Amazing to hear myself say it ....

It's a girl! That is all.

Life is funnier than ...

Two funny incidents in the last two days, both involving my wife:

1) Last night we were at a Thanksgiving Potluck; several of our friends are Taiwanese (my wife was born in Taiwan, although spent her whole life in Brasil). We told people there that we were pregnant, and one of our friends said it was old Taiwanese saying that after you conceived, if the woman got prettier during the pregnancy, you were carrying a girl; if you got uglier (ie, if your complexion got worse etc), you were carrying a boy. A funny saying, that. Anyway, I quickly turned, and looked at my wife, paused a second and said:

"Hmmmmm, looks like it must be a boy."

Got a pretty good chuckle out of that, and a few slaps upside the head. (Of course, could never get away with something like that if she wasn't pretty.)

2) My wife and I work at the same company, and a couple days a week, we work from home in the same office. Today, we were working like this, and I heard her say while on a phone call with a customer:

"No, I can't tell you where you put your install media."

I couldn't help myself: I laughed alound, and pretty loud. I don't know if the customer heard this, but they couldn't help but notice when my wife started laughing too. She had to make up some story that I was looking at my camera, and there was something funny on it, and I showed her, and it made her laugh. (Camera??? I asked her about this, and she meant to say "TV".)

This is the kind of stuff you read online and never believe. Working in Support is the perfect machine for generating comedic content. I'd write a novel based on this, if I wasn't so busy helping customers find their install media.

The Magic Typo

Imaginary situation: I've just searched for something in Google toolbar; what it is isn't important. I'm reading my feeds in Google Reader (maybe I should be in a commercial for Google) and I'm using the shortcut keys. But as often happens, Google Reader doesn't have focus, and my focus is still in Google Toolbar. The combination of the search and the unintentional extra characters produces the greatest search ever, the one search on Google that returns the magical hit that changes life forever. Imagine that.

So much for my turn at President ....

I had planned to become President of the United States in 4 or 8 years until I saw this story. Can you imagine being without email for 4 to 8 years? I can't. I guess that's it then: I guess I can stop working on my acceptance speech.

Meme poseur ...

There's a meme going on over on planet gnome. I usually don't care for them, but I liked this one:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

People who know me won't be surprised by mine:

"This in turn will stretch and tighten the body to a degree at which the downswing becomes an instinctive and uninhibited reaction."

Treeman

Search on "treeman" at Google for one of the saddest and most unusual stories of an individual struggling (courageously) against HPV.

Spirit of 76!

One of the two people who read this blog already know about this (golfed with me), but have to blog it anyway. I shot a 76 today! This is 5 strokes better than any round I've had in the last 10 years, and 3 strokes better than my best round (at Lions with a couple of beers in me when I was much, much younger).

I birdied 1, 9, and 17 with lengthy birdie putts (for me anyway). I could have potentially shot lower if I'd not three-putted two par 5's on the back nine (bogied both of them). Saved several pars with one-putts. Was unusually accurate with my short irons. Almost holed a sand wedge on the first hole.

I had no idea I was going that low until I checked the golf cart score card on the 18th after my third shot was on the green. I two-putted for the 76. In our golf foursome, the best previous score was a 78 and Ren and Toben had both scored several rounds under 80. It looked like I was never going to shoot a round like that ever. I was pretty much in a state of a shock when I realized I'd shot a 76. A very happy, pleasant state of shock.

Long live '76! Life is good!!

How sound can hang ...

