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Tuesday, September 29 2009, 10:12 PM

That's the rumor, anyway. I figure I should update this at least once or twice a year, so here goes.

The past few months have been pretty busy, but in a good way (mostly). The largest event has easily been the purchase of a house! It all happened in a whirlwind, with all of the pieces falling together in an eerily easy progression. Home ownership is definitely a change, but it's a good one, no doubt about it. Almost immediately after moving in, I was taken with the (much larger than usual) urge to build things and acquire copious amounts of power and hand tools. Erin has also noticed changes, hers being largely unexpected. In the search for another indoor activity besides Eve, she took up quilting! She's getting into it pretty heavily, and is making a lot of progress in a short amount of time.

Work has been hectic and stressful, which is the norm these days. I still haven't found a comfortable balance between being a boss and getting my own tasks done, and it makes things pretty difficult. I'm making a concerted effort to delegate more, but it's met with only limited success so far. Hopefully that trend doesn't continue.

That's all for now. We'll see if I can get back into the habit of posting, but I can't make any promises!

erin eve house work

Wednesday, November 26 2008, 2:42 AM

I can't say I've been exactly busy over the past few months, but I've certainly been occupied by things that keep me from updating this blog. I figure it's past time for an update, so I shall discuss said things in ascending order of awesomeness.

Work - My responsibilities at work keep growing, which is both cool and stressful at the same time. I am now supervising four subordinates and am much more involved with our product development process as a whole. All the while, I'm still doing many of the tasks I've been doing for a long time, along with the endless list of new tasks that come along. The people on my team are quite easy to manage for the most part, but I'm still getting accustomed to worrying about the work flows of four other people, rather than just focusing on my own. I'm sure it's something I'll get better with over time, but I still find myself struggling with it.

EVE Online - A few buddies from work got me into this game over the summer, and it's become something I spend a lot of time on. There are a lot of things about EVE that make it really neat in my eyes (its server technology being one of them), but the one that stands out the most is the fact that the intensity of the game is pretty much what you want it to be. If you want to spend crap loads of time playing, you can surely do that, but if you're low-key, the game allows you to advance your character with very little interaction. It also reminds me of a game I played a lot as a kid - Privateer. A lot of the concepts and pursuits are similar, but instead of it being limited to a rather small single player environment like is present in Privateer, EVE has literally thousands of solar systems to explore, each with planets, moons, asteroids, and other things that you can interact with alongside of tens of thousands of other players from around the world, simultaneously (the most I've seen online was just short of 40,000, this past weekend). I could probably talk about EVE in great length, but suffice it to say that I think it's quite cool.

A Girl - Yep, you read that right. Fortune has smiled upon me and given me the gift of an awesome girlfriend. We shall call her Erin, for that is her name. Erin started up working where I work in the middle of the summer, and our paths crossed for the first time at a party thrown by a coworker. She was instantly taken with me (yes, instantly), but it took me a bit longer to come around. I'm really glad I did though, because this is easily the most healthy and rewarding relationship I've been in. I'm well aware that I have my fair share of quirks, idiosyncracies, and downright annoying behavior. She is very patient with me in those regards, doesn't try to change me in ways that she knows I won't change, and instead does her best to adjust her expectations accordingly. This is a stark contrast to some of my past relationships, and I can't describe how much I appreciate that. I'm doing my best to reciprocate. At this point, the list of things about her that I would change is pretty much non-existent, so it's not too hard for me. :) Long story short, we both make each other very happy, which is pretty damn awesome.

erin eve work

Sunday, October 26 2008, 9:13 PM

As most people probably can discern by reading the backlog of content entries here, I'm a fan of Memcache. It makes database driven applications crazy fast when used properly, and can be damn simple to integrate if your code is set up properly. I integrated it with the monitoring system I wrote at work a while back to take some of the load off MySQL, and it's worked exceptionally well.

While checking something else out in the monitoring system, I ran a report on the current Memcache status, and was kind of blown away. The system currently consists of 16 servers, 15 of which have memcached running on them, with 512MB allocated on each. That's 7.5GB of cache memory, for those that don't like doing math. I'll let the report speak for itself...

In just the current running processes, there is over 15 years of combined uptime, with 9 memcached processes up for over a year... 183 terabytes of data read from the memcached processes and 199 terabytes written. That's a lot of uptime and a lot of data! I've got a couple of crash-happy servers in the cluster too. Without those, the numbers would be higher.

For those wondering, the write number is higher than the read number because the latest snapshot data is stored into memcache for easy retrieval each time data is collected. The read numbers are part of the snapshot storage process as well, and would also be higher if there was more activity on the web interface.

memcache mysql work

Thursday, August 21 2008, 7:07 PM

It should be the goal of every good geek to build something with lots of blinking lights. I'm proud to say that I've done this many times over. The latest...

