Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/06/28/pizza/
I like the New York pizza for its own sake, and I like the Chicago pizza for its own sake. They’re just different dialects of the same Sicilian mother tongue, equally valid, and equally susceptible to variance of quality among speakers.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/06/28/japanese-eel-related-quotes/
Several years ago I watched a Japanese film titled “Unagi” which is the Japanese word for “eel.” The film was one of those 1960s-type free-form free-spirit no-plot-really affairs, where the protagonist one day comes home early to find a guy schtuffing his wife, murders his wife and her lover, then reports himself to the police. He serves his time as a model prisoner, and although prisoners are not allowed to have pets, he was allowed to feed the eel in the prison pond, and the warden gave him the eel to take home with him at the end of his sentence.
That is the beginning of the movie. First five minutes or so. After that, there’s not much plot. At least, not that I recall. The movie then lingers on a bunch of folks in his town who don’t have much going on. But the protagonist, Yamashita, did leave a quote I still adore:
“Nobody knows your father, but you’re still a fantastic eel.”
Just now, I saw a YouTube video about a Christmas tree that was lit by the power of an electric eel. When the eel swims, it discharges electricity, and the tree lights up. What could the commentator on the video possibly have to say about this wonder?
“If we could gather all the electric eels from around the world we would be able to light up an unimaginably large Christmas tree.”
Yes! Exactly what I was thinking. (Well, not really, but far more enchanting than my whimsical musing regarding the feasibility of electric eels as an alternative energy source.)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/06/06/growing-up-and-counting-the-cost/
I used to believe . . . that growing and growing up are analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will, that one can choose to become an adult, but only at given moments. These moments come along fairly infrequently — during crises in relationships, for example, or when one has been given the chance to start afresh somewhere — and one can ignore or seize them.
Nick Hornby
I think that is a fair description. I think that for a long time I chose to be swept along with the current, without taking much responsibility for my destination. In the past few years I have gained a better understanding that the crises are “growing up” opportunities, and that I have successfully “grown up” from some of these experiences. Still, it is easy enough to be swept along and fail to learn lessons, and I have surely missed the opportunity to grow as much as I could have from some of these crises.
I also remember John Chambers, Cisco’s CEO, recounting advice he had received during the dot-com boom, that you really only have a great company after you have survived an existential threat. After you have had to “grow up” and see what hard decisions you make when it comes time to make those hard decisions. John recounted with a grim face the large number of layoffs that Cisco chose to make in order to survive the dot-com crash. Today, Cisco pays well, and hands out bonuses, but although it has billions in the bank, it is also religious about managing expenses, which can be frustrating at times. All the same, I prefer to work for a company that can sometimes feel frustratingly stingy, if it means my job is less likely to be axed in the next recession. I like to think that this “stinginess” is the mark of a “grown up” company which is keen to reduce the risk of future crisis.
There is a well-worn adage that those who set out upon a great enterprise would do well to count the cost. I am not sure that this is always true. I think that some of the very greatest enterprises in the world have been carried out successfully simply because the people who undertook them did not count the cost; I am much of the opinion that . . . the most instructive consideration for us is the cost of doing nothing.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The cost of doing nothing? Global Warming springs to mind. I have talked myself down from a lot of ideas because, for example, I have a better and better understanding of the costs of building a service on robust and scalable architecture. For the most part that is a good thing: great ideas should be able to wrestle down their opponents. But sometimes you just have to charge forward, and in the words of Buckminster Fuller, “dare to be naive.”
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/06/05/fix-your-dns-with-google/
I have run in to this a zillion times. You SSH to a Unix server, type your password, and then wait a minute or two before you get the initial shell prompt, after which everything is reasonably zippy.
The short answer is “probably, something is wrong with DNS . . . your server is trying to look up your client but it can not, so it sits there for a couple of minutes until it times out, and then it lets you in.”
