dannyman.toldme.com

Living

Breathing

Tactile

Books

Hold and keep
or give away

Now on display
forever.

Books Inc. Mountain View, CA

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. . . FIVE Mourning Doves . . .

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Ant smasher!

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Unexpected tear-jerker.

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Especially in Mountain View, CA, the heart of the Silicon Valley.

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Hell yeah, my man is going to play the bin Laden card!

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First, install ccsm.

Terminal windows resize themselves stupidly when changing font size. I don’t know how to fix that, but in the CompizConfig Settings Manager, I can enable Resize Info to overlay the dimensions of any window as I resize it.

Often, when dragging a window around, it tries to go full-screen on me. This is obnoxious! Just disable Grid in CCSM.

If anyone knows how to reconcile Focus Follows Mouse with “menu bar at the top of the screen” I would love to hear it! Or if you know how to configure the pager to something besides 2×2 …

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Time tracking in JIRA is a nice feature, but we have to get people to do it. My initial attempts to enforce time tracking ran into trouble, but I was able to develop a Jython Validator to hook on to transitions to the Resolved state. Now it is mandatory for our users to log time worked before they can resolve an issue:

# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
import com.atlassian.jira.issue.worklog.Worklog
from com.atlassian.jira import ComponentManager

# Time Already Logged
timespent = issue.getTimeSpent()
# Time Logged via current screen
try:
    timelogged = dict(issue.getModifiedFields())['worklog']
except:
    timelogged = False

# Duplicate Issue?  It is as good as logged!
resolution = issue.getResolution()
if resolution['name'] == "Duplicate":
    timelogged = True
if resolution['name'] == "Self Corrected":
    timelogged = True

# Nagios likes to close tickets, but doesn't get paid
user = ComponentManager.getInstance().getJiraAuthenticationContext().getUser()
if user.getName() == "nagios":
    timelogged = True

if timespent < = 0 and timelogged == False:
    result = False
    description = "Please log the time you spent on this ticket."

2012-01-24 Update: the script now contains additional logic, which exempts the nagios user from enforcement and allows resolution of duplicated or self-correcting issues which may not require time tracking. Hopefully this example is useful to somebody.

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Stuffed Polar Bear demonstrates proper airplane safety procedure.

This is the passenger who had the middle seat on my flight back from Chicago yesterday.

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What up, yo?

PJ reminds me of drawings of Lucy Knisley’s cat.

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I was poking around my CloudFlare Control Panel, and pulled up stats for the past month, from Oct 11 to Nov 11. It says it had blocked a bunch of attacks on my site, and consequently saved me over 5GB in bandwidth.

I said to myself, "I pay for bandwidth! Maybe this free service is saving me money?!"

“Really,” I said, “I pay for bandwidth, so if CloudFlare is saving me bandwidth, it is saving me money!”

But 5GB seemed kind of high. So, I checked my invoices from RackSpace. Here is the outbound bandwidth I have been charged for this year:

Invoice Date   Bandwidth Out
11/11          4.660 GB
10/11          4.972 GB
09/11          7.534 GB
08/11          5.467 GB
07/11          6.402 GB
06/11          5.978 GB
05/11          4.694 GB
04/11          6.294 GB
03/11          6.254 GB
02/11          9.652 GB
01/11          7.117 GB

RackSpace charges me on the 11th of the month, and, conveniently enough, I started using CloudFlare around October 11th. The highlighted line above is my first month on CloudFlare. It is my lowest number of the year, and it is conceivable that I could have totaled 9.5 GB in October since I pushed more than that in February. I’m skeptical that they are saving me as much as they claim to be, but for a free service to speed up my web site and save me even a little money . . . that is a good deal in my book!

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There will be friends you haven’t exchanged a word with in years, and one day you’ll meet and it is as if no time has passed, except that you are a little older, a little wiser, a little more foolish, and you have a bunch of gossip to catch up on.

There were friends before there were text messages, or email, or telephones, or letters, or even an alphabet or a language.

Which is just a long-winded way of suggesting you don’t need to worry too much who is texting you back. Years from now you’ll know who some of these best friends from today are, and it won’t have much to do with who texted you back this week.

(From some unsolicited advice posted to a nephew on Facebook.)

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