Velo, Rapido: Going Places

Every other year we go to San Francisco for Christmas, where there’s a tree (lately three feet, max, which I try to pretend is just great since cutting down whole trees sits less and less comfortably with me with each passing year. So a little tree is better than a big tree, but I don’t really understand how you’re supposed to sit around the tree drinking egg nog and reading A Christmas Carol aloud if the tree has to be sitting on the dining room table.) but this was not one of those years. I was trying to get a Vermont tradition going in alternate years, we had a good run of that, but the truth is that there’s not really enough snow in Vermont by December 25th and, also, there was a lot of construction going on this winter in Waitsfield. So Vermont was out this year, and so we did what all good Jews do on Christmas, which is that we made a pilgrimage to Chao Thai (with Peter J. who’s growing a beard that makes him look uncannily like photos of my father, circa 1975) and then went to a movie. In between, we stopped off at home to light the menorah and play some dreidel (told you). And the internet failed us on two counts. Or our collected reference volumes did. First, I wanted to make a proper hot toddy and I realized that I really am short a reference volume. This comes up from time to time, this shortage. So that was one failure. As it turns out, the internets claim that a hot toddy is pretty much any hot cocktail. Gin in fennel tea qualifies. Which isn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was something like:

One Hot Toddy
• 1 1/2 oz. bourbon
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 2-3 teaspoons of lemon (about 1/4 of a lemon, squeezed)
• 1/4 cup hot water
• 1 whole clove (optional)

Which really wasn’t so hard, but you have to get the proportions right. The internets other failure was dreidel rules. I wasn’t holding the machine, so it is possible that *someone* just wasn’t trying very hard, but we kept coming upon long narratives about the history of the game, when we just wanted some rules. Rules like:

• Start with maybe 15 things (things like pennies, maybe) each. Not 40 pennies. Unless you want this game to go on forever.
• At the start of each round (or, maybe just at the start of the game, depending who you ask), everyone puts a penny in the pot; if the pot empties out, everyone puts a penny in.

We had no trouble finding a cheat sheet for nun/gimmel/hey/shin but it goes something like nun means you get bupkiss; gimmel means you get the whole heap; hey gets you half the heap; shin you put two (or one) in the pot.

Sorry if you already knew that. We thought we already knew that until we sat down to play and discovered we didn’t.

I manage a web server. Sometimes, I think I do a way better job than anyone who managed this server before me. Other times, I think I’m grossly under qualified. There is a lot that I don’t know. Too much, I sometimes suspect.

One thing I do know is that I’m paying a lot of money ($360/month) for a dedicated server that I’m pretty sure I don’t need. When I started to shop around for alternatives, I started to hear a lot about Virtual Private Servers from folks like Mayfirst. Actually only from Mayfirst — I didn’t shop around that intently. It wasn’t until I got a beer with Scott the other night that I had the perfect alignment of stars I needed to get me over my comprehension hurdle. Here’s the thing about not understanding everything all the time: it is hard to know what questions to ask. I know I need root on a machine. I need to be able to tweak the apache configuration at will. Can I do that with VPS? The answer is “yes” but somehow it took me a while to get to where I even knew how to ask that question. Read the rest of this entry »

I thought I’d be slick and use the library (I don’t, ever. Which is no good) and the thing I wanted to put my hands on isn’t there.

I’m still looking for a non Windows based old Treo or something that I can geek out with. Also, I’m kind of loving this.

I have installed reblog on other blogs, and never had a whiff of trouble, but this time around I’m just flummoxed.

My Refeed-Plugin.php looks about right, and “Fetch reBlog” claims to have accomplished things but I can’t figure out where to find and approve the gathered posts. The users guide is also a little vague on this point.

I’m sure that administering it is indeed self explanatory if you can divine the URL where admining occurrs.

