A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
Technology does eventually fail. One of my LCDs (both of which are pushing 5 years old now) has started to go bad on me. It originally was just having one row of pixels that would flicker in and out from time to time. Now the bottom third of the screen flickers every few seconds, making it really hard to use. That was a few days ago.

Today, it's shut off on me twice and the video card deemed that it was no longer there and collapsed all of my windows on to the main display. Pulling the cord off and reconnecting it caused it to wake up again. Only to repeat a few hours later. Annoying.

Now back to code. That is all.
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
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?

update

Jan. 6th, 2012 11:32 pm
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
Thanks everybody. I'm an uncle now, and the baby and mother are doing fine. A big scare, but it looks like it's all worked out. Congratulations to my brother Ryan, I'm really excited for you dude!
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
...thoughts and prayers.

My brother ([personal profile] 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 drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
I have learned an important lesson about baby boys.

In short, it seems that the waste elimination system that feeds his butt and the one that feeds his penis are on separate timers. (You parents know where this is going already, I bet.)

The practical side of this lesson is that I have now, something like five times, been in the middle of changing a diaper stained, smeared, or otherwise full of poop and have felt a startlingly warm and wet sensation followed shortly after by the thought "aw damn, he's peed on me again!" I've been getting better about positioning the new diaper and catching it, but it's quite the tricky maneuver.

It's not the end of the world, of course, but it means more laundry. I don't really prep for a golden shower as part of the changing ritual -- no plastic sheets or anything. Maybe I should?

Anyway, the shining moment in this story (and the reason for me posting this) was yesterday. I probably should feel bad about this but, alas, twenty-four hours later I'm still giggling. It was another standard poop filled diaper that I was cleansing from his buttocks and assorted boy parts -- if you've had a kid, you know exactly what I mean. That shit gets everywhere.

On this particular incident, I turned away for a moment to go throw away the diaper that I had just wrapped up. It was pretty full and needed to be somewhere other than on the changing surface. Out of nowhere and with great gusto, little Oliver started crying like only a very upset, startled, and angry baby can. Confused, since he normally doesn't start up the crocodile tears until the new diaper is going on, I turned back to see what was up.

Sure enough, the boy had decided to have another loose cannon incident. Unfortunately for him, though, this time the friendly fire was not on Daddy. Nope. This time, little Ollie managed to aim the cannon to attain a perfect bullseye. Poor kid managed to nail himself in the chest and face with his own warm surprise.

I managed to get him cleaned up and handed off to Ari for feeding before I collapsed in a helpless, giggling heap. I'm probably going to hell for this.
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
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
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
We are in the middle of our first "cluster feeding"! That's actually kind of exciting, probably because it's not happening at 3AM and so we're not entirely run down at this moment. We're pretty tired, but we're not destroyed and barely hobbling from point to point.

A cluster feeding, for the uninitiated, is when the baby finishes one round of feeding ... and goes into the next one very shortly thereafter. Apparently a baby's stomach is so small that a good burp and poop and they're ready to go again. It's kind of disturbing when you can spend an hour putting food into the little thing and then change his diaper and he's ready to spend another hour "on the boob".

All told, though, the feeding situation seems to be on the upward trend. We had a 24 hour period or so where he was clearly wanting more milk than Ari was able to provide (it takes time for the breasts to get their assembly lines up!) so he was a little distraught last night and Ari did some quite awesome baby-calming.

Today, though, it seems that she's very ably keeping up with all he's drinking -- and he's very interested. Om nom. We keep joking that he's an expert at Boob Savaging because he does this funny thing where, when he's about to latch, he goes all wide-eyed and shakes his head and dives in like a starving man on his first meal in paradise. It really is adorable to watch.

That is, right now, my life in a nutshell. Helping Mom and Baby. Fetching food, water, ice. Changing diapers. Being supportive. And generally being out of the way of all of the million visits from the nursing staff -- damn, there's a lot! I was joking with my mom yesterday that
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
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.
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
Today we say hello to Oliver Graham Smith. He was welcomed into the land of the born at 11:31 AM. Weighing in at a whopping 9 pounds, 1 ounce and 21 inches long, he was declared a "big boy".