I finally found it! I've been plagued with random gnome app hangs (usually gnome-panel, but plenty of other apps as well). I started stracing some of the hanging apps and it wouldn't give me much, but if I killed them, and restarted them under strace, I'd always see something like this at the end:

access("/tmp/.esd-501/socket", R_OK|W_OK) = 0
socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 18
fcntl64(18, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0
setsockopt(18, SOL_SOCKET, SO_REUSEADDR, [1], 4) = 0
connect(18, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/tmp/.esd-501/socket"}, 22) = 0
rt_sigaction(SIGPIPE, {0x3d07c0, [PIPE], SA_RESTART}, {SIG_IGN}, 8) = 0
open("/home/foo/.esd_auth", O_RDONLY) = 19
read(19, "\371\27PG\6\f2utX=!\f\2):", 16) = 16
write(18, "\371\27PG\6\f2utX=!\f\2):", 16) = 16
write(18, "NDNE", 4) = 4
read(18,

It was always hanging trying to read this esd socket. After seeing several of these, I searched online, and it took me almost no time to find this once I searched on 'gnome-panel hangs esd socket'. This has been bugging me for weeks, and I had blamed it all on Notes 8. Nice to know I was wrong.

Looks like killing esd, pulseaudio or both resolves this problem. Previously I was actually having to reboot to resolve this!

Cool beans ...

I'm very excited about the results tonight. No one will (I think) claim that he's perfect, or will be free from mistakes, but I wonder if this is how many Americans felt when JFK won the election back in the day. While I'm writing this, McCain is giving his concession speech, and so far it's quite good ...

Voted!

I voted today. I went to the wrong precinct at first, and there was no line at all in the wrong place. They redirected me to the right precinct, and at the new voting location .... there was no line at all!

Rescued ....

We had two power outages today at home. The second one was about 45 minutes long. The worst part was it zapped my master boot record on my mythtv Fedora 9 machine. When I tried to boot it just printed:

"GRUB"

and stopped. This normally would have caused a great deal of panic in the old days, since I used to believe this wasn't recoverable. However, this is actually pretty easy to fix. I had already recently created a Fedora 9 respin using jigdo. I burned that and booted the computer in rescue mode.

Then did:

chroot /mnt/sysimage

and then tried to do:

grub-install

but it gave me:

"does not have any corresponding BIOS drive"

grub-install --recheck /dev/sda

Took a long time but eventually worked.

Next, started up grub and did:

root( hd0,1 )

setup( hd0 )

Everything worked, and I was able to boot ok!

Cleaning up rpm duplicates

Every once in awhile I'd have one of my linux boxes crashing during a yum update. If yum doesn't have a chance to do cleanup, it will leave a bunch of duplicate rpms that will totally mess up yum and it's dependency resolution. I used to have this rpm one-liner a colleague had come up with to list duplicates, then would manually remove them. This was a pretty not-fun process.

Well, apparently there's a tool that does this for you:

package-cleanup --cleandupes

package-cleanup --dupes

will list any duplicates. This is in the rpm yum-utils. I wonder when this was added?

When good food goes wrong ...

Had the worst case of food poisoning on Saturday night. It was either the Dim Sum we had Saturday afternoon, or the steak and salmon a friend cooked for me Saturday night. In either case, the symptoms were the most violent I've ever experienced, and for several days. My wife actually insisted I go to the ER (which, of course, was a total waste). I'm only now starting to feel anywhere close to normal. I don't think you'll see me at Dim Sum for quite a while ....

A summer of grueling, hard-fought competition ....

Well, the long summer season finally ended this weekend. We worked pretty hard, competed without respite all summer long. I didn't think I could handle the long haul, but somehow I managed to last until the end. And, I'd made a pretty big comeback towards the end, but got beaten pretty badly one of the last few weeks, and it was too much to overcome. In the end, Ren proved to be the better man, and convincingly so.

I think we all deserve congratulations for how we persevered. I'm really going to miss Fantasy Golf.



I'm "Desire is the golf game killer" (and a truer word was never said).

Bad day, good night ...

Tough start to the day.

While not much could make up for how the day started, we went to a friend's house for picanha (cooked generously with ice cream salt) and hung around chatting and (some of us) drinking beer. Very nice night. We agreed we'd do a batida (sp?) party sometime soon, which is apparently a Brasilian drink made with cachaca, condensed milk and something else that sounded really good. This drink was invented with me in mind.

Remote downlevel document

I'd never been able to get printing working when my HP OfficeJet 4215 was samba shared to my Linux boxes. The print jobs would always show up as "Remote Downlevel Document" then the spooler would basically hang, and I could no longer print unless I deleted the job and rebooted the Windows box. The printer would work fine if it was connected directly to the Linux box (although we'd lose some of the functionality).

