Gnubbs Blog

Saw this on Ongoing today, and got sucked in.

steves-MacBook:~ gnubbs$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s \n",a[i],i}}’|sort -rn|head
   92    svn
   76    cap
   58    cd
   57    ssh
   55    ls
   26    ~/rdiff
   22    exit
   13    export
   12    mate
    7    vi

"svn" allows me to make stupid mistakes without regretting them.  "cap" allows me to roll out those stupid mistakes from Subversion to my web servers.  "ssh" shows that I upgraded servers lately so was stuck doing a bunch of SysAdmin work. "rdiff" is a piece of code that I stole off the intar-webs that allows me to run diff on two pieces of code reguardless of what computer they are actually on.

I mentioned the other day that I am working on some new servers at work.  I am replacing one ancient web server with two modern ones — staging and production.  I need this two servers to be basically identical, but I wasn’t looking forward to configuring everything by hand on both of them.

My solution was pretty simple.  I built up the staging server, got everything working, and then today yanked out one of the mirrored drives and swapped in a blank one from the production server.  I told that one to rebuild the mirror, popped in the drive with data into the other server, and told that one to rebuild the mirror as well.  Now I have two identically configured servers.  All I have to do is change some network settings, and I am good to go.

It might not be for the faint of heart, but worked great for me.

In the interest of not coming across as a total rails fan boy, I have a beef to share today.  I am moving servers for some work webapps, and have hit two distinct snags:

1.  Getting Mongrel_Cluster and apache to play well together is not trivial.  If you are working green field, the instructions in the Rails books and blogs work just fine.  Unfortunately, I have been using a hybrid of Rails and PHP apps on my servers for a couple of years now.  Getting my rewrite rules to work has not been fun.  They work finally, but there is some kludginess involved.

2.  I like the syntax of "form_for" more than "form_start_tag" a lot.  Unfortunately, I have dozens of forms using the old style.  They haven’t been updated since the deprecation warnings started popping up because I have had actual work to do.  Now that I am upgrading servers, I am switching to a newer version of rails.  This means there are a whole lot of forms to go back and update.

I will give props to one part of the Ruby/Rails world — Capistrano.  I have finally configured my servers to use it, and it makes life very nice.  "cap deploy" deploys to my staging server, and "export DEPLOY=PRODUCTION; cap deploy" deploys to my production server.  Nice. 

Well, i should quit writing this and get back to updating forms.

This past Friday I had what I would describe as the second worst beer I have ever had.  Steel Reserve 211.  How could I resist it at the liquor store — $1.19 for a 24 oz can of 8.1% beer.  I had to try it.  It was terrible.  Truely terrible.  Second worst beer ever.

This beer is just a tad worse than Schlitz.  Schlitz is bad, but has kinda a clean disgusting taste.  This stuff is like the worst beer in the world, with a kinda furry disgusting taste.

For the record, since I am sure that you are wondering at this point, the worst beer in the world is Old Chub Scottish Ale.  Terrible.  Profoundly terrible.  Really beyond description.  At least Schlitz and Steel Reserve are cheap — Old Chub is $8 a six pack.  Thats fucked up.

Yesterday, I officially declared that winter was over.  I got new summer wheels and tires, and yesterday I had the tires mounted and put them on my ride.  Of course, the first thing that happens is that it snowed several inches last night…  I could have waited until June and it still would have snowed as soon as I put on my summer tires.

(It has all melted already, and it is back to sweater weather outside.)

Can’t say how the tires perform yet, but I can say the wheels look nice.  They are Piaa FR-s 17×7 and Kumho Ecsta MX 225/45ZR17.

(This is the new storage system I threw together to store my winter tires.  Can a couple of chains and 2×4s be called a "system"?)

