It appears that my Apache server on my colo box died early this morning at 6:26, which is around log rotate time. The only anomaly in the logs is that it appeared to have problems killing one of the FastCGI processes, sending it SIGTERM twice and then SIGKILL. This has never happened before, and it’s somewhat annoying. Fortunately I was only off the air for two hours or so.
Category: Geekery
Probably not going to happen
Well, I heard back from the guy who wants to buy this domain. He said he’d meet my price, but wants to spread the payments over 5 or 6 years. Oh oh. A friend pointed out that this could very well mean that they’ll be out of business in 2 years, and I’ll have lost the domain and not gotten the full price for it.
So I’m sending him the following response.
Yeah, you see that to me is a big sticking point. As a former nordic racer, I’m all too aware that good ski shops go out of business at a horrendous rate, and the ones that don’t go out of business barely scrape by. I imagine it’s even worse now when you can order from a bazillion on-line shops instead of having to drive 30 kilometers to the next competitor who isn’t trying to sell you some plastic monstrosities with fish scales on the bottom.
So to me that says that if you don’t do better than your most optimistic predictions, I’ll get one or two years of payments, and then nothing. And that’s not worth it to me.
I’m not in the business of evaluating business plans, and while I know banks are often wrong, they *are* in the business of evaluating business plans, and if you can’t convince one of them that having “xcski.com” as your domain is worth what I’m asking and give you a small business loan on that basis, I’m not going to disagree with them.
I wish your business well, but I’m going to have to say no to giving up xcski.com. Like I said earlier, though, I have the domain xcski.net which I will part with for a much more reasonable price.
Oh well, that share in the Cessna 180 on straight floats was nice to dream about for a few hours.
Is it worth it?
I got into this internet thing early enough that I got myself a damn good domain name. I was the original owner of canoe.com, a name I chose because it represented something I used to love doing. Also, at that time, you had to sort of justify why you needed a domain name, and so my story to Internic was that I was planning to set up a public access network called “Community Access Node Open to Everyone”. (Internic was the one and only domain registrar at the time.) I originally tried to register canoe.net, but it either got lost or rejected, so I tried canoe.com, and it worked.
Continue reading “Is it worth it?”
They’re doing it again
As I wrote about in Rants and Revelations » Dear Boss, my boss has a stick up his ass about my DocumentCache, and blames it for any problems with the cinlib long before any evidence comes in, and continues to do so time after time years after the last time it was actually a problem.
So yesterday we were discussing a problem and Tony asked for something new to be put in the DocumentCache, and the head of QA starts saying “I don’t want you guys messing with DocumentCache so close to the release date because it always seems to be causing problems”. AAARRGGGGHHHH!!!! I patiently explained that, no, the DocumentCache hasn’t had a bug against it in three years, it’s just a matter of perception because every time there is a bug anywhere near that part of the code “somebody” (I didn’t say Dave’s name) thinks it’s a DocumentCache bug even though it never turns out to be the case that it is.
The next time I write something that caches something, I’m not going to use the word “Cache” in its name. I’m going to call it the XMLPuppyAndKittenPlayground or something.
Note to self
If you want to find a picture you saw yesterday, and now the picture has been removed from the web site that you saw it on for copyright reasons, *and* you haven’t exited Firefox in many weeks, *and* you have had a web page open on one page that is constantly showing you different parts of the world in Google Maps in hybrid mode, DO NOT try to find the picture by going to your .mozilla/firefox/*/Cache directory and typing “kuickshow *”.
After my screen filled with several hundred images, mostly Google Map tiles, it started getting really slow. My CPU was pegged, I was swapping heavily, and still images were appearing. The mouse was moving, but nothing was responding to clicks or keyboard presses. I went to another machine, ssh’ed in and did a “killall kuickshow”, but the load average was still over 8. I waited a while for it to drop down to under 1.0, but my display was still unresponsive. Eventually I gave up waiting for it to recover and rebooted.
Of course, my Cache directory is now nearly empty and I’ll never find that picture again.