August 14th, 2008
For the past year or so I have been partially commuting to work by bicycle on occasion. I live about 17 miles from my office so it is not practical to ride the whole way there and back. I have done that a few times but it ends up taking close to 3 hours for the whole trip. So most times I drive about 7-8 miles towards work, park in a parking lot somewhere and ride the rest of the way.
Yesterday was one of those days, but on the way home it was just such a nice day and I was really flying along that I just went right past my parked car and rode all the way home! I even managed to average 15mph on the slightly uphill journey, which is very good for me, especially with all the stopping at lights/stop signs.
Of course this morning that meant I had to drag myself out of bed after staying up until 1pm and get back on my bike for the 7 mile trip to the car, ugh. I just need to remember that soon the days will start getting shorter and colder and I really won’t feel like commuting…
Then when I got into work and unpacked my lunch I found that my mediterranean pasta decided it would explore the inside of my bag. Everything’s better with olive oil right?
-dweebo
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August 13th, 2008
Was trying to find a specific process to kill today on a solaris machine at work. But a
ps -ef | grep Process
didn’t help much because we run 3 or 4 instances of the program on different environments. We pass in a config file for each environment, but I couldn’t see that from the ps listing because it truncates the process information. Some days I just kill them all and hope no one notices.
But today I was looked via google that doing
/usr/ucb/ps -auxww | grep Process
returned the full process information and then I could kill the correct process.
Tags: ps, solaris
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August 12th, 2008
I used to have the pente database replicated to my home computer, but for the last few years haven’t been doing that (my linux box got gutted for other projects, and laziness). I’ve been just backing up a nightly copy of the database to my remote backup space.
Today I decided it is finally time to start backing up again, especially since I recently had a hard drive go bad on my server. I setup a vmware copy of Debian on my home PC and got it networked. Then I setup mysql and started to setup replication and realized I should probably replicate over SSL now, no sense in letting anyone snoop the data. So I followed the instructions at mysql.com and here but got stuck when I tried to connect with ssl with the error message
usr/src# mysql --ssl -h pente.org -uroot -p --ssl-ca=/dev/null
Enter password:
ERROR 2026 (HY000): SSL connection error
Looking on google that appears to happen to Debian because the mysql packages aren’t linked to openssl due to Debian’s strict licensing stuff. I found someone with a solution of compiling from source, and that worked for me as well. The one thing I’m not sure about now though is if future apt-get upgrade’s will work for security fixes to mysql, or will I have to check myself and redo the whole thing each time?
-dweebo
Tags: debian, etch, mysql, ssl
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August 11th, 2008
I recently read this book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
while on vacation at the beach. Not the usual beach book I’m sure, though I also read a few other books too. But it was an interesting read, dry at parts with its discussion about libraries and the dewey decimal system, but overall it provoked some thought.
My take on the author’s big idea is that now that we have the internet, and particularly with some of the new web 2.0 sites (twitter, digg, flickr, blogs, amazon book reviews, wikipedia, etc.), ordinary users (i.e. non-experts) can contribute their small bits of information about any and everything. Everything online is put into a big messy heap of unsorted data, but with the help of software we can analyze and find meaning (knowledge) from the heap that we couldn’t before. I guess its one of the reasons I want to try to blog, I normally am more of a user of the internet, not a participant. Hopefully I can add some bits to the pile that someone else will find useful someday.
The book actually gets way deeper, with a discussion of what knowledge actually is, how it is not something that is black / white but more relative to the observer. It sort of reminded me of the discussion of quality in Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance which I found interesting but hard trouble following! I never did finish that book but should pick it up again. The observer of the knowledge is not a single person however, but society as a whole. That started me thinking of some sci-fi books I’ve read where in the future the youth figure out how to link their minds with hardware and humanity evolves to the next level because of the “global brain” 
Anyways, it was a good book!
-dweebo
Tags: book
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August 11th, 2008
So I’m writing a blog, big wup right.
I don’t have a real clear idea yet what I will write about, or why anyone would care. A few things that I’d like to write about:
- Pente.org and what is going on with it. Currently the site’s “news” is hardly ever updated and maybe there would be more posts in a blog and I could update the main page to show blog posts
- Interesting projects I’m doing with my own development/hosting company hewittsoft.com
- Point out good web sites I come across, or good books I’ve recently read
- Put some pictures up, and other personal stuff
- Document technical issues I resolve, to help others and to have a record for myself when I forget things!
We’ll just have to see if I can post regularly or not…
-dweebo
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