Prosthetically Hip » Grrr…

Do as I say, not as I do…

Will — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 04:12:57 +0000

I know this post is technically going out on the 27th, but I’m backdating it.

Tonight I had to re-write my recently created DUI.system, because the hard drive it lived on crashed, and I didn’t have a copy of it on a second drive. I don’t know how many times I’ve told people not to trust external drives as the keeper of their primary (or only) copy of something, and somehow, this one slipped by and bit me in the ass.

Derp.

On the upside, the new revision is cleaner and the actual tweet output will be more informative based on the title of the press release. Looking at the old releases, some would have Cancelled or something similar in the title – handy info at a glance, IMHO.

Several Levels of Failure

Will — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 04:27:40 +0000

I know several things went well today, I’m just going to harp on what went wrong:

Truck needs an oil change/transmission fluid/pretty much every fluid change.
One of the big 5-drawer tool chests is pretty banged up. Waiting ’till above is done to return. Hopefully tomorrow.
4 trips to Lowe’s today, got almost all I needed through process of elimination. Then lost a piece.
There’s a mosquito loose somewhere in my office
Looks like tomorrow will also be oppressively hot.
Running out of things to write about for NaBloPoMo

I know I know, first world problems.

Sing it, Front:

Dog Fighting

Will — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 21:05:00 +0000

Bad luck wind been blowin’ on my back
I was born to bring trouble wherever I’m at

– Danzig, 13

Some days, you look for a fight. Other days, fights look for you.

I took Indy and Bosceaux to the new dog park in City Park today. To make a short story shorter, Indy decided to pick a fight with a Great Dane (a fight Indy was winning, I’d like to point out) and we left early.

Not even five steps outside the dog park, an old drunk guy asks me to swipe my magnetic card to let him in. After living in the Quarter for so long, I instinctively replied with “Sorry man, no can do.”

Apparently, no can do would not do. This old guy lost it, started yelling at me. He had a clear plastic go cup half filled (empty?) with a brown colored liquid – in all likelihood it was booze.

To make a middle-length story short, he yelled things like “faggot queen” at me, then proceded to get in his car and block me in so I couldn’t leave. Well, fuck that shit – I just called the cops – but by the time the City Park Police came by, he was gone. After giving the officer the license plate and a description of the guy, his dog, and his car, he took off and so did I. I did call NOPD first, but since I couldn’t give them an address or street corner, I was S.O.L.

I kept my distance from him at all times though – nothing takes the fun out of a fight as much as having your opponent be a drunk septuagenarian. The whole drive home though, I couldn’t let something go. I kept mulling over what it was he called me, and whether it was better to be a “queen faggot” or “faggot queen.”

I’d rather be the Faggot Queen with a fabulous army.

On Tagging, etc.

Will — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:39:05 +0000

I hate taggers. Speaking in broad generalizations, I think taggers just a group of people who, unable to make their mark on the world, decide the next best step is to write their pseudonym in permanent marker on other people’s property. It’s juvenile and immature, and shows a distinct lack of respect for others. I’m sure I know some people who do this, and that’s unfortunate. Maybe even someone who reads this little blog thingy.

Just grow up.

I was no fan of taggers as a renter in this city, and now as a property owner, I am even less of a fan.

Fred Radtke, New Orleans’ own “Gray Ghost”, is no better. In fact, what he does in some cases is worse – he primers over these tags. It doesn’t matter if it’s on brick, glass, marble, cement, or traffic signs. Glass? Marble? Why on Earth would you put primer on these surfaces?

Since Sept. 24, I’ve been going back and forth with the Sewerage and Water Board. They decided to dig up a large part of the sidewalk and street directly in front of the house.

I don’t know why, I just know they took it upon themselves to do it. Well, early this week, they finally dug up the temporary gravel and actually re-cemented the sidewalk. Street is still unfinished, but eh, it’s progress and I’ll take it. Actually, as we speak, there’s a crew working on the street. I must have some sort of unrealized super power. Excuse me while I go get a lottery ticket.

