All posts by rbowen

Those holding a ticket with the letter K

I went to Joseph Beth this evening, knowing that if I stayed home, I would be distracted by IRC and get nothing written. As it turned out, Robert Jordan was there, signing his new book. And so were all the Robert Jordan fans in the state of Kentucky. Every one of them. And they were all waiting for him to sign their copy. Every 10 minutes or so, the Uber-Loud announcer would announce the next letter in the alphabet, and there would be a mad rush of frenzied fans around the store trying to get in line. Meanwhile, the rest of the fans, realizing that they would be waiting until sunrise to get their book signed, moped dejectedly around, pretending to be interested in the latest edition of Car and Driver, or The Complete Morons Guide to Navel-Lint Farming. It was almost as distracting as IRC. But not quite. So I stayed until I had written at least one chapter, and then came home. At least, I think I finished a chapter. I’m not actually sure, since the chapter was not outlined, and I was sort of winging it.

The light remains the same

Today could have been a lot worse, I suppose.

On the way to work, the light at Reynolds and Clays Mill stayed red
through 4 cycles, while traffic in all other lanes got green. I finally
just went through on red when there was a break in traffic, as I had no
desire to be there all day. And while this was a pretty poor omen for
the day as well, the rest of the day turned out pretty good. I did an
install at a customer site, so got to spend some time in the car
listening to Umberto Eco. And the install went well, which is always
good. So, for the most part, I seem to have escaped from the terrible
karma of yesterday.

Ill omen

I just managed to drop the lid of the sugar bowl into my cup of coffee, and spent about 2 minutes fishing for it with a fork before I managed to locate it and get it out. With this little omen, I feel that perhaps today is going to be just as wonderful as yesterday.

What else could go wrong?

Some days, it just doesn’t pay to chew through the leather straps.

Today, I made the mistake of going to work, and things just went downhill from there.

I should start by mentioning that the one good part about today was that my little girl was with me all day. Of course, this was because she was sick and stayed home from school, but, still, it was the one redeeming quality of the day.

Yesterday, our coloc called and told us that our UPS was beeping, and we needed to come out and take care of it. Well, I promptly forgot about it. When I went in to work this morning, I was reminded of it, and went in to the coloc. We have three machines in a rack there. And it was beeping very loudly, but it did not sound like a UPS beep to me. But, anyways, I shut down the machines, swapped out the UPS, and started them all up again. And it started beeping again. Oy.

So I finally figured out that one of the drives in the RAID array had gone south, and that was what was beeping. So, I figured I would pop down to the computer store, get a new SCSI drive, and pop it in there. Right? Well, there’s a catch. I live in Kentucky – not exactly the technology center of the world. I could not find a store that had SCSI drives as part of their standard stocked items.

By this time, Sarah needed to get her nap, and some lunch, so we went back home, and made some calls while Sarah rested, and tracked down some small custom computer shops that actually had SCSI drives. I expected I could have gotten it cheaper if I had had more time to shop around, but meanwhile, my RAID array was running on 2 drives, and beeping at the sound level of a 747 taking off.

Sarah didn’t take much of a nap, and about 4:30, we headed back out, picked up the drive – an 18G rather than the 9 that I needed, so half of the drive was lost right off the bat – and took it back to the coloc.

The machine in question was a Dell poweredge, which is one of those nice machines that opens up and disassembles easily. But I could not get the darned thing apart, and nobody in the whole building had a screwdriver I could use. So I had to reassemble things, start it back up yet again, and come home to get tools.

We got back there at about 5:30, put the drive in (only had to redo it once, due to having the drive jumpered wrong) and waited an hour while the drive rebuilt.

So it is up and working now, but I don’t recall having a day this frustrating for a very long time.

There were a number of other very frustrating events today, but none of them warrant discussing in a forum this public. Suffice it to say that it was annoying enough to last me a good long time.

Third time’s the charm

DrBacchus’ Journal: Surreal tech support situation

Third time’s the charm. The first two people that I spoke to were not able to help me, and it was not even clear that they understood the problem. This time, I spoke with Tim, who clearly knew what I was talking about. This made the whole conversation much more pleasant.