If you people knew how many personal finance posts I’ve started and walked away from, you’d … well, okay like five, but still. You’d something. I want to talk about saving and budgeting. I want to know how other people manage it. Are you structured? Loose? Are you putting money away for retirement? Based on a formula or a loose number or just “what my employer matches”?

I have a theory that we don’t, as a society, talk about money enough. We talk all the time about what we have, but we never say “shit, she’s got how much set aside for retirement? eeek.” Sometimes, gingerly, we talk about debt. I kind of know who of my friends is juggling credit card debt.

Mostly, I have no idea how people manage money or how much time my peers, my non-profit or self-employed early thirties peers spend thinking about financial planning. I spend approximately not enough time. N + I got about as far as deciding what we can put towards a mortgage and putting the difference between that and our rent aside. We decided to do that. We haven’t done that. We just kind of generally “try to save money” and haven’t assessed it beyond that. We do save money, but we haven’t set any goals in any practical way.

And, we haven’t done a very good job of combining our finances. We’re hovering in this half combined state, probably because we don’t have a budget and we both feel like we were doing just fine saving money before and it is a lot easier to contribute explicitly to joint expenses. Also because we just haven’t sat down and done it. That would be the other reason.

We do have a google spreadsheet, which is not the most f/oss solution, but there is a limit to how much tech support I can provide my spouse with. I’ve been eying an even less free solution, Mint.com because (and I”m just being honest here) it has pretty graphics. But: the only way to use Mint (which is basically like Quicken. Or Microsoft Money. Basically.) is to provide Mint with your bank login information and so far as I know my bank has no way for me to set up a second, outbound only, username. So Mint has a lot to say about privacy, but it still comes down to basic trust. I can believe them, or not believe them, but to use the service, I have to trust them with the same login information that I can use to withdraw my whole account. Or wire every penny to an offshore account.

Suddenly OAuth is sounding more and more appealing. OAuth is a scheme designed to let you decide who can access an account. If you want Facebook to be able to access your Flickr account, should you trust Facebook with your Flickr account password? Or should you tell Flickr “Yes, do allow Facebook user moi to access my account.”? In the latter case, if you decide that it is totally creepy and not at all okay that Facebook never, ever deletes your account, you can go back to Flickr and say “stop sharing with them, please.” Since I have a hard time pretending that I trust any one nifty webby service (delicious, flickr, facebook, twitter) more or less than any other, the whole OAuth hoopla kind of passed me by.

Now, however, I can see how the standard might be incredibly useful. Which would you rather do, trust some website to do right by your private data? Or trust your bank to cut that random website off when you ask them to? That’s what I thought.

Meanwhile, dear readers, have any of you decided to just go ahead and trust Mint.com?

Someone (Hsuan, to be precise, but that isn’t the point really) came to me recently with a corrupted SD card. Normally, I don’t do corrupted SD cards. I so do not want to be that guy that sits there and fixes what is broke. That doesn’t appeal to me at all. But when there is a command line involved, or a real mystery … I can find it hard to resist. You can see why my career as something other than a widget twiddler is not really taking off.

The answer, if you like to skip the narrative (hmph) is photorec. Which actually does amazing things for all manner of data recovery.

Here’s what I had before me:


[0 amanda@stillwell CANON_DC]$ find . -type f
find: Filesystem loop detected; `./DCIM/101CANON/101CANON’ has the same device number and inode as a directory which is 1 level higher in the filesystem hierarchy.

So whatever, PhotoRec. Great. But people always want to know why. I do. So why? Why? David Henry, who I do not know, and yet kind of do know (the internet is sneaky that way) had a pretty good explanation, which I can’t really improve on:

I was long puzzled by filesystem stuff, until I realized much is done by elves!

Read the rest of this entry »

Worth trying: sar -q for a rundown of queue lengths and load averages. Also pstree and I need to sort out what this:

I reniced the gzip process with a low priority level to reduce the load it’s putting on your server. I’d recommend running these scripts with a +19 niceness during periods low traffic to reduce the impact they’re having on your server.

means.

