Legends of the Sun Pig

October 3, 2006October 3, 2006

Absorbing the “Second Best” blog

At the end of last year, I created a new blog called “The Second Best Swordsman In Caribastos”. The title is a reference to a quote from the book Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold. I had intended to post techie content to that blog, and to keep my main blog here for more personal and irrelevant stuff. Anyone who was interested in the techie stuff could subscribe to the feed over there, and ignore everything else I post here.

The problem is that that’s a false distinction for me. I am fundamentally a techie geek, and my personal life is intricately interwoven with technology, coding, and the web. Having to figure out which of the two blogs a potential entry should go in has on several occasions frozen me into such complete indecision that I ended up not writing anything at all. That’s just not good.

So from now on, the other blog is dead, and its content (what little of it there was) has been absorbed here. There are redirects in place, so any links to the old pages won’t break. At some point in the future I might set up tag-specific feeds here to allow a more filtered view of my brain, but for the moment the you’re just going to have to live with whatever randomness I decide to spout. (Hey, at least I’m not posting cat pictures.)

September 29, 2006September 29, 2006

Movable Type 3.33, and associated FTP problems

Movable Type 3.3 badge-type thing Six Apart have just released a new version of Movable Type (3.33) which contains several patches for a bunch of potentially nasty security holes. Given the problems I had upgrading to 3.3 in the first place, I wasn’t exactly relishing the idea of another install, but security comes first.

And, just like last time: HTTP 500 server errors as soon as I tried to log back in afterwards.

It looks like my problem isn’t related to Movable Type at all, though, but instead to the FTP upload process. I had grabbed the .zip version of the movable type package, unzipped it locally, and then uploaded all the individual files to my web server. My FTP client is FileZilla, and the server is running NcFTPd. With FileZilla set to use multiple simultaneous connections (for a faster upload) it would occasionally transpose the contents of two files.

This is very ungood. Not only does this lead to the obvious failure situation where an app doesn’t work because its internals are screwed up (the HTTP 500 server errors I was seeing), but there’s also the possibility of a silent failure, where everything still appears to work, but all is still not well. For example, a file containing passwords could be swapped with a simple HTML file so that they become publicly readable (and Google-able).

Curiously, the transposing of files doesn’t seem to be entirely random. When I first noticed the phenomenon, I tried re-uploading the pair of files that had been switched, and they ended up switched again. It was only when I dropped back to using a single connection (menu: Queue -> Use multiple connections) that the upload worked properly.

A quick search on Google showed that although this is uncommon, it’s not an entirely unknown problem. A few people have mentioned this happening with FileZilla (here and here, for example), but this also seems to be an occasional problem with CuteFTP, too: see this forum post.

The fact that the problem shows up on multiple clients makes me wonder if it’s the server that’s at fault. Alternatively, both CuteFTP and FileZilla could be using a very similar, but subtly wrong piece of code to do multiple simultaneous uploads. Very curious. But at least knowing what has gone wrong will make me feel much more at ease when the next MT upgrade comes around.

September 20, 2006September 20, 2006

Now with 10% less fat!

We haven’t been making a big thing of it, but since we got back from holiday in July, Abi and I have been on the “Flickr Diet”. (That’s where you look at all the pictures you’ve just uploaded and think, “Urgh, I really don’t like the way I look.”) And by amusing coincidence, today Abi and I both hit the point where we have lost 10% of our original body mass. I started at 80.1kg and am now down to 71.7kg; Abi started at 77.0kg, and is down to 69.3kg. Wow.

Our strategy has been two-pronged:

Eat less
Stay honest

The “eat less” bit has come from counting calories. No fancy points or diet meals; just getting into the habit of paying attention to the nutritional information for everything that we would be eating normally, and rigorous portion control. No snacks. No seconds. This was really difficult for the first week or so, but since then it has been easy.

We’ve been enforcing the honesty part by weighing ourselves daily, and keeping a chart on the fridge, where we can both keep an eye on how we’re doing. Daily weigh-ins are tough, because natural daily variations can easily kick you up 500g or so. But just like eating less, it’s all about the habits. The general trend is always downwards, and you have to trust that.

With this regime in place, I’ve even found that the occasional pizza emergency isn’t a disaster. Provided I don’t eat a massive dinner as well, a nice lunch every now and then doesn’t have a significant impact on my weekly progress. (They key is in the “every now and then”. I don’t think that “every other day” would cut it.)

This is pretty much the same technique that Abi and I used to lose a good deal of weight back in 1997 or so. It worked then, and it worked now. I tried the low-carb Atkins thing back in 2003, and although it was successful in the short term, the weight came back on again pretty quickly. Habits, habits, habits: a low-carb diet is not a sustainable habit for me, and so it fell by the wayside very quickly. Other people may be different, but I can’t live without my preciousss bread. Smaller portions are much more realistic.

So anyway, yay us. We’re not stopping here, though. I’m aiming to get below 70kg, and Abi wants to be under 67. The downside of all this slimming behaviour is that last weekend I ran out of trousers that fit me, and had to go shopping for new clothes. Not my favourite activity, but that’s a rant for another time.

Beyond funny

hard disk After two dead disks last month, another one died on me this evening. This time it was the 400GB external drive I have attached to my Mac Mini. The data on it wasn’t critical, fortunately. I’d been loading it up with ripped DVDs from our collection, so the only thing I’ve really lost is time.

That, and my cool. Data loss FREAKS ME OUT at the best of times. Losing three disks in the space of a month has practically got me hyperventilating.

August 27, 2006September 23, 2006

Fuck, it’s Christmas again

Advent calendar in Costco Walked through Costco this afternoon, and the Christmas decorations are already in the aisles. It’s still August. Hot damn.

Okay, so here’s the new rule: The only people who are allowed to buy me anything this Christmas are Alex and Fiona. That’s it.

It’s not that I don’t want anything–there are plenty of things I’d like to have. I just don’t want anything for Christmas. Not anything from my wishlist, not “just somethig small”, and not a charitable donation in my name. Just nothing. Please.

August 24, 2006September 23, 2006

Alex starts school

From April 2001 to August 2006:

Note the school uniform. Just for the record, I disapprove of them. Yes, they make children look cute, but cute in the Yorkshire-Terrier-in-a-paisley-waistcoat sense, i.e. just not right.

Britain has an obsession with uniforms, from kids at school to adults in business. I used to think there was a shadowy conspiracy of tailors who manipulated politicans and lobbied industry to maintain suit and tie as the standard dress code. How else to explain the fact most large institutions still require even their computer geeks, who rarely get to see daylight, let alone a customer, to still wear “business dress”?

Now, though, I’m coming round to the point of view that wearing a school uniform during your formative years somehow warps your mind. You may start to feel uncomfortable when you’re out of uniform, so you join a company where everyone wears suits. Or more insidiously, you may start buying into the myth that wearing school uniform promotes a sense of common identity, and puts both rich and poor on a level playing field. And you decide to take that idea forward into the workplace.

To this I say, “thpppt.” When was the last time you were around a set of school kids? If you really think that wearing a uniform is going to stop them from forming cliques and ganging up on others, you need to get your doctor to adjust your medication. Likewise, if you think that wearing a jacket and tie in the workplace presents a more professional face to your customers, you need to hire some better-informed consultants. Providing a good service is what makes your customers happy.

Anyway, that’s my rant. Here are some more photos of Alex dressed up as a junior bank clerk.

Update: If you’re looking for the actual details of Alex’s first day at school Abi has them over here.