A friend asked me to create a list of companies from which I might realistically purchase a sports car.  Here is my response:

1.  Subaru — Figure I better rank it first considering I have a sporty Subaru already.
2.  GM — Pontiac Solstice is a pretty nice car at a reasonable price.  Plus, I might have to grow a mullet and buy a Corvette one of these days.
3.  Audi — S4.  Nice car, awd, and there are tons of them out here.  Makes used prices reasonable.
4.  Porsche — Caymen S.  This is my next car.  Keep my WRX for winter, and buy one of these once it is a few years old.
5.  Mazda — Between the Miata and Mazdaspeed 3, they have some fairly priced sports/sporty cars.
6.  VW — I have a friend with an R32 and have to say that is a very nice ride.  There are so few of them that they tend to be overpriced though.
7.  Toyota — Is there anyone that doesn’t love the twin turbo Supras from back in the day?
8.  BMW — M3s hold their value pretty well, so getting one used wouldn’t be cheap.  From a performance standpoint though, they are hard to beat.
9.  Lotus — an Elise is only about $50k new.  Can’t afford one today, but that is not an unattainably priced car.

Noticeably missing:
1.  Ferrari — Unless I grow a moustache and buy a 308 GTSi, they are just too expensive to realistically hope to buy.  To this day, a 599 GTB Fiorano is the best looking car I have ever seen in person on the street.
2.  Lamborghini — See above but ignore the Magnum PI comments.
3.  Ford — I have a friend with a couple year old Mustang SVT.  It should be a nice car, but it isn’t.  They are so cheaply made — especially the interiors.
4.  Mitsubishi — You might think that I would be a Lancer Evo fan.  Nope.  I know a couple of people who traded in STIs for them, and within months had traded them back in for STIs again because they are so poorly made.
5.  Nissan — Yeah.  The GTR is true sweetness.  It will be quite a few years before I have the scratch for even a used one.

I am looking out my window at a coworker’s Aston Martin DBS  — I could probably swing one of those…

A while ago I bought myself a MacBook.  I use it as both my primary computer at home, and at work.  It sucks to have to buy a computer with my own money for work - but it was either that or continue to use an outdated PC and WinXP.

Over time, it has gotten to a point where I pretty much only use the PC to check my outlook and make sure that documents I have created on my Mac look okay in Office.  Not exactly computational heavy lifting.

The other day I had the bright idea to try and get a corporate image of WinXP working in VM Ware.  It was amazing how easy that turned out to be.  The process was amazing simple.  Use VMWare to create a new virtual machine, pop in my depoyment CD, type in my corporate username and password, and let the installer run.

Once installed, everything worked like a champ.  I use the Unity option in VMWare so that I can just interact with my windows apps like they were any other app running on my laptop.  Performance is surprising usable — just a tad slower than Windows running on my bottom of the line PC at work.

Overall, a very pleasant experience.  For anyone holding out on using a Mac because they need to run one or two applications, this is a great solution.

Man, it sucks that I don’t have more stories that start like that.  I have been working way too many hours lately so the best I could come up with for today was a link to a great essay.

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.

- Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

One of my favorite places to go to lunch is a Mexican joint called Efrain’s II. It is delicious and dirt cheap. An added bonus is that one of the nicest auto detailers in Boulder is in the same parking lot. So, on nice days there is usually a nice car or two out front. This past friday there were two — a Maserati Quatroporte and an Audi R8.

This was the first R8 that I have seen, and I have to say that in person the car is very sexy. From the photos, I didn’t think that I liked the blade behind the doors. This car was gold and the blade was left carbon fiber. It looked great. (Gold? Yeah, I know that the Audi site doesn’t list gold as a color option. Apparently if you can afford an R8, you can also afford a paint job.)

Was the R8 the best looking car I have seen at Bing’s?  Not by a long shot.

Okay. I finally got around to getting things working on my blog. My new site uses Wordpress MU to manage my blog and a couple for friends and families — as opposed to just having a separate Wordpress installation for each person.

It took me a while to get around to fixing my mod_rewrite rules to redirect my old urls to my new urls. Hopefully it works.