Thursday, July 2. 2009
One week passed and in 24 hours I will already be almost halfway on my way back!
New York is great, both as a city and as a Google office, and I'll definitely try to have some more trips to here in the future. The first night I walked here, on my way from the Penn Ave LIRR station to the apartment, I already decided I'd spend as little time in the apartment as possible. Weather forecasts looked like they were going to get in the way, but the actual weather was pretty fine (almost) all the time.
What did I see? Loads of high buildings, walked along the water quite a bit, saw the building site that used to be the WTC (I expected to see some monument, but nope!), Times Square, a view from on the General Electric Building, the Statue of Liberty from far away, a tiny piece of Central Park, another park near it closer to the water, and blisters on my feet after walking for many hours especially during the weekend. I tried to not be a typical tourist and probably failed, but I must say that I saw a few of these things by accident by just running into them while pointlessly walking around through the city.
I made over 500 pictures and will try to make a decent selection of what's actually interesting and original. This is probably going to take a while... :-(
Time to catch some sleep now; in the morning I will finish packing and spend half a day at work. After that I'll get the joy of travelling to/being at JFK airport the night before the Independence Day weekend. My planning was definitely "splendid" with that detail in mind...
Thursday, June 25. 2009
For the next week I'll be writing from (who knows how often, keeping my blogging frequency in mind :-P) New York. Arrived yesterday, flied Aer Lingus long-haul for the first time and I'm actually quite satisfied, especially because they did not charge me for sitting at the exit. :-)
Staying in the middle of Manhattan and will spend most of my time at work, not so much doing touristy stuff. Although the nights will be long and this place does look like it's suitable for night photography. So let's see if I can finally put my Sigma f/1.4 lens to work.
Ooh. Also this seems to be my fiftieth blog post. 50 posts in 32 months. I guess that's not too bad. :-P
Saturday, June 6. 2009
Sigh. If a PHP coder says "The complete upgrade path is automatted and can be performed with a single mouse click.", don't believe him. I just spent almost an hour on a Serendipity upgrade. Maybe it works well if you have a dumbass FTP CGI-exec webhost, but I miss the good old days without "user friendly" installer scripts, where installing a webapp was a matter of unpacking a tarball and feeding a database dump to MySQL. Stuff just worked without having to give the webserver write permissions pretty much everywhere.
But now, after the hackish s9y upgrade I lost the old theme, random plugins broke and I had to reinstall + reconfigure them (after resolving some more permission issues), and the best part must be that the upgrade script does absolutely no error checking. After tons of error messages it says "upgrade successful". Fortunately it's also dumb and didn't mark the upgrade as successful, so I could retry the upgrade after fixing permissions. One day I'll just figure out how to move all this stuff to Blogger. :-/
Anyway, I promised pictures. Lots of stuff is now on http://wilmer.gaast.net/fotos/. Don't have very fast hosting for it yet, but I'll work that out later. Hilights are the pictures of my first flight lesson, and also pictures of my cool model airplane. Bought it in April (after mostly trashing my Super Cub and leaving it behind in Beilen), and got some cool in-flight pictures. I also bought a 37g camera especially designed for attaching to these planes, so soon I'll be spying on people in the park and around here in Dublin. :-P
Some pretty hiking pictures from this year's Mountain View trip are also there: Big Sur (under Monterey), Rancho San Antonio (just under Mountain View/Sunnyvale). In other news, I'm flying to New York on the 24th. Not sure if I'll make any pictures there since probably everything there has been photographed to death already.
Wednesday, May 20. 2009
And my time in Mountain View is over again!
Had a busy time. At work, but also pretty cool weekends. Best of all was a one-hour flying lesson last Sunday, in a real Cessna 182. Pictures will definitely come!
One picture I have now is a fine piece of Macintoy PoS X security. And yes, those buttons are clickable even before I type my password to "unlock" my screen. I'm starting to wonder why we're even allowed to use these things for work purposes.
Saturday, May 9. 2009
Just a quick Perl hack I put together last night. This "oneliner" reads the sessionstore.js file and prints the URLs of all tabs you're currently looking at. I also noticed that the sessionstore contains lots of other useful information, including all session cookies. I'm quite sure that will come in handy some day. :-D I took a quick look for code that does this, and found people trying to put some complicated grep/regex together, but that seemed way too fragile to me. One person did it in JavaScript (which makes a lot of sense since the session store is encoded as a JavaScript data structure), and I decided to go that way as well except I'm using Perl's JavaScript module so it can still run on the command-line. :-)
CODE: #!/usr/bin/perl
use JavaScript;
my $rt = JavaScript::Runtime->new();
my $cx = $rt->create_context();
$cx->bind_function(fetch => sub { print( $_[0] . "\n" ); });
$sess = `cat ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/sessionstore.js`;
$sessparser = <<EOF;
for( var win_ in sess['windows'] )
{
win = sess['windows'][win_];
for( var tab_ in win['tabs'] )
{
tab = win['tabs'][tab_];
fetch(tab['entries'][tab['index'] - 1]['url']);
}
}
EOF
$cx->eval('var sess = ' . $sess . ';' . $sessparser);
And yes, my code is indented, but my shitty blog software likes to break it.