While he agreed with me as to the problem and the likely solution, it was not quite that simple, since they are, of course, using some mass vhosting module. He was not able to tell me what module, exactly, they were using. Not that it matters – I was just curious. But apparently the account name makes the hostname different from what we are using, and this goes into the mass-vhosting algorithm. He agreed to change the name on the account, which should resolve the problem, but could take several hours to actually happen.

So, we seem to have a happy conclusion to this all. And the next time you call Earthlink support, ask for Tim.

Religious tolerance … well, except for Christianity

I suppose I could get inflamatory here, but I’ll try to remain bemused and offer commentary, rather than ire.

I find it interesting, in a culture that appears to value tolerance over discrimination (and here, please note, gentle reader, that I use the term discrimination to refer to the intellectual process of considering options and choosing the better, rather than the brainless process of spurning those who are different) that the principle of religious tolerance appears to apply to only non-Christian religions. Now, I suppose, that as a white protestant male, this should not surprise me, as tolerance in all other areas applies to those that are *not* in the majority groups, while those who *are* in the majority groups are deemed not to warrant such tolerance. Likewise, Christianity, being in the majority in the USA, is not deemed worthy of tolerance. Tolerance, after all, is something that the majority is supposed to extend to the minority, not the other way around.

I find this attitude abhorant at a number of levels. It is hypocritical, with different standards applied to people from different groups, which is, in turn, the very discrimination (of the latter, not former, definition) that it seeks to counteract. But it also seems to imply that the majority are, in fact, in the moral right, and should extend these graces to the “lower” groups, which are not required to reciprocate. This attitude, too, is worse than the evil it seeks to counteract.

As to why I bring this up – A discussion has arrisen on the datetime@perl.org mailing list as to what is the first day of the week. I made a comment that the “general usage” should determine the the API, so that average users would find the API useful. And, although the ISO has declared that Monday is the first day, any calendar on the shelves of your local bookstore will list Sunday as the first day, and that thus the API should reflect this, not the ISO’s statement. But, that, perhaps, this opinion was more that of a USA audience, with largely Christian heritage, at least within the last 3 generations, and that the European perspective was solicited. I suppose that I did not phrase it quite that way. draw your own conclusions.

What amazed me, though, was that this generated not just one, but two sarcastic remarks about how Christians are confused about the distinction between Sunday, the Sabbath, and the Seventh day, on which God rested from his labors of creating the world. This is not the case – Sunday is a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, not a celebration of the Sabbath, and the Christian tradition is not confused about this, although certain individuals may be.

Now, perhaps I’m oversensitive about this, but it’s not an isolated incident. It is fine, in our culture, to criticize Christians, but not to criticize Islam, Universalists, Buddhists, or Hindus. It is perfectly OK to equate radical wackos like Robert Tilton and Tammy Faye with Christianity as a whole, but if you were to equate Osama Bin Laden with Islam as a whole, you would be accused of religious intolerance and bigotry. Clearly, Robert Tilton does not represent the traditional view of Christianity any more than Osama Bin Laden represents traditional Islam – at least, this would be clear to anyone who took a moment to look at the larger picture.

Now, I’m straying rather far afield from the original remarks made on the mailing list, and I don’t want, by any stretch, to claim that the people making those comments were the same insensitive boors that I’m portraying here. I do think, however, that they are related symptoms of the same social ill. And I think that the majority has as much right to courteous treatment as do any given minority.

But, perhaps, as a white protestant american male, I’m not entitled to that opinion.

=====

Followup: 2003-Jan-13

Note:

Please note that the comments made merely sparked this line of thought, and were not nearly as inflamatory as this article might lead you to believe. This article is part of a long train of thought, and not solely based on the remarks made on the mailing list, which, in retrospect, I appear to have misconstrued anyway. *sheepish grin*

Dates and stuff

I’m waiting for my talk to start. I don’t have network in the room, and there is evidently no way to get it. This is unfortunate, as a number of my examples would benefit from having network access.

