Jade's weblog Archive

So now there are multiple ways to motivate yourself:

1. Public humiliation
2. Competition with others
3. Competition with yourself

Lots of ways to keep you motivated to exercise this holiday season!

Their friends, Jade and Kate Rubick, a Web developer and a librarian who live in North Portland, said hawks had carried some birds off.

Tektonic:
http://www.tektonic.net/vds.php?op=budget_plans
UM2
$28 / mo, 256 MB memory, 20 GB disk, 1.0Mbit Un-Metered
Unmetered bandwidth
Daily Backups

Spry
http://www.spry.com/webmin-vps/
Webmin VPS 200
$25-30 / mo, 256 mb memory, 10 GB disk, unmetered bandwidth
Daily backups
May I upgrade my OS? All of our VPS accounts use a shared kernel which will limit your choices when upgrading. You may be able to upgrade several user-land programs (Apache, Perl, PHP, gcc) but you will not be able to perform a complete OS upgrade.


Vinod's quest:
http://wiki.kurup.org/wiki/show/FindNewWebHost

I decided on tektonic.net, although I think either Tektonic or Spry would have been great.

Top does show nsd (Aolserver) taking up a lot of CPU. I restarted it just now.

I wrote a script that did this:

#!/bin/bash

echo

for file in *.org

do
/usr/sbin/sendmail hisemail@safe4all.org hisemail@safe4all.org < "$file"
echo "$file name";
done
exit 0


Our domain name ends in .org, so that would change if you were at a .com or otherwise.

Very nice!

During the install, the installer says that the install disks didn't work. See linux media check issue with Fedora Core 4 disks. The solution? Start up the installer with:

linux ide=nodma

I installed Fedora Core 4 last night, and found that it would periodically freeze (every ten minutes or so). I couldn't find much pattern behind it, except that subversion was usually running. Upgrading subversion did not help, however.

I'm reinstalling again this morning, running memory checks and any other sort of checks that it has. I'd really like to get this working as quickly as possible, but I also want it to not freeze..

It looks like the 3rd install disk was corrupted. I reinstalled, and thought I was fine, but after about 4 hours of use this morning (and getting a lot of things installed), it froze again.

ALEXANDRA MEI RUBICK

Formerly known as Tiny, she is now affectionately known as "Sasha." Sasha
arrived Saturday, August 20, at 2:15 a.m. She weighs 8 pounds 3 ounces and measures 20 inches.

We've put up photos linked in from Tiny's home page.

Delilah is actually our cat! The baby hasn't been born yet.

You also can now see your exercise reminders from the main page of Rubick.com if you are signed in.

Looks like the hard disk got corrupted a bit as well.

It turns out the swap partition was corrupted, and not mounting. I was getting my system load up to about 60, which is the highest I've ever seen.

I fixed it by using mkswap on the partition, and sudo /sbin/swapon /dev/hda5

Anyone is free to sign up. It's free, and I plan to add in a public shame page, which will show how long it's been since you last worked out.

After spending about 3 hours looking into it, compiling half the gnu tools from scratch I finally fixed arch on my machine. After I compiled the latest version of tar I noticed that rather then giving an error it simply said 'permission denied'. Doing some more googling it seems that the latest security update for Panther has disallowed the user from setting the setgid bit. It's the only UNIX to do this and the move was praised in some security researcher's blog. By simply

sudo tla replay

the problem was resolved.

Arghhhh!

sudo'ing the replay command broke all the tla commands for the normal user but chowning the {arch} directory back to alexk seems to have fixed everything.

Starting udev:
Initializing hardware... storage network audio

Sometimes it freezes there, sometimes it doesn't. Right now, I am restarting over and over and it isn't coming up. Annoying.

The default security in javascript is even more restrictive than "same domain". It's known as the Same Origin policy. It says that a script can only read properties of windows and documents that were loaded:

1. from the same host
2. through the same port
3. by the same protocol

shell# bin/tclsh8.5
% load lib/libnsd.so
% ns_info pools; ... look at output on zippy memory usage ...
% ... run test ...
% ns_info pools; ... look again ...

I'm hoping this will ensure that it will be more reliable in the future.

When you start back up the system, it will bring up a "Choose User Profile" box, but won't start up with the default profile.

The fix is quite easy. Look in .mozilla/firefox/tt2k25do.default/ or something like that. Remove the lock file.

Google Maps uses XSLT in novel ways, apparently.