Anyways, some jackass inevitably wrote his name is the wet cement. It wasn’t on the sidewalk, but on the edge of the street. I don’t know if it’ll be re-surfaced, and if it’s not, I’ll have to re-cement that strip strip to cover his name.

I guess I should be grateful. At least he didn’t write in something like “fuck” or draw some tits or something.

I just don’t get it.

Smartphones are dumb.

Will — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:56:31 +0000

While upgrading the system software on the crackberry this morning, it decided to wipe out all my contacts.

So if you are so inclined, please send you phone number along to dubtea@gmail.com. Thanks.

Downtime and EXT3 undelete

Will — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:01:57 +0000

The other day, the server I share with the other bicycle/computer nerd Will (yes, there are two of us) went down.

I called my friend Paul who basically runs the datacenter the box lives in to give him a heads up I’d be heading over. Paul was already having a rough work day, but still carved out a little time to help me out – thanks again P.

Anyways, we hooked up a crash cart, and here’s what we saw:

Ruh-roh. We could discern that it was asking for the root password for maintenance, and that was about all we could glean from the garbled screen. Unfortunately neither Paul nor Will knew the password, and if you tried to skip it, it would just reboot. This meant I had to pull it and work on it elsewhere.

I went to boot from a cd, but the server had none, so I tried the next step – putting a bootable disc image onto a USB thumb drive. That didn’t work as the hardware is old enough to not be able to detect bootable USB devices.

I hadn’t yet opened up the case (which I should have done earlier), so I went the only route that I had available to me at the moment: floppy boot disks.

Holy crap y’all, I made linux boot floppies. I know, I know, I as stunned as you are. I was not only surprised to find that I still had some floppies, but that they were still good! As it turned out, it too was all for naught – when booted up, I couldn’t really do anything for one reason or another.

I finally opened the damn case, and to my exultant joy, I spied an IDE port. I plugged in a CD-ROM and booted up a Gentoo install disc. After fixing the screen garble (which was due to a splashimage being loaded by Grub), I was able to see and address the actual problem: somehow the EXT2/3/4 fsck had gone missing.

Before I actually fixed the issue, I figured it would be a good time to back some stuff, and due to an unfortunate timing of keystrokes, I managed to delete the entire home directory, residing on its own partition. Dumb.

After immediately unmounting the partition and some serious googlation of various terms including EXT3 undelete, EXT3 restore, oh holy hell what did I just do, linux undelete, etc… I had pretty much lost all hope of restoring this data. Luckily, at the bottom of some forum thread, someone had posted a link to an app called ext3grep. This page and application, considering how completely amazing it is, has an extremely poor google listing. Hopefully this may help. I doubt it, but you never know.

Anyways, after crapping myself, here’s all it took to restore the deleted files:

umount /home
cd /usr/src
wget http://ext3grep.googlecode.com/files/ext3grep-0.10.1.tar.gz
tar -zxvf ext3grep-0.10.1.tar.gz
cd ext3grep-0.10.1
./configure; make; make install
ext3grep /dev/sda8 –restore-all -after=1252972801

There’s actually a bit more, but that’s superfluous things like changing to a directory with enough free disk space. But the pure simplicity of this app is that once downloaded / compiled / etc, is that with a single command, you can restore files deleted after a certain timestamp.

If for no other reason that finding a working, powerful, and simple ext3 undelete utiliy, the headache was all worth it.

Here’s a quick photo of the server on my desk at work:

I still can’t believe I deleted the /home directory – sometimes you just hit that Enter key a mere moment before you actually hit the tab key a second time. At least I learned from this mistake.

Department of Redundancy Department

Will — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 17:14:53 +0000

I got a call (well, a text, really) this morning, prompting me to hurriedly run out of my house and head to the office. My linux server, the workhorse, the reliable one, was apparently offline. Suck.

