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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • The Linkage Awakens

    Kylanath and I went to see that new War In The Stars movie thing. In a theater, no less.

    My spoiler-free reaction?

    I liked “The Force Awakens”, mainly due to how incredibly fun and engaging the new characters are. Also, it’s occasionally an incredibly pretty film, what with the panoramic backgrounds full of crashed Imperial Star Destroyers and what-not. (Be cynical on your own turf. I’m not immune to well-done nostalgia.)

    On an almost unrelated note, one of the things I realized that I can do with this site is to tell you, dear reader, about things I like. Sure, this was always supposed to be a journal. (Was I ever good at journal-ing? Probably not.) But back while it was a more active web location, this site served the same function for me that Twitter does now: Quick thoughts, and links to stuff elsewhere on the Internets that I find amusing/informative/etc.

    So. Let’s do more of that latter thing, the linky-ness. And to tie this back into today’s theme, I’m going to link to the Xanadu Cinema Pleasure Dome podcast’s website. This past Thursday they put up an episode all about the aforementioned new movie, and I agree with pretty much all of their reactions, so listening to them for an hour will give you a good idea how I feel. (I’m 100% less tipsy than they were when they recorded, mind you.) And if that’s not enough, I wrote a blog post’s worth of comment on their post. Ahem.

    Be aware, if you haven’t seen the movie yet, do that first and then follow this link to the “KlaxOn! KlaxOff!” episode of the Xanadu Cinema Pleasure Dome. Enjoy, won’t you?

  • Goodbye Gallery, Hello… Piwigo?

    Since the Menalto Gallery project seems to have shut down some time back in 2014, I have switched to… Piwigo. The bulk import went well enough, though this does mean that links in old posts here are going to be horribly broken.

    Link rot. It happens to the best of us, and also me.

    Check out the new gallery (full of the same old pictures), won’t you?

  • It’s Almost Like I Know What I’m Doing

    I just completed an important and long-neglected task: The backups for my webserver have been reinvented and improved. This isn’t to say I haven’t been making backups previously, mind you! I had a (somewhat) cumbersome system of weekly tarballs and nightly rsync-over-ssh jobs going on. It was a bit I/O intensive, though. The opposite of efficiency.

    The new system consists of:

    • My home QNAP with the rsync app.
    • My home firewall configured to route rsync traffic to the QNAP, but only from my webserver’s IP address. (There’s still a good username/password involved as well.)
    • A group of organized, nested target directories on the QNAP.
    • A string of rsync commands in a nightly cron job script which update the QNAP’s copy of each of the websites, each email account’s mail store, the website database dumps and a few key configuration directories out of /etc.

    This setup should cut down on disk I/O on the webserver as well as nightly transfer rates. (I look forward to not seeing any more Sunday morning “hey, we noticed that your disk I/O is higher than normal” alert emails from the fine folks at Linode, if nothing else.) Note that this backup scheme is in addition to Linode’s nightly server snapshots for disaster recovery.

    I configured the IP address for our home as a ‘hosts’ file entry, so when (inevitably) Frontier changes it on us, all I have to do to fix the backup job is to update that entry appropriately. (A near-future project: Detecting and alerting on communication errors in the backup script…)

    Next up? A bunch of software upgrades and migrations, particularly now that the Gallery Project has shut down. D’oh!

  • Gundam It All

    You know those time lapse things I’ve been doing? Here’s something a bit more along the lines of what I’m really hoping to do with the technology. (Well, that and a lot more cloud shows. Because seriously. Clouds!)

    Let’s be clear: I am not a skilled model assembler by any stretch of the imagination. (The less said about that chest sticker, the better.) But “doing things on camera” like this amuses me, so expect more of it as I find more things to do along these lines…

  • Thyme Laps Video

    I bought a new tablet. I installed Lapse It Pro onto the tablet, and this afternoon the clouds were rather pretty and scudding across the blue sky quite nicely and… this happened:

     

    Not bad, eh? Now, for this video I basically just propped the tablet up on top of one of the living room bookshelves, opened the window, started the recording and walked away for an hour or so.

    And walked back, and walked away, and walked back, and finally decided I should go play a game or something for a while because otherwise I was going to be tempted to tinker with things while the recording progressed. Ahem.

    I’m hoping to do more like this, but I’m mostly looking (once the tripod mount arrives) at doing some time lapse “build” videos, such as for assembling one of the very small Gundam models whose boxes have been collecting dust for a couple years now. (A devoted modeler I am not, apparently.)

    Why not use the Pentax? Because I don’t want to assemble these videos from a pile of raw images by hand, that’s why. The additional expense of shutter timer equipment is also a factor.

    So here we are. A guy needs a hobby, right? It’s not so much about the Gundam model as it is about what kind of video I can make out of the process of building the model…

     

  • The File That Crashed Word 2013

    My morning started with a ticket assigned before I got here, scheduled for first thing after the morning “huddle.” The dispatcher pitched me to the client as “the best person at this sort of thing,” having wholly misunderstood the nature of the call. (They thought it was a backup-restore situation, when in fact it was an Office Behaving Badly situation. D’oh.)

    I was, in fact, able to quickly recover the desired information from Word’s auto-recovery files. This made the client very happy. Unfortunately, unless we could figure out why Word was crashing so reliably (as it were) in one particular set of documents, the problem was going to come back again and again. In one location on the network could be found eight similar Word DOCX files.

    The symptom: Open a file, scroll down into the numbered lists, go to the end of a line of text and press the Enter key to initiate a new numbered line. Word 2013 immediately crashes.

    The things we tried:

    • Open the document in Word 2010: No problems at all.
    • Use Word 2010 to save into 2003-compatible DOC format: Word 2013 still crashed.
    • Launch Word 2013 in Safe Mode: Word 2013 still crashed.
    • Use Word 2013 to open-and-repair the file: Word 2013 still crashed.
    • Repair Office 2013: Word 2013 still crashed.
    • Copy & paste the document contents into a whole new file and save (into either 2003-style DOC or 2007+ DOCX): Word 2013 still crashed.

    I lost an hour and a half on this just of my own time, and then brought in a couple members of my team to bash on it as well. One of them figured out the problem:

    The numbered list formatting was broken, somehow, in a way that only Word 2013 had a problem with. If we select the document contents and simply choose another numbered list format/style preset… the problem vanishes.

    Yep. Seriously.

    So, that was a fun way to spend the first half of a Friday!

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