They have an explanation of how Amazon created the photos on the Yellow Pages site.

My idea was a little more collaborative -- the ability for any user to upload GPS encoded photos. You then could look at an overview map which would show how densely people have uploaded pictures in particular areas, and you could take virtual tours of those places.

You then would need a way of determining which pictures were the best in a densely photographed area. Probably some sort of rating scheme.

Scientists have begun blurring the line between human and animal by producing chimeras—a hybrid creature that's part human, part animal.

Chinese scientists at the Shanghai Second Medical University in 2003 successfully fused human cells with rabbit eggs. The embryos were reportedly the first human-animal chimeras successfully created. They were allowed to develop for several days in a laboratory dish before the scientists destroyed the embryos to harvest their stem cells.

In Minnesota last year researchers at the Mayo Clinic created pigs with human blood flowing through their bodies.

And at Stanford University in California an experiment might be done later this year to create mice with human brains.

This reminds me of a thought experiment I had about ten years ago while in college:

Humans and apes are fairly similar genetically. Yet some religious groups think that people have souls and apes do not. Given that we can now start blending the line between humans and apes, imagine doing an experiment where..

You 'create' 100 children:

• The first child is 100% human, 0% ape.
• The next child is 99% human, 1% ape.
• The next child is 98% human, 1% ape.
• Etc...
• The last child is 100% ape, 0% human.

Now these people believe that having a soul is a binary thing. Either you have a soul or you don't. So the question is: which of these children have souls, and which do not?

(Stop and think about that before continuing. What do you think?)

The conclusion you (inevitably I think) come to is one of the following:

• There is a gene for having a soul. Somewhere in your genetic material is a gene that makes you have a soul. Or,
• There is no such thing as the soul. Or,
• The soul is not a binary thing at all. There are degrees of soul.

I won't say which of those I subscribe to, but I thought it an interesting thing to think about.

ns_section "ns/server/${server}/module/nscgi"
ns_param map "GET /mailman/ ${mailmanprefix}/cgi-bin"
ns_param map "POST /mailman/ ${mailmanprefix}/cgi-bin"

If I put a symlink from www/mailman to the /usr/local/mailman directory, it mostly works (but only mostly). But it really should work with the mapping, so I've removed the symlink, and I've tried fiddling with it in lots of ways. I'm back to the original configuration (I verified that), and am wondering if there is some trick to it.

Vinod says you have to list every directory, and I've tried that as well, although I really hope that is not the case.

Anyone have any suggestions?

I've commited this to oacs-5-1, so it will start appearing in OpenACS soon.

I believe I can use this in conjuction with Analog to produce reports on the amount of time each request takes...

The message on the server's main page said that the database was down.

So I log into the server, take down Aolserver, and attempt to restart Postgres:

svc -d /service/servername

www:~# /etc/init.d/postgresql restart
Stopping PostgreSQL database server: postmaster/usr/lib/postgresql/bin/pg_ctl: kill: (30083) - No such process
pg_ctl: postmaster does not shut down
.
Starting PostgreSQL database server: postmaster ((null) already running.).

www:~# su - postgres
postgres@www:~$ pg_ctl stop
waiting for postmaster to shut down...2005-01-17 10:26:12 [1548] LOG:  received smart shutdown request
.2005-01-17 10:26:12 [1590] LOG:  shutting down
..2005-01-17 10:26:15 [1590] LOG:  database system is shut down
done
postmaster successfully shut down
postgres@www:~$ exit
logout
www:~# /etc/init.d/postgresql start

One of the flaws in open-source software is that everyone wants the software to do different things -- so users add in lots of options. This article exposes the danger of not being selective when adding new functionality in.

I'm glad they are paying attention to both Windows and UI issues.

arch_commit: unable to acquire revision lock (could not rename file.)
tree: /home/safe4all-staging/safe4all-staging
revision: jade@safe4all.org--2005/openacs--staging--5.1.0--patch-14

The problem was the umask of another user committing to the archive. That set the permissions so I couldn't access them.

I figured out what was going on with help from ddaa and Rotty on #arch. They suggested using strace on the tla commit. That helped diagnose the problem.

Then, to fix it, you have to do this (I had to be root for some reason):

cd /home/safe4all/{archives}/2005/openacs/openacs--staging/openacs--staging--5.1.0/
chmod g+w *
cd patch-13
chmod g+w ++revision-lock/
chmod g+w ++revision-lock/+contents/

Then the commit worked.