Category: Activities

IT’S ALIVE!

The GoogleBox lives!


Yes, after 4 days of downtime, my illustrious yellow 1U server has been revived from the dead. After it died, I asked the colo provider to power cycle it, and they said it didn’t come back up. I asked them to yank the box, and I picked it up and brought it home. Expecting a power problem, I first tried yanking all the hard drives and memory, but even then didn’t get any beeps or other activity. So then, I tried yanking one of the CPUs. I must have gotten lucky, because removing the #2 CPU got me a couple of POST beeps, and when I put back the memory and the hard drives, it booted just fine.

I’ve had this box since January 2007, and the CPUs are dated from 2001, so I guess it’s time to replace it. I ordered a slightly newer box off eBay that has twice as much memory and 4 SATA drive bays. With two 1Tb drives, it will have much more disk space, but more importantly the empty drive bays mean that if I need to expand, I can add newer bigger drives when they become available. I’m considering using software RAID to mirror the two drives, because even 1Tb is bigger than what I have now and I’m not hurting for space. And with lvm, I can plonk in two new 2Tb drives when the time comes, migrate the volume groups to the new drives, and yank the old ones. All the remains now is to decide whether to build a new OS and get everything working on it, or just restore from a backup and continue the upgrade path.

While I had the box home for a few days, I took the opportunity to do a long-delayed upgrade from Debian “etch” to Debian “lenny”. I didn’t want to tackle that remotely because there was a significant chance (and it happened several times) that I was going to get it into the situation where I needed to intervene at the Grub stage, and I couldn’t do that remotely (because the cheap colo facilities don’t give you remote boot consoles like the expensive ones do.) The biggest hassle of this upgrade was that I had to do some messing around to get a console to appear, changing the boot options on the box itself, and also the getty lines in inittab of each of the guest “domU”s. The second biggest hassle was that I had to install “udev” on all the guests so that ssh could work. Also while they were home I took the opportunity to make a backup of the whole thing, including the guests that don’t belong to me. Normally I just back up my own. That should make setting up a new box a lot easier.

I got all the fixing and upgrading and backing up done early this morning. I brought my box over to the colo company office at 10:15. And waited. And waited. And waited. I had a “ping -a” running so I’d know as soon as it came back. And I waited some more. The business office is the other side of town from the colo facility, so I figured there would be some delay. The company that used to own those racks would let me go out to the facility with them, but these guys bought the business from that company and they’re anal about security and won’t let me go. Well, it turns out that their scheduled visit to the colo facility was at 10pm – nobody told me that, of course, until after I’d started panicing that they’d all gone home for the weekend without racking my box. But here it is – they racked the box, phoned me to say it was powering up, and now I’m connected again. Hallelujah!

Chrome – still not great

Update: A few hours after I wrote that, I decided to quit and restart Chrome to free up some memory, and now none of the extensions I installed are showing up.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my experiences with Google Chrome on the Mac. At the time, Chrome on the Mac was lagging quite far behind the Windows version. Supposedly now it’s all caught up, and so I’m going to revisit my previous complaints:

  • It frequently lost the text cursor in text input fields, especially on GMail.
    • Still happens.
  • It seemed much slower and more likely to corrupt the display compared to Safari in Google Wave.
    • I haven’t been using Wave, so no comment.
  • It had a bad habit of undocking a tab on the slightest provocation.
    • Still happens.
  • The fact that the tabs take up space in the window frame means that you’d frequently undock a tab when you were trying to move the whole window.
    • Still happens. There is a tiny bit of real-estate near the “+” to open a new tab that is still available, but it’s a pain to grab.
  • It doesn’t have a “Reload all tabs” option. Supposedly there is an extension to that, but in order to use extensions I’d have to upgrade to the latest development build. That’s more work than I’m willing to do when it has all these other problems.
    • I found an extension that will reload individual tabs on a schedule rather than the whole window on demand. That’s actually nicer than having to reload everything manually. It’s not bad, except when your computer goes to sleep you have to restart it by reloading all the tabs individually. Plus when it reloads on a tab that is on a different Space than the one you’re on, it will switch back to that Space, but that’s a Spaces problem not a Chrome problem.
  • It doesn’t recognize or tell you about RSS feeds. In Safari or Firefox, any page that has an RSS feed displays an icon, and if you click it, the OS opens the feed in the currently configured RSS reader. The functionality is so ingrained in browsers that many pages don’t seem to have any other indication that they have RSS feeds. Once again, I’m told that Chrome has a plug in for that. Once again, too much trouble.
    • The only RSS plug ins I could find will add the RSS feed to a web based RSS reader like Google Reader. There is no support I can find anywhere for the OS-defined RSS reader. So I’m experimentally putting NetNewsWireLite out pasture in favour of Google Reader. Not bad, but not great.

