It appears that mod_gzip keeps work files FOREVER. Don’t say that you want to keep work files, because it will. I appear to have GIGABYTES of mod_gzip work files. And I’ve been backing them up. For months. This is an enormous pain.
You bet your life
When I am in big cities like this, I am struck more than ever by how much we rely on the good will of strangers. In fact, as is observed by Rush in their song of the same name, “you bet your life.” I got in a van with 9 strangers, and wandered around a strange (*very* strange) city for almost an hour, just hoping that I would end up somewhere pleasant. And, eventually, I did. This is a very nice hotel room. Not quite as nice as the room at ApacheCon, but still very nice. And a lot cheaper.
They did not have any note that my room cost would be covered. And Kevin Lenzo, who was standing next to me at the check-in counter, also did not have such a note on his reservation record. I don’t think Kevin knew who I was, which makes perfect sense considering I met him once, more than 1.5 yrs ago. Kevin has done some very cool stuff, including the original YAPC, and heading up YAS.
While we’re quoting Rush …
In the canyons of the city, you can hear the buildings cry.
It is darned cold out there, and the wind is just killer. But on some streets, you feel like you’re in a canyon, and the wind whips through it like it is possessed, and flings trash at cars almost belligerently.
On another, completely unrelated note, it appears that Apache::Perldoc does not work under Perl 5.8. I have not yet figured out why this is the case, but it appears that pod2html itself has changed syntax somewhere in that timeframe, and so when Apache::Perldoc calls pod2html, the arguments are geborken.
Flying to New York
The flight out of Lexington was delayed, and my time in Cincinatti, already painfully tight, was reduced to about 3 minutes. I arrived at the gate after they had already closed the door, but as the plane door was still open, they let me on.
And so I’m on my way to JFK, using my wonderful new ElectroVaya 16-hour laptop battery. I’m really happy with it. Although it was very expensive, it’s cheaper than 3 laptop batteries, which is about how long it lasts. Except for my laptop batteries, which seem to last about 10 minutes on a good day. When I’m using 802.11, it seems to last about 6 hours. When I’m not, I seem to be getting about 10 hours out of it. So it’s not *really* 16, although I suppose if I did console only, no sound, no network, I could probably get that much out of it.
In other news, the Magical Vhosts thingy that I posted a few weeks ago only works for one vhost. So it’s not much good. The fix is pretty simple. Instead of:
$VirtualHost{‘*’} = { … etc
I have
push @{$VirtualHost{‘*’}}, { … etc
This should have been obvious to start with, but, alas, I did not actually test it. Well, I tested it with one vhost, but not with more than one. And having it work for one vhost is not terribly useful.
Hopefully, the guy on IRC who was frantically trying to get this working will still be online this evening, or tomorrow morning, or some time, so that he does not get fired for not getting this working. I had to get on the plane, and so did not have a chance to tell him my solution, which I really just arrived at just now, at 5000 feet or so.
Linux World Expo
Heading out to Linux World Expo this afternoon. In New York City. In the dead of winter. Ick. Anyways, hopefully it won’t be too terrible, and there will be a few training leads that come out of it. (Shameless self-promotion!)
My goal for this trip is to get my GPG key signed by John “Mad dog” Hall.
Oh, yeah, and to get my presentation written before it is time to give it. 😉
Mongols?
Seems Saddam is calling us the new Mongols. (NOTE: If you saw this earlier, the link was completely wrong. This should be better now.)
Now, personally, I find this a bit comical, since the Mongols left Iraq a smoking pile of rubble, so this seems like a bit of a bad omen.
But, on a more serious note, there’s the matter of the Mongol Horde itself. I mean, how many times in history does one get the opportunity to participate in a mongol horde? Not many, my friends. Go enlist now, while there is still time.
And, more importantly, there are the yaks.
Here, for your reading pleasure, a slightly sanitized IRC transcript:
BOB: so, that means we like large women, long hair and ride yaks
BOB: See the World! Ride Yaks! Scare the pants off of Women! Meet Genghis in Person!
BOB: Yak Riding. Do they do that in the first week or did they tack that on to the end of boot camp?
Bacchus: I wanna yak!
BOB: now where would you keep him? he would produce quite a quantity of fertilizer.
HARRY: in the yak pens out back. Doesnt everyone have one of those? or am I just Spesial
Bacchus: In the spare bathroom
CHARLIE: (large women)++
There you have it, folks. Proving, yet again, that IRC is the source of all wisdom.
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.