The Spin Cycle

Journal Space Dies

Information Technology | January 2, 2009

I never did hear of this site but it looks like Journal Space died a sad death. It really is a warning to all content providers that mirroring a database is not enough and their should be snapshots taken regularly and stored as far away from the site as possible. Flickspin used to have a mirror of the DB with a snapshot taken daily. Flickspin now does a snap shot every hour and copies it off site. After the recent catastrophe of the site being down for 9 hours we came out with no significant data loss - a nice consolation.

Journal Space had 55,000 pages indexed with Google and were seeing some good growth. Poor Journal Space - surely they would have copies of old data for their development enviroments. I guess not. If I were them I'd be crawling Google's cache trying to pull out as much content as possible and making sure Apache logs are logging every request so that some idea of the site structure can be gathered. It may well be futile but it's a hard choice to just roll over and die.

Local Park Snowboarding - No Resorts Needed

Snowboarding | December 26, 2008

It's been dumping down snow in Vancouver for over a week sitting at about 2 feet deep where it's untouched. Athough it has annoyed a lot of locals the snow has given the mountains a solid base after a slow start to the season. The snow has also meant a white Christmas throughout Vancouver streets, so no one can complain too much about the freakish white stuff landing on the holiday season.

One of the benefits of the snow dumping down close to home is that you don't need to go far to get in a decent ride.

Going up the local mountains would make for some great boarding but the holiday period makes for long lift lines and crowded slopes so there are good reasons to stay clear. Instead of going to the resorts all you need is a fairly steep hill with not too many trees and presto! - you've got sweet terrain for some jump building.

I did some research and found a great tobogganing spot that also had plenty of room for the odd snowboarder.

Setting up your own booter can be the perfect way to practise your stuff and maintain your own terrain without people taking the top off your kicker. You're also not paying for a pass which makes it all even sweeter. You'll find yourself more relaxed and more focused on your riding which can go along way to becoming a better border.

For me it was a great chance to practice some backside 180's. I just hope it keeps dumping down because I totally need to work on my game.

Peace!

Zeno's Paradoxes

Mathematics | November 22, 2008

When I was doing some research on the theory of everything I came across Zeno's paradoxes. If you got some time check them out and have a good think about them. It's fun to try and wrap your head around them. This one is good too.

Flickspin EC2 Instance Crash Forensics

EC2 | November 18, 2008

As some of you may have noticed Flickspin had a hiccup on the weekend but all systems are now appear to be better than ever. The problem was caused by executing a script I hadn't checked over thoroughly that blasted the file permissions up to root level on what was a particularly bad folder to be messing with.

Needless to say, when it happened I panicked and made the situation a hell of a lot worse. I had no idea what had happened and assumed the db had crashed due to corruption as the script I was running was db related. It turned out I was so far off the mark that I almost made more of a mess by panicking than the effect of the original mistake.

It's been interesting to go back through that moment of panic. Here's my search history - I got a good laugh out of it:

• ubuntu restart mysql command
• ubuntu mysql fail start
• ubuntu mysql fail start db died
• ubuntu mysql dead
• ubuntu mysql dead after script . . << . . clutching at straws... lol
• ubuntu mysql dead fail start

My searches were mostly in vane. So many things can cause major problems that search results aren't always useful. I beinging to learn that if you are not comming across a common problem that can easily be found on the net, you are probably dealing with a symptom and not the cause. Permissions are awesome and painful at the same time. They remind me a lot of webpage caching. Caching can improve the performance of your site like you wouldn't believe but it does add an extra element of voodoo. So many times I've pulled out hair because I can't see the effects from something I'm working on. You learn overtime to remember caching as the first thing when things go wrong. I now reaslise I need to do something similar with linux permissions.

The other interesting thing about the crash is the famous failing backup process. Fortunatly the data backup for the site was well managed, it was the cold ec2 backup instance that failed that made my life just that much harder.

