2008-08-10: Update and eyrie.org migration
Week before last, I had an absolutely fantastic visit with long-time
friends. It was the first time that all four of us were able to get
together in one place physically in eight years. We spent the whole week
talking, mixing in some game playing, a long tour of Stanford, photography
and comic book geeking, and watching some DVDs and TV shows, but mostly
just talking. We went until 5am several days and at least 2am almost
every night.
Then Monday, the day after the end of that visit, the power supply failed
in the eyrie.org shell system and main web server (or at least I'm fairly
sure that's what the symptoms meant). I then forgot that it had a weird
power supply (ATX-GES) and wasted $70 (well, I could still return it) on a
power supply that didn't work. Since ATX-GES power supplies are basically
impossible to find and the converter cables weren't available locally, I
went through some worrying about what to do, and then decided to just
accelerate the migration to hosted VMs.
So, that's what I spent basically all of Monday and Tuesday on, and some
of Wednesday, but it's all set up now and is working great. I cleaned up
a bunch of old accounts too, which will reduce the mail load and provide
fewer opportunities for someone to brute-force some old account. I'm very
happy with the results; the new system seems quite responsive, I'm well
under the bandwidth cap, and I now have a good template and installation
system for making changes.
Since I didn't want to take vacation to fix my machine (I have other
vacations coming up to use that time on), the rest of the week was
catchup, trying to get a full week's work in. Of course, then the
Olympics started Friday evening, so I'm now into my intensive
Olympic-watching mode.
So, I'm basically packing as much as possible into every day right now. I
have a bunch of web site work that I still want to do, I have lots of
services left to migrate off of my other main eyrie.org system, and I
still have lots of writing ideas from our visit that I want to explore
with friends and have only just started. And there are the Olympics,
which as usual have more coverage per day than I can actually watch.
This summer didn't look like it was going to be this busy going in. I
guess they never do.
The current goal is to make sure that I do two full weeks of work these
next two weeks, and spend all the rest of my time watching the Olympics.
Everything else, as usual, will take something of a back seat. Then I
have one regular week, and then vacation, during which I can catch up on
all sorts of other things.
2008-08-11: Recent photo gallery
I've added a gallery of recently posted
photographs to my photograph page, which should make it easier for people
to keep up to date with new photographs I'm posting. It will also make me
feel less like I need to mention each one here if I feel like posting a
few things that don't feel worth announcing in a journal entry.
Another beach photograph today.
The recent gallery only has three pictures right now, but will eventually
hold the most recent eighteen.
2008-08-11: New photographs
Three new photographs posted today, including a
new gallery of photographs of random
objects, often junk, that caught my eye and look more interesting in a
close photograph. Here's the first:
To for quick links to all three new photographs, see the
recent gallery.
2008-08-12: Classic haul
With all the other things going on in life right now, one of the things
that's suffering is reading. My yearly total is likely to be far below
the last few years, although a bit after the Olympics I do get to have a
week of vacation which is going to be devoted mostly to reading and
playing video games.
But, of course, that doesn't mean I can stop buying books, particularly
since there are new books out by a few authors I like to support. I also
picked up some very nice classic editions of some famous books.
Elizabeth Bear — Hell and Earth (sff)
Philip K. Dick — Four Novels of the 1960s (sff)
Philip K. Dick — Five Novels of the 1960s and 1970s
(sff)
Thomas M. Disch — The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of
(nonfiction)
Richard P. Feynman — The Feynman Lectures on Physics:
The Definitive Edition (nonfiction)
Ralph Keyes — Nice Guys Finish Seventh
(nonfiction)
Karl Schroeder — Pirate Sun (sff)
Charles Stross — Saturn's Children (sff)
After reading a lot about Feynman recently, I finally decided that I
wanted to own a copy of his lectures on physics, even if I'm not likely to
read them soon. The Library of America has published two very nice
collections of Philip K. Dick's short novels, and I couldn't resist
picking those up, particularly since I'd only read one of the nine novels
included in them.
2008-08-13: Reviews now on journal page
When I moved my old journal into my web site, I removed some redundancy by
deleting the individual journal copies of book reviews in favor of keeping
the canonical version in the reviews section of my
site. As a side effect of that, though, and the way the various index
files in my journal are generated, that meant that reviews stopped
appearing in my regular journal web page. They were in the RSS feeds, but
to know that a new review was posted when browsing my web site, you'd have
to go to the review section specifically.
I didn't think much of this, but I've since discovered that this has
apparently confused at least one person. Plus, the more I thought about
it, the less sense it made.
