Red Drag Diva

Moving update.

Fri, 17 May 2013 20:28:51 GMT

Still not really Internetted, but we have severe delays obtaining our phone line (the account in the previous tenant's name is apparently still active, so Zen can't just grab it; agent is on the case) so arkady has paid a swingeing sum for a month's BT wifi. Which injects fucking ads in your HTTP stream. (Here's to HTTPS Everywhere.) I'll see if this works for working from home, which would make half-term somewhat less completely insane.

Moving stuff to the new house is a quart in a pint pot problem. We still have a Mac G4 with 22" Apple Cinema Display (ADC, so useless without this or similar Mac) to give away, or it goes to THE DUMP! Three Ikea GORM wooden shelves at old house for first taker. The older teen has two boxes and two bags of stuff to move, still waiting on the address it's to go to. I suspect a lot of stuff we did move is actually going to get chucked.

Freda likes the new house even if it's a lot smaller. It's also stupendously well-located for all sorts of things Freda does (school, Rainbows, church, friends). She also has a plasma lamp for a bedside lamp and nightlight.

My back hates me so much. Lots of codeine and a bottle of wine helps. Best thing for cleaning is some stuff my (old) landlord actually recommended, from the 99p shop: a mould removing bleach that contains caustic soda. Definitely the most noxious household spray I've ever met.

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The fun is in full progress.

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:14:26 GMT

Can anyone get to E17 over the next few days (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) and help us with cleaning our old house? LOVE YOU LONG TIME.

We got the keys OK. Survived the day of box lugging with only a slightly screaming in agony back and one waffer-thin car crash. Here's to hire companies who rush to take care of all the details for you; I should only have to pay the £250 excess. Happy customer of Enterprise here, highly recommending them. (Pro tip: Always book online — if they don't have the size you booked in stock, you get a free upgrade.)

Internet will be patchy indeed. arkady and I have phones. Monday I'm back in the office. The phone line account for the previous tenant is apparently still active, so Zen can't just grab it; waiting for the real estate to ask the landlord to ask BT about that, tralala.

Also can't work out how to switch on the hot water. There's an immersion heater (= horribly expensive storage heater powered by electricity rather than gas), but there's also a gas boiler which has no power.

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Moving house is made of cock and bureaucracy.

Sun, 12 May 2013 18:27:15 GMT

And the XFree86 Memorial Award for Community Management goes to ... GNOME, attempting to shake off those last straggling users, who are just a pack of trolls after all.

Moving house is made of cock and bureaucracy. Without the cock. One week till we have to be out of here and gone, and I hope to finally collect the damn keys tomorrow, at which point I hire a van and move as much as possible, getting the professionals in to handle the piano and whatever else is left. At which point we polish this place to perfection.

Apart from the delays, arkady has largely been ill the last couple of weeks, with a cold and a secondary infection. Recovering a bit now.

The older teen's room is finally being cleansed. Freda has adopted her sister's old netbook with a 19" monitor hooked to it and is delighting in having something faster to play her Flash games on than the ancient Mac G4, which is being adopted by hooverpig. The lounge is a sea of boxes.

I am exhausted. I want a magical teleport to this time next week when everything will be JUST FINE AND ALL DONE.

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Doctorin' the house.

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:50:23 GMT

We're moving house again! The ongoing problems with this house (e.g. mould in strange places) turn out to require serious building work, which is basically incompatible with using it as a house. Our delight at this is unalloyed. Anyone in London got a car we could borrow in early-mid May? Also, we'll be seeking volunteers to help with cleaning this place. Which is really very easy to clean. Barring the hideous mould.

One plus point is that, the older teen finally being elsewhere, we can move somewhere smaller. There's a lot of two-bedroom houses and ground floor flats in E17 for £1000 or under. The utility bills should be smaller, too (this place is heat-inefficient to Australian standards).

Life otherwise continues quite nicely. arkady remains gainfully employed, and has successfully convinced her ~~victims~~ coworkers that the other sysadmin is the bad cop and she's the good cop.