Was looking on the internet again today to see if anyone figured this out yet. I'd seen a lot of other people had this same problem, and never found a satisfactory solution. Finally, I hit paydirt: someone finally figured it out! Worked for me too. Nice.

Also, watched the Longhorns game recorded, and it was a pretty dominating victory. It would have been a great day if I'd hit better at the range.

Helping out ....

So my wife often complains that I don't help out around the house enough. One of the reasons this has happened is that my wife is very intense about everything being done a very specific way (her way), so that you pretty much stay out of her way, if possible. I've often warned her that if I started to do more around the house, I was fairly confident that she was not going to be happy with the fact that I was helping, but would likely be upset with me for not doing it exactly as she would have done it.

But, anyway, I can't not help based on this suspicion, can I? That's a total cop out. I've got got to keep the faith and assume everything will be fine. So, lately I've started to try and do more to help out. Tonight, I did the laundry while she watched TV (was a bachelor for a long time and have done my share of laundry). I won't go into details, however, let's just say it did not go well. Laundry got done, but there was no happiness.

What happened to my chomp?

Was working on a perl script for work today (a pretty ugly behemoth of a script at this point) and I kept getting weird behavior when printing some debug output. chomp() seemed like it had gone completely useless. Now if I was Toben, I would have started stomping around my office complaining about how broken perl was (I wish I could do that). However, I'm all too familiar with my propensity for shooting myself in the foot when writing perl code. And, as it turned out, setting $/ to a string naturally results in a useless chomp(). Although the perl programming book was kind enough to point out the error of my ways and that I could set $/ locally in a loop to get it back to it's normal behavior. Cool.

But the real question is: where were you Ren when I needed you?

Ryder Cup and seed-spitting ...

Had planned to record the Ryder Cup and watch later (although I didn't really have a good chunk of time available to actually watch the recording). But I blew off mowing the yard this afternoon (was still semi-wet) and watched the Ryder Cup (partly catching up the recording and partly live). So many putts were made it was quite remarkable! The ending was a little anti-climactic considering how well everyone played. I think the Euros wore down a little bit; the crowd was great for the US and it takes a lot of energy to fight that again and again.

After the Ryder Cup ended we went over to the house of a friend from church and had a potluck dinner. Food was very good, company was great, and we finished the night outside on their stone deck having a watermelon seed-spitting contest. The temperature was perfect, the sky was purple and dark blue and it was so quiet out. All in all, an awesome day.

Ubiquitous shells ...

Starting playing with Ubiquity and I like it. It's basically a small shell that you can install into firefox and allows you to do actions relative to specific contexts (highlighted text in the webpage or relative to the URL). It will need a lot more commands before it's really going to be useful, but I'm already using the email feature to send myself bookmarks.

Infinite Jest ...

Bought the book tonight at Barnes & Noble. We went down to San Marcos with A. and G., bought some golf shoes (only $40), came back, went to the golf range at Avery Rancy (we all mostly sucked today) then to dinner at Momji (sp?) where there was almost nothing on the menu I really liked. However, the mango ice cream kicked ass.

Football and other ...

Was disappointed in the USC-OSU game. Had been recording it on my mythtv box and one of our DVRs, but the game was so bad, I deleted both recordings around halftime (even though I have plenty of space on both).

Hadn't heard of David Foster Wallace (which kind of surprises me since he's the kind of author I would have normally known about) and the news of his death is a bit odd. When stuff like this happens don't the family usually try and hide the fact that it was suicide? I have no problem with the fact that they didn't, since I think in death, I wouldn't want the final statement of my life, that's this big, hidden. But it's almost as if they're broadcasting the fact that it was suicide (and if they are, they probably have a good reason to do so).

I think I'll have to read Infinite Jest, even though I've seen many reviews that suggest it's a book that's being clever for the sake of being clever (and I generally don't have any patience for that). I guess I need to read and decide for myself; the theme certainly sounds fascinating.