When the free lunch comes with a seminar on affiliate marketing opportunities and other ways to make a buck with pyramid schemes, it is a very special kind of free, nothing like kittens or beer or flying birds or freedom. Google is that kind of free, whether you believe that or not. And, I’m falling for Google Calendar. I’ve fallen. Fallen so hard that I’m documenting it for you.Because one thing it does nicely is import events from a CSV file. The catch is that if your CSV file is set up wrong, you just get an error that says “Sorry, Calendar is unavailable right now” when that isn’t the problem at all. So, if you tried to be sneaky and note the required fields with an asterisk or a wee “(required)” you’ll just be told to come back later. You won’t be told that Google can’t read your document.

Anyway. This Works.

Here’s the thing: today, Google is hanging on strong. But we’ve been over this with Flickr and del.icio.us. You may recall that both were acquired by Yahoo in the last year or two. And you may recall that Yahoo was about to be bought by Microsoft back in May, a buying that didn’t happen when Yahoo stock was at $37/share. Last I checked it was hovering around $9/share (actually, it is back up to 11). My sources (okay, the guy on the bus) say that the campus and soda machines are worth about $8/share which means that somewhere around $8 it starts to be worth it to takeover the whole thing and start selling off the chairs at a yard sale. Which means that I have no idea who is going to “own” Flickr or del.icio.us in six months. Not me, I know that, because neither is free.

So I’m trying to migrate. It helps that Yahoo’s system means that I am never entirely sure how to log in to my Flickr account anymore. I don’t take notes when I do login. I can never remember my username (actually, I have two). So I installed Gallery and if I ever figure out how to it to talk to Ubuntu in the webdav tongue, I might actually use it. And I’m trying to figure out a good substitute for del.icio.us, which is now just “delicious” anyway, which is lame.

free association, that was. I’m not even going to explain. I tried, this morning, to go off on a decadent adventure in the freezing rain but it didn’t work out as I had planned. Choice Greene turns out not to have seats, the expanded Pioneer still doesn’t sell cranberries and there was a line out the door at Choice. So my own living room it is. We did finally turn on the heat.

Oliver wrote, though. mailx v. mutt

I’ve been playing around with some shell scripting on my laptop and reading about command line email clients. The book I have talks about mail and mutt but only talks about how to read and send email with them,
mutt seems pretty good for sending but with out the program on my laptop I don’t know if it will retrieve them too. Do you know of any such programs that can download the messages from a pop or imap server? When we get to Guam in a week I’ll try downloading those two programs and looking at the help and man files but since time in port is so limited I figured I should make sure I’m getting the packages I need now since I’ll next have web access around the 22nd of December.

I envy his high seas. My people are mutt people when they aren’t using Eudora. I haven’t used Mutt since I worked at bway.net, and I found it frustrating because it wasn’t Pine and Pine was better because I knew how to use it. Funny how that works.

Mutt, though, ought to be a functional IMAP client. This is a good rundown of how to connect, but I think you are saying you want to store your IMAP messages offline. Store a copy.

Marius Gedminas, a generally helpful person and the author of a handful of generally useful tools, wrote a good response to some questions about fetchmail and mutt and IMAP that actually spells out some common points of confusion really well. So that might be helpful, just in terms of putting things in context. Another good read is Dave who eventually gives up, but first stews up a combination of mutt, UW IMAP, Isync and mairix.

I should dig in a little deeper. I’ll let you know how it goes.

On dkg’s advice, I picked out an iAudio 7 for my birthday present (N. had solicited said advice and provided it in a birthday card) and I’m hoping to get all my podcasts onto in advance of my transcontinental flight home so I can listen to Radio Lab and that famous TAL episode about the economy.

That is all I wanted by the way — something for travel, to plug headphones into and wrap myself in on long train trips and bus trips. So far so good: it launched rhythmbox when I plugged it in. Now to sync it …