Longest Upgrade Ever
With the release of a new OpenOffice.org from Ubuntu (to close some security issues), Ubuntu’s servers are being hammered. I happed to flip to the ‘apt-get upgrade’ window I had going just in time to see this:
Longest Upgrade Ever
Look at the time left on the download. I don’t think I want to wait ’49,710 days’ for the download to finish. That’s roughly 187 (and then some) years. I wonder if my son’s son’s son would finish the upgrade for me?
Fortunately, the download didn’t take quite that long. It finished shortly after I got done cropping the screenshot. I still think it’s pretty funny what “progress bars” will read from time-to-time.
Backup Disaster
Here’s my backup schema.
My laptops (3 of them) and flash drives (a handful of them) get backed up to an external hard drive named “Helix”.
Helix, in turn, gets backed up to an identical external hard drive named “Operator”.
Now that the scene is set….
I had successfully backed up 2 of 3 laptops and all my flash drives to Helix. While laptop #3 was being backed up, I decided to save a little time and wiped Operator to make room for the fresh image coming in from Helix.
Well… Dammit… During the backup of the third laptop, things went all screwy and the hard drive at itself. Now I’m left with no backup of anything I deemed important. You see, there was data on Helix that was not on any of my laptops or flash drives. I’m not sure what to do now other than to fsck Helix and see if I can recover the drive. I really hope that I can because I can’t afford to lose the years (decades?) worth of collected data, files, music, PDFs, pictures and more. I just hope the fsck works. It churned all night last night and didn’t finish by the time I had to leave for work. I have the drive plugged into my laptop now, and a second fsck is churning away. I hope things come out well. We’ll see…
Now to figure out an affordable solution for backing up the data that just lives on Helix and none of the laptops or flash drives. *sigh*
S9Y Gone
Serendipity (S9Y) is going away on my site. I’m removing it forever because I have migrated everything to WordPress and I’m very very happy with the results.
S9Y served me well over the long years this blog has been around, but it’s anti-spam features are, quite honestly, lacking and poor. WordPress has rocked in this area, so I’m sticking with it.
Goodbye, S9Y.
Learning Ruby
For some reason, I’ve picked up a Ruby book (I had a free book coming to me from a local tech book store.)
I’ve been reading through it, and I’ve gotten up to page 80. Ruby is a slick little language, and I can see why it’s so popular. After I’m through some of the more complex concepts in the language, I may see about rewriting some of my existing applications in Ruby… Just for the fun of it.
We’ll see how it goes.
Domain Name Expired
I screwed up and must have missed the warning emails from Network Solutions (my domain name registrar) about the fact that my domain name was about to expire. I got an email this morning telling me that my domain name protection service had expired, which meant that anyone in the world could have scooped up my domain name. Fortunately, the domain name is worthless. It’s really not a great e-commerce or business name, so it’s pretty safe.
I’m just glad someone didn’t snag it, park it, and ransom it for big bucks. I’m not sure I would have shelled out the money for the ransom had this happened. I guess it would have depended on the price and how well I trusted the ransom holder.
Anyway, beosig.net is safe for another three years.
PS: I did check my other four domains (yes, I have five total), and they are fine for a while. As a matter of fact, the one I have for my son is good until he turns 10 years old, and he’s only four months old at the moment. Heh. That’s assuming that the whole WWW as we know it now still exists a decade from now.
OSCON 2007 Trackback
As most of you know I went to OSCON 2007 last year. I recently subscribed to the OSCON 2008 RSS feed in anticipation of going again this year. The OSCON 2008 RSS feed had a large dump of articles today, and I was linked in with them!!! This really makes me happy and proud that O’Reilly thinks that my write-ups on the conference warranted linking to.
Here’s a blurb that they pulled from one of my posts and put on their site:
“The trip was worth every penny, every bit of effort, the lost sleep, and the crazy schedule. I learned more than I ever thought I would. I met more people than I thought I would, and I got to learn about new companies, new products, and new ideas. I really hope to be able to return next year, but that’s a year off. We’ll see how it goes at that time.”
I tend to try to work my links into my wording, but there are too many to try to do that with. Here they are:
I’m Not Alone!
Two weeks ago, I made this post railing against the fact that so many schools are cramming Java down the throats of CS students, which is making them become less effective at coming up with their own solutions to real world problems.
I kept my rant short, but there are a few people out there that have talked in much greater detail about why they also dislike this trend in universities. Here are some related posts of people that agree with me:
A Real Programmer Can Write in Any Language
This write-up by Dr. Robert B.K. Dewar and Dr. Edmond Schonberg makes me very happy. They are basically railing against the propensity that modern universities and colleges have towards forcing Java on first-time programmers instead of teaching them the foundations of quality software engineering. Most universities are ignoring the basics of how to actually get software to operate properly. Properly means keeping data and processes secure, functional, accurate, stable, and efficient.
