Our Heros recording cut off with a couple minutes left to go in the final monologue. I can’t believe it. I like the more recent episodes much more than when this season started off. I’ll have to catch the end on hulu when it posts. GRRR.
I’m glad Obama’s elected for the same reason I was glad George Bush got elected. In the late 90s as a Clinton voter I was so sick of listening to Rush Limbaugh berate Bill Clinton and Democrats that I was happy to see a Republican President with a Republican Congress. It became put up or shut up time for the Republicans and predictably in the end it didn’t pan out, though it didn’t really shush Rush either to my disappointment.
So now it’s eight years later and I’m happy to see a Democrat Congress to back a Democrat President. Democrats took control of Congress in 2006 and least we forget there was the “Six for ‘06″ agenda which involved: National Security, Jobs and Wages, Energy Independence, Affordable Health care, Retirement Security and College access for all. Obviously this didn’t happen as it’s the presidential promises two years later, if anything most of this has gotten worse since 2006. Of course the lawmakers and their defenders blame the fact that they didn’t own the presidency for their lack of ability to get anything done, similar to my nine year old blaming any issue he has at school to be caused by a classmate. In the present day now everything is owned by the Democrats and aside from clinging to lame excuses such as not having a filibuster proof Senate they have no reason to accomplish the things they said they would. The Bizzaro World Rushs whom blame Bush for anything from the global economy to the fact that there is not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow will now be in the same position of the Republicans of 2000.
This last week I voted for McCain and I’m not sure my reasons are the same as most. What clinched it for me was the presidential debate where McCain talked about cutting the pork out, Obama’s response was that the pork didn’t really amount to that much money. The problem here is that “the pork” is Washington currency for buying votes from congressmen. Removing pork projects would force politicians to worry about the mechanics and ramifications of a bill rather than the fact that they just netted a set of big business men in their home state a big government contract or tax loophole. So while windows on the house might not take up much surface area, you sure as hell close them when you are trying to keep the air conditioning in. What I saw in that instant was one candidate looking to change the system by fixing it and another candidate looking change the system to run for their benefit.
The other thing that added to this assesment was the choice of running mate. While I don’t agree with many of Palin’s views I do note that she is someone who has reformed government in her past and would come into the current environment with a skeptical and outside perspective. Biden on the other hand has been a part of the game and while he’s there for change, he’s not there to change the system. In this respect Obama was kind of like your local football coach saying he really wants to switch the team from passing to running and then using the first round draft pick to grab up a receiver.
Regardless of whether I like Obama for president or not, I’m very happy for the USA to have elected an African-American president. What I am even more proud of is that everyone I talked to during the election, whether we agreed or disagreed, I never heard the reason “because he’s a black man”. I think it is a much bigger milestone to see things done not by a specific race, gender or orientation but to do so with the lack of consideration for those. Maybe that view comes easy because I’m a middle aged white guy, but waiting around for the first moderate German/Swiss/English redheaded Nebraskan father of five to become president might take awhile.
I’d done a search before on switching RT to reply to requestors on resolving a ticket rather than it being a comment and came up blank. Today provided this gem:
In <path-to-your-RT>/share/html/Ticket/Elements/Tabs, search for the
part where it says title => loc('Resolve'), (which, in my code, is
$actions->{'B'}), and change it from Action=Comment to Action=Respond in
the Update.html URL.
Eric Schultz
United Online
In my revision it was actions->{’G'} line 180 in /opt/rt3/share/html/Ticket/Elements/Tabs
they changed host flushing on osx, the latest way to do it is
dscacheutil -flushcache
so the post I made earlier is no longer valid
For future reference, I am not insane when when editing /etc/hosts and the changes don’t show up immediately on OSX. Mac uses lookupd so I need to send a /usr/sbin/lookupd -flushcache.
What we have a right to expect of the American boy is that he shall turn out to be a good American man.
The boy can best become a good man by being a good boy–not a goody-goody boy, but just a plain good boy.
I do not mean that he must love only the negative virtues; I mean that he must love the positive virtues also. ‘Good,’ in the largest sense, should include whatever is fine, straightforward, clean, brave and manly.
The best boys I know–the best men I know–are good at their studies or their business, fearless and stalwart, hated and feared by all that is wicked and depraved, incapable of submitting to wrongdoing, and equally incapable of being aught but tender to the weak and helpless.
Of course the effect that a thoroughly manly, thoroughly straight and upright boy can have upon the companions of his own age, and upon those who are younger, is incalculable.
If he is not thoroughly manly, then they will not respect him, and his good qualities will count for but little; while, of course, if he is mean, cruel, or wicked, then his physical strength and force of mind merely make him so much the more objectionable a member of society.
He can not do good work if he is not strong and does not try with his whole heart and soul to count in any contest; and his strength will be a curse to himself and to every one else if he does not have a thorough command over himself and over his own evil passions, and if he does not use his strength on the side of decency, justice and fair dealing.