Yesterday I was working with an artist who had a hosting account, and when he got in, I said:
sudo vim /etc/resolv.conf
He admitted that he had just copied the DNS configuration from his previous server. How to fix this? Well, he could check what nameservers are provided by his current hosting company . . . . or, I changed his file to read:
nameserver 8.8.8.8
“What’s that, localhost?”
“It’s Google! Wherever you are, they’ll give you DNS.”
“Cool!!”
“Yes!!”
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/06/03/sweethearts/
Boyfriend? Girlfriend? Fiancé? Significant Other? Partner? And what if, like me, you are utterly lacking in “gay-dar” and have no idea you’re using the wrong word? That’s why my default word for Super Happy-Fun-Time Love Partner is now “sweetheart.”
“You got a sweethweart? How are they?” Boys are sweethearts, girls are sweethearts, husbands and wives are sweethearts, and maybe your sweetheart is a cat, or a video game, or your spinster sister, or what-have-you.
The only place where I see this maybe falling down is with poly-amorous people who have multiple sweethearts, but in my experience these folks are so busy getting laid that they don’t have much energy to take offense at the most superficial of trivialities. Sweet!
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/05/30/a-brief-history-of-the-banjo/
The banjo came from Africa. White people began playing banjo in the 19th century in Minstrel Shows. As white people in black face got better at playing the banjo, black people lost interest.
. . .
Mei was called in to substitute at the hospital. Left without any better ideas of how to spend my day I hopped on the train, transferring to the 7 at Times Square, figuring that I might as well cover the IRT system. Once it hit Queens, a borough I haven’t visited since moving to New York except to fly through the airports, we rode on elevated tracks. At one point the elevated tracks were double-stacked, which thrilled me and I thought “only in New York . . .”
I hopped off at Woodside 61st St to admire the LIRR overpass. I then rode two more stops up to 74th St Broadway thinking I might transfer to the trains running out to Jamaica, then take some complicated set of transfers back, but first I had to explore the neighborhood, which began Indian, everyone offering a $12 lunch buffet, though I wasn’t hungry. A bit further and I saw some stoop sales and a sign advertizing a Flea Market, but what I found were many people milling around a board with lots of spread sheets posted, each spreadsheet headed by “Mesa” and a number. At first I figured this was table assignments for the flea market, or maybe a silent auction. I got closer and saw that the spreadsheets were tallying rows of numbers in the tens of thousands. I am used to wandering in foreign countries where I don’t speak enough to ask intelligent questions so my natural instinct was to wonder to myself and continue my wander.
People were standing around filling out forms on clipboards. Others carried red, yellow and blue flags. “Venezuela?” I wondered. No, Venezuela has stars. Finally campaign posters and small groups chanting for their candidate. I caught the name Columbia, and at last understood that people were campaigning for mail-in ballots.
I wandered back around, passing a lady who was selling meat kabobs from a grill set on a grocery cart beneath the elevated tracks. I was tempted, because the last street vendor of this nature I had seen was nearly a decade ago, in Bangkok. I was glad that New York had enough people from developing countries that someone had balls enough to (I assume) flout the authorities and sell some proper street food.
Back at the station I reconsidered my plan: the other trains ran underground, how far I did not now. There were also multiple service advisories: shuttle buses to Jamaica? Nah, I took the 7 to the end of the line: Flushing.
The Flushing station gave very much the impression of a transit outpost: plenty of people ride to the end of the line, and pass past a dozen signs indicating which buses connect nearby, then they go stand in long lines on the street to head, I assume, home. Also, everyone is Chinese. And many signs are posted in Chinese, without translation.