So over-all, it’s got a few user interface annoyances, but the really big sticking points have been taken care of by plugins. And I was happy. Until today. And that’s when I discovered that Google Chrome is utterly useless for a web developer – there appears to be no way to make it reload your javascript file that you’ve just changed unless you go to “File->Clear Browsing Data”, uncheck everything except “Empty the cache”, click “Clear Browsing Data”, and wait, and wait, and wait. In normal web browsers, you just have to hit shift-reload on your page and it will reload that page and all the attendent files, including CSS and JavaScript files. That’s it, I’m switching back to Safari (or maybe Firefox) for the page I’m developing.

Oh, plus the built in “Developer Tools” in Chrome suck in comparison with Firebug, but that’s apples to oranges since Firebug is a plugin.

A bad day paddling is better than a good day erging

Today was a gorgeous day, brilliant sunshine and warm, but a bit of wind. Doug, Bill and I met up at Bay Creek for a paddle on the creek. The water was a bit lower than last time, but it was more open. Doug’s Burn is in the shop getting fixed, so he paddled a much tippier Jet. Or is it the other way ’round? I can never keep the KayakPro boats separate – too many 17’3″ long boats, and their web site says one is 438mm wide and the other is 438cm wide, which probably is wrong. Bill showed up with a Romany sea kayak – his wife and daughter are in the Rough Riders club, so this is his secret other life kayak. Since he normally paddles a surf ski, I can’t blame him for paddling a more stable (and more importantly, one without a leaky drain in the cockpit) boat.

Doug was paddling a strange boat and was on a low intensity week, I’ve had sniffles and sneezes for a week, and Bill hasn’t been paddling for months, so we took it easy. On the way up, a Forge Racing canoer came paddling down, and barely managed to grunt out a response to our hellos. One of us made a remark about how unfriendly the Forge Racing guys, and wondered why Jason, a kayaker and a really friendly guy, hangs out with them. And a few minutes later, Jason came by in a canoe – and unlike the first guy, he had a friendly greeting for us and a smile.

We didn’t go all that far, and we didn’t paddle that hard. But it was a beautiful day, and we were in boats and with friends. And that’s what’s important.

More erging

I went erging again. I’m sure you’ll be relieved to hear I didn’t bring my video camera. The last few times I’ve done a long “distance” workout, I’ve done half an hour straight, then for the last half hour I’d spend 15-20 seconds having a sip of water, paddle normally for the remainder of 9 minutes, then paddle very hard for 1 minute, repeat, then sip, paddle for the remainder of 8 minutes, and go hard for 2 minutes.

This time I tried doing the “9 minutes normal, 1 minute hard” right from the beginning. Given that I’d done a fairly hard 25 minutes on a rowing erg yesterday, that was probably a mistake. The breaks were often a bit longer than normal, because the foot brace on Stephen’s erg kept slipping, as well as having a few iPod issues. Everything was ok, but at the end I only got one minute and twenty seconds into my last hard bit when I just had this weird “I don’t want to do this any more” feeling. I wasn’t especially exhausted, and I didn’t stop because I was tired. I just didn’t want to continue any more. It’s kind of odd for me to get 59:20 into a planned 60 minute workout and stop then. You’d think that close to the end you’d just keep going.

I’m getting some major calluses forming on my right hand (the “control” hand) at the base of my middle fingers, and a bit of an open sore on my left hand on the top of my thumb. I’m not sure where that sore is coming from.