avenue d-artmouth

By anders pearson 27 Jan 2003

so debbie, daphne, <a href=”http://so_i_was_thinking.blogspot.com/“>blair</a>, angela, lani, myself, and 9 random avenue d groupies all squeezed ourselves into a 15 person van and drove up to the land of ice and snow.

the drive up was pretty much hell. we left early in the morning, it was crowded and hot, and i was way in the back of the van where it bounced around like a rollercoaster. unsurprisingly, some motion sickness occurred.

once we actually got to dartmouth, things improved considerably. lani and i hung out in jP’s apartment with <a href=”http://bootypile.blogspot.com/“>mark</a> and <a href=”http://robot_andorid_fist_fight.blogspot.com/“>eric</a> drinking PBR while the band did their soundcheck.

jP <a href=”http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jconnoll/2003_01_26_archive.html#88103514”>describes the rest of the night</a> better than i could and includes pictures too. i just need to mention that hannover has some of the <a href=”http://www.ebas.com”>worst pizza</a> i’ve ever tried to consume.

the trip home was slightly less painful thanks to dramamine and the fact that we were in a hurry to get back so people could make their shifts.

downtime

By anders pearson 27 Jan 2003

this weekend’s downtime was brought to you by Microsoft SQL Server.

apparently a few machines in the server room were infected with <a href=”http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/25/1245206&mode=nested&tid=109”>the worm</a> and generated so much traffic that the network people had to reboot the router sometime on saturday. this, unfortunately, meant that i needed to refresh the network interface on the server for it to reconnect to the network. so it was stuck until i could come in this morning, log in to the console and type ‘ifup eth0’. once bitten, i now have a script that runs every hour and runs that if it can’t find the network so this shouldn’t be a problem again.

still, i’m sick and tired of being fucked by microsoft worms. i haven’t run any MS code on any of my machines for about 3 years now. i keep up to date on security patches on the stuff i do run. and still, every few months i have to deal with the fallout of Nimda, or Code Red, or Melissa, or whatever that week’s worm is.

ok, i guess it isn’t fair to blame microsoft. the vulnerability that this worm exploited was fixed in a patch from last june. if people would actually apply their security patches, these things pretty much wouldn’t happen.

server move in progress

By anders pearson 22 Jan 2003

you may have noticed that you were redirected here.

i’ve got thraxil.net setup now with the new codebase on a temporary server. i’m redirecting thraxil.org and thraxil.com to thraxil.net for the time-being. things will be on thraxil.net for probably a week or two while i rebuild the machine that thraxil was once on and will be on again. once that’s rebuilt i’ll get the code set back up there and have thraxil.net redirect back to thraxil.org. that should make it about as painless as a server move really can be.

if you look closely, you may notice a few new things: 1) speed. everything’s running under mod_perl with a new, more aggressive caching strategy. 2) the urls of pages should be a little nicer. instead of things like ‘node.pl?nid=4203’, ‘diary.pl?user=matti’, and ‘keyword.pl?keyword=fnord’ we now have ‘/nodes/4203’, ‘/users/matti/diary’, ‘/keyword/fnord’ and similar urls for most of the site. this is all through the magic of apache’s mod_rewrite module. and finally 3) bugs. there seem to be some problems with how i’ve configured the module i’m using to cache database connections and i’m seeing some sporadic errors. if you get a server error, try reloading the page a few times; usually that will do it. there are probably other errors too since it’s a fairly new and untested codebase. if you encounter problems that don’t go away with a couple quick reloads, let me know.

also, if you’re into tweaking your diary templates, you’ll need to take a good look at things to figure out the changes in the site organization. i’m going to run a script through the existing templates and hopefully get them all in line.

shrink wrap

By anders pearson 20 Jan 2003

yay! 3-day weekend!

lani came up to hang out. she immediately decided that my apartment was intolerably cold and gave me a nice kick in the pants to actually do something about it. my apartment generally stays about 20 degrees warmer than it is outside. so when it’s 10 degrees outside, it is still rather chilly inside. i’d pretty much gotten used to it though and just spend most of my time wearing sweaters and hiding under blankets.

lani assessed the situation and decided that my main problem was drafty windows. for some reason, i have a lot of windows. (in my bedroom i have 3 30” x 84” windows.) they all face right into brick walls so they don’t provide any kind of light or view; they just make my apartment drafty. so we went to the hardware store and got a bunch of weather stripping and some of those shrink wrap kits. then we spent the rest of the night balancing precariously fighting with giant sheets of plastic and double sided tape.

sure enough, when we looked closely, we discovered that two of my windows were actually open a crack way up at the top. another one in my bedroom didn’t have so much of “draft” as a “breeze” coming in. it was almost impossible to get the plastic up because it kept billowing out from the air currents. in the end though, nature was no match for large quantities of duct tape.

now with almost all the windows in my apartment sealed off, the difference is astounding. my lips and fingertips aren’t even blue anymore!

in between our home improving, we also managed to go out for vegan food, watch Eddie Izzard: Dressed to Kill, and <a href=”http://us.imdb.com/Title?0087909”>Phenomena</a>, which was a pretty cool old horror movie that didn’t really make too much sense but was visually very interesting.

earlier this evening, after lani left, i also managed to meet up with <a href=”http://www.miromi.org/“>mimi</a> for a brief spell while she’s back visiting.

meetup 2

By anders pearson 17 Jan 2003

went to my second <a href=”http://perl.meetup.com/“>perl meetup</a> last night.

this time it was me, <a href=”http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node=tilly”>tilly</a>, <a href=”http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node=perrin”>perrin</a>, and two new people: Avi and Laura.

we met at a cafe down on St. Marks and had some beers and talked. mostly about programming stuff and the state of the tech economy.