I wandered in the commercial bubble surrounding Flushing Main St, wandering into “malls” of little stalls. I didn’t buy anything, but I recalled that Mei’s parents had declared San Francisco Chinatown superior to the one in Manhattan, which was too cheesy. There was little dairy for sale in Flushing: just Chinese people selling goods and services to Chinese people. There was no self-consciousness of outsiders. I saw a man hold a little boy over a street curb so he could urinate in the gutter, as I thought to myself “there must be a toilet he could use.” In the basement level of one mall I caught sight of an ancient man sitting in a stall impassively watching a porno. The video screen was angled away from me but I could see what was on the screen. I smiled: people were being human and that was all there was to say.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/05/28/ubuntu-linux-add-swap-file-at-boot/
A while back I outfitted my personal workstation with 4GB of RAM. That’s plenty of memory and since disk space was tight I didn’t want to waste any on a swap partition, and I lived happily without swap for a very long time until I began using more virtualization. (I freed up space on my physical desk top by migrating my work environment from a laptop to a virtual machine on my personal workstation.)
I wrote a script to add a “temporary” swap file on demand but what I wanted was a swap file at boot. That actually turns out to be pretty simple. In this case, I just prepare the swap file:
FILE=/mnt/swapfile SIZE=8388608 # 8 GB dd if=/dev/zero of=$FILE bs=1024 count=$SIZE mkswap $FILE $SIZE swapon $FILE swapon -s
Then, to make it stick, add this line to /etc/fstab just as you would for a swap partition:
/mnt/swapfile none swap sw 0 0
This is a win for the Unix everything-is-a-file philosophy.
See Also: Ubuntu Community Swap FAQ
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/05/20/rackspace-cloud-server-crude-performance-tuning/
I recently migrated this web site to a virtual server at the Rackspace Cloud. I started with the cheapest, 256M slice, but after hitting some performance issues really quickly, I figured that the extra $10/month to grow the slice to 512M was worthwhile. Even so, I don’t think MySQL and Apache are tuned, out-of-the-box, for such “small” systems.
I am running WordPress, a PHP application, on Apache and MySQL, running on CentOS. I am using Munin to track the system health. Since MySQL performance tuning can be extremely complicated I have focussed my initial efforts on Apache.
So, the memory graph would ideally top out at 512MB, but in practice, the system and programs allocate excess memory they rarely touch, and that gets paged out to swap. It is when the swap activity gets high that system performance goes to heck. A spike in system load is a good symptom of possible performance issues.
When things went bad on Wednesday, I tuned Apache down somewhat from the defaults and then enabled the Apache status page, and told Munin to go ahead and graph that. I am new to Munin, but Slicehost has some excellent articles on installing and configuring it in my environment.
This morning Munin sent me e-mail that it was having trouble collecting data, so I took a look, and reset performance values for Apache based on the above graph:
<IfModule prefork.c> StartServers 6 MinSpareServers 3 MaxSpareServers 12 ServerLimit 15 MaxClients 15 MaxRequestsPerChild 4000 </IfModule>
Hopefully, this will hold. I would love to audit the system memory use in greater detail to allow Apache some greater flexibility, but in the interests of achieving a stable system quickly, this will hopefully prove to be a good strategy.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/05/19/brooklyn-shooting/
On my way back from the Post Office around 11:30 I passed a big police tape scene on Franklin Ave at Lincoln Pl. I saw a small river of blood on the sidewalk next to a dropped shopping bag. A neighbor tells me that he heard five shots and a passing fire truck stopped and had police on the scene in two minutes. I assume the victim is in an ER somewhere and I hope he’ll be okay. The neighbor says that is one of the places where people from outside of the neighborhood like to hang around, and he always walks past there quickly, because although they aren’t aiming at him, they don’t have weapons training and he doesn’t like to be around poorly-aimed bullets.
Update, via Save Brooklyn Now!: At around 10:56am, a 34 year old black male was shot in the head, pronounced Dead on Arrival at Kings County Hospital.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/05/10/password-manager-solution/
To a discussion as to preferred password manager solutions, I added the following:
I developed a simple algorithm I use to generate passwords using my brain. I have changed this algorithm a little a few times. At the most basic level, something like this would be you like to use the password “frog” . . . but then add the first two letters of the web site name: Yahoo ->
frogya, Google ->froggo.The benefits of this “password manager” are that as long as your brain functions appropriately, you will always have platform-independent access to your passwords. If any given password is compromised it is non-obvious to an attacker what your other passwords are.