I am continuing to bang my head against the RationalWiki blog. Writing a post every day is exhausting — even just polishing up a wiki article as a blog post requires a complete reference check and quite a bit of rewriting — but hopefully it's helping in the eternal battle against public stupidity. (Typical ~200 hits/day, the occasional popular post might be 5000-8000.) The things I'll do for charity. I need to fix the theme again (the header), and move it to the RationalWiki Foundation server (it's currently camped out on someone else's VM they want to get rid of). If you like it, tell your friends! And if you don't, tell them anyway. You can also sign up to get it by email, which saves remembering to go to the site.

Running the Twitter has a much better fun:work ratio. Edzard Ernst even retweets it on occasion.

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A further message from simplyled.co.uk, who really are too stupid to give your money.

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:55:06 GMT

I emailed all involved about the previous post. So what do I get today?

( Hi, we're too stupid to live. )

( Yes. Yes, you are. )

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simplyled.co.uk, and Burton and Sons in general, don't want your business.

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 13:19:30 GMT

Forgot to post these before. Enjoy.

( TAKE DOWN THE LINK TO OUR SITE IMMEDIATELY. )

( You're an idiot. )

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Step on the floor.

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 12:09:18 GMT

NewsTechnica: Spring clean: Google Search now part of Google Plus.

On holiday and reveling in it. Sitting on the couch with music playing on the Mac. I suppose I should be hacking on the blog theme.

arkady's new job is actually halfway between PFY and Jen from The IT Crowd (with less shoes and more ability to work a computer) and includes the word "manager" in the title. She is rather enjoying it. Also racking up appalling quantities of CV keywords.

The video card in the gaming laptop died, which is something the model seems prone to. So she got an HP DV7-3112SA from eBay, which was about £600 new and she got it for £175 since it was badly cracked from being dropped. But working and with a 45-day warranty. And it's rather shiny. If we can fix (baking apparently works) or replace the video card, it would also make a very nice replacement for Freda's ancient Mac G4.

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Radio junk.

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 10:59:11 GMT

Rocknerd: Monty explains how digitising signals actually works.

arkady has a job! Part-time PFY to hawkeviper, who seems to have told her boss to employ her before actually telling Arkady herself. This of course saves a certain amount of fuss. Starting Monday. I am enormously proud.

Still getting a post up every day on the RationalWiki blog; mostly rewrites of RationalWiki articles. The latest homeopathy one is the most popular thing ever posted there, even if making fun of homeopaths is like shooting 10¹⁰⁰ fish in a molecule of barrel. There's lots of great stuff there if you read back ... I need to get around to making a new front page for the Twenty Twelve theme, 'cos every magazine theme I've looked at seems to suck or be broken.

So yeah, it's still eating my life. At least I feel like I'm getting something useful for the world done. Still unwritten: an article on cancer quackery — not just that it's particularly evil, not just why it's evil, but how the false hope works.

"Hallelujah 2000" is the conclusive argument in favour of record bonfires in Chicago stadiums. I lasted until the banjo. Fortunately disco has its high points too; still on large doses of Yellow Magic Orchestra, whose name you don't hear so much these days, but you really should. (Lots on YouTube if you're curious.)

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Hacking WordPress themes for frustration and annoyance.

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 00:45:59 GMT

http://test.factsite.co.uk/ is a test version of the RationalWiki blog, for me to mess around with less boring layouts.

The current theme is approximately what I meant by "magazine-style layout" (at least viewed in a desktop browser): a four-column layout, three of post excerpts and one of sidebar.

This theme is EvoLve, which is almost there but not quite. The front page is nearly right, the single-post pages are laid out right but have not quite right CSS. It's a miserable failure on phones ‐ full-width header, no sidebar, huge space between items (on Android, BlackBerry OS5 browser and Opera Mini). "Responsive" my arse. Oh well.

Suggestions for other themes that are magazine-ish are ''most'' welcomed. (Assume we have a budget of $0 for commercially supported themes.) I'm after that 3+1 columns thing. Must not look like poop on a phone.

Apart from that, the blog is going great guns. The audiophile post got very lightly Reddited — 1150 hits in a day. And I don't even have to administer the server! Yet.

