Mark Smith's Journal

A month ago, I had two separate charges appear in my bank account:

12/01/2011    $167.76     ACADEMY SPORTS #7 HOUSTO     11/30ACADEMY STRN: 054813
12/05/2011    $150.00     ACADEMY SPORTS #10 HOUST     12/03ACADEMY STRN: 012816

Okay. So, based on the name here, these were made to Academy Sports which is a chain of stores all over the south. The stores seem to exist, and in fact, are just a few miles from each other down in sunny Houston, TX.

Let's take a moment and think about this, though. Texas... in late November/early December... oh gee, wait a second, I'm not sure that makes sense. In fact, I'm pretty sure it doesn't:



Yeah, my bad. I had a kid that was 7-10 days old at the time of these charges. I was most definitely sitting at home partaking of the restful sleep of ... wait ... no, actually. I was cranky and tired and most definitely, absolutely, nowhere near Houston, TX.

Well, thankfully, I've been on this rodeo before. I called up Chase and talked. They issued the credits and I went about my business of getting a new debit card. Annoying, but most definitely not the end of the world. This kind of thing happens and we had a pretty bad rash of card theft in my city over the past few months. It's annoying but no harm done.

So I thought, anyway, until today. Today, I got a nice letter from my bank -- Chase. They let me know, in no uncertain terms, that these were authorized charges and that they'd be re-debiting my accounts for the hundreds of dollars that I spent in Houston.

Exciting. I guess tomorrow I will have to make some telephone calls and put on my Angry Face?

...thoughts and prayers.

My brother (togra)'s partner is in labor and just had to go in for an emergency c-section. They were trying to put the epidural in and she and the baby crashed BP/heart rate.

Prayers, thoughts, everything would be welcome.

A little video of Oliver. I held the phone badly and accidentally the mic halfway through, but you get the idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gS51hOb67E

I'm not posting small versions because I don't have the brain to resize and crop and do all those things one does to make pictures generally presentable on the web. For now, though:

Obligatory "first pic!" shot of angry Oliver: http://xb95.com/pics/oliver.jpg

Mom and baby: http://xb95.com/pics/ari_and_oliver.jpg

Dad and baby: http://xb95.com/pics/mark_and_oliver.jpg

Baby is doing great. He passed his hearing test today with a 100% on both ears. Ari is also doing well, the pain meds allow for reasonably normal functioning. Breastfeeding is going -- waiting for the milk to really come in, which is exciting (sarcastic there).

Oliver has actually let us sleep some today -- from about 4AM to 10AM we had some (mostly) uninterrupted sleeping. Well, Ari got woken a few times by nurses, but I slept pretty well (as well as can be expected on this damn chair).

That's all for now.

I am vaguely aware of the stuff going on with the AO3 project, and tonight I saw lim's resignation post and it made me really sad to see.

So, this post is pointed not at AO3 or the OTW (I honestly don't know enough about them to critique), but instead I'm going to talk to the users. To people like yourself who use sites like Dreamwidth, Archive of our Own, LiveJournal, and the many others out there in the world.

These sites are made by people.

They are made by people who actively want to make your life better by giving you something awesome. I can't think of a single person in the history of my time in this industry who has wanted to make the lives of their users worse. That's just not why people do this.

Let's focus a little closer to home: on sites that have volunteers. People who usually get paid nothing to expend many (and frequently all) of their spoons to give you something that you want. These people -- people like lim -- are wonderful, amazing people. In thanks for their hard work, to recompense them for all of the time and effort they've put into this project, what do we do?

We tear them down! We bash them with our words, letter by letter, until they cave. Until they give up. Until they are broken. Then what? Do we feel better? Have we really accomplished any particular goal? Now that we've driven off the person with the domain knowledge, proven ability, time, and energy to fix the problems -- who's going to fix it? Are we going to find another person who will just step right in?

My money says that the next person who considers it will go "actually, I saw what happened last time" and they won't bother to even try! Where does that leave the project? Dead in the water! End of the line! Fín! The End!

Nobody wants that to happen. None of the users want to see the project they love die. The world would be a sadder place without AO3 and what it represents. I really don't want to see them go away. But I think that, in order for them to stick around, this issue has to be addressed: how to properly care for volunteers.

(Okay, I lied, now I'm going to talk a bit about something relevant to the organization behind AO3. I will again point out that I am not intimate with this organization, so all of my knowledge is secondhand from various readings over the years.)

Part of the solution is community management. You have to have an organization willing to step in and say "look, that right there? that's not OK" when people are abusing your volunteers. This is something that LiveJournal always struggled with, honestly -- people could say whatever they wanted about the Support and Abuse teams and then go whine to Brad and it was the age old game of playing the parents off of each other. Not good.

The bulk of this, though, is volunteer management. People need to be cared for much like any living thing. We need food, water, and sunlight: we need to know that our efforts matter, that we are appreciated, that someone is listening, and that we are not alone.

When I was at CCP, this is something that they did really well. The community manager, kieron, was exceptional at making sure people felt like they could go to him at any time. At LiveJournal, Denise and Carrie drove that bus and we had a thriving volunteer community. On Dreamwidth, we did a fantastic job for two years, but the last year hasn't gone as well for our volunteer developers (mea culpa).