we had some bonus entertainment when Laura stopped mid sentence, froze and turned white as a sheet. then the rest of us followed her gaze to a nice big cockroach climbing the wall right next to tilly. Avi handled the extermination with a napkin and a blunt object. we were pretty unphased, but our waitress was mortified. this brought up the subject of geckos (apparently letting a gecko loose in your apartment is a very efficient way of reducing the insect population) and their <a href=”http://polypedal.berkeley.edu/Profs_office/Full/Publications/publication_reprint_PDFs/63_evidofvanderwaals2.pdf”>feet</a>.

trapped like a rat

By anders pearson 12 Jan 2003

i have a better understanding of where that phrase came from and what it really means.

since about thursday, there’s been some kind of rodent trapped in the wall in my apartment. from the amount of noise it creates, i’d guess it’s a rat. naturally, the wall it’s gotten itself trapped in is the one that my bed’s headboard is up against. thursday night, i was kept awake all night with a constant barrage of scratching, pitter-pattering, and squeaking coming from the wall inches from my head. friday night and last night, the noise was still there but getting much less frequent. tonight, i’m still hearing the occasional scratch but very infrequently.

i wish there were something i could do to get it out of the wall. it’s not my idea of a fun time being kept awake at night thinking about some animal that’s trapped in a small, dark place, slowly starving to death.

it’ll probably stop making noise in the next day or two. then i get to hope that whatever material my walls are made out of (probably drywall or sheetrock; pretty hard stuff: it’s difficult to drive tacks into) contains odors well.

vacation reading

By anders pearson 06 Jan 2003

being home in maine, i didn’t have much preventing me from getting a little further down my reading list.

what i finished during vacation:

and i made it a ways into <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486600882/“>Euclid’s Elements</a>.

i’ve been getting really interested in math again lately and i must say that <a href=”http://www.doverpublications.com/“>Dover Books</a> have been a godsend. if you go to the Mathematics section of a bookstore and start looking at prices, you’ll notice that most books on math are <em>really</em> expensive. but the Dover books mostly seem to hover around $10-12. they tend to be older but still are often of decent quality. when you <em>think</em> you might be interested in tensor analysis but aren’t really sure, spending $10 on a Dover book is a reasonable investment.

on a related note, does anyone have a good introductory calculus book they recommend? i can <em>do</em> most calculus that comes my way but i haven’t actually <em>studied</em> calculus for 5 or 6 years and i’d like to brush up and fill in the gaps in my memory. i have a bunch of books on vector calculus and differential equations left over from my college classes but i did all my intro calculus in high school and they take the books back at the end of the year.

jere's 2003

By anders pearson 05 Jan 2003

in attendance this year: jere, raim, myself, nigel, teri, nigel’s little brother sasha, matti, jesse, anthony, heather, tasha, and emile.

some highlights:
• presenting jere with the eMac that we'd all chipped in to get her.
• emile brought his homemade didgeridoos and showed us how to play them.
• tasha cooked nature burgers and some fantastic indian stuff.
• after running entirely out of alcohol, heather, tasha, and i drive all over massachusets at 1am looking for beer only to discover that it's illegal to sell alcohol in mass. after 11pm.
• then we get back and discover 4 beers, 2 bottles of wine and 3 bottles of champagne hidden away in the fridge and the cellar.
• lots of card games

downtime

By anders pearson 03 Jan 2003

things were down here for a while. they had to do some electrical work in our office so they shut the power down. then, when the power came back, one of the IDE drives in the server decided it was time to breathe its last breath. luckily, it was just a drive that we use to do backups; the root filesystem was fine. but, fsck wouldn’t get past that point in the boot sequence. normally this would take me 5 minutes to fix. but… it’s a little more difficult to debug and fix a hardware problem from a few hundred miles away.

thank god we’re moving to the new server with RAID drives soon.

vacation, pt. 1

By anders pearson 27 Dec 2002

i thought i’d be clever and took an overnight greyhound from new york back to maine on saturday night. i thought “no one else would be crazy enough to get on a greyhound at midnight so i’ll be able to stretch out and maybe get some sleep.” hah! never underestimate the insanity of holiday travellers. the bus was packed. it was a miserable 11 hour ride and there was no sleep for me.

my parents picked me up at the bus station and we headed over to my aunt’s for the big family gathering. i somehow managed to retain consciousness through most of it but i was pretty much dead by the time we got back to dexter.

spent the first part of the week just hanging out in dexter with my family, doing the christmas thing, playing with the pets, etc.

on thursday, my friend kat came and picked me up. we were close friends in junior high and at my first high school. i hadn’t seen her for about 4 years. she has two daughters now. i still have a hard time accepting that people my age are actually even capable of having children. anyway, despite the difficulties of being a young single mother, she seems to be doing ok. wednesday night it had snowed pretty heavily so the roads were nice and slippery. on the way to bangor, we managed to do a nice slow motion sideways slide off the road and into a ditch. luckily some kid coming the other way had seen us slide off and he pulled over and called a tow truck for us. the entire accident happened at about 2 miles an hour so no one was hurt and the car wasn’t damaged; the ditch was just steep enough that we couldn’t get the car out ourselves. so we sat in the car in the ditch for about 40 minutes waiting for the tow truck to come pull us out. didn’t really matter much to us; we’d just planned on getting together and talking anyway. in a ditch was about as good a place to talk as anywhere else. there was only one real downside. people in maine are very friendly and helpful. to the point of being annoying. every single car that drove by felt it necessary to pull over and ask us “is everyone ok?” “yes, we’re fine, thank you” “do you need a cellphone?” “no, we’ve already called a tow truck, and we’re just waiting for them now, thanks.” i had that exact conversation with about 30 different people.