Dear Santa, thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you but... honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know its not cause at night there's voices so... please please can you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman, or...
Back in a moment.
Thank you Santa.

Later That Evening...

Well, it's a whole lot cleaner under there, and somewhat better organised.  But the KVM switch seems disinclined to, well, switch, or indeed to K or V or M, which kind of defeats the exercise.

I do have considerably more legroom now.  And I swapped my keyboard for a new one while I was at it, so it's no longer an all-you-can-eat buffet for ants.

Oh well.  I could always read the manual, I guess.

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Blergle Blergle Eep

If it's 42° in November, you could equally be in Sydney or Minneapolis.*

If during such weather conditions you find a venomous spider** while cleaning under your desk, probabilities favour the former.

* As I write this, that is indeed the temperature in those two metropoli.

** Only a redback; in other words, deadly but not dangerous.  I promptly reduced it to a brown smear.  A funnelweb would have seen me vacating the vicinity with extreme precipitousness.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:29 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The Daily Bleh

Had a power glitch here at Pixy Labs, and my UPS helpfully responded by dropping dead on the spot.

I also discovered that one of the drives in Pepper, my anime storage box, has failed.  But it might have failed previously and the box only noticed when I rebooted.

It's RAID-5, so the data is safe for now, but there doesn't seem to be any way to rebuild the array.  So I have to back up 2.4TB, replace the drive, and restore that 2.4TB.

Ick.

Do I even have 2.4TB of space to do a backup?

Hmm...  Yes, in fact.  Okay, good.  Off we go then!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:27 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Peas, Corn, and Baby Carrots

And a 12 oz. rump steak marinated in red wine and garlic.

Damn.  If I'd bought some of those little potato puffs as well, life would be perfect.  Fattening, but perfect.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:33 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I Still Aten't Dead

But busy.

My day job involves stitching together social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube into a cohesive and accessible whole.  Last Thursday (and continuing on into the weekend) that whole got DDoSed.  The application providers responded by raising defences, and the combination of the attacks and the defences led to our cohesive and accessible whole decohering and inaccessibilising, and to my having to glue it all back together at several successive 4AMs.

Which general sequence of events is not unfamilar to me, of course.

Somewhere in there I got to go out and see Coraline, which is nicely animated but doesn't hold a lot of surprises if you've read the book, and to lay down rough cuts of the first four tracks of Summer Theologica.  I'm pushing ahead with my ambitious tenth-anniversary schedule of four albums in four months, and damn the torpedoes.

Normality will resume as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:16 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sigh Of Relief

For the first time in two weeks I'm not insane.

Trying desperately to fix the failed RAID array (ugh) then finalise the server migration before they turned the old servers off (just made it), shore up the defences of Munuvia against a rising sea of spam (new filter in place), and clean house and tear out some fairly impressive weeds before a maintenance inspection (almost made it, then at the last minute my vacuum cleaner died, leaving my floors looking less than spotless ).

Of course, I also accidentally corrupted some of the tables on the replica database at my day job yesterday, leading to a 3:30AM support call today and some hasty creative thinking on how to repair 100GB of scrambled data.  But I even solved that one, mostly.

This weekend, to celebrate, I plan to sleep for 36 hours.

Update: Yeah, right.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:57 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Damn Power Efficient Systems

One thing with my old computers - when sitting at my desk, even in the dead of Winter, my feet never got cold.

Nowadays even a quad-core system with 8GB of RAM, 4.5TB of disk, and a 1GB, teraflop video card doesn't make much of a footwarmer.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:48 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Eating Mice

Anyway, I'm going to try a new recipe tonight - teriyaki beef with snow peas on jasmine rice.  Was going to use lamb, but there was no appealing-looking diced lamb at the supermarket this evening.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:28 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Eaten By Mice

In theory, we're scheduled to move to a new server tomorrow.

That might still happen, though it's looking doubtful.  The reason it might still happen is that if it doesn't, I'll be up for hundreds of dollars in fees to keep the old servers around for another month.

And the reason it's doubtful is that we had trouble with the systems at work every day last week.  Every day, US time.  So between 3AM and 5AM my time.  And every time, I got woken up and had to fix it.

One hardware fault, one software bug, one software bug in an error-handling routine triggered by another site going haywire, one software bug in normal processing triggered by another site going haywire, and one instance of things just not working right for no apparent reason.

Then I finally got back to setting up the new server.  I found some issues with my configuration of the containers for the CPanel sites - insufficent space allocated for the kernel structures, insufficient datagram buffers (which is hardly critical, but I fixed it while I was there) and a couple of other things were we were close to the limit.

So I fixed all of that, recreated the containers, and reinstalled CPanel.

Whereupon I came unstuck, because CPanel would not install.

Turned out - after considerable cursing and deleting and recreating of containers - to be a firewall issue.  CPanel's installer couldn't access CPAN (no relation) because CPAN couldn't access the server.

Fucking FTP.  Passive mode is there for a reason - though it seems to work about as consistently as secondary DNS servers.

Anyway, sorted that out, but noticed that 6GB of RAM had gone walkies without leaving a forwarding address.  It was physically there, but unaccounted for inside Linux.  A reboot sorted that out, but then I had a slight accident with a command run on the hardware node instead of inside a container.

So I decided to do a clean reinstall of Linux and load everything again.  Since I've been experimenting on the box for two weeks now, this is not overall a bad idea.

The reinstall of CentOS went smoothly.  The I went to load OpenVZ - and the OpenVZ repository, and indeed the site - and the list of mirrors - was down.

Gah.

It's back now, but I've pretty much lost a day.

Plan now is to move mee.nu (and the mu.nu Minx sites), and prepare to move mu.nu.  That way I can cancel at least one of the servers.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:24 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Dreams

So humans and aliens finally make contact - in a horrific starship collision, where the warp fields of the two ships interact in such a way as to draw them inexorably together into a gravitational singularity.  As time dilation effects spread out differentially from the engine cores, giving everyone more than enough time to realise their fates, the aliens resign themselves to the inevitable, while the human captain (yours truly) figures out a way to save his ship and crew, while dooming himself and the alien craft - and takes it.

The aliens respond, punishing the captain by trapping him in a time loop, where every morning he awakens to find an unfamiliar pistol on his dressing table, and slowly comes to the realisation that he is trapped in a time loop on a strange planet, with no way out, no way to ever see his family again, no escape except to end it all with a bullet to the head, whereupon he awakens to find an unfamilar pistol...

And manipulates the idea of quantum immortality to survive his own death, escape the time loop and the growing gravitational singularity both, and return to the real world, where he finds that he has been reading a little-known story by Fritz Leiber (or George R. A. Murray, whoever he is) in a small-press limited-print collection at Galaxy Bookshop, the old one on Bathurst St, where his 19-year-old self is trying to update his store discount card, only they won't accept his identification, and he has to get his mother to sign for him.

I don't think my mother ever set foot in Galaxy, though I do remember her buying Dragon magazine for me, back in the day.

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