Posting from lilkitt’s house, heading to the hotel tomorrow. More people should visit him, he and Ellen are very awesome hosts :-). I’m feeling kinda random, so this post is a bit disjointed.

I’m watching Voyager right now, and it’s a pretty decent episode, but it feels very surreal to watch Star Trek in a house (and a room) filled with more Star Trek autographs than I thought one person/couple could acquire in a lifetime. Earlier, Kitt showed me their collection, and told me tales of his experiences at Star Trek cons, which was really awesome. Now, I’m working, and Voyager’s on TV. I look across the room, and there’s an autographed picture of Captain Janeway on the wall. Trippy, yet cool.

Speaking of TV, there’s a banner on this channel (Spike) that scrolls across the bottom of the screen, with a dire warning to Time Warner and Brighthouse customers that they’re about to lose this channel (with 18 others), and to call some number. Two things are weird about this. Number one, why is this message being played on Verizon FIOS? And number two, what psychotic cable network would drop channels like Spike, VH1, MTV, and Comedy Central? Oh, and why must this stupid banner play constantly during the show, but not during the commercials?

On a completely unrelated note, I’m really having fun with SL lately, and looking at it with a new perspective. Before, though I wouldn’t admit it at the time, it was pretty much a substitute for real life. After the things that have changed in my life since then, SL still appeals to me, but not in the same way. It’s no longer an escape in the same sense, for me. Instead, I’m using it as true game; something recreational for my spare time, as well as an artistic medium. I’ve been working on a new building that I’m really having fun with, and I look forward to unveiling it, and posting pictures of it to my website. I’ve always enjoyed 3D modelling, but I’ve never done a whole lot with it, because it’s hard to really show off 3D creations to others. But, SL provides a venue for others to really explore my work, instead of just looking at 2D pictures of it.

Anyway, I should sleep now, or something. Kitt’s heater makes really freaky noises, though

Since this seems to happen every couple of days, I want to clarify something. The IM client I use, Trillian, has a very annoying habit of resetting my Yahoo status to “Available” and clearing my auto-responding away message whenever my connection to Yahoo flakes. And, it tends to do so with annoying frequency, usually when I’m actually not here.

So, here’s a good rule of thumb. If you see me set as “Available” on Yahoo, but not on any other protocol/SN*, it’s a glitch, and it’s extremely unlikely that I’m actually there. And, if you IM me, and I don’t respond within a few minutes, I’m definitely not there.

This post brought to you by the fact that I just came back from a 4-hour road trip to find Yahoo set to “Available” (but nothing else), and over two dozen different Yahoo windows open, with people chatting as if I were actually there. Which is why I stopped using Yahoo for awhile (and because this was happening nearly every hour).

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* = The screen name I use for work (which is not on Yahoo) is exempt from this guideline. It has a separate buddy list, on a different client, usually on a different computer, and therefore has no relation to my personal accounts.

Now that Christmas is over, I’m down in Blacksburg, VA, attending a the wedding of an old friend. Everyone send her congratulations!

Just a quick post, I wanted to wish everyone who celebrates it a merry Christmas!

A favourite comedian of mine recently posted an article on his blog about a trip he took to Australia, and a passenger on the plane. The article is a touch on the vulgar side, so I won’t copy/paste the text here, but I highly recommend reading it.

The short version is that, on his flight, he was seated next to a woman with a 7-year-old girl. Everything was peachy, the little girl was polite and well-behaved, and he was having a good flight. But, when dinner was served, the woman became indignant and refused food for herself and her daughter because it had meat in it, and there was no vegetarian option. The little girl asked if she could have chicken, because she was hungry, but the mom refused because “it’s disgusting”. Hours later, they came through with a snack (sandwiches of some sort), and the mother again refused to let her daughter have anything. A few more hours went by, and it was breakfast time, and this scene repeated itself. At this point, the little girl was starting to feel ill, and the mother started going seat to seat begging for food, trying to blame this on the airline. Other passengers, who didn’t see what was going on, offered bits of their breakfast, which the mother rudely refused because “it’s disgusting”.

