In various on July 1, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Schools out for summer, and the bike tackle is back. A dog walker found almost all of my stuff the next morning, but my neck feels like crap and my wrists hurt. And I’m feeling blanket resentment towards all Hasidim everywhere since the four or five women who witnessed the mugging did absolutely nothing to help, made no offer to call the cops, did not ask if I was okay. Stood silently and stared at me.
Note that, the youths kept my phone book and my phone. Which is what I get for keeping both in one bag. Which means I don’t have your number. Except Taliah’s, which I know by heart.
Otherwise, MIT (Gehry’s dysfunctional but gorgeous Strata Center which secretly reminds me of San Francisco, specifically the stretch of O’Farrell behind Kaiser. An instinctive, gut reference, not a visual lineup; getting ideas about Comparative Media Studies); Vermont (swimming holes, chocolate malts, N.); Brooklyn (vitamin greens, quinoa and just being home)
However, I’m disappointed that I haven’t heard one Glengarry, Glen Ross wisecrack about Padavan’s stroll across the senate floor.
Coming soon, Wesabe, OOo Calc and Get Rich Slowly’s list of high interest online savings accounts.
In learning, misc on June 20, 2009 at 8:34 pm
One hundred pushups, Git, SVN, Emily’s gratitude. I won’t commit to sharing the things I’m grateful for every day, but I need to start noting them for myself.
Sometimes the list might include:
Pratyahara, of finding Meredith on DeKalb, of letting go of many precious things. Ayami, because she makes me look good. Of deciding that it is just fine for me to say that, yes, I appreciate Ayami. She’s a genius, thank you very much, even if her website has almost inspired me to an essay on third wave feminism (is it cool if I just stick to being content in my skin? Can I pass on tramping about in a bustier? Kthxbye.) Of an invitation to bring my dinner to the garden. Cider donuts, strawberries, snap peas, Knight and Future Civic Media and digging in to heady places where I want to spend more time (context, visualization, social network theory)
And proud of, pushing through, jumping over, taking risks.
And delighted that, while Dollar still charges $55 /day surcharge to Brooklyn residents (lame), the clerk All Car in the Brooklyn Marriott suggested calling our credit card company to find out if we even need to buy insurance. Turns out we don’t. Points to All Car for being helpful instead of upselling us. Screw Dollar.
command-line, free-software, linux, technology
In learning, linux on May 19, 2009 at 4:12 pm
We’ve got two packages running, OpenX and Phorum, that seem to make a lot of database connections. Sometimes so many that the whole database runs out of connections. Phorum gets hammered by bots looking to exploit vulnerabilities in the code (and sometimes finds them). OpenX is just greedy. Or needy.
So I got smart. I limited the database users that those tools connect as to just a handful of connections. Which solved one problem: we stopped getting errors complaining that there were too many users connected to the database. But we started finding that the site would slow to an absolute crawl from time to time.
Talking it through with a friend, he pointed out that what I was probably doing was causing all the rejected database connections to queue up and wait. Kind of not the ideal solution, though I bet I could further fine tune things to prevent that as well. A better idea, since the Phorum forums are entirely archival at this point, was to restrict any and all post requests in the directories where Phorum is running. In htaccess you’d say something like:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^(POST) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F]
</IfModule>
So that’s where I’ve left things for the moment. We’ll see how we fair.
PS. How much do I love that you can make a firefox search bar out of anything?
