I hopped on the scale recently (something I’ve never owned before, and still rarely step on), the other day, and saw a number that was new to me: 167.5.

This is the most I’ve ever weighed, topping my post-Katrina expansion. And I don’t really care about that, because it’s all relative. I don’t care that I weigh that, I care that my BMI is high. I also care that I wasn’t able to button a pair of pants.

The problem is I have become sedentary. I’m traditionally used to a much more active lifestyle, and that just isn’t happening these days. Between the day job, the design/development LLC that Bea and I formed, the housework, and the less-than-happy knees, I just haven’t been exercising. And I /need/ to. I want to.

I just have to make the time. And I am. My friends Chum Dumpster and Everything Butt Sex have been meeting up at NOMA M-W-F at 6am-ish to run 5k. Chum and EBS are hashers who have been concentrating on the drinking part of hashing over the running part. While they run a slower pace than I do, they’re doing the hard part: getting up and doing it. This is what I need. So, Mondays I plan on bringing one dog, and Friday the other, leaving Wednesdays to myself. The pups need exercise too, especially chubby little Indy.

And as for the knees/etc, I’ve already taken the first step, so to speak: I went to the Louisiana Running Co to get fitted for a new pair of shoes: K-Swiss K-Ona C. They’re meshy on top and drain out of the bottom! THE BOTTOM! I really liked that place, too. Just a two-person startup, and I didn’t feel like I was being “sold to” – he just wanted to help me run how I wanted to (no races / half-marathons / full marathons). I definitely recommend them.

Now, obviously running won’t fix the problem alone. I have plans to mountain bike (at least a few laps at the spillway) every few weeks, and do Wii Fit on an almost daily basis.

There are of course dietary concerns, and all I’m going to say is that I’m already making a concerted effort to eat better, and especially cut out as much high fructose corn syrup / crap foods overall. I also understand that it’s just not practical to go whole-hog on that effort, so it’ll be within reason. The last thing I want to is stress out about what I’m eating. If you are (or if you aren’t) familiar with the next handful of months in NOLA, then you should read Pistolette’s excellent rationalization on eating and goals in NOLA.

And as usual, she has inspired Bea and I with our life this year. We have a list of goals, broken down into months, for the year. We’re gonna get a lot of shit done that we’ve been putting off. We’re tired of a project being 85% done.

 

Long day, I’m tired.

I don’t want to be conscious

any more today.

I’m going to say this counts, as I just wrote you a haiku. Goodnight.

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.

In the spirit of the manifesto set forth and in combination with a generally needed re-ordering of my day-to-day schedule and goals, I’ve figured out a calendar, or should I say guideline, to help me get the things done I want to get done.

This mostly means setting aside time for working on the house, and light yoga/exercise – something I wanted to more of this year, but have since lapsed.

I run (er, hash) ~5-6 miles every Thursday night, and bike pretty much everywhere, but need to do just a little more. And the housework I want done can be attacked in hour or sub-hour increments, and will probably be done faster in this manner than I had be doing before.

To help kick my ass, here is my rough daytime schedule for the work week (click to embiggen):

 
I start on Monday. Let’s see how things go.

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

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?

It’s really simple, only 2 lines of code, really.
The first is in the comments.php page (if your custom theme doesn’t have this file, use the one from the default theme).

Around line 80 (right before the comment author, etc. fields), I added the following line:
<input type="text" name="subject" id="subject" value="" size="22" style="display: none;" />

On wp-comments-post.php in the blog home directory, I changed the following line:
$comment_id = wp_new_comment( $commentdata );
to:
if(empty($_POST['subject'])) { $comment_id = wp_new_comment( $commentdata ); } // execute comment if "subject" field is empty

Since the “subject” field has the display:none; style, it is hidden to the regular blog reader. But, most comment spam is performed by bots, and not people. The bot will “see” this field and populate it with data.

Since this field now has data, it is not empty, and the actual commenting action will not happen.
All this from one extra line of html and a single “if” statement.

I decided to let both mine and Sonny’s blog run for a week, so see how much spam we got, then to “turn on” the new spam filter and see how much spam we accrued in a week.

I started at 12:30pm on 11.08.06, with both blogs using a plugin called Akismet which would “tag” the spam, but not delete it.

One week later (12:30pm, 11.15.06), I had accrued 201 spam comments, while Sonny on the other hand, racked up 1423 spam comments. Today, one week after the initial measurement, I had 10 spam comments, compared to Sonny’s 953.

Why were my numbers both before and after so much lower than Sony’s? I don’t know. I’m guessing it has to do with cached pages. Either way, the reduction is significant.
And down the road, as bot writers may/may not pick up this method, you can specify the hidden attributes as a CSS style (in the header or something, called “form”, for example), and class=”form” the hidden input, or maybe even apply the style to a div or span tag that wraps around the input, etc., etc.

Anyway, I’m going to start building this functionality into other web apps I write. Hopefully you’ll do something along the same lines.

Then I took a hit of the Robotussin, to help with the removal of phlegm left in my lungs from my extended weekend sickness.

Well, that was dumb. I feel fuzzy, and I still have work to do. Blargh.

Well, barring evening fuzziness, Lara, Sonny, and I will ride in the Sorry Bout Ya Face ride, a benefit for what I assume is a cyclist who got hurt.

Oh, and at midnight at Molly’s is the great can opening. That is all for now.

I worked at the office all day, then at the R for a few hours, then at a location or two for a project with Jonah that I undershot / misjudged.

Tomorrow is looking to be the same, except replace working at the R with a (hopefully brief) meeting with a local restauranteur.

Hopefully after the regular workday on Thursday, I can meet up with Madam Provocateur for a drink or several. I’m sure I’ll need them at that point.

And now, sleep, for there is an over-sized cat that is making it quite difficult for me to type, not to mention my mutinous eyes.
That sounds grosser that it really is. Eh.