the jof

The first thing I do in the morning is come in and swap out the backup tape from last night and put in a freshly rotated one for that night. Then I begin booting and I get some coffee and a glass of water and come back to check the production server logs for errors. Next comes email which includes the output from the cron job that ran the backup last night and check what was done and how efficiently. There’s also the occasional alert email about something going wrong elsewhere. Then I begin plotting things I want to get done that day in emacs.

After that I begin making the rounds in the office to check in with users and see if fixes from the day before are working for them. When I make it to my desk after that, I check on the firewall logs from yesterday to make sure nothing fishy has been happening, and that things are generally ok.

It’s usually at this point that printers start exploding.

To whom it may concern, let it be known that running subversion on a windows server is a really bad idea. If you really, really must, don’t run an older version.

At work, some of out software development is outsourced to India where they run an SVN server that developers in our office regularly access. Unfortunately, there are all manner of problems with Internet transit in India through VSNL who gets pretty much all their transit to the US through Teleglobe. Sadly, it seems they have all kinds of routing and actual delivery issues, so we’ve had to use a really tiny MTU to see to anything getting through it seems. One quirk a coworker and I both noticed on our Linux boxes is that running deltas on files seems to get progressively worse the further and further our client versions were from the server. So if you’re using SVN 1.1.1 on a Windows server, be sure and use an SVN client under 1.3.2 to work more or less reliably over a problematic network.

Exclusive disjunction….. in space!

THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS JESUS
THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES
THE ALGORITHM IS BANNED IN CHINA
THE ALGORITHM IS FROM JERSEY

So I’m headed off to Chicago for the weekend, and have no idea what I’m getting myself into…

I’m primarily there for the Green Festival to support some public Internet kiosks should anything *too* crazy happen. But I think that most of the time, I’ll just be out and about town. No plans really, just revisiting and checking out whatever I can.

Suggestions on things to do, people to see, and place to go? Drop me a line: “mail `echo thejof|sed -e ’s/^/jof@/;s/$/.com/’`”

How strange… 7/8 is a block allocated to DISA and for all intents and purposes is pretty much segmented from the rest of the Internet, but lately I’ve been seeing a briefly flapping announcement through Sprintlink for 7.1.1.0/24. It’s been inserted and withdrawn about four or five times quickly beginning in April. And the weirdest part is where it’s going…

traceroute [(x.x.x.x:33456) -> (7.1.1.1:33457)], protocol udp, algo exhaustive, duration 29 s
1 P(6, 6) [redacted] (x.x.x.x) 1.157 ms
2 P(6, 6) [redacted] (x.x.x.x) 0.743 ms
3 P(6, 6) ge-6-4.r04.plalca01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (140.174.41.101) 5.055 ms
4 P(6, 6) xe-0-3-0.r21.plalca01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.4.121) 1.961 ms
MPLS Label 219297 TTL=1
5 P(6, 6) xe-0-2-0.r20.plalca01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.4.230) 2.505 ms
MPLS Label 778752 TTL=1 | 180403
6 P(6, 6) ae-1.r21.snjsca04.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.4.119) 3.574 ms
MPLS Label 180403 TTL=1
7 P(6, 6) xe-1-1.r03.snjsca04.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.2.209) 2.897 ms
8 P(6, 6) 144.232.8.197 (144.232.8.197) 3.342 ms
9 P(6, 6) sl-bb21-sj-2-0-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.18.30) 3.663 ms
10 P(6, 6) sl-bb23-sj-13-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.3.206) 4.109 ms
11 P(6, 6) sl-bb25-rly-1-0-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.8.144) 72.520 ms
12 P(6, 6) sl-bb26-rly-11-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.14.170) 164.899 ms
13 P(6, 6) sl-bb20-rly-12-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.7.249) 67.314 ms
14 P(6, 6) sl-bb20-tuk-11-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.20.137) 88.053 ms
15 P(6, 6) sl-bb21-tuk-15-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.20.133) 88.929 ms
16 P(6, 6) sl-bb21-lon-14-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.19.70) 197.116 ms
17 P(6, 6) sl-bb23-lon-14-0.sprintlink.net (213.206.128.54) 160.513 ms
18 P(6, 6) sl-bb21-ams-3-0.sprintlink.net (213.206.129.142) 176.129 ms
19 P(6, 6) sl-bb20-ham-14-0.sprintlink.net (213.206.129.50) 201.490 ms
20 P(6, 6) sl-gw2-ham-0-0-0.sprintlink.net (217.147.96.100) 182.500 ms

It seems odd to me that it stops somewhere in Hamburg of all places. Leaves me wondering…

Now that the weather is beginning to turn up, I started bicycling to work a bit. Since I wanted to know relatively how long my trip is each way, I started timing it with music. Since I listen to music while I’m riding anyway, I started keeping track of how many tracks I go through along the way. I’m feeling pretty lucky to have a quick two to two-and-a-half track commute.

My biggest boost to productivity at work since GTD?
root@powell:~# echo -e -n “127.0.0.1     reader.google.com\n127.0.0.1     digg.com\n127.0.0.1     www.digg.com” >> /etc/hosts
So sad…. I have to give it to those stupid Digg commenters, they’re pretty funny… intentional or not.

Columba livia

I think it’s sometimes too easy to forget, when living in a city, that there are all kinds of other animals and plants living right along side us. Sometimes it’s nice to just slow down and take a better look at the things we’d otherwise walk past.

First HDR Try
I was pleasanly surprised to find that we’ve got a decent office camera at work. A 30D with a decent Canon-L series lens…

I guess I’ll be taking more photos sooner than I thought.