I get there, and while it is powered up, it is absolutely unresponsive. Might as well had been off. So, I powercycle it, and up it boots. Unfortunately on the front of the case is a orange blinky light. As it turns out, one of the two Ghostbusters-esque power supplies (PSU) (hooray, redundancy!) is dead. Boo, hiss.

Because there are two PSUs in the rig, it just pulls all the power from the other, good, PSU. That’s all fine and dandy, unless there is a power hiccup.

“But wait!”, I hear you cry, “What about UPSes? Don’t you have battery backups?” Very good point, young reader. I indeed do have UPSes. Two APC Smart UPS 1000s, to be exact. And to be extra redundant, one PSU from each server is connected to each battery, instead of each server getting its own dedicated battery. This way, if a UPS fails during an outage, one battery can still provide power to both servers.

Back to the power hiccup. Apparently, one of the UPSes died recently. Not a biggie, right? That’s why I mixed the power sources. Normally, it would not be a big deal, unless THE REMAINING GOOD PSU IS PLUGGED INTO THE BAD UPS!

Yeah. So, in the interest of visual simplicity, the setup is below:
GREEN = Power, battery backup.
ORANGE = Power, no battery backup.
RED = Dead

stop. go.

Will — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:46:01 +0000

I’n currently on Earhart, not moving. Why? Stupid fucking rush hour.

For a long time, I’ve said that traffic congestion is worse than genocide. You can really only fully kill a group of people off once, and traffic is everywhere.

When was the last time you banged your fists in anger and aggravation over Darfur? How about your steering wheel over traffic?

At least I have Radiohead and my crackberry. Heh, I initially mis-spelled crackberry as “crackbert”. Looks like my phone has a name.

Dr. McNinja and PHP/CSS

Will — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:46:59 +0000

I’ve been noticing how on one of my favorite webcomics, Dr. McNinja, the page that displayed each comic was loading pretty slow.

Before:

After:
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CSS:

#pages a { font-weight: bold; color: #FFFFFF; background-color: #000000; display: block; text-align: center; width: 25px; margin-bottom: 3px; text-decoration: none; }

PHP (with NEW current page highlight! oooohhhhhh!):

for($p = 1; $p <= $pages; $p++) {
unset($style); if($p == $page) { $style = ‘ style="color: #CCCCCC;" ‘; }
echo ‘’.$p.’’."\n";
}

For some reason unbeknownst to me (and I emailed the tech girl, Zoe (who apparently offers help on websites, WTF?)), it was deployed so the output is as such:
Yanno, you try to help some people, and they just don’t really listen. And yes, those slashes before the double-quotes are in the output HTML.
The page load is still much faster after dropping all those img calls, but meh. Why the extra table? Why????
More on that mod_rewrite hack.

Will — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 02:45:31 +0000

So I implemented that mod_rewrite hack (but added string sanitizing, etc.) on a project for a client.

The other morning, it failed spectacularly. It was definitely one of those “But it worked fine yesterday” moments that we all love.

In this instance, the host uses cPanel (an out-of the-box hosting solution), and I was not able to specify a custom 404 page (neither via the .htaccess nor the unaccessible virtual server config). I could do a custom 404 page though – it would create a 404.shtml file in the pubilc_html folder. Just fuckin’ dandy. SHTML is pretty much worthless.

What I was able to do, however, is add a custom handler in the .htaccess that says “hey Apache, treat .shtml files as if they are really PHP files!” like so:
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .shtml
Apache was parsing the PHP code in the .shtml document. Every it seemed, would be all right.

Fast forward a few months to the other morning. Instead of processing the PHP code in the 404.shtml, it was printing it out. BAD. Turns out, the web host updated to PHP5 overnight. As you very well may know or have surmised, PHP4 and PHP5 are handled very differently on the server level.

Now, the humble little .htaccess that looks like this:
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .shtml
Don’t you love how those one character differences make all the difference in the world? How nobody was notified? How they didn’t anything in place so that all would be backwards compatible and therefore gravy-like?
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