The instance was sitting there are ready to be used. I had been thinking lately that I should give it a spin to test it out my ec2 command handling and blow the cobwebs out of the instance. When I decided to move to the backed up instance (after having torn the heart of my production instance) I totally forget that I changed the ssh keys and no longer had access. Maybe if I was a guru I could have hacked into it somehow but I knew that wasn't going to happen. So I made it to the verge of resue only to realise the door was locked and I thrown out the keys 6 months ago. Such a fool. So I rebuilt FS on top of a ec2ubuntu instance and all went smoothly from there. I'm just hoping I can manage to be a bit more careful when running scripts in the furture.

Cheers!

Blog Fast and Blog Often

Blogging | October 28, 2008

If you contemplate maintaining a blog it is important to remember that they are easy to start but hard to keep going. A blog that only has an entry every couple of month tends to be pretty useless. It is true that you don't want to just up your noise ratio to satisfy a stupid quota you've set for yourself, however, when you make a mental shift to write more often you'll find a lot more things to write about.

An Active Blog is Good Blog:

If someone is visiting your blog, chances are they are bored and are wanting to see something to take their mind off their boredom. (If you are reading my blog you must really be in real trouble!)

People tend to have funny built in reminders and will slowly learn how often your work gets updated and will know that they won't be missing much if they don't visit for a while.

Frequency is important for sure. If you have a couple of bad posts in a row after having been writing constantly for sometime, it's likely your readers will steer you in the right direction and indirectly motivate you to keep writing.

One other thing; don't write about how your [insert small animal here] did something cute the other night. No one wants to hear that kind of thing and if they do, then it should just be kept to catster.com

Snowboarding Season Preparation

Snowboarding | October 27, 2008

Snowboard season is nearing once again. A recent dusting on the nearby mountains served as a perfect warning to get in some last minute preparation for the season opening.

As per usual, the plans to keep in good physical shape in the pre-season went out the window as soon as it was warm enough to fire up the BBQ and crack a cold one. Despite realising I was foolish once again in the off-season, I can now try to at least limbre up for what is soon to come.

Yoga would be a good option but just following basic stretching routine should suffice. A lot of the focus should be on the back and the legs. The hamstrings are a big concern as they going to want to tighten all the more through the constant crouching while riding. Including some squats in the routine would also be beneficial and would help prevent soreness as well as the shakes.

Preparing for the season also means checking gear and tuning things like edges and fixing any dings that might need plugging. Examine carefully for signs of delamination before the start of the season and also after the first few rides as plywood glue can do funny things in the off season.

I know some of my equipment is getting old and warn out. It's going to be a tough call to replace things all at once or doing them one at a time. I want to take some time to test out some new season flow bindings but I'm sucker for the engineering behind Ride bindings so it'll be an interesting case.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember with the season coming up is that the season is long and the first rush of blood shouldn't see me out of action for the season. Also, when getting out for an early season ride to remember the base may be patchy. I've got a rock hopper and I'm going to make good use of it. If you don't, either stick the the groomers or be prepared to damage your board.

Peace!

The Chrome Revolution

Software Development | September 3, 2008

The web is a buzz with the release of Google's web browser - Chrome. Although there are already a multitude of reviews out there I thought I'd offer my 2 cents as this release is a pivotal moment for the history of the web.

The decision for Google to build and release their own browser is extremely clever. By making it open source makes it even more clever. Google is pushing an ideology more than just a product and they are doing it in style.

The product itself is secondary. Google is making operating systems, like Windows, redundant. The ideology that is being pushed is that the web is the ultimate environment for applications. This happens to be Microsoft's worst nightmare as they have failed to capture this market and are losing their dominance in the tech industry. This dominance has been seen as a blight on the innovation of computer science and many are happy to see the technology giant stumbling to maintain control.

This process may just be the handing over of the torch and creating a new giant that everyone will soon despise but, some credit has to be given to Google by the way they understand the technology markets and the way they can control them by offering so much freedom. The freedom presents so much opportunity and in the age of opportunism, people know a good thing when they see it.

The open source pitch is reaching a crescendo in the software world and it was mentioned repeatedly during the Chrome announcement. Google wants the other players to takes parts from their browser and forward the benefits on to help make the web a better experience and help the web become the home to the majority of application development. This is their goal and ideology. With it they can offer the world a slice of the pie. It's hard to see how this dream could be stopped.