I am now 46! I got a very nice cake. Freda wanted slices from the side with the number 6 on it, because she will be six next birthday. She has been home all week on half-term and has been a right handful; we very much look forward to Monday, when she's back at school, and not at the replacement school on the other side of the borough but at the old main site (while the new main site gets the asbestos stripped out).

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Ode to joy.

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 14:32:22 GMT

You know how stupid baraminology is? QuantumMAN could actually be stupider.
I concur wholeheartedly with this Register piece on netbooks, my favourite computer form factor ever.

I spent most of the week thinking about RationalWiki's social media strategy, and I am slightly horrified to use that phrase as if it means something. The blog is ticking along at about 150 hits/day, which is not terrible for something completely new. There's some really good posts on the blog, and of course they disappear in time almost immediately; if you like a post, please spread the link around lots. There's a lotta stupid out there in the world to clean up. I also have the keys to the @rationalwiki Twitter.

If you ever need to grep -r a whole codebase (or other huge directory tree of text), just use ag instead. It's really nice and ridiculously faster. Not in the distros yet, but there are developer-endorsed debs and RPMs.

Started using RT at work. It really is just completely a bucket of cocks. Still a better love story than Remedy, though.

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RationalBlogs is go!

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 22:32:49 GMT

Hey, why not add another blog to the pile. I've started an unofficial RationalWiki blog with aspirations to official blessing, provided it doesn't suck: What is going on at RationalWiki? The theme is skeptical interest (using RationalWiki as a source) and RationalWiki-related inside baseball.

CONTRIBUTORS WELCOME. Help raise the sanity waterline a little. Also, tell all your friends. Suggestions for topics also welcomed.

RationalBlogs is an idea from RW contributor (and RationalWiki Foundation board member) Nutty Roux. So far this is the first one, but it aspires to more. So far it's being paid for out of Nutty's pocket.

I'm trying to get a post a day on there to get it going, and it feels like NaNoWriMo in my pants.

To fix the shitty, shitty hyphenation in the WordPress Twenty Twelve theme, go Appearance->Edit CSS and add the code fragment from here.

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Watching the hydroplanes.

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 20:59:20 GMT

New Wikipedia by me: Kalima (band), Category:Factory Benelux artists.
RationalWiki: Isagenix.
My Wikimedia blog: ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED.

arkady asks the world: "How do you market your skills and sell yourself as an artist? How do you turn talent into earnings? I seriously need to learn." Because basically, we need the fucking money. She has a Facebook page (please like it and each post on it), Twitter, DeviantArt, CafePress. Commissions eagerly accepted!

Spent half the week sick in bed, thus missing Perth friends Wendy Smith and Gareth Jones visiting. Bah!

We now have two 30W 6400K daylight-spectrum bulbs in the lounge. That's 150W equivalent. Bloody hell, they're bright. arkady is finding herself perking up a lot — turns out bright light is good for wakefulness, particularly in this weather at this time of year. Though it's utterly unforgiving for any trace of grime in the room.

I don't need to detail Freda's reaction to the SNOW!!! Or mine. Annoyingly powdery, though; impossible to make anything out of. She enjoyed throwing snowballs at me, of course.

If they'd had the Internet in Biblical times, "don't read the comments" would have been in Leviticus right after the shellfish.

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From the hip.

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 14:00:32 GMT

US readers: As well as the Carmen Ortiz petition, don't forget the Steve Heymann one.
Belle de Jour very patiently explains what trolling on or off Twitter is and is not.
"A man in charge of something important just made a SEX PISS JOKE at the Panasonic Press Conference and that’s all fine."
My Wikimedia blog: Uncyclopedia has left Wikia.
Rocknerd: An evil mob princess with really good hair; Factory Benelux is alive and well.

arkady miscarried. The embryo didn't develop past a few weeks, so what miscarried was literally an egg yolk with pretentions. We're mostly disappointed, A is recovering from the dilation and curettage after the miscarriage and we plan to try again in a couple of cycles.

Seeking Wikipedia-quality citations regarding the loathsome scam known as Train2Game. It's the one where they promise kids meaningful training in a job they'd love, via hard-selling very dodgy loans at a total price of about twice the cost of, e.g., an Open University degree.

