Posted On Sunday, October 2nd, 2011 By David Veatch
I’ve made some updates to the score sheets. I’ve uploaded all of them now to GoogleDocs for one. That’s the big change. Other small changes, currently exclusive to the GoogleDocs versions, are minor formatting changes, formulaic changes to rid the sheets of #DIV/0 errors, and the removal of some extraneous columns to help with formula drag filling. Furthermore, I’ve shared all the GoogleDocs versions so they’re public for the finding, though I’ve retained exclusive editing rights. As always, suggestions and tweaks, especially those that stem from trial-by-fire experience, are always welcome. Straight Pool & Equal Offense Scores and Stats Sheets
Posted On Monday, February 28th, 2011 By David Veatch
UPDATE 2011.03.09 – I think I got a handle on it. I’m still pursuing the subject of this post, but I’m no longer worried about the backups. I’m done. I’ve given up on USB based backup solution. Sunday morning has become my standard “find out what went wrong with the full backups last night and see what I can do to fix them.” I tire of it. Granted, the failures this weekend were because I ran out of room on my little 80GB USB drives. Totally my fault. It was just a matter of time. I wasn’t paying attention and the backups failed. Fortunately, that’s all that happened, as opposed to something more insidious. At least it wasn’t some sort of kernel panic, or soft-updates issue again. I could easily solve it by spending a few bucks on a larger drive, but that would just be another stopgap. I want a solution that will carry us a few years and then some. So, I’m thinking NAS*. Something that would serve my family’s needs (which amounts to my wife and I at this point, but we’re really hoping for a little papoose sometime here real soon). That means a lot of more »
Posted On Tuesday, January 25th, 2011 By David Veatch
UPDATE 2011/03/09 – I updated the code to backup to an NFS mount, and to include the “-h 0″ flag to skip all nodump flags. That was causing me serious problems. Summary I’ve given quite a bit of thought to backup procedures at home since my FreeBSD 8.1 box dropped my mirrored filesystem. The signs of impending apocalypse were there, I just didn’t pay them proper heed. Fortunately, all of my data was salvaged; unfortunately, I lost all the custom PHP code I wrote over the last 6 months, my wordpress themes, plugins and modifications, and everything else that actually DID anything with all that data. So, while I’ve been rewriting that, I’ve been giving equal, if not more attention to backing it up. I’ll catch up again, but before I do that, I’ll make sure I won’t fall behind again. I did a few searches for FreeBSD backup solutions, and rolled my own little backup script using dump. It was decent, but it didn’t do everything I wanted as well as I wanted it to. Every night was a full backup, and there were no incrementals. I had to implement some pretty inelegant code to accomplish a couple things more »
Posted On Wednesday, January 19th, 2011 By David Veatch
As I suspected, my 100MB/month plan reset this morning, and I’m back up to my full allotment. Which isn’t that much, as I also suspected. See, I’ve been tracking it, and my own data usage on my desklaptop is pretty severe, and I really haven’t used it that much. Admittedly, I’ve used it more in the last couple of weeks as I built out my two servers, and wanted the ease of side-by-side ssh sessions. Lots of research and referencing online tutorials, how-to’s, man(n) pages, and the like. Most of it was primarily text based (not a lot of imagery in man pages – don’t you think they could be prettified a bit?), but the bandwidth usage still adds up. In fact, for me, it adds up to about 100MB per day! I could have used my Chromebook, but it really wasn’t ideal for the task. My wife was, many times, confounded by the sheer amount of LogoRhythms I was ensconced within. Throughout the bulk of the builds, I never had fewer than two sessions going (one for each server), and several times I had upwards of 5 and 6 as I tailed logs there and yonder, and ran compiles more »
Posted On Saturday, January 15th, 2011 By David Veatch
