtful ones, and then tell it to purge everything. For some reason, it doesn’t come the same time every day - I think it’s on a 25 hour cycle. Last night, for some bizarre reason, it sent me 5 copies of the daily report, all within minutes of each other and all identical. Strange. It’s not even like there was a time change or end of the month or something that would explain it.

Footnote [1]: Let me explain the logic behind that statement. Geeks are hard on equipment because they need to have it around all the time, which means that laptops don’t get put in fancy padded sleeves or left on desks, they get balanced on the arms of chairs or put on the floor sideways with the hinge open, with power cords running across the floor where they can be tripped over or run into by small dogs. iPods and cell phones get crammed into your pockets instead of living in some nice padded case or locked in a desk drawer, which means they fall out when you reach into your pocket to get your keys out (said keys also scratching the screens and doing other damage), and in one case, even falling in the toilet when they fall out of your pocket as you’re putting your pants back on. Keyboards accumulate crud because you don’t put them aside to eat, and TiVos and desktop computers never get their cases screwed back on because you’re always opening them up to do yet another upgrade or using them to do other work.

Way too much medical information after the cut.
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Ok, a few weeks ago I bought a 320Gb drive to upgrade my upstairs TiVo, and discovered that although I had rejected a couple of earlier bargain drives because of it, this time I’d forgotten to check it was SATA or not. But then my coworker Rob pointed me towards satacables.com, where they sell a little adaptor doohickey that you slap on the back of a SATA drive and it can be plugged into an IDE cable and Molex power connector. Nifty.
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“Friction makes me hot!”

Last night, I heard somebody say possibly the stupidest sentence ever uttered in the English language. Now, I could tell you that it started with “Bill O’Reilly hit the nail on the head last night”, and most of you would say “Stop right there, you’ve already won the prize”. But the stupidity continued to pour forth like sewage: “when he said that Putin got Time Magazine’s `Man of the Year’ instead of PatreiusPatreaus because PatreiusPetraeus is winning the war in Iraq and Time would never admit that”. At this point, I threw up in my mouth a little.

But because I hang around with pilots, and a large number of them are the types who believe any bilge that Fox News tells them to believe, I shut up and try to steer the conversation away from the things that would make me have to stab this guy in the face.

Here I am skiing near the beginning of doing the Silver Courier du Bois. I look a little tired here, but I’m pretty sure this is the near the first or second feeding station on the first day, so I’m not sure why. Maybe I was just cold? At various points along the way, they made large marks on your bib, such as when you got your pack weighed or when you finished a day. Maybe an efficient system for preventing cheaters, but it sure ruined your bib as a souvenir. But that’s how I know that this was early the first day - no marks.

I already wrote about my memories of the CSM. You can re-read them here.

In the summer of 1979, I did the Summer Recruit Training Program with my unit of the Canadian Forces Reserve, the Lorne Scots, Peel, Dufferin and Halton Regiment. Back then we called it “the militia”, but living in the US has ruined that word for me.

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(This is first of a new series: my mom sent me a bunch of my old pictures for Christmas and I’m in the process of scanning them and uploading them.)

In 1980, I was doing most of my training on road skis because my knees were already hurting. The Southern Ontario Ski Division had their first ever road ski race, and I figured I had an edge on the guys who were normally better than me on the snow because they probably trained mostly on foot. So I lined up on the front row beside guys I knew were way better than me on skis. Well, it turned out that they were still way better than me on road skis, so I quickly ended up in the back of the pack. But at least I was near enough the front of the pack in the first lap to get my picture on the front cover of the first (and probably last) issue of “Track”, the newsletter of the Southern Ontario Ski Division.

In case you can’t figure out which young fit hirsute guy is hiding inside my current old bald and obese shell, I’m the one wearing bib number 532.

A week or two ago, somebody from customer support came to me because certain customer sites were having some weird problems - some sites weren’t seeing new content even though it had been delivered and couldn’t update their schedules. She reported that restarting our services fixed it on most sites, but on one she’d had to reboot. Unfortunately the wasn’t anything obvious in the logs. The weird thing is that she said that the problem started with our content provider moved to the new servers - but the content provider says that they didn’t change what they were sending, just what servers they were sending it from.

After a few days, she managed to find one site that still having the problem, and I poked around and still couldn’t find much, except for the fact that if I went into the postgres command line, psql, it would allow me to do anything on the database except query one particular table. If I tried to do anything on that table, it would freeze up. Hmmm. Lacking any other ideas, I shut down the database server and restarted it, and that cleared up the problem. But shutting down the database server also kills off any processes that might be using the database. I was starting to think that two processes were in a deadlock over this one particular table. I filed away the information and asked for her to call me if it happened on any other sites.

This morning, she comes and says it’s happened on several sites at once. She logged me into one of the sites, and sure enough psql would block if I tried to select from that same damn table. Time to dig a little deeper. “select * from pg_locks” showed a couple of exclusive locks. Hmmm. Doing a “ps auwwfx” showed that there was a vacuumdb going on. Oh oh. It’s the nightly backup scripts. A couple of years ago (21Sep2005), I threw a call to “vacuumdb –analyze –full” in there. A bit of googling showed that duh, you’re not supposed to do a “–full” when anything else is going on because it does an exclusive lock on full tables. And JDBC has to take some sort of weird work-around for the fact that Postgres doesn’t give them an easy way to turn autocommit on, so they do the equivalent of a “commit;begin;” after every command. And this causes some locking of its own to go on which is clashing with the vacuumdb locking.