Too bad the system this set of drive arrays is attached to is causing me no end of grief.

coraid work

Sunday, July 13 2008, 1:18 AM

It's been a pretty crazy couple weeks, for sure. I've been super busy with multiple projects at work, with each one demanding lots of attention. I tend to have a hard time changing directions once I get going on something, so having so many things to do can be pretty stressful. In addition, a system I take care of at work also had some kind of a nervous breakdown, and required a ton of attention in order to correct. A ton of attention while I was on vacation. Totally weak. It's mostly fixed now though, so it's back to being pulled in multiple directions by other stuff. Sigh.

There hasn't been a lot going on outside of work recently due to a general lack of energy and motivation to do anything. All of the stuff happening at work leaves me with no desire to do anything when I get home. It's pretty depressing, in a way.

One relatively fun thing happened though. For the first time since around 2000, I built myself a brand new computer. I got myself a quad-core AMD Phenom processor clocked at 2.3GHz, 4GB of PC2-8500 RAM, a Biostar TPower N750 motherboard, a power supply, and new case from Newegg. I also got a couple of SLI-capable Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS video cards from a coworker. Combine all the parts together and I've got myself a pretty beefy machine. A hell of a lot more beefy than my other desktops. I've been installing some of my old games on it, and they absolutely scream.

amd biostar frustrations nvidia work

Thursday, April 10 2008, 10:15 AM

It seems that posting here regularly is getting more and more problematic. It seems as though I'm busy a lot of the time, but most of the stuff I'm busy with is mundaine and would be boring to talk about, or its stuff that shouldn't be talked about in a public forum. I've been a lot busier with human-oriented things at work as opposed to the purely technical side of things. It's definitely taking a while to get accustomed to. I still lack team members for my group, but that's my fault as much as anybody else's. I still need to come up with a list of qualifications that are required/desired for people interested in joining the team. It seems easy enough to do, but every time I think of it, I come up with more and more items to put on that list. It may be a never-ending task... :)

Other than work, there isn't a whole lot of things going on. I've been doing some more playing with AoE/Xen at home, and have succeeded in getting some things working that should open some doors regarding what I can do with those tools, but that's a subject for another post... One with drawings and diagrams. :)

Oh yah... It's getting warm! Yay for spring!

aoe work xen

Wednesday, March 05 2008, 1:02 AM

I've been pretty occupied with work lately. I've been busy putting the finishing touches on a project that will be unleashed on the masses within the next week or two. I put in a lot of hours trying to meet a deadline that ended up being meaningless because others involved went on vacation before finishing their parts. That's fine though. It gives me more time to solidify my end of things, which is never a bad thing.

Also in the work front, I've been given what most would consider a pretty significant promotion. I've been made the head of new department that, for all intents and purposes, is a R&D group primarily focused on bringing innovative products and services to the customers. I'm the only member of the group right now, but others will start filling in sooner rather than later. This role also puts me in a position where I'll be (along with another senior member of the company) overseeing the progress and direction of most (if not all) projects, company-wide. In ways, it's a pretty big change from my previous role of hiding in the shadows and making things happen, but at the same time, it's really not. I'll still be making things happen that most people aren't even aware of, but I'll also be someone's boss. That's definitely a first for me. If anyone's got any helpful advice, be sure to share.

In other news, I'll be taking a well-deserved vacation starting this coming friday. Chris and Darin have somehow found a way to free themselves from their better halves for the weekend, so we're headed down to Andre's for the weekend for some old school debauchery. It sounds like Andre has a full itinerary planned for us, and judging by the list of things I saw yesterday morning, we'll be lucky if we make it out alive. I await the challenge. My liver, however, would be wise to prepare its defenses while it has the opportunity.

indianapolis vacation work

Friday, February 15 2008, 9:35 AM

Eeek! It's been a month since I last updated here. Time flies when you're ... alive. I guess.

I haven't really been up to all that much. I had a couple of pretty hairy weeks at work where I was called upon to help clean up messes that I did not create. This occured on multiple occasions, and because of which, I was pretty stressed out during those two weeks. Its been better recently though, so I can't complain a whole lot.

I recently picked up some new pickups for the Carvin, and I'm mighty pleased with how they sound so far. I bought a pre-assembled pickguard on eBay from a guitar store in Florida, and it came loaded with three Lace Sensor pickups. I had a Lace Sensor in the Carvin before the upgrade, and I always liked the way it sounded, so I figured I couldn't go wrong. I'll be updating the guitar page with the new details sometime relatively soon (read: before 2017), and I may post some sound clips for the axe handlers out there.

