This post marks the end of this blog on Blogger. After publishing I will be finishing the migration of all my content to distributelife.com. Distributed Life is my own blog and the direction I want to take with my content. If I get the automagic confibulated correctly, your RSS feeds will be automatically routed.
All the posts will be left here (for people who have linked externally) but I will be redirecting all links over to distributedlife.com.
My time at Blogger has not been entirely bad. While I do complain, Blogger did and has served a purpose that I found useful at the time of me starting. That is no longer the case and as such I am moving that fits my requirements.
I hope to see you there.
Regards,
Ryan Boucher (aka Chad Aubergine Stone)
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Saturday, May 24, 2008
It was so easy I thought I was kidding myself
I came home today to find my mantis server had stopped working. Something was wrong with the some aspect of the HDD. Not entirely sure yet, but I've put the drive in another machine and copied all the valuable data of it.
I was impressed just how easy it was to restore some aspects of the server. The physical machine I moved it to already had Apache on it. So it was a cut and paste of the Virtual Host and Listen line to configure and a bounce to get it going.
The next step was to reconfigure the router so that the server could be reach from the interwub. This was a 5 second job. Quick test, no database! Of course!
So I jumped on to the machine and quickly realised I couldn't access the existing MySQL install. Argh, what was I going to do? Try and reconfigure the current install of MySQL to point at the dodgy servers data? I thought I would have a look in the MySQL folder to see how the data was stored. There was a folder called data, and in that a folder with the same name as the database.
So I tempted fate (I have backups) and logged into MySQL, show databases and there it was. Ha! How awesome is that? OK, now for a real test. to access it via the mantis web-app. Works perfectly. Once again, awesome! Awesome like a million hot dogs.
Now, allow me to digress. I love it when applications don't bind themselves to the system that they are running on or force uses jump through some farcical ceremony just to perform a simple task. For instance, my brother has a Toshiba Gigabeat for his mp3 player. I remember him trying to get his songs onto it. You had to install their application and then work this ghastly interface just to transfer some songs. I think it was more than 24 hour period before he had everything working.
My Creative MuVo is literally a flash drive that I could drag and drop files onto. The music player app was smart enough to work out folder structures and to not trust the file system state as it last remembered it. My Nokia N95 8GB thankfully supports both methods.
Last time I checked most users know how to drag and drop a file and while it might not be immediately obvious that your application can support such advanced functionality, it is nothing that good documentation can't fix. If you have to spend lots of money writing an application, try making it one that wraps a GUI around the cut and paste process. You will save money if nothing else.
Anyway, I have just finished copying some music onto my phone. Time to go to sleep with some soft tunes ghosting through my headphones.
I was impressed just how easy it was to restore some aspects of the server. The physical machine I moved it to already had Apache on it. So it was a cut and paste of the Virtual Host and Listen line to configure and a bounce to get it going.
The next step was to reconfigure the router so that the server could be reach from the interwub. This was a 5 second job. Quick test, no database! Of course!
So I jumped on to the machine and quickly realised I couldn't access the existing MySQL install. Argh, what was I going to do? Try and reconfigure the current install of MySQL to point at the dodgy servers data? I thought I would have a look in the MySQL folder to see how the data was stored. There was a folder called data, and in that a folder with the same name as the database.
I wonder what would happen if I just cut and paste that
So I tempted fate (I have backups) and logged into MySQL, show databases and there it was. Ha! How awesome is that? OK, now for a real test. to access it via the mantis web-app. Works perfectly. Once again, awesome! Awesome like a million hot dogs.
Now, allow me to digress. I love it when applications don't bind themselves to the system that they are running on or force uses jump through some farcical ceremony just to perform a simple task. For instance, my brother has a Toshiba Gigabeat for his mp3 player. I remember him trying to get his songs onto it. You had to install their application and then work this ghastly interface just to transfer some songs. I think it was more than 24 hour period before he had everything working.
My Creative MuVo is literally a flash drive that I could drag and drop files onto. The music player app was smart enough to work out folder structures and to not trust the file system state as it last remembered it. My Nokia N95 8GB thankfully supports both methods.
Last time I checked most users know how to drag and drop a file and while it might not be immediately obvious that your application can support such advanced functionality, it is nothing that good documentation can't fix. If you have to spend lots of money writing an application, try making it one that wraps a GUI around the cut and paste process. You will save money if nothing else.
Anyway, I have just finished copying some music onto my phone. Time to go to sleep with some soft tunes ghosting through my headphones.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
The value of hyphens
It is the contract renewal time of the year for me. I have a little tip for you. If you intend to extend your contract, make sure you use words like extend or renew. While wording up an email regarding my conditions of an extension I found I was about to resign... or was it re-sign?
Monday, May 12, 2008
Life Tip #1 - Birthday Candles
When you a placing birthday candles on a cake, make sure that you put them the right way up. The base of a candle, once lit, burns faster and more brightly than the wick-end of the candle.
This achieves a number of things:
I wish I had photos from the birthday cake I witnessed on the weekend. Classic.
Additional:
I looked up Happy Birthday on Wikipedia and did not expect the copyright issues around the song to be so ridiculous. Still the words come out of copyright at the end of this year. Woo!
This achieves a number of things:
- The candles burn much faster - you need to belt out "Happy Birthday" just a bit quicker
- The cake looks a lot more exciting covered in flame - always good unless it's ice cream cake
- The cake gets covered in wax - never good
I wish I had photos from the birthday cake I witnessed on the weekend. Classic.
Additional:
I looked up Happy Birthday on Wikipedia and did not expect the copyright issues around the song to be so ridiculous. Still the words come out of copyright at the end of this year. Woo!
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