greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Good friends, good food, good times.

    I’d have posted this sooner but I wanted to get my 2,000 word quota in for the day on my NaNo novel. (No special website for it, I’m just writing the damned thing and I’ll post my progress when I damned well feel like it.) Anyway…

    Merripan hosted an All Hallow’s Eve gathering of family and friends at her apartment last night. Some were in costume, the rest of us were casually dressed. (Among the notable costumes? Dalemar’s “inspired by Michael Landon” wolfman gig, Lilith’s “inspired by that Spears chick” naughty-schoolgirl bit of nothing, Doug and Mari as Doctor and Candystriper, and Firedancer Fred’s homage to Brandon Lee’s “Crow” persona.)

    On the way to, Lil’ and Lyse and Anxiety and I picked up Leon, who has recently moved to the Portland area. (Once he warms up to our peculiar brand of humor, I think he’s going to make a cool addition to the group.) We made our introductions and our way to the Freddy’s near Merripan’s place. Once again Lilith and I proved that we have no business going shopping together, as we managed to scandalize the rest of our merry little band in our own special fashion.

    It bears mentioning and repeating that Merripan’s one helluva cook. Her jambalaya was right up against the upper limit of how spicy of food I’m willing to eat, and yet I not only finished off one serving but went back for seconds, which I also finished off. Yum.

    I met (and have already forgotten the names of) a number of new folks, and everybody was good fun company. Flirting and teasing and snark filled the room, which is an almost perfect ambience for a Friday night party as far as I’m concerned. I even took my own teasing in stride since it was all in good fun… and yes, I certainly earned most of the snark directed my way!

    The only downside was my allergies picking last night to make themselves apparent. It’s the first time this year I’ve had any serious trouble while visiting the home of a cat owner, and I’m still rather surprised by it. It took almost two hours after I’d left the party for me start breathing normally again. Bleah.

    Still, all in all, one of the better Friday nights I can remember. Thank you, friends!

    (Mari, who has a better recall of detail than I, has posted her recounting as well.)

  • Past, Present, Future – Round Thirty-seven

    PAST: Because we haven’t delved deeply into childhood trauma lately, tell us about the scariest event from your youth.

    PRESENT: Creepy-crawlies? Heights? Large dogs? Oblivion? What are your phobias nowadays?

    FUTURE: Who (or what) do you want to be for Halloween? Price and practicality are no object, here.

    Imagine that, a Halloween-themed PPF. I’m sure you’re all amazed. Leave a comment with your answers or a link thereto, and when you link back please use the handy-dandy permalink below. Thank you, and I hope you have a ghoulishly grand time tonight!
    http://greyduck.net/ppf/

  • Another example of that scary-cool brainwave thing.

    So here I am, tidying up after last night’s email disaster, and Amy brings me a box labelled Priority Mail. It looks suspiciously like a similar box I received a couple months ago. It is, in fact, from the same person… and once again I find brownies inside!

    Of course, this time I had to actually work to find ’em. The entire care package was an Egyptian puzzle-box, I swear! Each brownie individually wrapped, twice! Inside of purple wrapping, twice! Inside a colorful take-out box! With Hello Kitty stickers sealing the take-out box! Inside of bubble-wrap! Inside the Priority Mail box!

    Oh, why don’t I just show you?

    I could be going out on a limb, here, but I think somebody likes me. Thank you, Dawn! Now how did you know to send a care package at just the right time to have it arrive today, of all days?

    (And the brownies? They’re even better than the last batch. Yum.)

  • A bit of nothing to tide you over

    Yes, it’s Wednesday. Humpday, if you will. No, there’s no humping going on, or at least none that I’m involved in.

    Why no updates? Because nothing of note has happened in my life in the last few days. Eat, work, sleep, yadda yadda.

    Okay, so I went out to dinner with Lil’ last night and we had a nice time talking, but that’s about it for excitement lately.

    I mean, yeah, I’m prepping to do NaNoWriMo (and by the gods I need to figure out what the hell I’m going to do for a NaNo website this year) but that’s not going to really take off until Saturday, so that’s not particularly newsworthy now is it?

    And hey, there’s the whole trick-or-treating thing on Friday in addition to some sort of party I’ve been invited to that evening, but that hasn’t happened yet so I can’t really write about it very well, now can I?

    We won’t even go into the long, long, way too long wait for OryCon. Feh.