I just spoke with Adam Turoff, who is here for the Golden Penguin Bowl. I’m sorry I’ll be missing that. That could have been fun.

We also talked about Calendrical Calculations. For those of you not privy to the extended conversation, C.C. is a wonderful book containing algorithms for a plethora of non-Gregorian calendars. It comes with Lisp code, as well as translations into several other languages. I would like to write Perl modules using these algorithms. However, the “license” that comes with the book forbids using the algorithms for commercial purposes. Well, if I go to the trouble of writing the modules, I will release them to CPAN under the Artistic/GPL joint license, and I don’t intend to put any caveats in there about commercial uses.

There appears to be no way for them to patent their algorithms, and so it appears that, legally, I can do what I want to do. However, I don’t want to make enemies of these fine gentlemen. I would much rather win them over to the Open Source/Free Software mentality, and have them grant me permission on their own, without coercion. The tricky thing will be if they refuse, what can I do then. Hopefully, I can get someone to ghost-write a note to them, being more persuasive.

The book is fabulous. I don’t believe that releasing modules to CPAN will hurt their sales. I recommend this book to anyone interested in calendars. The information in here is fascinating. But smarter people than I, have said that the license agreement that comes with the book is a Very Bad Thing, and, even though it seems legally insupportable, they would still shun using the algorithms, because they have no interest in getting into a legal fight – even one that they would certainly win. Of course, with the way that silly laws like the DMCA are going, they might actually win. Then I’d be broke *and* a loser, instead of just broke.

By the way, there appears to be a GPL C implementation of these algorithms. I need to talk to that guy, and see what kind of arrangement he has with the authors, if any.

Oh, and regardless of how this all turns out, I encourage you to pick up a copy of Calendrical Calculations, by Ed Reingold and Nachum Derschowitz.

mod_perl, DateTime::, and other

Various tech things going on that I thought I’d mention.

DateTime Perl modules

The biggest one, I suppose, is that Dave Rolsky has rejuvinated the Perl DateTime module jihad that I started way back in May 2001, and which subsequently died because I did not have the time or energy to fight the status quo.

Dave’s actual note is here, and is very very worth reading if you have any interest in the state of Date/Time modules in Perl, and the general arean of date/time/calendar calculations on a grander scale.

Summary: Date/Time modules in Perl are a huge joke. There’s more than 15 ways to do any given thing (a case where TIMTOWTDI is not necessarily a good thing is when it gets way out of hand) and they might give different results. There’s no document, other than the random chicken scratchings that I have produced, that give you a roadmap of the available modules. And I really fell down on that pretty early. And, most importantly, the modules can’t talk to each other. So you can get a date in the Discordian calendar, but if you want to convert it to a date in the Mayan calendar, you’re out of luck, because they use different syntax. Or, if you have a date in the Vedic calendar, and want to know what holidays it corresponds with in China, well, that’s really hard too.

mod_perl

Well, not really much to say about mod_perl. Two things, both of them small in the grand scale of things.

One, I have been receiving the mod_perl mailing list at work for 2 years, and periodically deleting all the messages when the total unread message count goes over 2000. That’s gotta stop. It’s an important list, and I need to be reading at least some of it. So I’ve moved the subscription to home, where I have better mail filtering, and tend to be more careful about reading incoming mail. And I’m going to read it all, or at least those things with topics that seem to be important. Consider it a new years resolution of sorts.

Email, Again

SpamAssassin, for no apparent reason, stopped putting spam in /var/spool/mail/spam, and started delivering it to my users, but with [SPAM] in the subject line. This was ok for me, but was not OK for my parents, who did not have an appropriate filter in place, and so received 200+ [SPAM] messages a day for about 2 days.

Then it stopped.

First of all, I blamed this on the upgrade to Perl 5.8, but it turns out that this is one of the machines on which the upgrade was not performed. So I am baffled. Particularly about it stopping.

Oh, and a VERY important lesson that came out of this. First, don’t edit regular expressions at 1 in the morning. Second, the regular expression [SPAM] is not the same as the regular expression [SPAM] Exactly what foolish thing I did is left as an exercise to the reader.