13 Feb 2007
I’ve been battling a Python for the better part of a week now. Mostly just in terms of creating a nice habitat for it to inhabit, so that we can gather all manner of useful information about the habits of pythons and interactions of humans with things that the python does. I’d been winning most fights and attributing the fact they arose at all to my slowly becoming familiar with the way it worked at all.
I’d been doing some research on this particular kind of snake for a couple of months before I decided it looked like a GoodThingâ„¢ to be wrestling with, so I knew a bit about it relative to something else that I knew a bit about (enough to be dangerous, as is apparently the case with 95% of the world’s PHP developers). I knew that it was slightly more strongly typed than PHP, but didn’t really think that was something I’d have to know about.
Ba-baauummm.
Error in formatting:__str__ returned non-string (type int)
Oh, come on, just play with the pretty little number. Grumble grumble.
I am in the strangest place right now. It’s 1.30 in the morning on a weeknight and I’m writing code, but I’ve spent most of the day going between Photoshop and a cocktail of a couple of shell sessions mixed with phpMyAdmin and a bit of Django documentation. It’s cool being able to write useful code again (and, better still, I am working on code to solve problems I’d be itching to solve for our own ministry context at TACKLES/Matthias but am being paid to do it under the auspices of the CYIADA project, which means I can afford to spend more time and do it properly!), but it’s possibly even cooler to have ready access to great design tools at home since last week — quality tools are an awesome blessing!
11 Feb 2007
Snazzy huh? :P I was pleased at how it came out… I’m continually surprised by our Photosmart‘s capabilities, it really does well if you feed it slightly thicker stock paper (I usually use this great 190GSM stuff by Nopa — some European company, they don’t even have a website that I know of).
And yes, Photoshop was used in the production of this DVD cover ;-)
08 Feb 2007
I don’t even particularly blame it, but it’s not working on whisper (faithfully serving in a cupboard since early-2005) anymore. It was running 5.10 (I think) for yonks and then today I decided it might be easier/cleaner to pull the plug and re-install than just change the apt sources for a third time (or however many it’s been)
So I downloaded 6.10 (hence the torrent post) and it didn’t work.
Fine. I downloaded 6.06 LTS (the, you know, meant-to-be-überstable-and-longlasting release) and it hangs loading the kernel. No kernel panic message, it just gets stuck.
This is annoying.
I’m basically going to rebuild this entire server for Django‘s sake, because it’s so useful for non-programmers like me to build things that work. This has been an interesting week at church because a whole bunch of new things started/old things restarted and finally I’m in a position to evaluate where we can use technology from an “insider” standpoint with regards to what I’m being paid to do at Youthworks.
I’ve got two smallish (with potential for massive extension) apps that I want to build in under two days for ongoing internal use (one for TACKLES, another for my Switch small group this year) which will essentially form prototypes for revision/replacement as appropriate for use in a CYIADA global context once we get a programmer on board (God willing sometime soon! I’m meeting with someone who will hopefully be helpful in this regard on Friday, please be praying!) and make some more concrete decisions about architecture. I can draw flowcharts until there’s nothing left to flow but that doesn’t get business logic written!
I’m thinking the Ubuntu issue will be some stupid hardware thing that will go away once I take the computer apart. It probably needs a bit of a clean, anyway. I just so don’t have time to spend on sysadminy type stuff these days, only no-one else at work will/is interested in doing it, which is rather annoying — there’s free hosting, but it’s seriously the most vanilla hosting environment you’re likely to find anywhere. It’s a CPanel/WHM gig with zero redundancy, zero backups, PHP4 only, and blah blah blah no-one cares. Generic with a capital G set in Times New Roman. There is, of course, little interest in anything using a non-.Net platform. I’d actually quite happily use MSSQL, but ASP.Net is, by all reports, just gross from a web standards perspective. And whilst I’m slowly being de-radicalised in that regard (partially because I am caring less about standards and more about accessibility, which is bad long term anyway, and also because my viewpoints are becoming less radical as mainstream moves towards where I am now! CSS is the norm, and pure content/presentation separated sites are probably representing 50% of site refreshes at the minute), I’m not quite ready to throw in the towel that much just yet.
Nor should I be.
*soapbox off*
08 Feb 2007
I got sick of wanky pseudo-African named-operating systems.
Actually, that’s a lie, but I’m feeling a little vitriolic (oxymoron?). Ubuntu didn’t work at all, and of a sudden CentOS did. It’s not quite as polished but I could grow to love it (maybe). I just need to look past this whole RPM thing, which really is ugly compared to the breadth and depth of apt options available. IMO, of course. And the whole ports gig just scares me so I’m gonna stay away from FreeBSD here for a while longer (until this one breaks in another two years?)
I’d forgotten how much work I’d put into making Samba shares behave as well as they had been for the last forever, too. And was convinced there was nothing of value left on the computer (I didn’t delete the home directories, just in case… that was really easy because they’re even on a physically separate volume, it was basically less effort to just leave them there) and consequently (yet again) deleted a MySQL database with StuffOfValueâ„¢ in it. In this case a CYIADA survey database I’d built because there were no other options available and (you probably guessed it) I hadn’t sorted out hosting by IT at work yet.
So the aim now is to setup a similarly solid server that’ll last me another two years, barring hardware upgrades (this thing desparately needs more RAM even though it’s got half a gig–I have no idea where it all goes). This time around it’ll be more web-production-esque in its role, which basically means it’ll have more than just being a quiet Samba PDC and file server and web dumping ground on its plate, at least until everything I’ve got planned for it today reaches maturity, or my situation changes to the point that paying for a VPS or real dedicated server somewhere else is a viable option. Loki does, indeed, work quite well, but I can’t screw with it quite as much as some things make me want to (not that I’d want to do that to Loki… in between catastrophic hardware failure it’s amazingly stable and the lack of general screwing-around-ness is probably a big part of that! Probably… :P)
No aspirations surrounding the idea of a media server this time around. Though there’s a possibility I’ll look at maybe building a terabyte RAID server later this year, which would mean rethinking whisper’s role somewhat. It’d probably be relocated to downstairs (it’s cooler there) and replaced by a case with better ventilation and requiring better ventilation. The EPIA board I’ve got isn’t passively cooled, but I reckon it can deal with getting toasty that much more because it’s got a fan stuck to it. It’s a borderline fan requirement, anyway — the hard drives get hotter than the processor (highest I’ve seen the drives is about 62° C, the processor would only hit 55, tops) on forty-something degree Sydney days. If the storage upgrade is called for I’d probably look at getting something with a bit more grunt though, just because if the space requires better ventilation then that lets me stop constraining the system power according to temperature!
Anyway. Now I’m a CentOS kid. Which makes me feel kinda dirty inside because of the whole Prominent North American Upstream Provider All In Title Case issue, but I think I can live with myself for the time being.
08 Feb 2007
I found this mildly hilarious. CNet’s speed tester obviously doesn’t quite accomodate ADSL2+. I was thinking the speed was a little slow, actually ;-)
TPG/iiNet/Internode/whoever should use a screenshot like this for their ads.