Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • Hold My Hat While I Kvetch

    This will interest no one but me, but I don’t care. I’ve found something completely annoying about AOLserver and I need to share. Let’s say you download these bigass (the technical term would be “friggin’ huge”) files every day and have to parse them out and dump them into a database so you can do a bunch of conversions on them and generate spiffy reports. Let’s just say this is a new system that worked fine in testing with small files, but now, it will only parse a small portion of each file before deciding to give up. Let’s then say that the reason it does this, and then doesn’t report any kind of error is a helpful feature in the server that closes active (and very busy) db handles after they’ve been open for a certain amount of time. Does it check to see if they’re doing something? Nope. It just closes it. Thankfully, there’s an obscure configuration setting (MaxOpen in the pool/POOLNAME section) where you can set that timeout to some insane number (did you know that 1,000,000,000 seconds is approximately 192 days?). This will run tonight… I hope it gets all twenty-four hours instead of just ten or eleven. The only good thing is that it made me go in and fix up a bunch of things it was doing that weren’t quite as efficient as they could have been, which got us from 9am to 1pm, but still, sheesh.

    I love AOLserver. I use it for things it wasn’t intended for, like turning it into a cron job handler, and reporting system. I guess that’s why I run into this stuff. I can live with that. But I’m still gonna whine about it when I run into stupid stuff like this.

    The other thing is that Postgres doesn’t handle databases with more than 200k records in them very well without creating a LOT of indexes (like on every column of every table). Before I deleted the records older than two weeks, it took five minutes just to get a count. If I were a real DBA, I’d go find out why. But, I’m not. I use it because it’s easy to install and configure for use with AOLserver. It also supports all the SQL features I’m used to with Sybase. It’s also reasonably fast for normal use.

    If I didn’t have this headache, you all would never have known all this stuff. Thanks, Dr. Nik! (yes, my dentist’s name is Dr. Nik)

  • The Forgotten Insult

    Cranial Endorectumitis: You figure it out.

  • Brusha Brusha Brusha

    I don’t feel like working at the moment because I’m in the throws of a novacaine headache (last one for a few weeks, thank goodness). I’ve tried Motrin, Exedrin and closing my eyes. Now, I’ve resorted to a brownie and a Dr. Pepper to see if that’ll snap it. I had the impression taken for my crown, and have to go back in three weeks for the final. Remember kids, brush your damn teeth. This sucks.

  • Digging In The Dirt – For a Decade?

    Why didn’t anyone tell me Peter Gabriel released a new album? He did, and it’s been ordered. It’ll show up with my copy of My Neighbor Totoro sometime in December. Thankfully, you can download the whole album to “preview” it. It’s great. It’s not quite worth the decade it’s taken to get out, and he gets one black mark for including the song I Grieve from the City of Angels soundtrack on it. I love the song, but come on, the album averages out to one song per year since Us came out. I know the man’s been busy greying, but jeez. Really, the album’s beautiful. It’s more melancholy than Us. For some reason, it reminds me of the Birdy soundtrack more than anything else, and I can’t really place why.

    If you’ve got a fast connection, go get it right now (it’s a 69mb download, so you modem folks are SOL)!

  • Borderless

    Not everything needs borders and a background color.

  • Add Another To The No-No List

    My boss took us all to Legal Seafood in Tyson’s for lunch today. It was awesome. Now, you remember me telling you about my allergy to shrimp and later to crab (maybe I didn’t tell you, because I can’t find the post now)? Well, you can add scallops to that list. I got the assorted grill, which was this amazing sample of three grilled scallops, and three small fillets of salmon, arctic char and tuna. I loved it. But now, I have that same headache I had when I got crab at Red Lobster, and am feeling nauseous. Why me?! I love shrimp; I love crab; I love scallops. What’s next, chocolate?!

  • How Did I Miss Them?

    Another gift from a friend, I got Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, and wow. This is an amazing album. It came out in 1991, but sounds like it could have come out yesterday. It sounds fresh and new, and combines all of my favorite bands. It sounds at times like Phish, Moby, Massive Attack and well, it sounds like everything. A great trippy happy groove album to keep you smiling. Check it out.

  • John Never Said It Would Be This Fun!

    Since I bought my PlayStation 2, I’ve bought just one game, Jak and Daxter. I’ve rented half a dozen now, and have found what will probably be the next member of my permanent collection: Madden 2003. Other than some unfortunate choice of music with profanity in it in the menus, the game is great. The franchise mode is still there (I’ve been playing the Madden series since Madden 1995 on my old 486), only improved greatly with trickier trades. My favorite part though is the improved play designer. It’s way too much fun. I created a formation yesterday with five wide receivers, lined up two to the strong side, and three to the right. The options are amazing, and you can practice the play with any offensive and defensive unit you want. It’s great, totally worth the purchase price. I think next I’ll create a whole playbook of I formation plays with four wideouts. Yes, indeed, the fun never ends.

  • The Most Beautiful Mirror

    There have been a lot of great shots at the Mirror Project, but this is by far my favorite.

  • The Running Play

    Wow. I never thought fajitas could have such a punch. We went to our local Mexican chain last night before my sister’s play (which I’ll talk about later). I got the lovely and tasty chicken and steak fajitas. Everything was fine until we were on the way back to my parents’ house. The pain in my belt area was like a kick from a small child. It gravitated south until I figured I needed to get back to their house, and more specifically their toilet, a little faster. Needless to say, I was incapacitated for the rest of the evening, and most of this morning. I think I’m better now, but I’m not trying fate. It’s rice and maybe chicken for me tonight.

    Now, on to the play. It was the Sterling Playhouse’s One Act Play Festival, with (I think) all the plays written by members of the playhouse. My sister was fine, better than the rest of the people in the play she was in, and I’m being completely objective here. They put these little skits (they definitely didn’t rise to the level of a one-act play) on in a little rotunda outdoors, a decent distance from their audience without any sound amplification. We were in the fourth row, and I had a hard time hearing most of the actors. I won’t even go into the actual material, because it’s better to say nothing at all sometimes. I had three more paragraphs here I just deleted because I’m not feeling mean today. Support your local theater group – they need all the help they can get.