Note for future: new microwave arrived yesterday.

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And so that was Saturnalia.

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 12:50:58 GMT

"... a generation of men and women who literally don't understand what sexual consent looks like."
NewsTechnica: Archbishop: "Christmas is all about the bumsex". THREE IN A YEAR.
Rocknerd: Party Fears #18¾ and #19 published at last; Record your voice! Amazing novelty!; Science proves it: rock stardom is bad for your health; A Lord Horror timeline.

arkady's body is not so much a temple as a flat conversion. Due July. || Freda is, of course, delighted at the prospect of getting to be the big sister.

I think we survived Christmas. Freda got a bike. I did the same trick to her that my parents did to me: bike in lounge so I could see her face. Success: 1, 2. I got a couple of books. Arkady made a BLOODY AMAZING Christmas mead that smells and tastes just like a Christmas pudding, except about 20% ABV. Christmas treat: lightly microwaved Tesco Value Stilton. OH MY GOD THIS IS WONDERFUL. The destruction of all life on Earth is a small price.

What I did on my holidays: cleaned up OpenOffice on Wikipedia. I am interested in your thoughts as readers.

RationalWiki got Redditdotted and I didn't even notice. So our work on the servers paid off, then.

Has First Monday ever published a useful and important paper? I see only bad papers on good subjects: trolling for academic hits. (Though they've had the good taste to take down "A Critique of Vulgar Raymondism" at long last.)

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Strike it up.

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:39:48 GMT

Final push: If you join now, you could be the one who enables the Open Rights Group to run legal interventions.
NewsTechnica: Murdered children necessary to protect your freedom. Two in a year? HOW CAN I MAINTAIN THIS FRENETIC PACE.

Well, poop. My BlackBerry is apparently dead of liquid damage, which is actually depressingly likely. So I can pay over a hundred quid for a repair, or note that that's about the going rate new for a 9300. My old dumbphone can actually do GMail and Twitter barely usably, but I'm really missing the MP3 player and ebook reader. Anyone have an old Android or Blackberry they could spare for a few months?

The tree is up and the lounge is festooned in tinsel. The small child is delighted. For the first time in four years, I am taking the holiday week off. Also, it is too cold.

I now have two people trying to draft me to the RationalWiki Foundation board. I already run the server. How do I find a suitable human shield for this honour?

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Save it for later.

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 18:09:50 GMT

That disconcerting sensation of wanting the Daily Mail to win.
RationalWiki: Examiner.com, Continuum fallacy.
Rocknerd: Party Fears #17 scanned and online (also done most of what would have been #19); Simple Minds, Devo, The Church: Palais, November 30.

You have a problem, you think "I know, I'll use PHP!" Now Ukrainian h@xx0rs pwn your problem. I've been clearing out stuff at work, putting the PHP onto one server and getting PHP off any URL it doesn't belong on. As a drug, PHP is not like heroin, more like petrol huffing. As a weapon, it's a dirty bomb: not much visible damage, but a nasty cleanup job. I picture post-apocalyptic three-headed mutants chewing on roast mutant dog around a PCB fire, communicating entirely in PHP. I so wish people would stop building useful things on a foundation of retarded toxic waste.

We have also looked at 'l33t3r alternatives to Apache. The trouble with getting rid of Apache is that it ends up like replacing a Swiss army knife with a kitchen drawer full of 20 individual replacement gadgets. Which jams shut a lot.

It's the same fallacy as the NoSQL movement: you are not Google, you do not have Google's problems of scale and you'll end up building the equivalent of a relational database on top, except even worse than MySQL.

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Above the law.