Everything went really well. The c-section was flawless, he came out very pink and healthy and so far everything's been great. Feeding has been working, he's created both types of excrement, and his blood sugar has been good. He's been a little cool (97.9 at most readings) but they think that he's fine and we've been keeping him bundled.

So far he sleeps a bunch, but he wakes up every 2-3 hours and we feed him. Yay!

Mother is doing well. She's got sensation back and can stand and walk (albeit very painfully). Nothing seems to have gone wrong in the surgery, so we're very thankful about all of that.

Now we're in the hospital for the next few days (discharge on Saturday) and we have a beautiful little boy. I'm still working through all of the emotions -- and honestly, probably will be for a while, so I won't give you anything else right now.

Pictures will be forthcoming. They're available on Facebook and Google+, but since Dreamwidth doesn't let me upload photos (yet), I don't have the energy to put them on my web site and then resize them and all of that right now...
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
I am vaguely aware of the stuff going on with the AO3 project, and tonight I saw [personal profile] 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 [personal profile] 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.
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
I saw an article in the news today about how peanuts have gone up in price some insane amount this year -- something like $450/ton to $1200/ton in the past year. From there I read that the same thing has happened to other grains, beef, dairy in general, and tons of other commodity foods that we take for granted. This is really causing a crimp in the ability of companies like Kraft to deliver things at the same prices we're used to. There's a lot of pressure on the system.

Does anybody have more detail about why there's this widespread impact on commodity prices? I know the peanuts are due to a hotter than usual summer in the southern United States. What about the other industries? Is this all due to weather patterns disrupting our ability to produce food here, or is there more at work? The global recession causing companies to fold and reducing supply? I dunno.

It's odd, anyway. It is going to impact me but it's not going to really hurt me more than make me grumble about the cost of food. I know it's really going to hurt some people, though. One figure I saw said that simply the cost of food is going to push millions of people over the edge into poverty.
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
[staff profile] 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, [staff profile] fu, and everybody else who had a hand in this!
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
I've decided to maintain technical stuff that is non-personal over on my blog at qq.is. It is currently syndicated on Dreamwidth at [syndicated profile] qqis_feed if you want to read it here.
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
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.
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
New blog post about a project I've just released, an easy to use API for Nagios:

http://qq.is/article/announcing-a-nagios-api
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
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.
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
Steve Jobs has passed.

I'm listening to American Pie by Don McLean. It seems appropriate, given the effect Steve Jobs has had on our world in the last 10 years.

They were singing, "bye-bye, miss american pie."
Drove my chevy to the levee, But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, "this’ll be the day that I die."


I may disagree with a lot of the so-called walled garden business practices Apple is so infamous for, but there's no denying that he's had probably the largest impact of anybody ever on consumer electronics and made them such a part of our culture. The silhouetted iPod ads that entranced us to the iconic white headphones that are known around the world.

Steve Jobs didn't compromise. He had a vision and he carried it through, whatever it took, whatever it required. He practically reinvented half a dozen markets while building a company that always seems to be lightyears ahead of everybody else. Many have tried, none of come close.

Rest in peace, Steve. You will be missed.

tmux

Sep. 28th, 2011 09:40 am
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
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.
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
I have now learned a lot more about the present state of the art of high availability in Linux than I ever knew. Awesome, knowledge!

The best guide I've found so far for understanding the Pacemaker, etc configuration is here:

http://doc.opensuse.org/products/draft/SLE-HA/SLE-ha-guide_sd_draft/index.html

It apparently was just released and is currently in draft state. It's from OpenSUSE but it's applicable to anybody who is using this stack of technologies. I.e., you can use it just fine for your Ubuntu setup, which is what I'm doing here at work.

I also recommend this blog post if you are coming from heartbeat and want more of a "and here's how to step into the present":

http://theclusterguy.clusterlabs.org/post/178680309/configuring-heartbeat-v1-was-so-simple

STONITH configuration (using IPMI) was a lot harder than I expected, but I found this useful for getting started with it:

http://www.karlkatzke.com/ipmi-stonith-howto-with-pacemaker/
A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
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.

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A drawing of Mark wearing a hat with the Dreamwidth "D".
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January 2012

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