Java may attempt to enforce some of these things, but by programming in Java, the person at the keyboard is not taught how to do these things. They take it for granted that their language will do it for them, and this is not always the case. It’s like not wearing a seatbelt because you assume your airbag will save your life.
One analogy that Dewar/Schonberg used was this:
“The irresistible beauty of programming consists in the reduction of complex formal processes to a very small set of primitive operations. Java, instead of exposing this beauty, encourages the programmer to approach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware store: by rummaging through a multitude of drawers (i.e. packages) we will end up finding some gadget (i.e. class) that does roughly what we want. How it does it is not interesting! The result is a student who knows how to put a simple program together, but does not know how to program.”
Another quote from the write-up that really tickles me is this one, “Conversely, we want to say that a competent programmer is comfortable with a number of different languages and that the programmer must be able to use the mental tools favored by one of them, even when programming in another.” According to these guys, I’m a competent programmer. I’ve always been able to take my expertise in one language and translate it into usefulness in another language. I’d like to see a pure Java programmer claim the same thing.
I could rant on this for much, much longer, but I highly suggest that you click the link at the start of this blog to see more of what got me started. I agree with pretty much everything that they’ve written there.
My Mud Is Dead
Almost a year ago, I announced Mudding Is Dead. I held on to my mud for as long as I possibly could even though no one was playing it. I built a new server, and put it online a few weeks ago. The new server had a new OS, new compiler, new libraries, new everything. I had to recompile my mud to get it to work under the new architecture. It didn’t compile cleanly. I spent maybe 30 minutes messing with the code fixing the east stuff, and then I hit a snag that wasn’t hard, but required some reworking of the internals of the mud. Entirely possible. Entirely easy. Not entirely trivial. I have the skill to fix the problem, but I just don’t have the time.
I sent an email to the staff (only one of whom cared enough to reply) telling them that the mud was dead, and those people that had shell accounts on the server would need to get their stuff because at the start of the new year, I was going to blow it all away. Today was the day that arrived for me to blow that stuff away, and I did. There were some really great things in the mud, so I did, of course, back it all up to a tarball.
While I was backing things up, I came across idea files, databases, notes, and other stuff… Man… we had some awesome ideas in there. We also had some awesome ideas that never got implemented.
It was really sad shutting down and removing everything. I knew that it was inevitable, but that makes it no less sad. My good friend died a long and wasting death. I knew that it was coming, and I made him as comfortable as possible during his passing, but it came time to shed a tear, bury the body, and say a final goodbye.
Fare Thee Well, Spear of Insanity. You will be missed.
Guelphism
Random word list:
spermatozoic
paranitrosophenol
Guelphism
Slovintzi
masque
Word chosen: Guelphism
Definitions:
1. a member of the political party in medieval Italy and Germany that supported the sovereignty of the papacy against the German emperors: opposed to the Ghibellines.
2. a member of a secret society in Italy in the early 19th century that opposed foreign rulers and reactionary ideas.
Free association word list:
Pope Bennedict
Modern Inquisition
Spanish Inquisition
torture
waterboarding
interrogation
General Attorney
nomination
Senate
vote
approval
balance of power
unbalanced
spying
telecom industry
EFF
Steve Jackson Games
Secret Service
Word chosen: EFF
Writing:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation was started when Steve Jackson Games was erroneously raided by the Secret Service for things that they had nothing to do with. One of SJG’s authors was working on a role-playing supplement called “Cyberpunk” for the GURPS RPG. During the course of the author’s investigation, he came across plenty of information on hacking, phreaking, cracking software, and the people that do such things. Most of this went into the game as rules on running these situations. Turns out that the Secret Service thought it was a how-to manual, and raided SJG’s office.
SJG lost all of their computers, all of their in-process work, lots of equipment, and Steve Jackson damn near lost the company. He had to cut back so severely that he had to lay off half of his staff! In the end, SJG persevered, and is thriving quite well.
The EFF was the organization that helped bail SJG out of their legal troubles, and went after the Secret Service to get justice for SJG. Ever since those days in 1990-1991, the EFF has fought the battle to keep our electronic communication mediums open, honest, secure, and private from the prying eyes of the government.
I’ve been a moral supporter of their efforts for years and years, but I only recently joined the ranks of the monetary supporters since it was only recently that I was able to do so. I hope to be able to continue my membership with them for quite some time.
If you have any fears about privacy in our digital age, and what people are doing to protect that privacy, please check out the EFF. They’re a great group of people doing great things for this nation and its citizens.
Their web site is located at: http://www.eff.org/
