04/08/07 - 19:24 EDT
Note To Self
Hide Easter eggs next year, before Easter!
(Amy likes surprises).
--Schmarty
05/27/06 - 19:04 EDT
Fuck Yeah for Biking and Brewing
Amy and I just went on an excellent bike ride through Frick Park, followed by a brewery tour of the East End Brewery, courtest of Venture Outdoors (well, we paid them $20). Scott (the guy who owns and operates the whole damn brewery) was a really cool guy and told us every damn thing he does (which is a lot). Check it out at http://eastendbrewing.com/ for more. Suffice to say that his process is very well thought out, and geared entirely towards creating excellent beers without messing with the environment. He runs "this whole operation without a dumpster".
In the end, I bought myself a T-Shirt to go along with the free (thanks, Venture Outdoors!) growler of Big Hop IPA.
Also, fuck yeah for biking. And for Amy's awesome new bike. The ride through Frick was great (if grueling in a few places. stupid hills). Thankfully we were hardcore enough to bike from home to the park (or in Amy's case, from the bike store a block over!), then all through the park, then from the park to the brewery, and from the brewery to the home. Hooray for us and beer (and while I'm at it: boobies).
I'm going to go collapse at a dinner table, now.
--Schmarty
05/17/06 - 00:42 EDT
Shitty Sysadmin TO THE MAXXX!!!
Holy fuck, it's a good thing there's not a Phlog Dev Blog, 'cuz this would have to go on it.
I've built an EXCELLENT system for doing phlog development. Build and test code in one place, store to CVS, update the production version and redeploy.
I'd found out a problem with the way Tomcat and Java were handling the images for the phlog. Namely, I was being careful to use a symlink to the main image directory (creating and destroying that symlink with bash scripts). However, when Tomcat went to deploy my project, it would hang for several seconds (a long time on this beastie of a dedicated server). Eventually I figured out that though I was cleverly symlinking into my project, Tomcat was copying over all of the damned images to its working directory, anyway.
So I took the symlink handling out of the build file and everything moved much more smoothly. Hooray for me. I finished up the work I was doing (an image thumbnail servlet for dealing with these punk-asses with nice new high-res camera phones), verified everything in the testbed, saved to CVS, updated the deployed version, and said the magic words:
ant removeRoot clean compile installRoot
The 'clean' target, which deletes all compiled files, took several seconds longer than I expected.
That's when the chill ran down the ol' spine.
After the project said it had redeployed, I loaded up the front page. All posts were being displayed. Displayed without their images, that is...
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!
It turns out that in my clever thinking about tossing the symlinks I didn't think about that one LAST call to 'clean'. Since I had removed my symlink handling step, the symlink to the images wasn't removed. Since the symlink was there and Java doesn't understand symlinks... I HAD DELETED EVERY IMAGE ON THE PHLOG.
::PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC::
Well the good news was that it wouldn't happen again, the symlink was gone and would cause no further damage. The bad news was HOW THE FUCK WAS I GOING TO GET ALL OF THOSE PHLOG POSTS BACK!?!?!?!?!
Thankfully, dear reader, my years of experience as a shitty sysadmin have taught me well to keep backups.
Well, they haven't taught me THAT well, or this wouldn't be a good story.
Having moved the phlog from my home server to the dedicated hosting box ~1 month ago, I had all phlogs up to those submitted one month ago on my home box. So, SCP began and those began to recover. So far, so good.
But so many fucking people had signed up in the past damn month! They would be goddamn livid if their posts were gone! I would be livid about the posts I had missed.
Thankfully, I had kept on the hosted server a copy of each email message in its entirety! I wrote some panicked-ass code to make a new phlog message handler which would simply extract the image from the message and put it where it belonged, no need to update the database.
That's running now. I know it'll work for all my T-Mobile, Verizon, Cingular, etc. users, whose carriers send along their images attached to the mail. I'm *not* so sure about users on Sprint, whose server may have dropped the messages by now.
Once again, I had serendipitously made myself a fallback. My backup system saves the image parallel to the message for just such an occasion. If things are missing, tomorrow, I'll just change the handler a bit to copy the file rather than trying to parse the original message.
I feel like about 10,000 karma points were just exploded over the night sky. I'll have to be on the lookout for random violent death and dismemberment in the coming weeks.
--Schmarty
05/05/06 - 01:05 EDT
zZZzzzzz
Seems to be the state of things.
--Schmarty
04/29/06 - 10:21 EDT
rollerblade
http://pittsburgh.about.com/od/recreation/a/skating.htm
04/15/06 - 14:58 EDT
OMGTired.
As they say in the new interweb lingo. I have just gone on my 5th bikeride (of ten) using my shitting bike, before I get to (maybe!) purchase a new one. So far my summer goal for Crap Loads of Bike Riding has been a success (as you may have seen on Phlog):
- We've made one full trip from SqHill->Point State Park downtown and back (that was a mistake. I could not ride my bike or even walk straight for 3 days or so).
- We've made one trip downtown via the Eliza Furnace trail (and back). That was much more relaxing.
- I've also biked to work.
- Twice.
- And today I rolled over to Point Breeze to visit Free Ride, the awesome volunteer "someone will show you how to fix your bike" service.
I will tell you this, however, living in and biking from a place named Squirrel Hill means that getting there is fun and easy, and coming back teaches you that sometimes your legs can't do what you think they can.
--Schmarty
03/14/06 - 22:14 EST
Might as well post something here
So the phlog is getting to be pretty popular over on the Jerknetwork. I just went through all of the previous posts (with comments only). It took me longer than two beers.
Now it just needs drinking content!!!
--Schmarty
03/14/06 - 00:24 EST
Some people need to not fuck with my news poster.
Also, according to Gibby, many things in the universe can be attributed to the following:
"all cause that fag loren decided to dry his hair."
--Schmarty
02/14/06 - 16:37 EST
Ugh
Fucking mailbot scripts. Why do they think this thing will spam email for them? It won't!
Anyway, deleted some awesome noise from this little blog. Next I need to make this page be worth a damn. :D
--Schmarty
01/16/06 - 11:14 EST
Clean Slate
Man. The phlog posts were making this page not only useless (not that it had a use before) but downright deadly to some computers (mine).
So: screw it. Phlog no longer posts here! If you wish to see more, you can check out: my phlog postings on the Jerknetwork.
--Schmarty
