July 16, 2009

Why does Ziggy’s Aunt Hate Him?

If you ever see me talking to myself, I’m just working through ideas for my book, honest… Here’s a good example of what I’m chomping on right now. So I’ve been thinking, why does Ziggy’s Aunt Makuran hate Ziggy so much? Why does his cousin resent him? First off, Ziggy is adopted, so take that into account. Originally I thought it was because she was upset that Keltrem was made chief instead of her(since she’s female), and resented him for it because she is the eldest child.

July 14, 2009

Morgan’s Corollary

New saying: “Never attribute to ignorance what can be attributed to bad grammar.” …which is a corollary of “never attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance/stupidity.”

July 9, 2009

Subversion Binary Conflicts

I caught some interesting behavior on one of our servers today- I’m using subversion to manage a jboss instance (there’ll be a writeup on this later, I’m sure) and caught the following behavior. Here’s the simplified setup. Two servers, X and Y. both of which are checked out of the subversion repository as a whole and fired up. They are clustered with each other. Each server is hosting a ROOT.war file (binary) that contains the site’s code base.

June 29, 2009

Stats, Calc and Loadtests

Preface: Kids, PAY ATTENTION IN MATH CLASSES. YOU NEED IT. So I’ve been spending a lot of time at work doing loadtests, and one question that keeps coming back is “what metric do we want to use to gauge progress?” We’ve been going with a simple throughput (pages/second), but that doesn’t take into account errors, average times, or samplecounts. You can have 30 pages/second and have the following conditions: average page takes 10 seconds to load (300 threads over a 10 second period) 50% error rate (pages that spit out a 500 error can return REALLY fast) 30 threads, 1 second page load That number doesn’t tell the whole story.

June 22, 2009

Jaunty’s Accidental Second Chance

So last week in an attempt to update… something (*shrug*, don’t remember what), I upgraded to intrepid, which bumped me up to kde4. It was a lot smoother this time around, but there were a few bugs left… mainly the fglrx driver didn’t like me. so I decided to go full bore and try jaunty again. it’d been 2 months since initial release, so it should be a bit more stable.

June 14, 2009

Keeping Busy

So I’ve been keeping busy with the outside of the house the past few days. Cleaning the Shed A few weeks ago I cleaned out the shed, but I still have a lot of crap in there. This past weekend I got around to hanging a shovel/rake tool organizer thing, plus a couple of J hooks so the floor is mostly clean. All that’s left is getting the stupid toilet and sink outta there.

June 10, 2009

The appeal of Who Knows What

I watch Lost. From what I can tell, one of the appeals of the first season was the disconnect between characters. Their lack of communication drove the plot and drove the viewers crazy in the process. I’ve come to a point in my book where I know what the catalyst is, and I know what the result is, I just don’t know how it gets from point A to point B.

June 5, 2009

West Asset Management is Harassing me.

As I discussed earlier about AT&T Still Sucking, it turns out I’ve found a company that’s even worse- West Asset Management. Now, just to be clear, I gave these guys a fair shake- If a Vulture sees you lying on the ground crawling, it’s expected that they’ll circle. It’s their nature, I won’t fault them for it. What I WILL fault them for is continually calling me, trying to get me to settle even after I file the dispute charges.

June 4, 2009

nerd alert

I pride myself on being a geek, but every once in a while I do something that can’t be described any way other than “Nerdish”. Today I think I crossed that line again. 1) A while back I hooked up my old PC speakers (kinda nice) to my server in the basement, then streamed music through it. Well, this was fine and dandy for me, but jackie wanted “her” music.

June 3, 2009

Drains, Gardens, Grass Seed, Wii Fit and Darth Vader

Ok, so time for some updates: About 2 weeks ago I got my CPAP mask, and boy is it uncomfortable. I feel like it does help, but I wake up in the middle of the night with a small panic attack that this thing is on my face and end up taking it off. The idea is it’ll keep me breathing properly all night which means better sleep -> more energy -> easier to lose weight, etc.