This story was originally told in a humourous manner, but it really disturbs me. I’ve seen all sorts of bad parenting, but the idea of a parent witholding food from a seven-year-old girl on a 12-hour flight based on self-imposed dietary preferences is just unforgivable. This is the kind of stuff where Child Protective Services needs to get involved, just like with those psychos who refuse medical care of any kind for their children based on religious beliefs.

Despite my best efforts, PHP seems to have issues on Lupinia’s server, and I don’t know what to do about it anymore.

When we first moved Lupinia to its new server last January, everything seemed to be working fine with PHP in an IIS environment. However, as time went on, we discovered a problem: After about 100,000 requests to a particular application pool (in IIS, a group of virtual hosts), PHP would suddenly stop responding, and start giving internal server errors, until the application pool was recycled (about a 15-minute process if left to do it by itself). And, every once in awhile, apparently at random, it would take a full restart of IIS to get it working again.

I was able to keep things under control for awhile, but as load increased, so did the frequency of these errors, to the point where it was happening every couple of days. I finally took the time to search for it, hoping that I was doing something wrong, only to find that it was a known bug in PHP’s ISAPI module, and they haven’t done anything about it since 2004. Lovely. The only other built-in option is to run PHP as a CGI application, where it launches an EXE every time a request is sent to it. Unfortunately, in a Windows environment, that equates to obscene loads on the system resources, and it’s not a viable option on a server that hosts the traffic we do.

After some searching, I found the answer in the Zend Core, a corporate-grade PHP installation for IIS. It has an interface called FastCGI, which is the best of both worlds in this case; it has the stability of a CGI application, but it only launches one EXE per virtual host (which is still a large number, but manageable). Everything has been working quite peachy in the few months since we upgraded, except for one problem; instead of PHP errors giving error messages in the page generating them, they result in a generic Internal Server Error.

Until recently, I didn’t really have the time to look into fixing it. But, this weekend, I’ve been working on a project that’s really pushing the limits of my abilities (in a good way, this is how I learn new things), which means little errors here and there. And, I’m getting really tired of blind debugging.

And, unlike the previous problem, Google has been no help whatsoever. I’ve spent the last two hours searching for possible causes, and tweaking config variables. All of the search results I’ve found have been irrelevant in some way.

I really don’t want to spend $500 for a support package from Zend (the software is free, but they charge out the nose for support).

[ Click for Article ]

British Telecom’s early trials of Phorm behavioral advertising technology ended in controversy, when it was leaked that the trials were conducted without informing consumers their browsing histories were being sold. BT’s third, and more transparent trial of the technology is nearing completion, Phorm saying they expect BT to fully deploy the technology shortly. Says Phorm of the recently completed third trial:

“The trial has now concluded and achieved its primary objective of testing all the elements necessary for a larger deployment, including the serving of small volumes of targeting advertising,” said the company in a statement on Monday. “There will now be a period of joint analysis of the results. Following successful completion of analysis of both the trial results and of any changes required for expansion, BT’s expectation is to move towards deployment.”

Deploying the snoopy technology across the carrier’s network delivers a steady stream of cash to Phorm — a former rootkit developer who hopes to expand their snoopy “service” into the U.S. market. BT customers would complain, but BT recently started banning all mention of the technology in the telco’s forums.

Why yes, it has been a slow news week for me, why do you ask? I thought this was worth mentioning, though, because it’s a really dirty tactic. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I loathe internet advertisements in general (you’ll find none on this entire server), so the idea that the ISP can insert ads in my web pages is, quite frankly, disturbing.

So, in the meeting I had today, that I talked about in my last post, one of the main things we discussed was using some code that I wrote as a starting point for new projects. My company is awesome at graphics and layout work, and my boss is pretty good at PHP. However, between him being busy with running the company, and the fact that he typically writes for function over form, the baseline coding for websites we build (that don’t use a CMS) is downright bad. Horribly structured, redundant queries all over the place, tons of redundant code, and a templating engine that, most of the time, actually increases the amount of work necessary per-page. It looks nice to the visitors, but not to us as we’re working on it.