It seems like I also put some more work into refining the code of the old web site here a few weeks ago. I converted some of the code to handle data objects over to an object-oriented approach using classes, and it's reminded me how easy they can make things. Instead of having to write code each time I want to say, make a form to add new content or submit new comments, I can just call methods on the class object. A few calls to something like $ContentObject->setTitle('OMG Wheee!'); and a $ContentObject->commit(); sure as hell beats a bunch of SQL statements.

guitar siteupdates work

Tuesday, March 13 2007, 3:39 PM

The ending days of last week were a total pain for me. The reason is something that I would have never thought to be much of a pain for anyone - daylight savings time. I don't know if everyone was aware of the problems associated with the change, or that there was a change at all, but it was certainly a major annoyance for me. When George Dubyah moved the daylight savings time changeover up three weeks, that mandated that just about every computer in the land needed to be updated with new timekeeping parameters.

Lets just say that the software automated updates didn't work out as well as one might have hoped. We manage an entire fleet of linux environments at work (they number in the thousands), and nearly one quarter of them needed work to ensure that they changed over properly. Most of these issues resolved around stale /etc/localtime files. While all of the information in /usr/share/zoneinfo was correct and reflected the new DST changes, /etc/localtime was wrong, and that's what the system bases its timezone conversions on. That meant a lot of work to isolate and fix all the problem machines. We got it hammered out though, with much loss of sleep and overtime. It shouldn't have occured that way though.

It doesn't look like the saga of my broken receiver will end soon either. I called up to circuit city late last week, and inquired about the repair effort. They stated that it had just come back from the repair facility that day, and was available for pickup. When I went to pick it up, I was presented with a concept that was strange to me - the receiver wasn't broken. Not according to Circuit City's repair facility anyway. They gave it a clean bill of health, which didn't sit well with me. I know it was broken when it left my house.

I asked that one of their techs there assist me in running a few tests to make sure it was functioning properly. He grabbed one of their display model TVs and a DVD player, and some cabling. We hooked it up with what we had (using the composite input/oupts), and everything seemed to work fine, except the on-screen setup menu. I thought that was strange, but was in a hurry to head into work to continue dealing with the DST problems. The tech assured me that I could bring it back in if it was still broken.

Well, it was. My fatigue and lack of motivation kept me from testing things out fully until yesterday. When I first sent it in, I just noticed that things weren't working properly, and that I could hack around the issues by changing the input/output path through the receiver. I thought the repair techs would perform more testing to localize the issue, but it would seem that I was wrong. I spent a half hour or so mapping out the various input paths I used, and what the picture looked like on the various output paths. In all the various combinations, it seemed as though there was one common issue - S-Video. Nothing relating to S-Video works. All of the component and composite video works fine. Knowing that, it would seem feasible that the internal setup menu is somehow driven by an SVideo feed as well.

I took the receiver back in yesterday and provided a nice printed copy of my notes that I had taken, which outline exactly what works and what does not. If it comes back as OK after this, I'll be quite upset.

frustrations homeaudio linux onkyo-tx-sr603 work

Friday, August 25 2006, 1:22 AM

I guess I haven't been in much of a posting state of mind over the past few weeks juding by the lack of new words being shown around here. It happens. Some cool things have happened recently though, so I guess I could talk about them.

First, I got an office at work. There's no significant promotion or anything like that associated with it, but it is pretty damned cool. I got the office because it puts me in a position to share my experience with some of the newer guys while they work on servers, which was an area that was lacking beforehand. So that's good. It's also good that my office is pretty big, and it has a huge desk. I need to make it cooler still, but it's coming along. I have a few pictures in the gallery here.

Another cool thing is that my sister's boyfriend Jay sold me a nice quality TV. It's only a 24", but it has a beautiful picture, modern inputs, and it doesn't take 10 minutes to warm up like my previous TV. It's pretty nice to just be able to crash on the couch and watch something, even though I don't watch TV that much.

Third on the cool list is some cool musical acquistions. I picked up the new Lamb of God album, "Sacrament," on tuesday, and it kicks all kinds of ass. Lamb of God rocked hard before, but they've upped their game. I wouldn't say that they'd appeal to any metal fan because they have a somewhat prog-ish sound wth lots of rhythm changes, but I like it, and that's all that counts. Another sweet CD I picked up came at the recommendation of a guy from work - "In The Eyes of Fire" by Unearth. I hadn't heard any of their stuff before he lent me the CD, but I'll be hearing a lot more. They are a total powerhouse. Their guitarists play with a fury, alternating effortlessly between groove-laden riffs and frenetic melodies and solos. I've only had their CD for a day or so, but it's definitely one I'll be listening to for a long while.

lambofgod television unearth work

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