Horses are terrible people

Recently I submitted a patch to PostgreSQL that will allow pg_dump and pg_dumpall to ignore tablespace data. This is useful if you use tablespaces on one machine and want to restore to another with a different tablespace setup. Since this patch won't likely make it into PostgreSQL until 8.4, I thought I would make it available here for those that could use it.

This should commit cleanly to 8.2.4, and I'll try to keep the patch up to date through 8.3. As of right now, I believe I am the only one who has tested it, so keep that in mind. That being said, I'd use it in production. If you find it useful, please let me know, and likewise if you find any issues with it.

pg_dump-8.2.4-no-tablespace-option.patch.txt

I finally bit the S3 apple at work today. I've been using S3 for a bit with Bandwagon for backing up my iTunes files, but I hadn't seriously considered how to best use it at myYearbook.com until I had a call today with one of Amazon's Business Development folks. It was during the call that instead of using it as a CDN as I had been thinking, and buying the optical backup system I had been contemplating, that it was a perfect disaster-recovery backup mechanism.

Since I could sync up with our S3 buckets on a fairly regular basis and they can be served publicly off of S3 in a pinch, I could focus on putting systems in place to keep S3 in sync instead of installing, managing and using an optical backup system. In addition, I didn't have the up-front purchasing cost for the system that we would have to put in place to be able to back up the many terabytes of data we have. Where media, power and rack space are a commodities that I'd pay for on an ongoing basis, the cost per megabyte when all is said and done is fairly similar and I have the option of restoring to any location with an internet connection instead of having to purchase additional hardware for out of data-center restorations.

Installation of s3sync.rb was very easy, and while the documentation is terse, it took me all of about an hour to compile and install ruby and have the app working. A few shell scripts later, some crontab additions and we have a regular, off-site backup taking place. Restoration is equally as easy, as s3sync.rb works similarly to rsync. All things considered, off-site backup has never been easier.

We're polishing up our soon to be released stats package, Stapler. My friend Carl was cool enough to throw together this neat logo for it:

In trying to diagnose why my systems feeling sluggish today I ran across this:

which begs the question of why these minor apps, which I rarely use, are using so much memory. Then I found iTunes was eating a lot of virtual memory so I restarted it. This is a fresly started iTunes:

What the heck?

I had a nice chef's salad today for lunch. I poured my dressing on it, put the cup down, ate the salad. When cleaning up, I looked in the cup and this is what I found:

I did not alter or craft the face in any way.

Update: I have put it in the freezer and will be accepting bids on what I am now calling the Honey Mustard Buddha.

I ditched the new keyboard in favor of the old one.

Back to ->

Woke up yesterday morning, went to church then to lunch in New Hope at Triumph. After Triumph, we drove up to New York City. Let me just say I love driving in New York City. After a driving tour that put is through two tunnels, across two bridges and through most parts of Manhattan, we had dinner in the east village. We topped off the night with another deer encounter (which I enjoy) on the drive home. PA: 1, CA 0.

In working to optimize Framewerk to run on a site as large as myYearbook.com and our related sites, we've found several bottlenecks which we're now working to resolve. Some of the bottlenecks can be attributed to our hardware; for example, on our very cool Isilon NAS setup, there is a NFS penalty for file stat operations, and the Framewerk engine does its fair share of file stats.

As part of the cleanup we’re doing the following:

• Adding a base level fFile class which will allow for transparent engine level caching using Shared Memory functions (shmop).
• Unifying as much of the XML subdirectory into one file. fRegistry has been completely rewritten to allow for nesting and arrays of nodes to support moving configuration.xml into registry.xml
• Caching maps of file locations that are used both at the base level class location and at the fTheme XSL, CSS and JavaScript auto-location detection routines.

In part of gearing all this up, and wanting to get Framewerk to a releasable state, the development team decided that we would pare the distribution down to a core framework without applications and to remove any database dependence for the core framework. The applications are not going away, they are just being moved to a satellite project level. As part of the base installer, the user will be prompted for their requirements, such as should database support be installed, what kind of user backend should be installed, if any, etc.

In addition, one of the ideas being tossed about is to add a function hook mechanism to fObject and fSingletonObject classes.

As such, the trunk of svn is once again unstable, but should become stable enough for a beta real soon. Keep an eye out for updates!

The new iMac arrived yesterday, it's quite a nice machine. I have the previous generation iMac at my office with similar specs and the most noticeable difference is the glossy screen. Colors seem richer and the screen just pops. I've only scraped the surface of the new iLife and iWork suite but it seems to be a good improvement. My only long term concern is the keyboard. While it looks cool, the feel is quite different and I don't know if I'm going to stick with it. The other odd thing about it is the location of the Function key. Unlike the MBP, the function key is to the right of the delete key, which makes for an odd reach when wanting to use the secondary functions in the function keys.

I used the new iPhoto web gallery feature to publish the unpacking photos. You can view them here.

Just more evidence of climate change being cyclical. Turns out 1934 is apparently the hottest year on record.

From the article:

1934 is now the hottest, and 3 others from the 1930's are in the top 10. Furthermore, only 3 (not 9) took place since 1995 (1998, 1999, and 2006). The years 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 are now below the year 1900 and no longer even in the top 20.

According to Fedex, it's made it from China to Alaska. I should get it on Tuesday.

I'm very happy tonight. I've just read the news that SCO lost their case against Novell. At Just Sports, I was the target of one of SCO's extortion attempts, so this is a particularly enjoyable event. It turns out the letter I wrote to SCO when they attempted to extort software licensing out of us was added as evidence and is part of the sealed court record.

SCO's loss is awesome news, much thanks to Novell, IBM, Redhat for fighting this and to Groklaw for documenting the whole affair.

“publish with impunity” is very catchy, but doesn’t capture the true nature of mephisto. I suggest as an alternative; something along the lines of “blog engine of the 1337” because surely you can't install this software without a base level of technical prowess. Once more the lack of an installer or sufficient documentation makes it truly a tool for those in the know. I couldn’t imagine recommending this, in its current state to anyone.

The back-end UI is streamlined and usable, yet I've not broken into the ability to host multiple sites... It definitely screams “Web 2.0” as any self-respecting ruby application should, but the 36 point fonts for things like titles are truly obnoxious. I’m also left wondering if the lack of a WYSIWYG editor was a configuration choice I missed.

I need to see about the multiple-site capability and then import my old articles. Maybe I’ll make something of this yet.

I'm experimenting with Mephisto, a Ruby-On-Rails blogging system for a corporate blog. Updates to follow.