You may have noticed that my site has been offline for a few days. Or you may have noticed and thought I was simply being quiet. I’m known to some to be that way now and again. Not the case this time, though. I was offline good and proper. Now, after lots and lots of LogoRhythms, I’m back on line… What happened was this: the utter corruption of my RAID1 setup, resulting in the loss of nearly all the data in the mirrored HD partition in which my web server data was stored. My /home directory was mounted on the same drive, but it wasn’t affected for some reason. My /www directory, home to my web server and all the data it served, was nearly completely lost, with plenty of data unrecoverable. At least I have my initial configurations, and somehow, the daily MySQL backups of all my databases. No, I didn’t have the data backed up elsewhere. I relied on RAID, figuring that HD failure was my biggest concern, not driver/controller/software failure and the loss of superblocks and disk labels. Yes, I’m an idiot. I should have known. Lesson learned. So, over the weekend, with the blessings of my more »
Posted On Friday, December 24th, 2010 By David Veatch
When I filled out the Pilot Program survey the day it started on December 7th, the last thing I expected was to be chosen. Yet here I am with a Cr-48 on my lap. Now that it’s here, I feel something of an obligation to do at least an initial impressions post on it. After all, everyone else has (march ye to the Googles to find more), and it doesn’t seem right to accept this free laptop without at least paying for it with some typing and whatnot. The Arrival I opened the Fed-Ex box, and found within the now-famous illustrated box, with the explodey drawings on it. I absolutely love the drawing style. It has a distinct Captain Mark sensibility, which I worshiped as a young lad. I especially like the little mouse. I couldn’t remember at first where I saw the drawings, but I felt my excitement build for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. Something cool lay waiting within… I just knew it. I just couldn’t quite place what it was. Then it hit me, and I immediately went to get my camera. On the hardware I’m not going to spent a lot of time because it’s a more »
Posted On Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010 By David Veatch
Previously, I mentioned that I had a good time at MicroCenter. Though it come as a major surprise to you, it was vastly different from my experience at Best Buy. I don’t fault my White Shirt sales rep for her lack of knowledge and experience. Though she did literally shudder at the thought that I would let loose the hounds of hell on my home computer by using *gasp* freeware (and I use the word “literally” in it’s true sense – she literally physically shuddered), I don’t fault her that. By virtue of her virginal White Shirt, she was new to the game, and remains a corporate shill, bless her heart. At MicroCenter, however, my experience was vastly different. I’m no n00b to the computer hobbyist game, but let’s just say it has been a long time since I took Arctic Silver to my CPU before clamping that fan down, and leave it at that. Knowing that I have a ton of catching up to do, I struck up a conversation with Patrick, and opened my mind and just let the conversation and questions flow. He seemed knowledgeable enough, and even if he was wrong on any number of points, more »
Posted On Monday, November 22nd, 2010 By David Veatch
We’ve finally made the foray into the land of Windows 7. The old XP laptop that my wife was using started showing signs of age a couple weeks ago when the NIC decided it wasn’t going to work anymore. Right in the middle of a browsing session, it just quit. I honestly didn’t do much in the way of troubleshooting, other than disabling/enabling it, and uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers. I just declared it dead. We’ve been talking about getting her a new laptop for a few months now, so this was as good a reason as any. We hit a couple stores, but settled on a Dell 17R from running Windows Home Pro, with the i5-460M, 8GB system memory, and a 5,400rpm 500GB drive from Best Buy. We had an interesting time obtaining it, which I’ll relate here for your edification. Sunday, Nov. 14th, 2010, the price was $749.99 in the store, and online. Sunday, Nov. 21st, 2010, the price was $799.99 in the store, and $749.99 online. We called, and they confirmed that they would honor the online price, thus saving the ~$50 that another, less observant or stand-upish individual would have spent. Arriving at the store, the sales associate more »
Posted On Thursday, September 16th, 2010 By David Veatch
Do you like unix?! Does maintaining unix software and packages and FreeBSD ports turn you on?! Then read on!!
Posted On Wednesday, September 8th, 2010 By David Veatch
Wherein geekery with bar code scanners is explored.