So tonight, I took some time while watching the Olympics to hack on the
various bits of software that generate my web site to automate generation
of the main index page for my journal (instead of semi-automated the way
it was before). This means that reviews will now appear in the regular
journal page like any other post and age out like all the rest.
In the process, I also cleaned up URL handling so that I can use relative
URLs in journal posts and they're always made absolute for all the RSS
feeds (I'm not completely sure how all RSS readers handle relative links,
particularly when turning the RSS feed into HTML to display on some other
site). This means that images references in my journal entries will now
get proper size tags in HTML because they're relative filenames that
spin knows how to deal with.
2008-08-13: Reflections
The latest photograph, another from my Oregon coast trip last year.
This is the first picture I've posted that's vertical rather than
horizontal, but all the software and layout seems to have coped fairly
well. The only potential problem is that the vertical height of the rows
of pictures in galleries containing vertical pictures is a bit larger,
which may look odd down the road. It doesn't yet, so I won't bother
trying to figure out how to fix it yet. (I can probably fix it with
judicious use of vertical padding around images that are horizontal.)
I'm fairly happy with what I'm getting done while still watching the
Olympics. I'm less happy that that's involved resurrecting dead AFS
servers for the past couple of days, although thankfully the problems were
all known ones from accidentally running a back revision of the file
server.
2008-08-18: spin 1.69
I added support to spin for setting links to RSS feeds for a page in its
header using an \rss command prior to the \heading command. I also
added support for a \sitemap command that includes the entire structure
of the site as a list in the page. There are some additional
documentation fixes and a bug fix where state from one page was not fully
cleared before starting to process the next page.
These features were added to be used on my site, of course. The pages
with corresponding RSS feeds now have the appropriate tags in the page
headers, which means that modern browsers with RSS support will provide an
easy interface to subscribing to the feed. There is also a new
sitemap for my web site. I don't know how
useful it will be to anyone, but it looks impressive at least.
You can get the new version of spin from my web tools page.
2008-08-22: Footprints on beach
Here, have another beach photograph. A bit generic, but I do love the way
the sky's color varies.
In other news, I just uploaded version 11 of the USEPRO draft, which I expect to be the final version before IETF Last
Call (maybe with an additional version to fix some minor issues like
typos). We had an end-of-the-month deadline to finally get this out the
door. It's a significant improvement over RFC 1036, and the working group
is burned out. The chairs finally picked a resolution for the main open
issue remaining, and I'm fairly happy with the result.
The Olympics have consumed my brain, so there haven't been many updates
(although I'm working on a new release of remctl; there's a lot of work to
incorporate). I love watching the Olympics in saturation like this, but
two weeks is the right length or maybe a bit too long. I want to watch
the rest and will also be happy when it's over.
Having the constant visual input and partial focus on something like this
is a drain. I've been pleasantly surprised at how much I've finished over
the last few weeks, but it leaves me feeling a bit stretched. Ideally,
I'll get the remctl release out next week before I go on vacation, but
that may or may not happen. I still have significant patches to
integrate.
The end of next week, I go on vacation, during which I will read, play
video games, watch DVDs, and generally let my brain relax fully.
2008-08-23: spin 1.70
I decided to start overhauling my Usenet article
format page a bit since I'm working on the USEFOR draft again, and
decided that finding the size of each file to indicate the size next to
links (which the IETF pages do and which I think is cool for an
at-a-glance feel of the size of specifications) was tedious. So this
version of spin now supports a \size command, which inserts the size in
bytes of a local file. It automatically scales the units to produce a
nicely readable number.
I also made the error handling of a botched macro definition a little less
spectacular in its failure, although it could still use work.
You can get the latest version from my web
tools distribution page.
2008-08-25: Debian packaging and Git
I'm now using Git for nearly all of my Debian packaging except for some
team-maintained packages and some packages where I'm also upstream and
have not yet converted the repository. I've
written up my workflow and related
notes.
I think I mentioned this previously in my journal, but somewhat in
passing. Since changing ones packaging workflow and adopting the new
revision control systems came up again on Debian Planet, and since I've
made various modifications and updates, it's probably time for another
mention.
What I'm doing still doesn't maintain nice patches for pushing upstream
that include complete revision history. I diff the feature branches
against upstream to produce patches, which works reasonably well.
Something like TopGit would
probably be an improvement, but I haven't had a chance to experiment with
this yet.
The Shibboleth
packaging team is using this repository format. The AFS and Kerberos
packaging team is using a simplified version of it.
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