Older blog entries for kickaha (starting at number 12)

Raid controllers should not crash. Spent 4 hours carefully recovering drives after an attempt to attach a 'scratch' drive.

A gunman has taken hostages in an Amsterdam office building, complaining about misleading advertising in widescreen TVs. Why? Philips, maker of many consumer electronics products including widescreen TVs, had its temporary offices in the building until getting more permanent offices elsewhere a few months ago, ie, they ain't there now.

It'll end in tears ;)

So much for leaving in daylight. Spun up a new server to run into troubles with hardware raid not being properly detected under Linux, then bootdisk conflicts with IDE. Repeat until Caffiene exhausted.

rsync sucks raw week-old eggs when asked to sync a 60+gig dataset, even broken up into smaller chunks.

chipx86, a diary isn't quite the right thing for others to comment on your words ala message-board style. All too often it just results in flame wars.

Of course, commenting on other's words in your own entry is part of the whole fun of Advogato.

work:

Playing mp3s over NFS is only as good as your local buffer. Having shiny new gigE in your office core helps greatly.

Actually managed to leave the office during daylight hours. Amazing how different your regular cycle home looks.

Watched The One last night. Yet another spin on Everything you know about your life, your reality, yourself, is Wrong.

Some rather cool martial arts scenes, Matrix-like stop-motion moves in parts. There are a few fatal lapses (ie, where did the surrounding explosion go in one of the end fight scenes, why were they so keen to transport the bad self off to Hades at the end, etc etc, etc) but overall quite nice.

Flubbed a performance on the weekend, but thats ok, was more relieved that the mobile didn't ring during it.

The letter cluster survived their first night together being bedded down. Should be more aux kit tossed at it in a few months.

Beginning to seriously loath BB due to how it handles target changes. You should not have to restart the entire monitoring system after removing a target, nor should you have to repeat the excercise the next day.

ugh. more pretty things being moved remotely and machines to remotely down and reconfigure and misunderstandings to sort out. The internet is safe once more. </sardonic>

~14hrs on work. definitely calling in late.

There once was a Goon named Milligan
Who put his Spike in Everything
Married Thrice, and Drunk more like
No more of his like will we see again.

very sad.

Hi, heres your ticket auto-ack. Hi, heres some more on your ticket. Hi, heres your ticket auto-ack. Hi, heres some more on your ticket. Hi, heres your ticket auto-ack. Hi, heres some more on your ticket. [repeat until irritated, add froth to suit]

Auto-ack loops are limited only by the available bandwidth, or MTA size limits. Never quote the full message in an auto-ack, as it may build to extremely silly sizes.

Activity lights on network gear look nice, especially when it indicates another machine entering a cluster.

One coffee, one cola. Drink 'em together, head to the wall, brew another and wait to pour.

other:

cmiller found an interesting game. Its a neat game you can play also with wavelans, although decent maps are also cool.

24/7 this week. Payment for 1 week of being on-call is 1 day, either in time or in money. Pity my last employer didn't go for that scheme (or any scheme, ha!). Hopefully I won't be woken up by letters again.

raid raid raid... its not as if we've got budget shortages, so why does someone, in purchasing more processing power for what appears to be a disk intensive task, buy IDE, then want software raid on it? The normal kit we get does this better (SCSI & hardware raid), is quickly replaced on failure (hot and cold running wa^Wspares), and is what our custom Linux distro is aimed at. Random frothing.

The patch list against our base is getting large, will have to regenerate the blessed thing.

Found some mod_perl tricks to possibly get RT & RT/FM working together with the same apache instance, also other pointers on the list.

personal:

Putting personal trivia up on a public diary? I haven't had my coffee/tea/drugs and I'm feeling depressed/angsty/suicidal/sad because my previous girl/boy/plastic/rock/dog/cat friend/pet dumped/deflated/crumbled/ran-away on/from me and joined a drug-running-ring/circus/ship/trash-heap? Screw that. Since I'm tied to a computer this week for work (more so than normal), see if I can get my own list archives to lead various GoogleBots awry. Mason is cool. Don't think I'm sleeping enough (normal).

travel:

March/April is busy. USA, Europe, USA, Europe, Australia, Asia, UK (?), Europe. I think I sleep sometime. I just need Africa, South America and Antartica for the whole set.

filk:

One of my personal bugbears is the deliberate removal of attribution lines in mailing list posts. Accidental, sure, fine, whatever. Usually though, the poster wants to confuse an argument, or to make sure that only their words are attributed down the track. etfb got me on a bad day, and got (with apologies to Freddie Mercury):

It was a happening list and the chat was burning
There were cries echoing over the land
When I read all your burble I feel the whole list shaking
I see the other's words
Deleted by your trembling hands

You were typing away saying such were pointless
I was dying just to give you a taste
Of the value of credit where the credit is due
By-lines are good for you
You know there's not another moment
Not another moment
Not another moment to waste.

You reply without those by-lines of mine.
But the thread is floating there without a ground.
I'm trying to type but no matter what I do
My lines are gone into the round.

And then you took the words right out my mouth
Oh, it must have been while you were quoting me
You took the words right out of my mouth,
And I swear it's true
I was just about to say

NO CARRIER

I've been tinkering with RT in recent months and have found it to be.. interesting. Still haven't managed to do all that I want to do (dependencies in Scrips for one, firing Scrips independent of a transaction event etc). RT/FM is also interesting. Hadn't seriously considered WikiWiki for an internal site before.

Should redo the mechanics of the internal site to be presented via RT/FM, but keep the source data as the text files and overlay the search features + wikiness. More code tinkering.

mbp sent my pics of his latest motorbike, and I got my bike inspected and judged roadworthy after 5 months of non-use. Hadn't noticed that I'm nearing a round-trip on the Odometer, although I only account for ~30,000km of it.