Work has been in-to-the-sane as of late (read: stuff physically blew up. Wonderful stuff, capacitance…) and I just haven’t had the energy to work up some proper posts.
In the meantime, here’s video footage of a full-grown man whipping the snot out of other full-grown men with a toy lightsaber:
“Mendel Doug” is apparently a bit of a legend on Villanova’s campus. There can be only one…
BONUS:
The best of Statler and Waldorf:
I Post, Therefore I Am
One of my coworker’s wives had their baby on Sunday morning, so we’re down a teammate for the next two weeks, thus my reduced posting output. I’m hoping to get a routine down soon, but blogging will most likely suffer.
Plus, I’m all outta good ideas.
A Totally Lame Dodge
Work stinks, home life is nutty, no time to write. More later.
SuQLite
If you were paying close attention, you would have noticed that the “Elbee Elgee Development” section of my footer was messed up for the past few days, and with good reason. That little bit of content is generated by parsing the RSS feed for the timeline on my Elbee Elgee Trac installation. Sometime earlier this week, the SQLite database that provides the backend for that install freaked out and locked itself up good n’ tight which necessitated me spending several hours debugging and de-wedging the DB.
The problem can be summed up thusly: it seems that Trac sites running on FastCGI have a tendency to try to access the default SQLite database fairly quickly and, if the DB files happen to be stored on an incorrectly-tuned NFS share, a race condition can ensue and incorrect file locking can occur, leaving the DB in a locked state.
It was initially a very long and frustrating process, as I scoured teh Googols for information on how to unlock a SQLite database. I found that a second file was created in the db/ subdir of my Trac site – trac.db-journal, which apparently indicates that a transaction is in progress or was incorrectly aborted. Search result after search result implied that one could unlock the database by
- Killing all process accessing the file
- Moving the -journal file
- Moving the .db file itself
- Restarting Apache
- Rebooting the machine
Since I’m on a shared hosting account at Dreamhost, options 4 and 5 were obviously Right Out. No amount of lsof or fuser tweakage, combined with judicious use of `kill -9` managed to unwedge the DB, so #1 was a bust. Options 2 and 3 allowed me to use the sqlite command line tool to connect to the database and run SELECT statements, but any INSERTs were met with “Database locked”-style error messages and thus Trac stayed broken.
Then it hit me – since I could SELECT, I could (conceivably) dump the contents and then reimport them into another DB. I cd’d into my Trac site’s db/ folder and executed the following:
echo '.dump' | sqlite3 trac.db > trac.dump; cat trac.dump | sqlite3 trac2.db
Using the sqlite3 command line tool, I verified that everything was copacetic and breathed a sigh of relief. Stupid SQLite.
I guess this seals it: when I finally move from Trac 0.9.6 to 0.10.3, I’m going to move to a real RDBMS like MySQL so this sort of stupid file locking crap doesn’t happen again.
NOTE: Apologies for the 3rd Grade-level insult inherent in this post’s title (it’s pronounced “Suck-well Lite”). Pretty much sums up my feelings, though.
Palette Swap!
I’ve had various and sundry people comment that the old default look/color scheme for my site was “too dark” so, in the interest of catering to the masses, I’ve done a bit of a turn-around, colorwise. Let me know what you think – the scheme still has some rough edges that I’m working on, but it’s pretty well tracking the development version of Elbee Elgee (the theme that Literal Barrage is currently running on).
So please, let me know what you think of the colors – what needs tweaking, what you like, what you don’t like, etc.
On the Elbee front, I’m quickly nearing a point where I feel like I could release it to the public. Beta 2 is approaching (yes, I know it says “4 months late” – that’s just about right…) and I think I’ll release it when I hit that landmark.
‘Scuse The Mess
I took the plunge and upgraded Literal Barrage to WordPress 2.1 on Thursday/Friday. I’ve been slowly picking away at the transition, re-enabling plugins, moving old artwork, etc. over. I know there are a bunch of things that still don’t work correctly: contact form, archives and a lot of my old images among them. If you notice any issues, please drop a comment on this story.
Thus far, 2.1 seems to be all-around faster and better put-together than previous versions of WordPress. For those of you following along with my theme development, I’ve moved Elbee to “beta 2” status. Things are progressing nicely (you can follow along with development without even leaving this page – the RSS feed down at the bottom shows the last few Subversion commits that I’ve made on the project).
Note to my hosted sites (Brad, AndyOne and Andy II, I’m looking in your direction particularly): Now’s the time to speak up as to whether you’d like to move from your existing 2.0.x installs to 2.1. (There’s another alternative as well – best email me so we can talk it out…).
A Quick Tip For WordPress Theme Authors
nobrainer nailed me a couple of days ago for not having auto-discoverable feeds on my site. The process for adding them to your WordPress is a rather simple one.
Add the following code to your document’s <head> section (usually header.php in WP themes):
This will alert RSS/Atom-aware browsers of the presence of your RSS, RSS2 and Atom (0.3) feeds. The last portion of the code will alert pingback-aware blogging apps of the pingback URL on each of your pages/posts so that authors linking to your content will automatically be able to generate pingbacks.
Hope this helps a few others out of the sandtrap I found myself in.
Happy New Year, Or: I Totally Meant To Write More On Vacation But Life Interfered
Happy 2007, everyone. I hope your New Year’s celebrations went well.
I got some great Christmas gifts this year, the latest of which is a most excellent head cold that I have very kindly shared with Will. So as for me, I’m off to bed. I’ll post more later in the week.
Finally, It’s Finished
The audit is closed out, my stint as senior admin on-site and the last “all hands” meeting of the year are all in the past now which means that I may finally be able to take some serious time out to work on shipping a beta version of my theme, reorganizing the rest of my site (gallery, test blogs, etc.) and purging the linkrolls on my site.
It’s so nice to be done.
How About Helping A Fellow Web Geek Out, Huh?
Why didn’t anyone tell me that my site/theme looks like absolute garbage in IE? I mean, I haven’t done extensive testing, but dang, man!, it’s awful.
Crap.