February 2004 Archives

This site and a few perl.org services were down for ~12 minutes while I added some memory to one of our servers. (6 minutes to install memory and 6 to figure out that I had plugged the internal and the external network interface in backwards). The recent onslaught of email viruses reminded us that some of the boxes could use a bit more memory, so I ordered some and Vani and I just went to install it.

Who would have thought that a gigabyte of (ancient) PC133 ECC memory costs ~$300? Wow. Things like that are supposed to be getting cheaper!

In any case, the box is now saying

[ask@x1 ~]$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       2064828     526044    1538784          0      37524      69084
-/+ buffers/cache:     419436    1645392
Swap:      2040212          0    2040212

which should last us for a while ... This datacenter is oddly not super cold. I'm not sure if it's just because I've remembered to dress warmly, if it's always been reasonably temperated and I just only noticed recently or if they have been getting cheap on the A/C. Whatever it is, I don't mind at all.

David Hyatt gives us Safari 1.2 release notes. The most useful tips:

In order to tab to popup menus, you need to go to your system preferences, select the Keyboard and Mouse panel, and then select the Keyboard tab. At the bottom of the tab is a checkbox next to the words "Turn on full keyboard access." Check that box to enable full keyboard access, and you'll find that you'll now be able to tab to popups all over the operating system (including Safari).

Another complaint I've seen on forums was that you couldn't type letters to have the popup jump directly to a selected item (e.g., typing "U" to jump to "United States"). Again, we obey the OS behavior, which does allow this, but only after you hit the spacebar when the control has the keyboard focus. Multi-letter typing is supported to complete to a specific item. Try it. You'll like it. :)

On a related note Firefox looks and feels very spiffy, at least on OS X. Too bad I've gotten too addicted to "bookmark syncing" between my desktop and the powerbook to switch browsers (I even subscribed to .Mac just for iSync between the computers, it's the only feature I use!)

It was brought to our attention that the Planet Perl RSS feeds doesn't validate.

Both feeds are not encoding my name from the configuration file and the RSS 2.0 feed is using an invalid date format apparently.

This is where you, dear reader, comes in. I know you are bouncing in your chair from excitement for fixing the python code already.

The PlanetPlanet site is empty, so I'm not quite sure where to send patches, but when they are made (nudge nudge, dear reader) we can try sending them to Thom and then he can send them to the Planet Debian maintainer and hopefully they'll make it to the other users...

I have an account at Imperial Capital Bank. I have it mostly because their interest rate on their checking account is quite good (1.92%, for now ...). Actually, that's the only reason I have an account there.

Anyway, I have a check for some GBP laying around, so I called them to find out what they'd charge and which exchange rate they'd use and so on.

Ask: "Have British Pound check. Need deposit."
CSR: "Uh. Hold on."
[long wait]
CSR: (slightly demeaning voice) "Well, first of all it's not British Pounds anymore, now it's Euro Dollars"
Ask: "Ehh. No, it's not."
CSR: "What do you mean. It's Euro Dollars now."
Ask: "No, some of EU countries are still using their original currency."
CSR: "We use a corresponding bank so we'll have to send the check there and it'll take up to 30 days."
Ask: "That's fine."
CSR: "Why is it not Euro Dollars anyway?"
Ask: "?!? Because it's British Pounds?"
CSR: (not knowing who their bank for british pounds is, I think) "Well, you'll have to wire it in."
Ask: "How about I just put my money in another bank?"

Hopefully they'll have more clue in the Big Bank where I have my business account...

Of course the longer I wait the more USD my money is worth ...

Like all the other cool kids I've made a weblog for short notes and links. Go and subscribe already.

It was much more work to setup the templates and such than I wanted it to be, even with lots of symlinks and "template modules". I really should get the templating of my weblog powered by Combust, that'd be fun.

Robert and I made Planet Perl. Fresh in limited beta or something.

I'm sure the python community uses Perl here and there, so in a meager attempt to restore balance to the universe we made it powered by Python. (Okay, maybe it was just because I got the program used over at Planet Apache from Thom May; thanks Thom!)

In any case, enjoy ...

On the way back from Telluride, CO Vani and I somehow got shuffled on a ~6 hour detour through "Grand Junction, CO". Not very excited about our 5 hour trip home turning into taking the whole day we were relatively grumpy. What happens when we get to Grand Junction Airport? We find an open wireless network from one of the car rental places and suddenly we are all sedated and the 2-3 hours we have to wait here doesn't seem so bad ... Vani got a powerbook for her birthday or some such from her mother, so we are geeking with two 12" powerbooks now. I think people roll their eyes when they see us. At least that's what they have done the whole week.

Vani is slightly miffed about missing something called the Superbowl. I already saw the Apple/iTunes/Pepsi ad so I don't understand what the big deal is.