diehn.net/blog

Anyone else get colds in summer?  I’ve got one and it sucks.  I’d say it’s an allergy attack, but it’s behaving just like a cold – itchy throat, then runny nose, then cough and fever…. ack!

When I read this, I thought of all the poor kids whose parents constantly correct them and scold them for making mistakes and prevent them from taking risks – intellectual risks, social risks, physical risks.  There’s strong motivation here for expanding your parenting style to incorporate allowing your kids to screw up.  And even for learning to be comfortable taking some risks your self.  Enjoy!

The bright side of wrong – The Boston Globe.

Turns out that for some cases, awking is much, much faster than grep.

Just now, I wanted to know how many unique MAC addresses appeared in our DHCP server’s log file asking for a lease but not getting it.  There are a few ways to skin this cat.  What’s interesting is that some ways are *much* faster than others and when you’re searching through large log files, speed helps:

This is all on openSUSE 10.3 (X86-64) with kernel 2.6.22.17-0.1-default. Your milage will vary, of course, but the ratio should be about the same.

wc daemon.log
  90145 1044693 9287866 daemon.log

So, 90,000 lines, about 9.2 MB. Not a huge file. Searching for a fixed phrase, no fancy regexp.

With GNU grep 2.5.2:

time (grep 'no free leases' daemon.log > t1)
real    0m12.512s
user    0m12.505s
sys    0m0.004s

I tried various switches to optomize – like -F, -E, and with a $ at the end of the search string. No help. Looks like the builtin optomizer knows as much as I do in this case.

With GNU Awk 3.1.5g

time (awk '/no free leases/ {print}' daemon.log > t1)
real	0m0.558s
user	0m0.548s
sys	0m0.012s

So, learn the basic awk syntax and start using it instead of always reaching for grep.

I follow this guy’s blog, Stephen Mills.  He wrote a piece today that explains very well one of the choices I’ve been trying to finishing making for the past five years or so.  Would You Rather Be Right or Be At Peace?.  Good stuff, Stephen.  Thanks!

Remember the pain we used to have to go through to cancel a credit card?  Well, not anymore.  And that’s weird.  You’d think that with the recession so close behind them the creditors would be trying hard to keep customers.

Luca and I just got back from fishing – caught a nice, 18″ large mouth and a 10″ horned pout.  The Citi Diamond Visa card statement was waiting.  Andi asked if I knew anything about the $60 charge on it.  ”Nope.  Hmm… says ‘fees.’”  So I called them.

It’s an anual membership fee they started charging back in February.  I told the woman on the phone that they could either reverse the charge or close my account.  She didn’t even bat an eye, just asked if I’d like a letter confirming the closure.

Wow.  They’d rather loose a customer than give up the $60 fee?  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  I guess we’ll be buying our new furnace on the AmEx.

Don’t forget that by default, most python module install themselves in /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/. But the default install of python2.6 on Ubuntu 9.04 doesn’t look there. Ugh. So, instead of installing with

python setup.py install

use

python setup.py install –install-layout=deb

and the module will install itself in /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages and then python will be able to find it.

Old news. Didn’t upgrade my wordpress for a looong time. Came over this afternoon to make a new post and found the bottom of my blog covered in arabic. Ugh. Someone had added an administrator account, too. So, apply new theme and nuke the old – the templates were altered. Delete all three add-ons. Change passwords. Remove the old admin account. Change passwords on my web hosting account, too. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

Got a squirrel at 75 yards Sunday. Not a bad shot, but about 1/4 of an inch to the left would have been better.  As it happened, the round passed through it’s neck just aft of the skull and just above the spine, apparently just disabling it’s shoulders.  So, it fell out of the tree and stayed where it fell.  Took me a while to find it.  And then I wasn’t sure what to do.  Wish I’d had a mentor along or that I’d been taught hunting as a boy.

This was my first hunting kill, and I’ll admit – when it came time to finish the killing, I wavered in my conviction.  It seemed the animal wasn’t mortally wounded and at first, I contemplated taking it home and healing it.  My wife helped me see reason and I realised it would be best to finish the poor thing.  But how to do it?  Well, first, take my gloves off to get a better grip.  (Now, anyone that’s handled a wounded animal just winced hard.)  And knows what’s coming next….

As I tried to turn the squirrel in my hands and figure out the most humane method to finish it off, it wriggled around and clamped itself to my now bare hands.  WOW!  About twenty good, deep scratches into untangling it’s claws from my skin, I just gave up and broke it’s neck.  Would have been better for us both if I’d just done that from the start.  So now I know.

Anyway.  That’s my first game animal. Does that make me a hunter? Well, I intend hunting more squirrel, so I think so. I skinned it and dressed it according to directions I found in, believe it or not, The Joy of Cooking.  I’ve got the hide curing and I’ve salted the tail stump so I can save it for the Meps people.  I got a surprising amount of meat off it and I’ll be cooking it tonight I think.  I’ll post about how it tastes, etc.

Seems that serving squirrel was all the rage to serve squirrel at dinner parties in England last summer.  The folks in NYC were at it, too apparently.

Randall Wood wrote a decent article about about customising Gnome for using Kinesis keyboards.

Power was out this morning.  It’s still out at home but I’m in the office where it’s warm and dry and happy…  ok, let’s not gloat.  Anyway, when the power goes out, we pull the digital, cordless phone base-station off the kitchen wall and plug in an old, analogue, single-line, business telephone.  And it works.  Cool.

ATT Single-line Telephone

Anyway, this morning when I called home to see how it was going there in the dark, apparently Tallis perked up and said – “what’s that funny sound?”

He’d never heard an actually ringing telephone.