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 23:30:12 GMT

The Ubuntu 12.10 dashboard search experience: "I wanted to update/install my nvidia drivers, so I opened the dash and typed 'drivers'. IT DISPLAYED GOLF CLUBS on sale at Amazon!"
Not drinking wine is as bad for your health as being a light smoker.
New ePetition: No women Bishops, no automatic seats in the House of Lords. Nitpickable, but popular and raising the issue. (And why it's hard to write new NewsTechnica.)
My Wikimedia blog: Internet Brands versus Wikitravel admins updates; PR industry: "Our bad actions are Wikipedia’s fault"; PR people in the EU: obey the bright-line rule, or suffer legal consequences.
Rocknerd: Party Fears #1, 2 and 3 scanned and online; Disco 2000; Party Fears #4 and #18 scanned and online. Now just looking for someone, anyone, who has a #17 and can scan it.

My hitherto somewhat-lovely BlackBerry Curve 9300 is doing the battery red X. After a week waiting for a replacement battery, the phone doesn't like the new battery either, so I have to hit a Vodafone store for a repair or replacement. Having previously loathed the idea, and rarely using a phone as a phone anyway (texts from arkady, Wikimedia press calls, annoying recruiter calls), I'm now missing the two things I actually seem to be paying £20/mo for: music player and ebook reader. And checking when buses are coming. I'm using the previous dumbphone (the cheapest Vodafone option a coupla years ago: £10 with a £10 PAYG credit), which actually does GMail usably well. So, I've become accustomed to a networked computer in my pocket. Considering Galaxy Nexus or possibly a comically large Galaxy Note for next time — Galaxy Ace and iPhone are too small for my fat fingers.

At work, the sysadmins were discussing the horrible truth about PHP, and the non-technical manager responsible for our Drupal sites overheard. She looked like she'd been told Santa was Jimmy Savile. So I spent the remainder of the week Gillian McKeithing through our LAMP server. Damn, PHP really does go out of its way to try to catch social diseases. When reviewing a LAMP server, there's little like finding an entire old WordPress in a subdirectory of your current one. I didn't go as far as setting up a user per application, but I did carefully make sure user www-data could only write where it needed to. Considering fcgid, though. (Probably next time we run out of memory.)

So I'm assured that, twenty-six years ago, and completely unaware of it until a short while ago, I vomited on Lux Interior.

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HOWTO: make your Ubuntu server do PHP via FastCGI.

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 01:07:32 GMT

tl;dr If you have WordPress on a server that's short on memory, use fcgid, mpm-worker and WP Super Cache. fcgid is also good for MediaWiki on a cramped server.

The below is currently in place on davidgerard.co.uk/notes, rocknerd.co.uk and newstechnica.com, which live on a 512MB Ubuntu 12.04 VM (Rackspace's cheap loss-leader option; 1GB costs three times as much) running WordPress. It is a first draft. I welcome your experienced advice, suggestions, tweaks and "oh God no that's stupid." This post will be edited as I go.

(Why do you want to do this? When your site runs useful applications like WordPress or MediaWiki, and you have any popularity at all and find yourself running out of memory alarmingly fast and the box choking on swapped Apache processes. So you want to shove PHP off to be a separate problem, and without libphp5 you can use Apache mpm-worker, which is smaller. fcgid is not as fast as the module, but if your limiting factor is memory then it's just the thing.)

What I did:

sudo -s apt-get install libapache2-mod-fcgid php5-cgi
Edit /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini and uncomment:
cgi.fix_pathinfo=1

Here's my /etc/apache2/sites-available/rocknerd.co.uk, changes in red (is there a way to do this for all vhosts?):

<VirtualHost *:80>
	ServerAdmin dgerard@gmail.com
	ServerName rocknerd.co.uk
	ServerAlias www.rocknerd.co.uk
	ServerAlias rocknerd.org.uk
	ServerAlias www.rocknerd.org.uk
	DocumentRoot /home/fun/www/rocknerd.co.uk
	<Directory /home/fun/www/rocknerd.co.uk>
		Options Indexes FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI
		AllowOverride All
                AddHandler fcgid-script .php
                FCGIWrapper /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php .php
		Order allow,deny
		allow from all
	</Directory>
	ErrorLog /home/fun/log/rocknerd.co.uk/apache2/error.log
	LogLevel warn
	CustomLog /home/fun/log/rocknerd.co.uk/apache2/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

I put this in a file called /etc/apache2/conf.d/php-fcgid.conf (these numbers were for a VM with 512MB memory and PHP memory_limit=64M; I have no idea if the numbers in the bottom half are at all sensible):

<IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
  AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi .php
  FcgidConnectTimeout 20
  PHP_Fix_Pathinfo_Enable 1
  # Where to look for the php.ini file?
  DefaultInitEnv PHPRC        "/etc/php5/cgi"
  # Maximum requests a process handles before it is terminated
  MaxRequestsPerProcess       1000
  # Maximum number of PHP processes
  MaxProcessCount             10
  # Number of seconds of idle time before a process is terminated
  IPCCommTimeout              240
  IdleTimeout                 240
  #Or use this if you use the file above
  FCGIWrapper /usr/bin/php-cgi .php

  ServerLimit           500
  StartServers            3
  MinSpareThreads         3
  MaxSpareThreads        10
  ThreadsPerChild        10
  MaxClients            250
  MaxRequestsPerChild  1000
</IfModule>

apache2ctl restart; apache2ctl status and verify the site still loads. All good? Proceed:
apt-get install apache2-mpm-worker; apache2ctl restart; apache2ctl status and verify the site still loads.
Now work out how much memory you want to give PHP in /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini and the MaxClients for Apache itself (to serve static content). Read through the mod_fcgid documentation to configure things sanely for your box.

Experienced advice welcomed. The above is currently in place; in my initial attempts to utterly hammer it, the memory fills and the box goes 250MB into swap, but it appears to actually be swapping swappable stuff, the pages get served (eventually ... a bit of a queue), the load average doesn't go nuts and stuff doesn't fall over. In later attempts to hammer it (wget in a loop), it didn't fall over but did take minutes to serve pages on uncached blogs; I'll need to do something about that.

Next victim: rationalwiki.org, which thankfully has 4GB to play with but is actually a bit popular. Victim after that: the LAMP box at work.

Update: I have just put WP Super Cache in front of all the blogs. It caches using mod_rewrite trickery such that Apache does all the serving for cached pages and requests don't touch PHP. So hammering it for 1000 of the same thing, it served them in a few seconds. I also tried hammering the site with 1000 different nonexistent URLs and it was slow but kept serving (and returned blank pages for most of the 404s). I am now confident that if I write something popular, then (a) the server will stay up (b) people will still be able to read it. If I write something unpopular then (c) it should stand up to a mild one-person DOS.

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Behind the mask.

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 21:49:28 GMT

In the UK, you can actually bill cold-callers £10/min for calling you, and win before small claims court.
The Caturday video to beat them all: Russian cat circus.
skud: No, I still don't want to work for Google.
RationalWiki: Pigeon chess.
NewsTechnica: Chuck Norris facts, updated. Yeah, wrote one this year.
Rocknerd: Party Fears #6 scanned and online; So what was Maxicut?

From Jeeves on RationalWiki: "The Answers Research Journal has really outdone themselves this time. In their determination to figure out how many mammalian 'kinds' there were on the ark, the crack geneticists on staff at AiG turned to the most up to date scientific methodology, using google images and figuring out which animals look kind of similar. The best part? Check out fig. 18. That's a fucking stuffed toy."

Christmas is coming! And oh fuck we're broke. SHINY MODERN LUMPS OF COAL FOR ALL!

arkady has successfully brought the broken cello back to life! And promptly broke the top A string ...

The most exciting thing in my life of late has been moving my assorted sites to new hosting, as we finally abandon the shitty un-upgradeable old box we've been camped out on the past several years. Cheers to hawkeviper and elpenguin. This does mean I will no longer have the root prompt on lemonparty.org. O NOEZ.

Rackspace don't offer an email smarthost, and recommend you smarthost with Sendgrid. Don't bother — the latter uses bureaucracy as protection against possible spammers showing up and will keep you waiting for days. Rackspace just bought Mailgun (and will do a coupon code if you ask) or you can just check your IP isn't in the blackhole lists and see if a test email to GMail works, as I did, and chance it.