The main drawback to this password manager is that different password policies are mutually exclusive: one site requires a special character, another site prohibits special characters.
I use a different algorithm for more complex passwords for important stuff like ssh keys and unix logins.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/05/05/so-long-facebook/
You remember how everyone was on Friendster? And then, Friendster was too slow, and everyone lost interest?
Then we were all on Orkut? But it turned out the guy just stole the code from somewhere else and it got boring pretty quickly, too.
Then there was Tribe.net, but I never signed up for that.
Then there was MySpace, and suddenly you could pretty much do anything with your profile, hook in doo-dads and gewgaws and blinky backgrounds? Well, I dipped my toes in that trainwreck but yeah . . . old news.
And then Facebook came along, which only stole the idea from someone else, and not the actual code. It was fast and scaleable like Orkut, and it had applications and stuff so you could have the flexibility of MySpace but within a controlled environment. Boy that thing took off!! But, Facebook was still missing a critical ingredient: you can not trust them.
So, I figured I would get ahead of the curve on this one. They keep revising their rules and re-jiggering things to make it harder and harder for people to keep their information private. Eventually enough people are going to be spooked at that. I tried to re-re-re-re-review my privacy options and look at taking out most of my profile information but they made it enough of a pain in the ass. Eventually I used Google to find the option where you can just delete your account, which, in true Facebook style, takes two weeks. Anyway, in another week and a half, I will have vanished.
If I change my mind someday I can sign up all over again. Despite the hooplah, though, I think there is a very good chance that lots of folks will move on in the near future. Either some kind of open-standard, or maybe a comparable platform run by a company that regards trustworthiness as a central ethic. (Speaking of which, you can stalk me on Google.)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/05/05/flying-jumbo/
I have long legs and long arms and I love to look out the window when I fly. Whenever possible, I check the seat map for an upcoming flight to jockey for the best place to sit. Instead of printing my boarding pass the night before I will wait until I am at the airport and hit a self-service kiosk and check again for a good seat. I use seatguru.com to help assess the quality of various bulkhead and exit row seats.
Sometimes I fly Southwest Airlines, which doesn’t assign seats, so I will try to print my boarding pass as early as possible (24 hours before your first flight segment) so that I can board early and homefully score an exit row. When I can not board early or if the exit rows are taken, I may go for the bulkhead row. No tray tables but plenty of leg room, and you get off the plane quickly: best “middle seat” there is!
Unfortunately, a lot of people think it is “clever” to store stuff in the forward overhead bins, where I have to stash my bag when I am sitting in the front row. So, I drop my coat or my hat on my new seat and head back several rows to stow my bag. The danger here is that when we get off the plane I have to wait until the aisle is clear to swim upstream to fetch my bag. So, sometime before landing I sneak back, fetch my bag, and stash it safely beneath my knees. As we get near landing time, I drape my jacket over my knees and tuck my hands in to this “blanket” allowing the flight attendants to check the cabin without noticing my “un-stowed” bag. Once the plane lands I am one of the first on my way!
Recently I secured a bulkhead window seat in the same row as a gentleman sitting in the aisle seat, and some of the middle seat. I figured he’s a good guy to share a row with because people prefer not to sit wedged in next to a fat guy. Better yet, there was a card in the middle seat saying the seat was “reserved” . . . a reserved seat on Southwest?
The man explained that Southwest has an excellent policy for people of his stature. When he travels, he purchases two seats: one for Tim and another for Timothy. When he gets to the airport they exchange one of the tickets for a “reserved” placard and then let him pre-board. He boards the plane first, takes his bulkhead seat, lifts the armrest, places the “reserved seat” sign in the middle seat, then stretches his legs and watches everyone board. The best part is that unless the plane sells out, Southwest then refunds him the cost of the second seat! “Its as close to ‘first class’ as you can get, and even if I pay double its still cheaper than first class on another airline.”