    So it’s Humpday and I’m in limbo. Bear with me, gentle readers. Bear with me.

  • External PHP via Javascript

    Fed up once and for all with the lackluster reliability and performance of the “free” commenting systems in use by some of my friends, I decided to see if I could rig it so (in theory) they could use a comment script hosted here at greyduck.net instead.

    So what do you do when you want to reference a comment-counting feature that’s written in PHP, on another server, from a server on which PHP is not installed? You call it as if it was a Javascript, of course! (And by “of course” I mean “I learned after a solid hour of Googling and headscratching”.)

    Here’s the trick:

    <script language="JavaScript" src="count.php?id=X">

    X gets filled in with the journal/blog/thingie entry number via whatever mechanism your journal software provides, and the ‘count.php’ is configured not to ‘return’ its calculated result but instead:

    echo "document.write("$result")";

    In other words, PHP is generating what looks like Javascript, and everybody’s happy. My hacked-together ‘count.php’ looks like this (with some obfuscation):

    <?

    function commentCount($n) {
    $comments_path = "/path/to/comments/directory/";
    if($file = @fopen($comments_path . "comments/$n.comment", 'r')) {
    $thisFile = fread($file, '1000000');
    $thisFile = explode("n", trim($thisFile));
    fclose($file);
    $comments = sizeof($thisFile);
    if($comments == 1) {$comments .= " comment";} else {$comments .= " comments";}
    } else {
    $comments = "no comments yet";
    }

    echo "document.write("$comments")";
    }

    commentCount($id);

    ?>

    And the link that calls the comment script and displays a live count of submitted comments looks like:

    <A HREF="javascript:viewComments(X)"><script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.domain.net/location/count.php?id=X">

    Again remembering to replace that X with the unique identifier for that journal/thingie/blog entry. The viewComments() function is your standard “new window popup” trick that I’m sure nobody needs me to detail here. (The X in that function call is passed to the URL for the comment script proper. Nuff said.)

    Granted that this is all designed around the comment code used on this website, so it’s not exactly portable for all uses. The code listed here is only an example of how it can be done.

    Not, mind you, that I’m putting this system into service right away… but working this out certainly was an interesting learning experience for me! Yay, my geek-fu is still strong! *smirk*

    UPDATE: I’m a freakin’ moron. It works great in Mozilla-based browsers but Internet Explorer ignores the living hell out of my count.php script. I have no idea why. I’ve added content-type headers, I’ve tinkered with it six ways from Sunday, and still no-go. So, basically, this was an exercise in utter futility. Argh.

  • When Email Servers Implode

    Goddammit.

    At about 3:15 this afternoon, our Groupwise server’s main mail storage volume ran completely out of disk space. All attempts to salvage the situation with the server code running failed utterly and miserably.

    As of this writing I’ve finally managed to semi-gracefully reboot the server, check and mount its volumes, delete an unneeded installer directory from the volume in question, and start a purge of sent items, trashed emails and (most importantly) oversized emails.

    I don’t know if this is going to work, mind you. Groupwise does funny things with purged emails, like (for instance) hanging on to them even though you’ve clearly told it you don’t want them anymore.

    It’s going to be a long, long evening here at the office, folks. I’ll update this entry as (or more accurately “if”) the situation progresses… or regresses as the case may well be. *sigh*

    And in case you’re wondering: No, I don’t have disk space alarms set on this particular server. SNMP troubles, doncha know. The sort of thing I’d have time to tackle if, say, I had an assistant… but we all know that’s a pipe dream, eh?

    Wish me luck. Lots of it.

    UPDATE: The first purge took 3 hours 20 minutes and brought the server from 99% full (I started the purge after deleting the client install directory so I’d have that one percent to work with) down to about 93%. The second purge took exactly one hour and brought the server down to 65%. How, you ask, did this miracle occur during the second purge? Easy. I was deleting any email larger than 1.5 megabytes. That’s right, folks. About 30% of a 34 gigabyte drive was taken up with very large emails, essentially emails with large files attached. Lovely.

    There’s gonna be some pissed-off folks around the building tomorrow when they realize that their mp3s, videos and PowerPoint files are all missing out of the email system… where they didn’t belong in the first place.

    Me, I’m going home now. It’s about damned time. Two 12-hour days in a row is not my cuppa, baby.

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