(I did manage to break James' previous VM. How to bugger Debian: upgrade udev on a slicehost with unupgradeable kernel. FUCK FUCK FUCK SHIT PISS COCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK. Instead of going through advanced geekly contortions to get it back, we just went "fuckit", declared it "storage" to get the old files off it and pushed a button to create a shiny new Ubuntu 12.04 VM. It's always nice when "KILL IT WITH FIRE" is actually an option.)

rationalwiki.org is ticking along pretty stably now. Ickiest part of administering MediaWiki: fixing broken math display. (Did it, but.) Until the box gets hammered by something and promptly collapses in a heap, like happened this morning. Yeah, best be getting on with making it FastCGI.

I will note that a sysadmin who sets server timezone to anything other than UTC is in a state of sin and must be redeemed by cleansing flame.

Screenshots my dad's way: take a photo of the Skype video screen with his DSLR. With flash.

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How's the Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 with recent Linux/X.Org?

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 15:49:40 GMT

arkady's Dell 1012 netbook (Atom N450 CPU, NM10 chipset) has been a nightmare since Ubuntu 10.10 support ended.

Ubuntu 12.04 has a kernel-oopsing Bluetooth bug introduced by Canonical, and 12.10 has a terrible tendency to run fine for a while then go nuts, have all its CPU taken by ... something ... then overheat and shut down.

So I thought, "let's get back to base: Debian." I put Wheezy on with LXDE. Which is nothing like as awful as I've been told, even if bits of the interface tell you to look up man 3 strftime (seriously, that's what LXDE tells you to do if you want your clock to show seconds). Debian remains a piquant blend of 2012 and 1993. Trouble is, it started doing the "go nuts, CPU locked up, die" thing as well.

(By default, Debian Wheezy boots into GNOME 3, which is so superlatively intuitive I literally couldn't figure out how to start an application. The only thing I could do was shut it down. With great pleasure.)

So I took it back to Ubuntu 10.04, which is supported until 2015, and everything is usable now, thanks (even if bits are the Museum of Old Software). Although Arkady is actually using the monster truck gaming laptop for daily work. But the netbook makes a lovely portable and non-fragile video player for Freda.

(Man, Ubuntu GNOME 2 is just so damn easy to use. I really hope MATE can attract a critical mass of developers.)

My question is: do you have a Dell 1012 running a recent Linux of any distro, and have you seen anything like the above pathological behaviour?

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Rydeen.

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:27:21 GMT

What I want for Christmas. (Because I can't justify sixty quid myself on headphones.) Remember that I am difficult to buy for, so this is a GREAT BIG HINT.

arkady has a new old laptop, eithin's old Dell XPS M170 gaming luggable. 17" 1920×1200 screen, four kilos, BLUE GLOWING BLINGY BITS. The giant screen is the fatal temptation to an artist.

Sysadminning rationalwiki.org continues to entertain. The solution to the melting server was simply to put a Squid in front: a cheap(er) 512MB Linode. Or, since Trent felt like it (and was procrastinating from thesis work), two Squids and a load-balancer. Minor hiccups fixing our config, but it's working really well now. Next things to spin out, when popularity next deals its mortal blow: Lucene and MySQL. We lost page-hit counters, but the code for stats.grok.se is publicly available.

The week before last was looking after an Arkady and Freda with norovirus (and watching far too much Pokemon anime with Freda), so last week was my turn.

The Science Museum has a pile of Flash games. Freda is greatly enjoying Launchball and is doing surprisingly well at it.

Hide and seek with Freda is surreal. "CATTY! BOOBOO! QUESTION! MARK! I AM THE LOUDEST SLEEPER! YOU CAN'T FIND ME!"

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Supernature.

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 21:37:41 GMT

Rocknerd: No, film is not in unique need of blockbusterism. (I'm quite proud of this one and would appreciate you spreading it as widely as possible.)

It's been a dull week, as arkady and Freda have been queasy and puking respectively. I've been attempting to work from home while a bored small child crawls all over me. Pokemon anime seems to keep her amused, she was already a fan of Dinosaur King.