Rumours about McCain true?

Been reading lots of blogs lately that claim that McCain has completely changed his personality in the last several weeks/months of this campaign. I have no way of knowing whether this is really true except via second-hand reports, and most of the folks who are in a position to report on this generally have their own agendas. If it is true, however, it's unfortunate. Even if I was unlikely that I was going to vote for him, I was glad he was the Republican candidate, since he seemed to be "different" than your normal glad-handing, ass-kissing, talking-points speaking politician.

iotop (2)

Have I mentioned iotop before and how much it rocks?

Mythtv ...

Forgot to post this awhile ago: I've had Mythtv working for awhile with the free regular cable jack that I got from Time Warner (for spending so much money with them, I guess). However, I kept having problems getting my frontends on remote boxes to work. Turns out I misunderstood the sql for enabling remote boxes to connect to mysql that they had in the mythtv docs:

grant all on mythconverg.* to "mythtv"@"" identified by "mythtv";

The docs don't mention (where I could see), that the "identified" clause is setting the password. I thought it meant something else, and so I kept setting the wrong password. :-) Now it's all good. Pretty soon I'll have a hard drive full of old Star Trek episodes, which still remain, in my mind, some of the finest over the top science fiction drama of all time (unlike the new Star Treks which are generally devoid of drama and replete with agendas).

factcheck.org

After reading some of the entries on their site and subscribing to their feed, I'm almost inspired to become non-partisan myself.

Displaying cpu usage separately for each processor ....

Didn't know this until someone asked me how to display the cpu usage for each CPU. Found 'mpstat':

mpstat -P ALL
Linux 2.6.18-92.1.6.el5xen (foo.domain.com) 07/16/2008

04:28:28 PM CPU %user %nice %sys %iowait %irq %soft %steal %idle intr/s
04:28:28 PM all 0.02 0.00 0.01 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 99.95 135.16
04:28:28 PM 0 0.03 0.00 0.02 0.04 0.00 0.00 0.00 99.91 44.19
04:28:28 PM 1 0.01 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 99.97 29.24
04:28:28 PM 2 0.01 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 99.97 29.23
04:28:28 PM 3 0.01 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 99.97 32.50

Nice.

ICQ blocking unofficial clients (what is ICQ?) ...

Thought it was humorous to hear that ICQ was blocking unofficial clients. It's been awhile since I used ICQ and didn't think anyone used it anymore. But even funnier: there are official ICQ clients??

Figuring out which column nulls are being inserted into ....

Actually see this kind of error a lot at work:

DB2 SQL error: SQLCODE: -407, SQLSTATE: 23502, SQLERRMC: TBSPACEID=2, TABLEID=1301, COLNO=0

If you see this error, you can just run the following sql to find out which table and column the null was being inserted into:

SELECT C.TABSCHEMA, C.TABNAME,
C.COLNAME
FROM SYSCAT.TABLES AS T,
SYSCAT.COLUMNS AS C
WHERE T.TBSPACEID = n1
AND T.TABLEID = n2
AND C.COLNO = n3
AND C.TABSCHEMA = T.TABSCHEMA
AND C.TABNAME = T.TABNAME

where the values from the error are replaced for n1, n2 and n3. This is actually from the DB2 V9.5 docs.

Nice comeback

Nice fourth quarter comeback by the Celtics!

Glad they don't work on my transmission

One thing that will never change (even if everything else does): NBA refs are horrible. I'm watching the Celtics-Pistons game and there have been bad calls already, but the one that really blew me away was the blocking call against Lindsey Hunter where Rajon Rondo just drove right into him with about 7 and a half minutes in the second quarter. Wow. I'm a Celtics fan and that call was a joke. To make a call like that the refs must keep a mental tally of which team they "owe" a call.

Day off

Went to Fogo de Chão today for lunch. Was good as usual. Food was good and the service was good. No need to eat dinner now. Went to see the Indiana Jones movie after; it was enjoyable, but as every review I've seen has pointed out, pretty silly. Anyway, we enjoyed it.

