Disclosed Information

miranda sound - ravari room - aug 15

bob — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 19:00:10 +0000

Last night was Miranda Sound’s last show in Columbus. ever. Internet can tell you more, but the gist is that they are retiring (kids and law school and such?). It was fantastic. Exciting and good and bad. It was sad that I won’t see them ever again, as they are a pure pleasure to watch, but everybody there loved them, and it made for a great show. There was a lot of emotion floating around. I can’t really do it justice, and if you haven’t seen them, well - too late. You’re fucked.

Bonus: They had two drumsets, and their old drummer was playing with them.

delicious.com

bob — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:05:20 +0000

Since Yahoo’s aquisition, del.icio.us has transformed into something quite a bit more sleek, without adding any stupid gruff. I’m impressed, and I’ve taken up on using it again. Their tag browsing and entry editing workflow has improved, and the addition of a color to the page has been a wonder.

I’m also pleased with their FF plugin, which finally works in ff2. Makes my use effortless. I must remember to add a feed of my deliciousesses to the sidebar on this site (which, by the way, looks fantastic right now.)

Speaking of this site, I continue to wonder if anyone reads it. I’ve not been a good content foster, and of course, I’ve mostly maintained this for myself, because nerd stuff is fun.

Lamest Keyboard Setting Ever

bob — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:40:58 +0000

I’ve had to do this over and over again and I keep spending days looking for the setting. On many systems I’ve used, an xorg config that sets up the keyboard in a certain way (i.e. automatically) breaks and fails to map the windows key correct. This particularly has happened to me on Fedora in Gnome.
The fix for this is buried in:

System > Preferences > Hardware > Keyboard
Layout tab > Layout Options button
Alt/Win key behavior

I change this to Super is mapped to the Win Keys. Gnome’s frustrating sometimes in its lack of reconfigurability when compaired to many other systems but then when it presents you with options, they aren’t always obvious. I guess I don’t mess with gconf, where gnome’s registry-like madness allows much greater granularity, but really - who does?

Long Walk Through Africa

bob — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:16:00 +0000

When I moved a few months ago, I was in the middle of slowly reading another freakin’ Dave Eggers book, What is the What. NYT book of the year or whatever, yada yada; of course I can’t get enough of the guy just like everybody else on earth. This one was a little different though. A coming of age story about an African refugee? What? You can read better descriptions on Amazon than I could write, but the gist is that the main character was displaced by civil war at a very young age and after 13 years of refugee camps and death and struggle and long, long walks, he gets a chance to come struggle in the US. (note: that isn’t a summary of the first chapter - that’s a summary of the whole book.)
90% of the readers of this book would probably be kidding themselves if they think they’d have read the book if Papa E didn’t write it, myself included. If you look over my bookshelves, the only books of strife and struggle that you see either take place in space, or involve educated white men. Or vampires. Space vampires. In that alone, I see enough reason to be impressed with the book.
So anyway, a few months pass and I realize that I stopped reading the book when I went through my own incredible struggle and displacement (moving out into the suburbs.) Last week, I picked it up again and finished it. Overall, it made me sad and embarrassed with myself. Stack this on top of a few movies about people Doing the Right Thing, and you could say I’ve had an impression left on me.
Either way, gotta love e-diddy.

iptthnihtt

bob — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:50:54 +0000

I played tennis too hard and now it hurts to type.

MySQL ifNull()

bob — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:55:53 +0000

I didn’t find an answer to this in my first few google search results, so I’m posting it here.

When using CONCAT() in MySQL, if any of the values are NULL, then the CONCAT fails and the return is NULL. BQW told me about NVL(), which is Oracle/PGSQL (so useless for me), but that led me to IFNULL(). IFNULL(statement, return): If ’statement’ is null, ‘return’ is returned. Simple use can be IFNULL(fieldName, “”), which will fit nicely into a concat. It actually worked much better in my case, allowing me to do some conditional output formatting.

midnight oil: burned.

bob — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 07:19:46 +0000

At work, we’re moving our glorified server closet into a room more suited to the title ‘data center’. Twenty-five or so racks, though most are less than half full. Several days of continuous downtime is, of course, unacceptable, so we’re moving piece by piece over the course of a few weeks. Production systems move at night.

This means that I’m still awake at 3:30am. See ya at work in the morning, right?

months pass

bob — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 05:03:49 +0000

I took the server down a month ago to move it. It’s taken this long to get it back up. This is mostly out of laziness, but that’s not your problem. Sorry. So what took my time, instead? I did some webwork for the OSU Solar Decathlon (Drupal theming, etc). Continued with my silly Java class. Prepared for moving buildings at work. Oh yeah, I moved. Saw a rollerderby. Saw In Bruge again. Made plans to go to Vegas. Washed my car for the first time in a year. Most of that was in the past few days, as my memory for these things isn’t very effective. Yar.

Thanks: GNU Screen

bob — Fri, 02 May 2008 04:28:38 +0000

During my day at work, I’m usually connected to 2-10 machines at the same time (ssh). The easier it is to manage, the higher than number gets. In the past I was using Gnome’s Terminal with tabs for each connection, and it was just fine. Lately, I’ve been using Windows, and don’t have that luxury, so I started looking for alternatives.

I habitually use putty for all ssh needs, so I found the Putty Connection Manager, which is a silly .NET way of wrapping putty and giving it tabs. It worked OK, but was a little clumsy and had weird saving mechanisms. As I recall, it crashed a couple times, also. I then moved back to my old standard, SecureCRT, but it’s not free, and wasn’t offering me anything that putty didn’t do better, other than tabs.

As my SecureCRT shareware trial expired, I began looking for solutions. I remembered that we have a so-called ‘jump-box’ - a server at our other datacenter that is supposed to be used to ssh into, and then jump off to other machines, so we don’t have to expose ssh to another set of vlans. (paranoid?)

I made this jumpbox my home, and started using screen on it. Screen gets a little unmanageable after 5 or 6 screens are open, and the following it my solution:

In my .screenrc -

hardstatus alwayslastline "%{= KW}%-w%{= wk}%50>%n %t%{-}%+w%<"

This adds the approximation of tabs on the bottom line of the terminal window, one tab representing each screen, containing the tab number and the xterm title in the text on the tab. That leaves me with something that looks like this:

1 bash   2 bash   3 bash   4 bash   5 bash

To give them useful titles, I added this to my .bashrc:

function ssh() {
    echo -n -e "\033k$1\033\134"
    /usr/bin/ssh $@
    echo -n -e "\033k`hostname`\033\134"
}

Now, when I ’ssh’ somewhere in a screen, it sets the title to the hostname. It’s perfect. Thanks go to an “anonymous” upload from spam@sweet.as on dotfiles.org.

manhub

bob — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 04:27:37 +0000

Additionally, a strong word of advice. Do not eat subway’s chicken salad sandwich. Especially not the full footlong. I’ve been burpin’ that shit all day and it’s not pleasant.

Top 2 new slang phrases invented in the past week: 1. Undergird 2. Manhub