Archive for August, 2007

This week’s Friday 5 is all about expenses:

1. What’s something you suspect you regularly overpay for?
   Internet service.
2. What’s something you suspect you regularly underpay for?
   Gasoline.
3. What’s taking up more of your time than it should?
   World of Warcraft.
4. What’s causing you stress only because you let it?
   All the things I haven’t done that I think I should have by now.
5. If all your karma were based on your positive and negative attitudes, would it be in good shape, in bad shape, or perfectly in balance?
   Bad shape.  Very, very bad shape.

The Mozilla Developer Center is now running on a cluster for improved performance, reliability, and availability.

We still need to do an overhaul on the MDC back-end; it’s still using unnecessary amounts of JavaScript, and needs its look and feel overhauled.  If anyone is interested in pitching in on that work, let me know!   I could do the work, but not as well as a lot of people out there.  Not to mention I just don’t have the time to deal with it, what with the Firefox 3 documentation work coming into full swing.

I’m just playing around with a Dashboard widget that lets me post to my blog without having to actually go to the enormously tedious effort of opening my web browser, despite the fact that I always have at least one running at all times.

How freaking lazy is that?

I’m busily documenting the Download Manager.  So far I have reference documentation created for nsIDownload, nsIDownloadManager, and nsIDownloadProgressListener.  I’m also working on a nifty little sample extension that logs downloads into a mozStorage database table and will then be able to pull information out of the database and tell you what times of day you get the best download performance.

So it’s kind of a “two-fer”  — since it will also be a useful demo of mozStorage and sqlite.  I’ll post again when I’ve got the sample done and posted.

This week’s Friday 5 is all about being tired.  I’m an expert in that!

1. What were the circumstances surrounding your last all-nighter?
   Couldn’t sleep because I had a bad cold keeping me awake.  Was just a few weeks ago.
2. What’s your favorite stay-awake-and-alert food or drink?
   Diet Coke (or Pepsi, I’m not choosy).  Lots and lots of it.
3. What are you most likely to be doing when you’re up in the late, late hours of the night?
   Watching TV or movies, writing code, or playing World of Warcraft.
4. In what way does your personality change when you are sleep-deprived?
   I tend to make less sense (which is impressive), and I tend to be short with people.
5. If you get home extremely tired and extremely hungry, which need are you most likely to satisfy first?
   Hunger first; it’s hard to sleep when all you can think about is how hungry you are.

There are some annoying glitches on my blog right now that I need to sort out.  It’s fallout left over from accidentally deleting the entire site the other day.  Not sure exactly what’s wrong but I’ll figure it out sooner or later…

So I was in the process of upgrading some stuff on my web hosted sites when I needed to delete some stuff; I keep a copy of Bugzilla running for bug tracking stuff for my spare-time programming work, but hadn’t gotten around to re-installing it since migrating to a new web host a few months ago.  So I installed Bugzilla 3 only to find it just didn’t work right on this host.  So I decided to yank it and switch to Bugzilla 2, which I’ve had better luck with on more restrictive hosting services (such as the ones that cost you like $45/year).

So I went to delete the Bugzilla 3 install… but was in the wrong directory.

As a result, several of the sites I run got nuked.  I think I’ve gotten most of them set back up but there are residual problems (for example, the polls here on my blog are broken at the moment).

Good times.  Dork.

We’ve adjusted developer-cluster to use a clone of the wiki database, so that now you can test away without fear of disaster striking the real, live wiki.  Test ho, folks!

To be fair, this clusterized version of the wiki won’t solve all the world’s problems, but it should help eliminate the problems we’ve had with the wiki bogging down to uselessness when a lot of people were using it at once, which happens pretty regularly with the current wiki, which is running on a single machine instead of the cluster.

We’ve got a test install of the Mozilla Developer Center web site running on our happy, speedy cluster, and we could use some help testing on it.  It should be tons faster than the old set-up, but before we throw the switch and make it official, we need some intrepid folks to use it for a while.  Do your edits on it, upload your files using it, and so forth.  Let me know if you run into any trouble, or file a ticket in Bugzilla if you’re sure it’s a problem.

Just keep in mind that this cluster-ized MDC is using the live database, so your edits are “for real!”

So a while back, I made a backup of my wife’s old G5 iMac so that we could restore her files when we set her back up after the replacement arrived.

Ordinarily this would be great.  Except we had a power failure while I was out of town, and as a result, the drive I backed up onto got a little bit borked.

I ran a disk repair utility on it (DiskWarrior from Alsoft, to be specific), and everything seemed okay.  At a glance.

Unfortunately, things aren’t okay after all.

Apparently when DiskWarrior rebuilt the directory tree for the drive, it decided to randomly associate files and file names with one another, with no regard for, you know, whether or not they actually belong together.

Net result: around 70,000 files that have completely random filenames on them.

Unfortunately, it gets even worse.  I deleted a rather large folder full of (ostensibly) my files that I didn’t need anymore, in order to make room for some additional stuff.  In reality, that folder was probably full of tons of Sarah’s files.

So basically, to make a long story slightly shorter, we seem to have lost the vast majority of Sarah’s files, even though I carefully made a very thorough backup.

Bloody hell.