Also looked at the new house. I think it's almost done. They put the turf down and painted the garage door. The door was locked so we couldn't get in, but could see they'd taped up the walls to indicate everything that needed to be fixed. So it looks like we won't need to do that much of that ourselves. While everyone keeps telling me that every builder will screw you over as much as they can, that has not been my experience.

Back to work tomorrow after a week and a half in classes or vacation. From what I could see, my team was getting hammered while I was out (although not because I was out). Looking forward to getting back to work. We paid $51 for a tank of gas today; first time either one of us has ever payed > $50 for gas. It's a cliche by now, but here's to working from home.

Not good ...

Went to Iron Cactus tonight by 360 and it was not very good. Used to be a nice restaurant, but it seems to have fallen a long way. It was almost empty around 8 pm on a weeknight.

A friend and his wife went to a different restaurant that is supposed to be pretty good (heard pretty good reviews of it from work colleagues); they went for their anniversary and were expecting more (it wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as they had hoped). Someone from the restaurant saw the post (I'm guessing they have a publicity firm or the like who scours the web for blog postings like that) and actually posted on his blog asking them if they'd to try again and saying they'd like another chance to show them how good they can be. It was impressive customer service. Although I think it was also a bit offputting; there's only a few of us who read his blog, and it didn't really matter what he said in it. Suddenly, I think he felt like he had to explain/justify himself to the person who contacted him. I might be putting words in his mouth, but hopefully not.

By the way, this wasn't an attempt to get a free meal out of Iron Cactus; I don't think I want to go back.

iotop ....

I was suffering from the problem described here (before I knew this bug was open and that it was a known issue) so I was looking for ways to monitor disk usage per program. I'd searched like crazy on google, searching for every keyword I could think of. I never found a prebuilt program that would monitor I/O usage per process. Then almost by accident I bumped into 'iotop' (perhaps I should have just guessed that there might be something with this name that would do what I wanted) and it was exactly what I wanted. It does 'top' like display of per-process I/O usage. Awesome!

Google rocks; just searched on "fsync mozilla bug" and the first link Google returned was a link to the aforementioned bug in the mozilla bugzilla. Nice.

I'm having another mozilla problem in FF 3.0: when I highlight text in Firefox, something similar to right-click menu opens up automatically, so I can't control-c to copy (have to hit escape first). Wonder if this is an extension I installed and forgot about?

Celtics lost at home tonight. Total downer. At least Ray Allen played well.

UPDATE: as soon as I was thinking it might be an extension, realized instantly what it might be (Auto Context); it really does the wrong thing for power users who like to use the keyboard. Once you select text, it kicks open a pop-dialog box with choices, and you can't do anything else until you dismiss that dialog. Royal pain. Anyway, it's disabled now.

Tried to send an email to the NBA ....

I tried to send an email to the NBA about officiating (they have a form in which you can send them an email on nba.com). I spent a long time thinking and writing it, and then when I sent it, it said the page couldn't be found. Imagine that.

NBA refs are amazingly bad ...

Watching the Celtics-Hawks game. Not only are NBA refs the worst homers, they make foul calls on big plays when it's clear to everyone in the building that there's no contact. I've never seen any ref in any league more susceptible to big plays, stars and momentum. And it's not just this game, this has the case for years. The calls that stars have gotten this league are just a joke.

Please note: I'm not accusing NBA refs of being corrupt; I'm accusing them of sheer incompetence. I've been watching games for a long time, and NCAA college refs are clearly better.

Moved out!

After a month long packing/moving and a frenzied last weekend of moving and cleaning, we're finally out of my first house! We're now staying in a hotel until the new house we're building is finished (sometime in June). I still can't believe that we sold it and got everything done! We've been so busy the last month; constantly packing and thinking of things we'd need to do to be ready to move out. We actually closed on the "old" house today.

On the contrary ...

We went to Waterloo Ice House by Parmer, and the service was very good. The difference between good and bad service is just amazing ....

Theme week: Subway sucks ....

Subway is a mess ...