This all brings me back to my main point, though, which is addressed to everybody out there who uses things:

We are all human beings, and we all deserve to be treated with respect.

If you only take one thing away from this post, let it be the previous line. Write it on your mirror. Tattoo it to your hand so that you remember it the next time your favorite site does a code update and there are bugs. These sites are made by and for people, human beings, and volunteers work out of the goodness of their hearts.

The basic rules of human decency still apply on the Internet.

fu just released the beta of the new update page. You can turn it on on the beta features page if you want to join in the beta.

Let me just say -- it is a thing of beauty. I love it. It really does look and work great so far, I'm super excited by this work. The update page is something that everybody spends a lot of time in and the old one, while functional, was really just behind the times. While there is still some stuff to work on here with the new one, it really makes me happy to see this project going forward and see it live on the site.

Nice job, fu, and everybody else who had a hand in this!

Mystery solved! Scroll down.

I have recently been using Apple's Photo Stream to sync photos across my devices. Just now, I pulled it up to see if my recent Henry photo had come through -- and discovered an image that I absolutely did not take.

http://xb95.com/pics/wtf.jpg

I don't know where that is, I don't know what that is, nor do I know what device takes photos in that size. It doesn't seem to be either the iPad or the iPhone 4S?

It really worries me, though -- where did this photo come from? Does Apple really have such an insane bug in their system that they let users see other people's photos? Does that mean my photos are showing up on other people's accounts? That's not cool, not at all.

Has anybody else seen this?

Solved: I used Bump with someone at work yesterday and they sent me this picture. It automatically stores it in the Photos section of the app. This automatically syncs it across all of your devices. Whew.

Hi all,

I'm again moving my server. This time from Linode to EC2. It's slightly more expensive, but the downtime I've been experiencing at Linode is terrible. They're been some serious DDoS attacks against their provider and it's been taking my server offline for long periods of time.

I could just move to a different data center with Linode, but I don't feel that they've been doing a great job with me as a customer. I've gotten no emails about the situation, updates have been less than timely, certainly no comped time, and they talk as if they're a big business ('we apologize for the inconvenience'). Maybe they are big, but if that's the case, they shouldn't be hosting in a budget data center. (They use HE in Fremont.)

Anyway, this affects some Dreamwidth services (Bugzilla notably, IRC bots I run) but it also affects some email (Denise's and mine). Please expect a little turbulence as I move everything. I don't have as much free time as I would like to do this gracefully, so I may just flip a big switch and then see what breaks.

Thanks all.

Of late, I've switched to using tmux instead of screen. It is functionally the same thing -- a terminal multiplexer -- but in my usage it works a lot better, more predictably, and is easier to use. The hardest part is getting used to ^b as the shortcut, but you can change that to screen's ^a if you'd prefer.

One of the coolest things I've seen is something I accidentally ran into today. When you have multiple terminals attached, tmux does the intelligent thing and constrains the size of everybody to the size of the smallest. This allows you to easily share your screen without having to muck about with making sure everybody is using the same size terminal. It also gives you a very visual display showing what is going on.

When I ran into this feature, though, I was confused. Today when I ran tmux attach my terminal came up and the right side was a whole host of dashes. It looked a lot like a pane of some sort, but nothing I did in the options would make it go away.

A quick ask on #tmux on Freenode and someone pointed me to the ^b D command. It allows you to remote detach other terminals that are listening in.

Anyway, if you are a big screen user, you should check it out. It's pretty easy to get used to and seems to work better than screen. Don't get me wrong, I don't have any major complaints about screen, but tmux is a very interesting alternative.

Edit: I've been told this feature has been implemented in screen as well. It seems my experience was based on a really old version of the software. Moral of the story: comparing software from several years ago to a competitor from today is not a particularly great comparison.

Having now spent the day working on our Pacemaker installation, I have to wonder: is it natural that as things evolve, they become more and more complicated? And, in this case at least, accrete XML (dammit) as it grows up.

I seem to recall that heartbeat version 2 was much simpler and easier to use. Now, there's this complicated XML configuration system that makes life more difficult than it needs to be. I'm sure it was a reasonable decision at the time, but meh.

Right now I'm mired in getting a STONITH setup to work. Which, hilariously, is apparently the way to handle node failures. STONITH is an acronym for "Shoot The Other Node In The Head" and it is exactly what you think it is. If $A fails, then $B can issue a STONITH and reboot $A. The catch is that you have to build rules such that $A's STONITH daemon does not actually run on $A.

I called these rules "$A-no-suicide" because, hell, what else would you call them?

At the very least, today has been amusing. If not productive, sadly, given my IPMI systems are not cooperating with me and not allowing me to run commands remotely. Something about privilege level problems. Not sure why yet.

Pro tip for working with Pacemaker: the 'show' command gives you a much easier syntax to work with for enacting configuration changes in the CRM tool's configure mode. I.e., from your root console, type crm configure show and enjoy the much more readable output.

You can use the same format for making configuration additions. It doesn't seem to work for changing attributes, though, so you'll have to go back to crm_resource and friends for that.