I like the elegance and fairness of the solution: there’s no slippery slope of aspiring “fatties” trying to claim extra room from the airline’s profit margin, and the airline isn’t extorting extra revenue to accommodate oversize folk; A “reasonable accomodation” is achieved! For me, the bonus is having a mostly-empty middle seat to compensate for the missing tray table.
It reminded me of travelling with my sweetheart. If we sit together I can borrow extra room from her and she can snuggle against me. “Yeah, my wife is all of 125 lbs.” “Ha! My girlfriend is 4’11.” “Funny how that works out.” “Yup. I figure the kids will come out average.”
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/03/24/holmgren-howard-2/
On the radio they are talking about the Census and taking calls from people on the topic: “What my name means to me.”
My surname is Howard, but if my grandfathers had followed convention my surname would be Holmgren. Back in the day the man who carried my Y chromosome married a woman whose surname was Howard, and he took her name for his own to avoid discrimination against dumb Swedes.
I have sometimes wondered about changing the name back to Holmgren, but it hardly seems worth the effort. There is no widespread anti-Swedish prejudice to stand up against in solidarity, and I have no special allegiance to patriarchy.
It seems that most Howards I meet are African American. I doubt they took that surname by marrying English. As best I can guess, their ancestors took their surname, as Howard University did, from Major General Oliver Howard, who fought in the Civil War, and later promoted the welfare of former slaves and war refugees as Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau.
Perhaps there is even a little solidarity to be had in retaining a surname chosen by people who, to this very day, face discrimination.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/03/01/week-of-21-february-2010/
Three laps around Prospect Park with a weaker headwind on the uphill, then I stopped for groceries and fit two gallons of milk into the bicycle basket, which made steering sluggish. Afterwards I watched “Letters from Iwo Jima” which was really neat because it tells a story from World War II in which the viewer’s empathy is given to the enemy.
2.75h Letters from Iwo Jima
Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule — Insight into why engineers dislike meetings, and the cultural difference between “makers” and managers regarding meetings.
Pushups: 40
I kept waking up through the night, which is unusual for me. There is a fair amount of tension at work and other open questions in my life, so I am thinking the subconscious is unusually bothered right now. I woke up dreaming that I was at a party gorging on a smorgasbord of delicious, sweet, and colorful home-made baked goods. I have had these sorts of dreams lately: on another occasion we were at some legendary restaurant and after the feast of dinner I was eager for dessert, but I woke up before dessert.
At any rate, flex hours are a blessing for productivity: if someone has a rough night they can sleep in a bit and just get a late start, rather than taking a sick day. But throughout the morning I felt hung over.
In the evening I made it to my fisrt NYC Yelp event: tacos at The Loading Dock. I made two new acquaintances while enjoying some tasty tacos and free beer. Unfortunately, Mei couldn’t make it.
I “shipped” a nice feature for our systems management software at work, which will make it easier to request server reboots and other services from our data centers. I then set about coordinating how to deploy the feature. In the evening I did laundry, and watched TV while folding.
Pushups: 35 + 40 + 25
1h Daily Show
1h Colbert Report
Due to the snow storm, we didn’t go out as we might have, ordering in some food instead.
After brunch, we spent some time at the Library, but then hustled home so Mei could get in touch with her family as we watched the would-be tsunami roll into Hawaii. Later in the evening we went to see “Invictus” which is an uplifting retelling of how Nelson Mandela won the Rugby World Cup, with a little help from Matt Damon. Afterwards, we stumbled upon a French Bistro type place, where Mei had tartar, I had sausages and beers, we both had dessert, and together we enjoyed a badly needed night out.
