Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
04 2007
It's Friday evening in the capital city, so once again the trains are broken, running late, cancelled or missing in action. For once, the station announcers in Pearse seem to have decided that it's best to announce something to the rapidly angering mob - so at least we're enlightened enough to realise we should take the Maynooth train and change at Connolly to head north. My plans for hitting the cinema for an 8pm showing are rapidly receding into the distance...
Over 20 minutes behind schedule, we pull out of Pearse and into Tara, where there is a genuine angry mob being held at bay by an addled youth with a walkie-talkie. His tactic appears to be to answer all questions with a negative, thus minimising his commitment to delivering any useful information. Eventually someone asks the right question and he has to reluctantly agree that perhaps taking our train and changing at Connolly is an appropriate course of action. No, it will not take anyone to Howth.
But trains being screwed up is normal for Dublin - particularly for a Friday evening. Why do I even bother blogging about it? Because of Irish people - that's why. On reaching Connolly, the announcer, in an illuminating bout of competence notified those of us heading north that we should migrate to platform four. Ahead of me were a lovely old couple: peaceful in the throngs of people rushing to get to platform four before the train left, or possibly to try and get seats on the overcrowded carriages that pass for public transport in Ireland's capital, I don't know. I slowed my pace to watch as the man walked ahead with one hand behind his back, so the lady could walk behind him, clasping his hand firmly and follow along. I slowed my pace slightly to keep anyone from rushing behind and bumping into them. At the bottom of the ramp in Connolly, between platforms 6/7/8 and 4, the crowd naturally splits in two, around a large pillar. I laughed as the couple broke into a mini-dash, taking the far less crowded right hand side and headed up to the platform with the rest of us.
Perhaps it's that it's Friday evening... Perhaps it's that I've received some good news today... Perhaps it's that I rather spoiled myself and had both a Crunchie (it is Friday!) and a white Magnum ice-cream earlier... Perhaps it's the nice weather we're enjoying... maybe it's a combination of all these things - but mostly it's that in the face of unrelentingly incompetent, annoying, frustrating, noisy, uncomfortable, overcrowded and expensive public 'transport', Irish people can find something to make the best of the situation. I've always thought that young love was wasted on the young, but it made me laugh out loud in Connolly station to see an older generation firmly claiming it for themselves.
Oh yeah, btw, Dear politicians, please can we have some decent public transport in Dublin. Love 'n' hugs, Me.
posted at: 19:54 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
...while reading a letter in the Irish Indpendent, complaining about just how poor the quality the outrageously expensive 'Full Irish Breakfast' cost in Dublin Airport:
"This letter reminds me of you... it's well written but moaning about stuff."
A huge happy birthday to Mr. tyrion who last night celebrated getting older with a combination of food, drink, guitar hero, dance mat craziness, discussion of the skynet game and much other madness.
Also, boo to Ryan Air for having a broken website that wouldn't let Megan check in online. Sucky! :-(
Yay! for Sarah, who rocked verily with the Guitar Hero rocking! Rock! No more need be said...
posted at: 11:08 | path: | permanent link to this entry
...I'M OBZERVIN U, OBZERVIN MAH BLOG!!!
( restecp! )
posted at: 12:24 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
...it all went a bit 'Yorkshire'...
< bigbro> danield: Well, in my day, we didn't have BBS's, because there wasn't enough RAM to store all 26 letter of the alphabet so we only had up to the letter "M"...
< munky> bigbro: in your day uou only had the BBC
< dgold> <drinks Chateau de Chasselas> In my day, we used to have to power the computer with a piece of cloth soaked in lemon juice, and half a rotten spud.
< Gwilym> dgold: you had a computer? we had pieces of card that we had to put drops of sacrificed goat blood on
< dgold> Gwilym: well, when i say 'computer', it were only a piece of glass with a transistor stuck to the side with snot, but it were a computer to *us*.
< Gwilym> dgold: I had wake up before I went to sleep to polish the stone that we had
During the investigation of a problem with a client website, running a thick Java client side piece, I needed to be able to see logs from Apache of when it received requests, rather than when it responded to them. Apache logging seems to only write to the log when it completes a request, which is understandable given that it also logs the number of bytes returned.
Thanks to kae for suggesting the use of mod_status. Because I use this to monitor Apache stats using munin, I already had this in place on all the servers my requests were going through (Multiple servers were hit due to some reverse proxy techniques.) So with a combination of:
while (true); do ( wget -q http://my.web-server.net/server-status && grep some-string-i-care-about server-status ; rm server-status ); done
and the old reliable:
tail -f ssl_access_log -f access_log -f error_log -f ssl_error_log | grep some-string-i-care-about
I was able to get a good idea of where the problem lay. There are undoubtedly better ways to do it, but this one worked well for me.
Comment: Thanks to atlas who suggested that the -O option to wget makes it write the data to a stream rather than directly to a file; so something like the following would be more efficient: while (true); do ( wget -O - http://my.web-server.net/server-status | grep some-string-i-care-about ); done
posted at: 18:31 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Due to a design decision it's a requirement that (sometimes large) binary files get stored in our CVS repository. Today, having checked in a 1.3GB binary chunk I'm not altogether entirely sure that was a good call by me. It looks like CVS server uses approximately memory equivalent to the file size for a check-in / commit operation. This is largely expected.
What I expected somewhat less was how much memory it attempts to use when checking the same file back out again, remotely, over SSH. An initial cvs process used approximately double the filesize in RAM - a whopping 2.6GB of memory, before I got a single byte of the file to my client. This was ollowed by a second process / thread being kicked off, which started to climb towards what I can only guess will be at least the size of the file in memory. The reason I don't know is because OOM killer stepped in and stopped cvs in its tracks.
Lessons learned: local checkin and checkout, on the server, for big binary files works well. This is how I'm going to get around this problem. Also, I need to upgrade our CVS server - a Linux server running 3 critical services on 256MB RAM just doesn't cut the mustard any more.
posted at: 20:12 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Avast... there be some sort of Oracle off teh starboard bow...
FOr your delight and delectation, here's a collection of useful (and not quite so useful) links regarding the Oracle database platform.
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