Archives Under "Random" (RSS)
Open Source Bridge
12 November 2008 | Planet Ubuntu, Random | No Responses
Went out to a studio to get senior pictures yesterday. The photographer really wanted to go to this old bridge for pictures. Well, wasn’t I in luck:
Obviously, I had to get pictures next to this. Unfortunately, they aren’t available yet.
I don’t know why someone would bother to spray-paint that onto an old rickety bridge in the middle of nowhere, but it’s awesome.
Oh, and the meme, right.
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open it to page 56.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
- Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
“Putting the backslash in front of a character tells Java to just pass it right on through; don’t interpret it.”
I haven’t used Java for five years.
Boom!
16 September 2008 | Planet Ubuntu, Random | 1 Response
Whew, the winds this weekend made it seem as if Ohio was hit by a hurricane. Oh wait.
Wind speeds in central Ohio hit 75 mph (~120km/h), nearly as fast as a moderate tornado.
Power was knocked out on Sunday. Calling AEP, if you were lucky, might have gotten you an automated outage reporting system if you didn’t get the “line busy” tone first, with estimates of seven days until power could be restored. Luckily for us, it came back on this morning after two days.
What was strange? There was no lightning, no thunder, hail, or rain, just heavy wind. No tornadoes were reported, yet the wind speed was already there. Almost every street was blocked off by trees, and as of right now, 30% of traffic lights in Ohio are non-functional.
I was going to take some pictures during the storm, but after being whipped in the face with leaves and stray tree branches I decided it was better to wait.
The damage here was minimal compared to other places. Cars were crushed, schools were shut down, and a 5-house fire was started in town from a downed power line.
Who else got hit?
Identi.ca?
2 July 2008 | Planet Ubuntu, Random | 3 Responses
I was innocently minding my own business today, when all of a sudden I stared getting notices about identi.ca on Twitter. Judging by the activity over there, it seems there was a mass migration today.
So far, it seems okay in terms of speed (but who knows what will happen once more users find it) and is fairly simple. It is missing SMS, an API, and a bunch of Twitter features, but more important is that Jabber works. To top the whole thing off is that the entire service is released under the AGPL and uses OpenID.
I’m willing to see how long it holds out. Who wants to help break it? I’m at http://identi.ca/jacob (horray for early-adoption usernames). Anyone else out there?
DreamFAIL
12 April 2008 | Planet Ubuntu, Random | 2 Responses
I have no issues with DreamHost’s service. Before I moved to a VPS provider, I was with them for all of my hosting. They had provided (and still do provide) great service and reliability for a shared host. Customer service for the most part is excellent, and gets things done in usually 5 minutes to an hour.
But when your signup form begs you not to leave, then you better run as fast as you can.
When trying to close the page:
- An alert appears.
- A confirmation dialog appears.
- If you hit Cancel, the “live chat” appears.
- Trying to close the “live” chat yields another confirmation box.
While I’m at it, might as well join the parade:
jacob@codechunk:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ |sort -rn|head
108 sudo
56 cd
36 tail
35 ls
31 svi
28 vi
19 screen
19 fg
17 ckbw
14 htop
svi = sudo vim
ckbw = script to check bandwidth on an apache site.
There you have it.
MOTDs are boring
10 March 2008 | Planet Ubuntu, Random | 3 Responses
I’ve decided my MOTD has gotten stale. What better to do with your free time than to look up escape sequences?
Bringing annoyances to the terminal, one color code at a time.
Snow.
8 March 2008 | Planet Ubuntu, Random | 7 Responses
Yesterday morning at a hotel, I woke up to prepare for a presentation. I looked out the window and there was a light snow. No problem.
Skip to noon of that day. A winter storm warning is in effect. 8 to 10 inches of snow expected. Okay, we can still make it out of Columbus.
By 4 PM, a blizzard warning was in effect. 12 to 15 inches projected by the end of Saturday (today).
This morning, I woke up to a level 3 snow emergency (only emergency personnel allowed on the roads). Everything is covered in snow, and it doesn’t look like it is going to stop.
How bad did the snow hit the rest of you in Ohio or the Midwest?
The dog seems to like it.
SSH loves rDNS
4 March 2008 | Planet Ubuntu, Random | 6 Responses
Since a few weeks ago, every time I would run SSH to sign into my server I would have to wait about a minute before I could even get a key/password prompt. The problem never really went away, so I contacted my ISP.
After a few email exchanges with some SSH debug logs and traceroutes, they added a reverse DNS record to see if it helped. Strangely enough, it did. I’ve never had a reverse DNS entry associated with my IP, and I’ve never had any trouble with it in the past. Only recently did connections start to halt because of it.
So, if you don’t have a reverse DNS entry on your IP and have been noticing slow SSH connections, call up or email your ISP to get one added. You will love your connection that much more.
Whew.
12 February 2008 | Random | No Responses
It took me a while, but I finally have all of my sites set up on a Linode VPS. If you are ever looking into getting a virtual server, definitely check ‘em out.
I’m tired, so I’m not going to write much more. Oh well.