2.25h Invictus
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/02/22/week-of-14-february-2010/
I got up before Mei-Lin to, among other things, make her breakfast. She let me nap afterwards as she, among other things, baked me an apple pie. I dropped her off at work in the evening for what was otherwise a really nice romantic holiday together.
1.5h Daily Show
0.5h John Oliver’s New York Stand-Up
The orthodontist is keen to finish my oral infrastructure project before two years has elapsed. He mentioned a desire to change my lower band, but that for my comfort he would wait until next time. I said I could go for it. He babbled with glee, “okay, if you insist I torture you . . . but if it hurts you forget you know me,” and then rambled on about what material the band was made of and how that had a memory so it wasn’t so bad, and words like anterior and other stuff that means he’s a huge orthodontics geek. I can’t tell half the stuff he’s saying but he says it with a sort of joy that makes me trust him, because I too, know the joy of impassioned geekery.
After driving Mei to work in the evening I took some Aleve. This is the second time this guy has adjusted my teeth and I feel it afterward where I didn’t feel it with the prior orthodontist. Since he’s a geeky man I just assume he is pushing my comfort zone to yield results, whereas the nice lady in San Francisco wanted to help me avoid discomfort.
0.25h Aqua Teen Hunger Force
1.75h Inch’Allah Dimanche
1h Colbert Report
Mei gave me a toy train set today. It is a juvenile thrill even if I can’t figure out a good home for it.
Pushups: 35 + 35
Situps: 100
1.75h Reprise
1h Dirty Jobs
1h Star Trek: The Next Generation
I have a modest pile of unused credit cards stashed away in case I ever develop a coke habit. And since I doubt coke dealers take plastic, when I say “develop a coke habit” I mean “fund my own Internet startup-up.”
0.5h Colbert Report
1.75h Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
0.25h Aqua Teen Hunger Force
So, LIVE Squirrelcam is occasionally entertaining but I may try to make it better. Right now one would have to tune in while I am broadcasting, and while the squirrels are doing their thing. There’s maybe ten minutes a day, really, of footage, and its in low res.
If I am silly enough to run a computer with some decent horsepower . . . not 24/7 but say during daylight hours, I’m thinking I could have the computer take a series of 30 second clips, over and over, and then we analyse those clips for squirrel activity. The analysis is the part I don’t know how to do, but I figure I can extract, say, a series of frames, and I’m pretty sure mogrify can give me the “diff” of two images, and if I can evaluate the quantity of that diff, then I know something is going on.
Splice together contiguous 30-second clips of “squirrel detected” footage and upload in hi def to YouTube.
The sup has also been talking about installing these giant, prison-like bars on the windows, “but you can open them.” Anyway, a more permanent fixture outdoors where the squirrels can look cute for the Internet without worrying about the guy inside typing away menacingly at the keyboard might be where I end up.
If I don’t just lose interest first.
After an unusually rough day at work, I watched “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” which was a nice enough film set during the Cultural Revolution, but in the last 40 minutes they skipped to the modern day and revealed the village was to be flooded for the Three Gorges project. Sappy sentimentality over unrequited love backed by plaintive violin music, this soft-skinned bourgeois intellectual found himself teary-eyed. It also reminded me of another movie I recently watched about the Three Gorges, “Up The Yangtze” so the idea of an ambitious young girl making her way in the world, in that case, literally up the Yangtze, was fresh in my mind.
1.75h Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Pushups: 30
Peddling a bike down a city street is much like paddling a canoe down a river: Watch out for the current if you don’t want to flip or crash!
Rode my bicycle over to the Post Office, then stopped by the bike store to put air in the tires. (They have a hose out front.)
Pushups: 32 + 40
Slept in, rode down to the Tea Lounge for breakfast, then two laps around Prospect Park. The weather was nice but there was a vicious head wind on the uphill part. Took Mei-Lin out for dinner but it was late and she was too exhausted to really appreciate it.
1h Mega Movers: Locomotives
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