Category: Rant

Car accident

[youtube l82nXRr_D0A]
I was driving home from lunch, and I managed to smash into a guy in an intersection. I have no idea how it happened – I thought I had a green light, but as I hit the guy and we spun, I looked up and saw a green light facing his direction. I wasn’t distracted in any conventional way – my cell phone was in my pocket, I wasn’t reprogramming my GPS or anything else. I just didn’t see the light.

The car is a mess. I had to really body check the door to get it open, and it looked like both the gas engine and the hybrid synergy drive box were knocked off their normal mounts. I don’t think the front wheels would turn. I don’t know if the car will be totalled, but I wouldn’t be surprised. They hauled it off in a flat bed.

The other guy’s car looks ok. It’s a Jeep Cherokee, and I hit the door behind the driver. Afterwards, that door opens and closes fine and the electric windows go up and down. So unless I bent his frame, he’ll be ok.

The worst thing is that it has badly shaken my confidence. How could I have not seen the light? There is another light about a hundred metres south of that one that I went through just fine. I have no recollection of thinking of something else, or looking elsewhere. I just blanked. And while nobody is hurt, I’m just glad I didn’t do something like that when I was flying.

Well, that was a huge waste of time

I noticed my picture gallery was showing a couple of albums twice, and when you clicked either of them, you got an error page. After trying about a million different things from various FAQs and from a guy who was being very helpful in the forums, I finally discovered something strange: the table g2_itemattributesmap had many duplicate entries. I deleted one of the dups (and manually reentered one, because there was no primary key or other way to uniquely identify one of the rows), one of the duplicate albums stopped showing twice, and when you clicked on it it worked correctly. So I did the same with another row, and suddenly the main page of the gallery stopped working. Oops. But in for a penny, in for a pound, so I continued on with the other duplicates and when I finished everything was working great.

I’m a little concerned about how this might have happened before. One thing I’ve noticed using Gallery is that the developers mainly seem to work in MySQL, and PostgreSQL (which I use) appears to be an after thought. And if there is one thing I know about MySQL, it’s that it implements a smaller subset of SQL than PostgreSQL, and it does some incredibly bizarre things that violate the SQL standard, especially when it comes to nulls. So I’m not surprised that MySQL-focussed developers don’t add unique contraints to a database table where the presence of duplicates causes things to break badly. I wouldn’t be surprised if MySQL doesn’t even support unique contraints correctly.

Houston, we have a problem

Since putting in the new colo box, we (myself and the two “tenants” on the Xen user domains (domU)) have noticed it being very slow. At times it seems like the first time you try something it will be very slow, but if you try again immediately it will run quickly. For instance, sometimes a page load will time out, but you hit refresh and it will load quite quickly. I’ve started to suspect the problem is the disks, because the CPU is pretty fast. In order to pin point the problem, I’ve decided to try and benchmark the colo box against my home computer. Both computers have SATA 3Gb/s disks in a software RAID-1 (mirror). Both computers have dual core CPUs (although the home one is a Core2 Duo at 1.86GHz and the colo is a Xeon at 3.0GHz). However, the colo is also running tons of other stuff and it’s running in a Xen domU, so that might slow things down a bit.
Continue reading “Houston, we have a problem”

Nissan Maxima NY Plates ELT 2912

Hey, jerkwad. When you swerved suddenly into the middle lane, the bus you cut off had to lock up his brakes and started to slide. If he’d been half a second slower on getting on the brakes, he would have hit you. If he’d been half a second slower in getting off them, his rear end would have broken loose and probably hit me or the guy in the left lane. Next time, instead of thinking of your own selfish and stupid need to get to your destination without applying your brakes, why don’t you give a thought to the people around you?

Back to the Mac. (Sfx: sigh of relief)

My laptop has been in the shop because it couldn’t connect to wireless networks with any sort of consistency. It wasn’t preventing me from doing my work, but considering I have surgery next week and my AppleCare expires in two months, I figured now was the time. So for a week now, I’ve been using Linux as my desktop. I’m extremely glad to be back to the Mac.

But not really because of anything wrong with Linux. As soon as I started using the desktop on the Linux box, it told me I should upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to Ubuntu 10.4 LTS, which was time consuming, but afterwards a persistent problem I’d had booting any kernel newer than the one I’d installed it with went away, and it recognized my Wacom Bamboo which it hadn’t before. I had to struggle a bit to get my VPN set up, and it was a struggle to get it to treat the “Caps Lock” key as a control key. And because my Linux box is a server, I’d originally set it up with XFCE4 instead of KDE or Gnome, so it wasn’t as functional and beautiful as it could have been.

No, the real reasons I was glad to be back on the Mac are because:

  • The Linux box doesn’t have speakers or a microphone, so I had to set up Skype on a netbook, which made for fun when somebody sent me a file or a url.
  • The cut and paste functionality is quite different in Linux, and required some getting used to. It wasn’t very consistent between apps.
  • The RDC client I was using on Linux didn’t translate the local printer so that it appeared as my default printer on my Windows session like the Mac RDC client does.
  • I couldn’t figure out how to switch desktops with a keystroke, especially not when I was RDC’ed into work.
  • Without my Mac, I couldn’t listen to my podcasts, and I couldn’t pay bills.
  • Most importantly: because my laptop has a 17″ 1920×1280 screen, and I also plug it into this 20″ 1080i screen, but with the laptop gone I only had the one screen to use for Linux, I felt very hemmed in.

So I’m glad to be back. But I’m having to retrain my fingers for cutting and pasting with Command instead of Control.