(more…)

Working from my porch >= awesome

I can’t wait ’til it’s warm enough for this not to be a fluke. I’ve also discovered that the shiny screen on my laptop isn’t nearly as glare-y if I wear my light blue sunglasses (I wear them quite a bit anyway), and the screen is still quite visible, unlike with my regular mirrored sunglasses.

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In other news, I’m still really torn about whether to go to FC or not. On the one hand, I’ve been trying to go since 2005, and every year, I’ve been unable to make it due to finances. This year, it’s a question of whether I should spend the money on this or something else, rather than a question of whether I have the money at all. Which makes it a much more difficult decision :-\

The rational side of me says to not go, and put the money toward debt repayment. I have a ton of credit card debt to clear, plus a car loan I want to pay off next month. I have some upcoming financial goals that will require me to not only get rid of debt in my name quickly, but also to resist impulse spending to a certain degree (and a $900 furry con next month is a hell of an impulse “purchase”). Plus, Anthrocon’s suite reservations are likely to open the week before FC (based on previous years), which is $500 I need to drop right away. And, based on my experience with MFF, working a few extra hours from a con is impossible to plan on, so FC would cost me at least four full days of work (three full days and two half-days), almost half a paycheck.

That said, I’ve never been one to let finances alone influence my decisions, and everything else is leaning toward going. FC has been this unattainable trip for me for years, and everyone keeps telling me what a spectacular con it is. It’s on my list of furry cons to attend at least once in my life, but if I go this year, it’s unlikely that I’ll go to any other cons between now and Anthrocon. I wasn’t sure which ones I’d hit, but I was thinking about going to FCN (there’s stuff to do other than drinking there, right?), or FWA, or some other small spring con. I’m already planning on Megaplex, which will pretty much have to be rolled into my Anthrocon budget due to their proximity. I hadn’t made any con plans beyond that, but MFM is tempting, and MFF next year is a strong possibility.

I just don’t know what to do. I’ve never been in this situation before, it’s always been a year-long process of saving up just to be able to go to one big con a year. One thing’s for sure, if I do go to FC, I need to adhere to my budget much more strictly. I spent WAY too much this year, enough to set the aforementioned financial goals back by almost two months (getting screwed over by AMEX didn’t help, but it was still mostly my fault). Note to self: Never go to the ATM at a con.

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Update to the first part of this post: In the span of about an hour, the temperature dropped by like 15 degrees. Yuck.

[curls up with a fluffy blanket and sips hot chocolate] I can’t feel my toes… :-\

Yesterday, my sister picked up the latest zero-day exploit for IE. This seems to happen to her computer every few months, because she keeps going to these nasty websites that are so popular with teenage morons. This one she picked up because she searched for song lyrics to a recent song, and clicked on the first hit Google gave her. Bad idea.

I spent a few hours working on the system yesterday, ran an overnight virus scan, and cleared out some trojans. Everything seemed to be fine.

Today, she said it was still acting up. I’ll spare y’all the details, but I basically spend my entire evening after work trying to chase down this virus and get rid of it. After three hours, and with my entire evening pretty much gone, I finally had it taken care of. And of course, I don’t get paid for maintaining systems on my own network, nor did I even get a “thank you” this time (an unusual occurance). And, the computer that I am being paid to fix (my favourite kind of customer, with more money than sense, and who throws big numbers at me before I can say how much I’m charging) is now delayed by another day.

I’m tired of this. I disabled IE in Group Policy for her account, and told her to use Firefox. That didn’t used to be a catch-all fix for stupidity, but it’s starting to be. If she manages to get infected by a virus again, I’ll fix it when I feel like getting around to it.

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Work isn’t particularly inspiring this week either. Our client for this current project is never satisfied, and keeps coming up with stuff that needs to be changed. After taking a week to finish the massive bug list he dropped on us last weekend, and spending my weekend adding a feature that was a pain due to the way the site is coded, he came up with a dozen more on Monday. This put me into “I’m going to finish this as fast as absolutely possible because I hate this project” mode, but I ran out of steam for today, and couldn’t quite get going on anything.