A rambling record of various things I have shared with the web. Things here are generally targeted at my friends and family.
— Jayson
Making Sense of Erlang’s Event Tracer
Let’s face it people, while Erlang is wonderful in a number of ways documentation is not one of them. I mean, it’s there, and it’s better than some other projects. However, there are incredibly useful things staring you in the face that are just impenetrably difficult. The et module is one of those. Fear not, gentle reader. After more time than I’d care to admit, I’ve managed to figure out roughly how the pieces fit together. As usual, they exhibit the combination of weirdness and inspiration that have driven us to embrace Erlang. Without futher ado, let me take aRead more →
Reigning In LVM pvmove Memory Leakage
If you use the Linux Logical Volume Manager, pvmove can be a wonderful utility. It lets you move a logical volume (or many, in parallel) from one physical volume to another. Engine Yard was recently attacked by raptors. To help deal with this, we needed to move off of the disks before they exploded. pvmove to the rescue. It turns out that we hit a few bumps. The biggest was that the pvmove command would slowly consume massive quantities of memory until a node would run out. This was both vexing and confusing, as we were pretty sure that the pvmoveRead more →
Maildirs, Timestamps, and Metadata Indexes
Every once in a while, you have a problem that has an approachable solution, but you just don’t want to tackle. This weekend, I took a brief break from a more significant problem to attack one that I’ve had since February 20, 2008 at about 12:35pm. You might ask, how do I know the date so precisely. Well, it’s been staring at me from my e-mail Inbox. Essentially, around that time I was getting ready to shut down my e-mail server I had run out of my cybercafe for a while. In doing so, I had to choose to moveRead more →
What If There Were No CDs?
I was just retagging some of my music. I ran across an interesting set of unexpected issues with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (by the Beatles, duh!). The end was cut off of some of the song names, so I wanted to fix it up. I looked up the album on the Internet and began fixing song names. Immediately, I noticed that the number of tracks in my list didn’t match the number of songs on the record. After some headscratching I realized that the songs were listed by side of the record. After smacking my forehead, I startedRead more →
Erlang Error: {open_error, -12}
This error happens when you have old or missing .so libraries for your Erlang app. It is rarely mentioned on the Internet and can consume hours of wasted debugging time. Now you know. 🙁
No to Bail-Out; Yes to Buy-Out
Leave it up to an opinion column in Bloomberg to perfectly articulate what I’ve had brewing in my head. I kept thinking, “How does putting money into the banks fix the problem that these assets are overvalued?” Unless we are buying these securities, and then writing them down to a corrected value, nothing is fixed. It’s quintessentially anti-market. The properties aren’t allowed to go down in value. Ron Paul hit it on the head, it’s price-fixing. As with most of Ron Paul’s theories, I don’t completely agree with his solution (i.e. the Federal Reserve and paper currency is the rootRead more →
iCal and Automator
Recently discovered something kind of cool. Apparently, you can save an automator workflow as a “iCal Alarm Plug-In”. Then you can select it as the “alarm” for a message. Depending on your bent, this makes either a very elaborate alarm or a poor man’s crond. Rather skimpy details here.
Sidestep The Little Bits of History Repeating
Is it just me, or does this make anyone else nervous. Read this. Then read this. Deja vu? Is it just me, or is this exactly history repeating itself. The most disturbing confluence is: Cheap Credit Bad Loans Reinvestment in Real Estate Basically, credit gets cheap. Banks compete too much because of the cheap credit. Bad loans are made because of the competition. Given the cheap credit, people reinvest in the real-estate, essentially refinancing themselves so it is never paid off. In that environment, it was just a matter of time until bad loans creeped unacceptably high. Even worse, naive interpretationRead more →
The Nikon D700 Rocks!
So, I picked up a Nikon (a D700 specifically). It was pricey, but I figured that David would only be tiny once, so I should get quality pictures. After a deep breath, I signed the check and went home with my equipment. I don’t regret it. See my photostream on Flickr for the goods.
Useful Mac Script
When I used to use Windows more regularly (i.e. Windows NT), one of the most useful commands was the “start” command. It would behave much like the “Run” dialog. The number one thing I used it for was to open the current directory (or another directory) in the Explorer. When I moved to Linux, this was still relatively possible (using konqueror or gmc from the terminal). Upon moving to the Mac, I’ve never found anything that does it very well. I googled around for something today, and still found nothing. So I thought a little bit and wrote one. YouRead more →