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September 23, 2005

Rita "fun"

Yesterday, I went with Sancho to meet his mom coming back to CS from Houston. Met her a bit south of Waller. We actually made decent time coming back... a 45 minute trip under normal conditions took maybe an hour and fifteen minutes. If you've heard the stories about 290, you know that's miraculous :)

I've finished my hurricane preparations. Almost. I picked up the rum, beer, and mixers but forgot the triple sec. Yes, of course I have food and water as well. I had THOSE things without needing to go to a store. It looks like the winds here will probably peak in the 30mph range... perfect weather for a hurricane party.

For an example of a couple people who AREN'T having a hurricane party, take my father and stepmother. Due to the trouble getting out of town yesterday, they've decided to weather the storm in Baytown.

Some important facts to bear in mind:
Baytown is from the latin "bay" and "town" - literally, "town on the bay". It is somewhat close to water.
The low end of the runway at the airport in Baytown (KHPY, for the curious), is 27.3 feet above sea level.
This is the current observations at Southeast Texas Regional which is about 50 miles east from Baytown.
This is the prognosis (sorry it's not decoded, but the real gem is winds of 90knots expected to gust to 110 knots.

or, for maybe a graphical expression of my concern:
Rita's track
Helpful Texas map

really, the saving grace might be that the eye is passing to the east.

In conclusion, not having parents evacuated who bloody well should be, sucks.

Posted by jeff at 05:09 PM | Comments (0)

September 15, 2005

Web programmer stabbing

Timeline:

Late June, Early August: We notice that at certain times of the day, websites are just outright inaccessible. It seems unrelated to a previous problem with a stray webdav semaphore file, and to be more related to the log analysis that ran every four hours. Over the next week or so I index the mysql tables used for storing Apache logs.

Aug 22-23: Severe user complaining is brought to my attention. I move the log analysis job to only one run a day (during the early morning, when it should not affect usage). There is still some slowness, so I put up a Zope 2.8.1 test server (for eventual migration).

Aug 31: After a week of little testing by the web programmer, it's requested that I instead make the NetApp NetCache box we have sitting on a rack (that was NEVER POWERED ON, and about which I HAD NO DOCUMENTATION) work to cache pages.

Sep 02: I get the NetCache configured for a test site, and notify my boss and the programmer.

Sep 04: I'm told to go ahead and start moving live sites to the cache for testing. I submit a request to get its port opened through the TAMU firewall.

Sep 06: I rerequest the port be opened. Urgently.

Sep 08: CIS helpfully closes the ports to the production webserver. Stabbings ensue.

Sep 13: I'm told that www.isc.tamu.edu and some other site I setup for testing around the 6th are fine, and to start moving more production live sites over. I move about 15 hosts over. I request that the programmer do even further testing on the 14th on the new site.

Sep 14: A fairly important site is found to be down. The web programmer apparently tried to enable page caching using plone.org documentation.

Sep 15: My boss relays frantic emails from users. The NetCache is delivering pages of logged-in users to everyone. Login credentials themselves don't seem to be affected, but this issue is considered to be huge and cross-browser.

Now, we got the problem fixed eventually (web programmer had to add a no-cache pragma for things to work again), but I still gotta wonder: WHERE WAS THE TESTING? Look, I'm lazy, I admit it. But testing the functionality of websites I shouldn't even have logins to seriously is not my responsibility. And if it's going to be my responsibility, I need to know ahead of time so that customer-visible changes get tested, and less shit gets broke.

Oh well.

Posted by jeff at 04:07 PM

September 04, 2005

Yay! Private pilot license

As of yesterday at about 7pm, I am officially a private pilot :)

The oral exam and checkride weren't bad at all. But then, I've spent so much time grinding and practicing that if they were, it would have been disturbing.

Posted by jeff at 11:09 AM | Comments (1)