I now have root on rationalwiki.org and seem to be poking it in the evenings after doing the same thing at work all day. The difference is that work have money to spend on adequate resources. Oh God, this thing is like an overstressed steam engine belching smoke and making ominous noises. Just calibrating and possibly reconfiguring memcached; then Apache and php.ini need tuning. The essential problem is we need to spend $400-500 a month, about twice what we do now, but hopefully we should be able to improve performance a bit in the meantime.

After a week on Windows 7, this morning I rebooted back into Xubuntu and doubt I shall be leaving again willingly.

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Sugarless girl.

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 19:40:46 GMT

The Campaign for Real Homeopathy. Really.
RationalWiki: Sophisticated theology.
Rocknerd: We must preserve the record industry, for the sake of artists.

rosefox and sinboy came to visit yesterday. Rose was utterly delighted by Freda.

The flytraps feed. The one on the left shows the remains of a fly it just digested, the one on the right has just captured a moth. Flytraps are cheap (Homebase sell them on the puppy farm model for a couple of quid), but ours are that healthy because they have a 50W halogen two feet away 14 hours a day. Give them rainwater, distilled water or (in a pinch) boiled water.

Me in my Wikipedia suit with no hair. Wikipedia PR is the only time I wear it these days.

My new law: Every application expands until it contains a sketchy rewrite of apt-get. Not just languages — I was originally thinking of WordPress, and now MediaWiki wants to get in on the act. If you must hand-roll a dependency manager, at least make it conceptually compatible with Debian. Please.

Project Blue Beam is now a RationalWiki featured article! I appear to have volunteered to be a sysadmin for RationalWiki. Which is now popular enough to be getting expensive. But there's probably stuff we can do in the short term.

Chakk were an insufferably tedious '80s industrial funk band. But they still warranted a Wikipedia article, so I wrote one.

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XFCE 4.10: not too big, not too small, Just Right.

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 15:43:09 GMT

The work laptop is now on Xubuntu 12.10 beta, which includes XFCE 4.10. This works just like 4.8 but with a few annoyances fixed (e.g., there's a menu editor, it comes with the GVFS backends; though I still have to faff to make caps lock a control key). And that's how it should be.

The question with minimal desktops is the fine line between as simple as possible and just a bit too simple. How much basic stuff do you have to add back? 4.8 took it slightly far, 4.10 is almost Just Right. XFCE is so far a case study in Not Fucking It Up; I hope they never go to version 5, and just update 4 forever.

What I heartily recommend about Xubuntu: My machine is instantly way more responsive than under GNOME or KDE. This is the fucking future, our computers have four cores of streamlined and optimised CPU power with not a lot to do, they should fucking run like it.

Of course, you can go too far. Oliver Keyes just tried Lubuntu:

"I have been using it for 5 seconds. The interaction design was clearly done by a fucking postdoc in heuristic estimation or getting CoffeeScript to work underwater or some similarly highly-interesting-shit-that-is-ultimately-irrelevant-to-MAKING-SOMETHING-USEFUL. The icons are about as intuitive as one of those zelda box-moving games, the taskbar is so slim as to be virtually invisible, and no amount of whizzy speed makes up for the fact that they clearly took all ubuntu elements that demonstrate Canonical's Windows poseur status and KILLED ANYTHING THAT WASN'T DESIGNED WITH THAT IN MIND. TL;DR if you offered me a choice between using this and having my balls deep-fried and served to the queen as an entree my only objection would be to using low-grade oil in the fryer."

I have in fact run an all-macho desktop of just Sawfish and xterms, middle-click to start anything. After a while I got sick of doing everything by hand and just installed KDE 3, which didn't suck and was just lovely (if still a bit fat), and I don't know what fucked-up rush of blood to the head was responsible for KDE 4 but it was an unmitigated disaster and conclusive evidence that computer scientists need to be kept on a short fucking leash around shit people actually use, particularly if they EVER use the words "semantic" or "ontological" in ANY circumstances. Different-but-the-same shit happened to GNOME 3, only worse.

When people combine the words "desktop" and "innovation", I reach for my revolver.

(For gratuitous horror: I'm actually posting this from Windows 7. Well, I did say to IT that I'd beta-test it. Firefox is noticeably faster on the same hardware; wonder if it's still faster in Wine.)

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