For those of you who know me, you know I find it useful to ask the question, "What's the worst that can happen?" when thinking about whether to do something or not - particularly when it comes to a matter of walking by faith in a particular situation.  I find that the answer to that question is usually, "I could get embarrassed", or "I might lose some money", or other such things that don't matter all that much.  Every once in a while the worst thing that could happen is a bigger deal, but I find it seldom is.

I was amused to see the question asked in the Dilbert comic strip the other day.

A customer wanted a "site index" page for their Wordpress site, which in blog terms means an "archive" page.  You can use the wp_get_archives() function, but that doesn't give you much in the way of customization.  I thought about using the "format=custom" parameter, and try to parse the information afterwards, but that seemed like a pain, so I threw away that function call, in favor of calling get_posts, and then doing all of the setup myself.

Here is what I ended up with (note, I'm skipping the template specific stuff, you'll want to include a header, and an appropriate div, and your sidebar(s), etc. There are many sites on the internet that will show you how to create a generic archives.php template)

Since the servers are located on the east coast, we are potentially affected by Hurricane Sandy.  But, the backup power systems were tested this morning, generators have their fuel tanks topped up, and we are not expecting any problems with the service.  Stay safe at home checking your email...  :)

For those customers who use domainsmadeeasy as their DNS provider, you are likely seeing sporadic outages.  A hacker has claimed responsibility, but hasn't said why.  DomainsMadeEasy's phone is busy/down, so I haven't been able to talk to them to get an estimated uptime.

I suppose there is one reason to use the company I use for DNS (who have recently changed their policy to not allow me to tell you who that is?? Though you can simply look up who I have for nameservers...) instead - the domainsmadeeasy DNS is free with a domain registration, and I have to pay for the other provider, but they have handled pretty large attacks successfully in the past.

It's been a while since I've had anything interesting to report, and that's usually considered a good thing...

We're having some trouble with one of the servers and replacement parts are on order and will be installed tomorrow.  In the meantime, if you are on "tangerine", your web page will be inaccessible.  Email will still be delivered relatively normally in most cases, and will be saved for later delivery in all other cases.

Sorry for the inconvenience.  Please call if you have any questions.

UPDATE: 08/23: 12:30PM.  The power supply is going bad and has been temporarily replaced.  Most customers (e.g. all but one) are now up and running.

UPDATE: 08/23: 4:00PM.  A permanent power supply has been installed and everything is back to normal.

Note: This is extremely hacky, and you had better make sure you have a backup, as it is quite easy to wreck the repository.

Scenario:

I was moving a subversion repository from one server to another, and in the process, I also wanted to update the paths, since the first repository had been a general purpose repository, and the second was only for one particular customer, and so didn't need the extra path info at the beginning.

I started with these instructions: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.reposadmin.maint.html#svn.reposadmin.maint.filtering and they got me almost all of the way there.  However, I had problems with one revision that contained some merge information in it.

The error I got was: pathname not terminated by :

The problem was that I had replaced:

Node-path: SAMS/framework/mine
Node-kind: dir
Node-action: change
Prop-content-length: 90
Content-length: 90

K 13
svn:mergeinfo
V 55
/SAMS/framework/current:4-9
/SAMS/framework/tags/3.6:10
PROPS-END

with:

Node-path: framework/mine
Node-kind: dir
Node-action: change
Prop-content-length: 90
Content-length: 90

K 13
svn:mergeinfo
V 55
/framework/current:4-9
/framework/tags/3.6:10
PROPS-END

And that isn't quite right.  The key is realizing what the "V 55" part means and that is counting the number of characters that is in the next section, and since I removed 10 characters (I removed "/SAMS" twice in the same block).  Replacing "V 55" with "V 45" and tada, it works.

I suppose that the Content-length field should be updated as well, but subversion seems to be able to tolerate text changes without updating that field.

Level3 (an upstream provider for Lime Daley) appears to be having some issues today, and that is causing some flakiness in our network.  Staff is onsite monitoring the issue, and may end up moving traffic off of Level3 until they fix their issue.

[Update: it turned out to be a Sprint issue, and it took them a while to figure it out.  It only affected the connections between some people and some websites.]

A little humor for your day, courtesy of Jack Gannsle.

1. Ratio of an igloo's circumference to its diameter = Eskimo Pi
2. 2000 pounds of Chinese soup = Won ton
3. 1 millionth of a mouthwash = 1 microscope
4. Time between slipping on a peel and smacking the pavement = 1 bananosecond
5. Weight an evangelist carries with God = 1 billigram
6. Time it takes to sail 220 yards at 1 nautical mile per hour = Knotfurlong
7. 16.5 feet in the Twilight Zone = 1 Rod Serling
8. Half of a large intestine = 1 semicolon
9. 1,000,000 aches = 1 megahurtz
10. Basic unit of laryngitis = 1 hoarsepower
11. Shortest distance between two jokes = A straight line
12. 453.6 graham crackers = 1 pound cake
13. 1 million-million microphones = 1 megaphone
14. 2 million bicycles = 2 megacycles
15. 365.25 days = 1 unicycle
16. 2000 mockingbirds = 2 kilomockingbirds
17. 52 cards = 1 decacards
18. 1 kilogram of falling figs = 1 FigNewton
19. 1000 milliliters of wet socks = 1 literhosen
20. 1 millionth of a fish = 1 microfiche
21. 1 trillion pins = 1 terrapin
22. 1 rations = 1 decoration
23. 100 rations = 1 C-ration
24. 2 monograms = 1 diagram
25. 4 nickels = 2 paradigms
26. 2.4 statute miles of intravenous surgical tubing at Yale University Hospital = 1 IV League
27. 100 Senators = Not 1 decision

Not much to say, but I figured there hasn't been anything posted in a while, so thought I should at least post something.

Lime Daley has expanded our existing servers a bit - one customer now has 16GB of RAM exclusively for their site, and another customer needed more disk space, and so we installed a RAID6 array with 8TB of usable space.

I've noticed a common spam method lately, which I'm not quite sure what the idea is since it is so obviously spam, and trivially filterable that it doesn't seem like it will last very long, but a couple have ended up in my inbox, and since I really don't like emails in my inbox I decided I would write a filter to keep this type out.

:0:
* ^From:[^@]+@[^@]+@
spam/mail

Pretty simple - just look for multiple @ signs in the From address - I can't think of a reason why someone would do that on purpose.  Though maybe some people have "joe@example.com" <joe@example.com> as their from address - I'll have to see if it results in any false positives.