In all this time, it’s never caused any problems, or at least none with any regularity, but evidently the server relocation has caused some content ingestion to happen at the exact time this vacuumdb is going on, and causing these particular sites to have semi-regular problems.

I told them to go around to all the customer sites and edit /etc/init.d/backup_cos_files and remove the “–full” from the vacuumdb command line, and all should be well. I can’t believe I made such a dumb mistake, and that it didn’t cause any problems until now. Actually, I’m sort of hoping it will solve my other mysterious database lock up that was only happening about once a year per site. But that’s probably too much to hope for.

…but I finally have a VMPlayer image that has

• Lotus Notes installed and reading my mail instead of somebody else’s
• Visio installed and working
• Access to files on the host box (using SMB mounts instead of Shared Folders)
• Access to the network printers

Now maybe I can finish that functional spec.

My contract got extended. Only for 6 months this time, but man that’s a load off my mind.

I hate this holiday brinksmanship. I bet nothing sucks worse than getting told your contract won’t be renewed the week before Christmas.

I’m having problems installing new software in my CrossOver Office Windows (non-)emulator, so I’m trying to get a VMWare Windows virtual machine working. A coworker gave me an image that’s working for him, and suggested that I just use that.

First thing I did was delete his personal account and create a new one for me. Then I copied over my .id file from ./.cxoffice/dotwine/fake_windows/data/notes/data/[foo].id to the appropriate place on the virtual machine. And when I fire up Notes, it says has my id in the drop down, and I can log in with my current password. But when I click the “Mail” item, it shows me my cow orker’s mail box. Just in case you missed that, let me spell it out for you - I used my password and accessed his email.

I mentioned that to our sysadmin guy (who takes care of the local Unix servers, and helps us work around the stupidity of corporate IT who are responsible for the Windows boxes). He said yes, you can put your Notes ID file on a thumb drive, take it to any Windows box in the company, log in with your password and read the email of the person who owns that box. Is it just me, or that just about the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard? Now, I don’t know if that’s a deficiency of Notes, or a deficiency of corporate IT, and I don’t particularly care. I’m just boggled.

But accepting that bogglement for the moment, does anybody know how to make Notes forget about the person who used to read Notes on this box and now doesn’t even have an account on the box, and allow me to read mine? The sysadmin says the only way is to remove Notes and reinstall it, but when I try that I get a Notes that doesn’t ask for any password and complains that the mail file wasn’t found when I start it.

One Laptop Per Child “XO” computers + health club tread mills = really green Beowulf Cluster or data center.

Now to submit my idea to the Google green initiative.

Ok, I missed last year. I really want to go again, and I really want to fly. But we don’t have a Lance any more and somebody already booked the Dakota, so I’m going to have to be *really* careful about weight if I’m planning to go in an Archer. The other problem is that last time I went we camped, but after a day walking around I’m in incredible pain and I was damn near useless around the camp, and I felt bad about letting Mark do all the work. Maybe what I should do is pack a tent, a sleeping bag, and a bike to get to the Chinese buffet place across the road? Or maybe I should fly in, but park in GAP (General Aviation Parking) and find a place in one of the dorms or something?

I’m also thinking that sacrilege of sacrilege, I might not go for the whole week. Maybe come in Saturday before things get started, stay for Jay Hoeneck’s famous party on Wednesday, and leave on Thursday. Much as I hate to admit it, the air shows get pretty repetitive after 4 or 5 days, and unless you’re specifically in the market for something, you can see it all in that time as well. Plus, when I stay the full week I’m in real danger of getting talked into buying a kit. After all, I built a canoe from scratch, how much harder could an airplane be? Oh, that much harder? Ok, never mind then.

I was reading a forum thread about a scuba accident that killed a friend of my brother’s, and which my brother was also involved in finding the body after the RCMP tried and failed.

One of the thread contributors posted this thing for divers, but it made me think of Mike and Dave’s recent death in their float plane, and my own thoughts about the possibility of dying in a plane crash.

If I should die while diving.

If I should die while diving please do not hesitate to discuss the incident and assess every element with a view to furthering your understanding of how to enhance diver safety.

If I should die while diving get the facts. They won’t be readily available and will definitely not be correct as reported by the media. But get the facts as best you can.

If I should die while diving understand, as I already do, that it will most likely involve fault on my part to some degree or another so do not hesitate to point that out.

If I should die while diving some of the fault will probably belong to my buddy and that needs to be honestly assessed as well though I must admit this is one area where I hope that compassion will be in the mix.

If I should die while diving there might be those who try to squelch discussion out of a misplaced notion of respect for the deceased, family and friends. They can say nice things about me at my funeral… but in the scuba community I want the incident discussed.

If I should die while diving at least I didn’t die in bed.

I could do a search and replace of “diving” with “flying”, and it’s pretty close to something I’d like to say to my fellow pilots and my nervous but understanding wife. Well, except for the bit about buddies - we don’t use a buddy system in flying even when we should.