In short, in life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard: don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard.
From a speech of Teddy Roosevelt highlighted on the Art of Manliness
A few weeks ago we (not me, but my company) started work on our GoComics igoogle gadget for the release of igoogle v2. We weren’t really sure how well it was going to go over, it didn’t take long before we were suddenly at 150,000 users and we were listed along with the New York Times and Wall Street Journal on the front of igoogle as the gadgets to get. Load generated by the gadget itself is extremely minimal as google has a excellent caching and proxy system that keeps the load off of us. We started to run some numbers on what we might see for users coming through from the gadget to browse the actual gocomics site. Those numbers started to looks a little scary and we (this is me now as the servers are my deal) got a bit concerned. Quick math lead us to figures that could easily double the traffic to our site and the amount of traffic we handle now isn’t trivial.
Our servers are virtualized using Xen and I had thought ahead, with some extra resources in place replicating a few more servers out didn’t take long. One of the things on our roadmap was to add a CDN in the near future, that got moved up a couple notches. In the original plan of the site we’d talked about separate asset and application servers, but as thing worked working well at launch we tabled that additional complication for later knowing we could add it in if need be. Later came upon us quickly, as often seems to be the case. I believe it took the Rails Dev less than a day to get the ability into the codebase for a distinct asset address, do testing and get things rolled out to a live environment. Going from decision of implementing the CDN to having the site running and using it took less than a working day. The speed at which we can do things in my company amazes me, I think of the extended projects I hear about other places and realize how special that is. Working with the talented crew that I do makes handling the back end so much easier and I can’t thank them enough.
Monday will be our big day and it looks like we gone from 150k to nearly 250k gadgeteers just starting into the weekend, I can’t guess as to how many we’ll have come the first “official” work day of the week. There’s a lot more tuning that can be done but it’s my view that we need to learn to run on high octane gas before we switch over to the specialized pieces in order to run rocket fuel.
Pushed a new site live today and I got a call this evening from my VP, she was getting a 500 error on the site. There is no way this site is getting to much traffic and it works just fine when I pull it up from home. I start log hunting and make my way to the Rails log:
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.5/bin/mongrel_rails:281
/usr/bin/mongrel_rails:16:in `load’
/usr/bin/mongrel_rails:16
/!\ FAILSAFE /!\ Wed Oct 08 19:33:05 -0500 2008
Status: 500 Internal Server Error
IP spoofing attack?!
HTTP_CLIENT_IP=”1.2.3.4″
HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR=”1.2.3.4, 4.5.6.7, 10.168.1.81″
Awesome, so it’s Rails that’s tossing an error, at least we know what is up now. I send out an email to the code gurus and get a quick response back pointing out this site (because I’m in a company of freaks that likes to stay up late, read work email and figure out problems… it’s good kind of freak). The answer is that RoR is pissy in later versions and if your HTTP_CLIENT_IP header differs from your HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR header it going to put the breaks on for you and throw a 500 error. Unfortunately were working in an environment with a loadbalancer as well a Apache/mod_proxy in from of mongrel and this will happen to us a lot. The solution is to add
RequestHeader unset Client-IP
to you VirtualHost config and make sure you have mod_headers enabled. At this point it should clear your HTTP_CLIENT_IP and stop the error.
Now I can go back to eating my chili.
It’s been awhile since I posted, maybe a month or two now. So the what’s big in my world right now? At the forefront is the house I’m looking at purchasing next week.
It is an awesome house for an awesome price that needs an awesome amount of work done to it. I don’t have the means to hire a bunch of contractors to come in and fix it up in 6 months but I figure little by little I can get it back to shape. I’ll learn a lot in the process and in the end we’ll ideally have a cool place to live or rent out.
There’s a lot more going on but with the Andrew needing food right now this is all time I’ve got.
Today I got my first EC2 instance running. It took a total of about two hours from registering for the service to a point where I had a full CentOS 5 install up and going serving out a static web page. Responsiveness of my server was fast ( even at the cheapest level ) and my experience on the command line felt like I was running on my own hardware. I have to say I was pretty high on the whole thing, that was until I realized there is no way to get a static ip or host name. Not getting a static IP I can understand. The inability to have a static hostname I don’t understand, this kills most of the uses I would have for the service. Sure there are ways you can get around this with dynamic dns and I can hear the hacker side in it’s Darth Vader voice, “Put together an XMPP based service to update to a master and share server locations as they come up. Only then will you know the true power of that Dark Side”. While my sysadmin side manifests itself as ObiWan’s ethereal image and says “Don’t listen to the guy who’s life support system shot craps and let him die”.
Linux server IO utilitzation:
iostat -d -x <wait> <count>
Things to note from output:
r/s and w/s (reads and writes per second)
svctm ( average service time per request)
%util (Percentage of CPU time during which IO requests issued to the device. Device saturation occurs as this approaches 100%)
combined info from the iostat man page and here