Tuesday, May 5. 2009
This week I'm frantically reloading the UPS package tracking page of my laptop shipment every few hours, and it looks like last night my package received a free tour through LA!
Back where it was about 24 hours ago apparently. :-( And LA is over 600 km away from here so I really wonder if they're still going to make it for delivery tomorrow... While looking at the map to see where these places are, I did notice one odd detail:
Apparently there's another thing called Mountain View in California. Did the package courier get confused? :-)
Update: Apparently it arrived in San Francisco at 17:40 today even without a departure scan from Vernon. I guess I should just take this tracking page with a grain of salt. :-)
Sunday, May 3. 2009
Writing from Mountain View again! Landed on Thursday, spent one day at work so far and today I got my bicycle fixed up so I can use it for commuting again. It's nice how year after year, the thing still works for me, all it needs when I come is some extra air in the tires. :-) One thing California is really not doing well this year is the weather, though. It's raining for two days already!
In other news, I should definitely be plugging The Australian Pink Floyd Show in this post. They were in Dublin about a week ago and they're amazingly good. Even a singer that sounds a lot like Roger Waters! The show was great too, with inflatable animals and everything, and the music sounded perfect. This tour they're playing all of The Wall, and for that that means not just a "copy" of the CD, but also many of the little filler pieces that PF used to play during the concerts.
Also working on a bit of OSS these weeks, adding more "diversity" to the already bloated landscape of gallery webapps. I'm making a difference though, SRSLY! I found myself making a lot more pictures since I bought my first dSLR and many of them aren't really part of an album/event or anything like that. I could just put them on Flickr or Picasa and be done with it, but that'd break my time-wasting tradition of hosting everything myself.
I already use F-Spot to manage my pictures, so it'd be nice to have a web gallery that can automatically use tag information from F-Spot. Turns out there are two programs that can do this already. They're not for me though; they automatically export everything, and there are pictures that I'd rather keep for myself. :-P
I then tried to adapt "original" to my wishes, but gave up when I saw it doesn't quite use templates and am rewriting it now using web.py and Cheetah templates. Going well, but TBH I feel homesick to PHP. Not that it's such a great language, it's more that I fail to understand why there are 982397832 different webapp frameworks for Python/WSGI/mod_python/whatever instead of just one that actually works.
This is a work in progress, and the progress is good. :-) Once it's done, I'll be able to post pictures here of my new radio-controlled airplane and other neat stuff. Yaaaay...
Saturday, January 10. 2009
Wednesday, I had this very friendly mail in my INBOX, from mdam:
QUOTE:
This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadm running on tosca
A Fail event had been detected on md device /dev/md1.
Faithfully yours, etc.
There was little reason to panic, since I had a spare disk installed already. A few man- and mdadm commands later, the array was resyncing. I walked away from the screen, confident that there was nothing to worry about.
How wrong could I be! Somewhere at 99% of the recovery process, one of the existing disks threw a read error. This was too much for md, and to punish me it marked two disks as spares, one as failed and only one as still working. RAID5 may be designed to deal with broken disks, but it does have its limits. ;-) This is where it got scary, especially since this machine is, say, 1300km away from me.
With some remote help, I managed to get the machine rebooted in single user mode with an sshd running. The disks were all available again, but the superblocks were sufficiently broken that md didn't want to construct the LVM array anymore. (Fortunately the rootfs array was not a problem!)
Anyway, I spent that night copying the raw partitions over to another machine. Tried to construct an array there, but things were untable, md often tried to resync the partitions (bad idea), or simply didn't want to run it for me. Instead of trying to make this go, I decided to write a little tool to do the dirty work for me. And that, reader, is why I'm writing this. :-)
To my surprise, I couldn't find any tool to do this on FreshMeat. Sure, when I search for "RAID recovery" on Google, I get plenty of ads for "Professional RAID recovery tools", but I don't want to pay $$$$ for a program that XORs a couple of GBs of data for me. :-P
So, behold: raidrec. Comes with no documentation, other than this blog article and the (long) comment at the top of the file. I hope it'll be useful for someone some day... It was for me. I have all my data back, LVM picked up all my volumes perfectly, and a few fscks later I managed to migrate all my VMs to OpenVZ running on a desktop elsewhere in the house. At least ruby (my workstation here in Dublin) isn't the only desktop machine being a part-time gaast.net webserver anymore. :-/
If anyone didn't get the JournalSpace reference (which fortunately isn't very accurate here anyway): http://journalspace.com/
|
Recent comments