My wife went to Subway while I was waiting in Half Price Books to sell some of my books. She called me when she was there because she heard that they were out of tuna while waiting in line (I wanted tuna). Next? Meatball. They were almost out of meatball. White bread? Out of white bread. Regular Lays chips? Out of regular Lays. There were like 20 people waiting in line, and they had only two people working at the counter. They gave me a three meatball six inch sub and put almost no toppings. The people working there were so rude, it made my wife really upset.

We're not going there anymore. The food is mediocre anyway, the prices have gone up recently, the service is incomprehensibly bad (how many times do I have tell someone the toppings I want?), and they're always running out of stuff.

Which Wish isn't that much more expensive, (although a lot slower), but at least you don't feel like a herd animal when you're getting your food.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that they were running out of everything on Saturday at noon. How screwed up does your store have to be to run out of everything at the beginning of your busiest sales period?

Sprint is a mess ...

Sprint is a mess.

No wonder Sprint is losing customers at a record pace. They are a complete mess. Where to begin?

I needed to change my address because we're moving. I went online to sign in (I've done this many times before, although it's been awhile). I try to find my username by entering my phone number, and it says "Phone number not found." I call customer support to change my address, and someone picks up without actually saying anything. I can hear conversations going on and they're dropping their headset etc. so there's all this banging. I say "Hello ....?" and a person answers, surprised that I'm there (they picked up the call, so how can they be surprised?). After changing my address (which didn't go smoothly because the call handler couldn't remember more than one number at a time: if I say 345, she gets 3 and that's it), it turns out I don't have an online account anymore. They've gone to a new billing system, and they couldn't migrate the old users to their new system (huh?). I work in this area of the tech industry for a living, and this is a joke. This is why Sprint is a joke now.

Whatever.

So I go to re-register my account and they actually require a number in your account name! I've always had an account that I've used that no one else in the world would possibly want, and it doesn't have any numbers. Who in the world besides Sprint requires this?? Now I've got to have yet another different account, because Sprint has their head planted so far up their ass, it's ridiculous.

Although to be fair, now that I'm signed up, their website is definitely better. You can get a lot more info more easily about your plan, including expiration date for your contract. And I suppose since they're losing customers at a record pace, they might not treat us like shit anymore if we stick around. I was always amazed at the hubris with which they treated us when we needed help.

Rain on meeee-eeeee-eeee ....

Is there anything better than a really good thunderstorm?

Packing and Oasis ...

Packing and Oasis ...

Spent the whole morning packing, going through old books. Managed to find five boxes of books I was willing to sell/donate/throw out. Major accomplishment for me. Also found a lot of my old paper and some old Plato articles I'd been looking for for awhile; especially a short work on the Charmides I thought I'd lost.

Packing went better than expected, and my knee held up better this time than last weekend. Managed to get through the whole garage today, and I'd thought it would take a couple of weekends. After the hard work we went with some people from work to the Oasis, and had a very good time. The weather was perfect, and the food was even that bad.

I'm very tired now, but it's the good kind ...

Ouch, my knee hurts ...

I aggravated my knee awhile ago packing for a move, and it's starting to get a little better, but it still aches and it is still swollen.

I'm missing golf outings while I'm hurt, which sucks, although I've got so much to do for the move, that in some ways it's a good thing.

We've got a few more weeks left to pack, and we really want to avoid waiting until the last minute.

Red Sox won 5 - 0 today in the home opener. Sweet. Watched the Kansas-Memphis game last night; was pulling for Kansas as a Big 12 fan, and was blown away by that ending. Wow.

Got to call a customer recently who's had a ticket (or six or seven) open or the better part of the last six years for a corruption of a timestamp that occurs in our product in a timestamp that sits in our cache. I'd reproduced this about a year ago, and my next line of support had been trying to debug this forever. They finally figured it out and fixed it (actually was only a few lines of code) and got to call and tell the customer, who had actually given up already (the problem wasn't happening to them anymore and generally only happens in situations of extreme multi-threaded load). They were very happy. Probably one of my favorite calls I'll ever get to make.