Category: Activities

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.

Wiki currently shut down

My “DAFIF Replacement” Wiki is currently shut down because of a bug that was causing my computer to hit load averages up over 10 every time Google indexed it. My log files were full of lines like:

[Thu May 31 21:09:21 2007] [error] [client 66.249.72.194] [Thu May 31 21:09:21 2007] view: Use of uninitialized value in string eq at /var/www/twiki/lib/TWiki/Plugins/TablePlugin/Core.pm line 457.
[Thu May 31 21:09:21 2007] [error] [client 66.249.72.194] [Thu May 31 21:09:21 2007] view: Use of uninitialized value in string eq at /var/www/twiki/lib/TWiki/Plugins/TablePlugin/Core.pm line 462.

I hope to have time to upgrade to a newer version of TWiki Wiki one of these days and then I’ll re-open it. Or possibly I’ll just let it die since it wasn’t getting any use anyway.

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.

Splashy fun

There is a member of my flying club who owns a Cessna 172 on straight floats, and a half share of a light sport Legend Cub which spends its winters on skis and its summers on straight floats. Yeah, some people have it tough, right? I’ve been begging him for a ride for over a year now, and yesterday he asked on the club mailing list if anybody wanted to be his safety pilot while he tried out the new Garmin 430 in his Cessna. I think I set a record for speedy replies to that mailing list with my “PICK ME! PICK ME!” response.
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