Last year, I spent three days at Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America volunteering for the New Year event. I haven’t posted yet, which is silly, because Saturday I’m heading up there to do it again, except for longer. I wrote pages and pages about it, but it’s too much, so I’ll try and keep it short here. I bet I fail. (more…)
Author Archive
New Year’s at Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America
Thursday, December 26th, 2013How I Started with Shinto
Tuesday, December 3rd, 2013I wrote a long e-mail today to the Shinto Mailing List and thought I’d go ahead and capture part of that in a more permanent place here.
How did I, a pasty white American guy, find Shinto? How did I get started with such a different, and occasionally inscrutable tradition? (more…)
Upgrading Databases
Sunday, October 27th, 2013In the middle of a large upgrade process to the home server. Kind of a mess, but things are coming back up.
When upgrading databases, use the old, running version to make a DB dump BEFORE you upgrade the software. I’ve just had to struggle with getting an old version of Firebird to run so I could read the databases. Then, I had to do the same thing with PostgreSQL. (more…)
Story 007: The Sensorites
Friday, October 18th, 2013Original air dates June – August 1964.
They’ve landed in a spaceship, complete with sleeping astronauts. The “evil” Sensorites of the Sense Sphere are keeping them there. But WHY?
Story 006: The Aztecs
Wednesday, October 16th, 2013Original air date May – June 1964
Ian, Barbara, Susan, and The Doctor land in South America at the height of Aztec culture. They emerge from a one-way door – leaving the TARDIS behind it – in a temple, which only reincarnated gods can use. Barbara, particularly, is treated as the incarnation of the goddess Ytaxa. This works fine until her 1960’s sensibilites get involved and she tries to stop human sacrifice. Meanwhile, the Doctor absent-mindely gets engaged to a local wise woman (they are a lovely couple!). They all scheme to get back to the TARDIS.
Clean the Golden Fingers
Sunday, October 13th, 2013Had a power outage at early o’clock this morning. Got up, shut everything down before the UPS’s died. One of our servers is too big for the UPS and I’ll have to fix that. Went back to bed.
When I got up, I started booting everything. The server with the too-small UPS came up fine, but the Web/Internet server didn’t. Which is odd, because I powered it down before the UPS went out. (OS crashed, but power-down was normal.)
When I powered it up, I got beep codes. Ugh. Long, two short, then a lower sort of “doo doot” tone. Dug around the Internet to figure out what the meant on this motherboard, and found this gem on Asus’s support site:
Memory issue: Beep (1 long 2 short)
- Clean the Golden Finger of memory
- Clean the memory slots
- Leave only one memory stick to test
- If convenient, please change different memory to test again
All the directions were to “clean the Golden Finger of” some part.
I knew what they meant despite the excellent translation. It was no help and I had to install my spare.
“Clean the Golden Finger” though. Made the morning tolerable.
/usr must be on the root partition now
Saturday, August 17th, 2013Modern linux builds apparently require /usr to be on the same partition as /. They send you to a smug and self-congradulatory web page explaining that it’s because you old farts suck.
My view is that it’s because the authors of udev and systemd are idiots who don’t know what /usr is for and ignored it, leading to unbootable systems. And then they won’t fix it because they don’t care that some people have been using that configuration for ten years.
Thanks for nothing, twerps.
Oh! I wonder if that’s what screwed up the upgrade to SuSE 12.2 on my Internet-facing server. It’s had a separate /usr partition for years, and upgrading to 12.2 screwed it up amazingly. Going back to init.d from systemd let it boot, and it’s still that way. I wonder if moving /usr to / would fix that.
Earlier Presentation on Catalyst
Saturday, July 27th, 2013The first presentation I gave for the Silicon Valley Perl user’s group was on Catalyst; they had just had presentations on Dancer and Mojolicious and I thought it might be nice to show the more complex tool that everyone seemed trepidatious about using. Certainly a focus of the other talks was “See how easy it is! No unneeded stuff!” which was cool. But, at every turn, I kept thinking, “Wait, you had to write that? Catalyst would have done that for me…” (more…)
Story 005: The Keys of Marinus
Saturday, July 20th, 2013Original air dates April through May of 1964.
The Doctor, Susan, Barbara, and Ian wind up on Marinus, and are blackmailed into finding some “keys” needed to operate a planetary mind-control machine. Hijinks ensue. (more…)
Story 004: Marco Polo
Sunday, July 14th, 2013Original air date February through April 1964.
This is one of the lost episodes. For some reason, the sound was saved separately, and fans have made various reconstructions. I’ve found animated version of the first one that is better than no video at all. For the others, there are photos placed over the audio track. It is enough to follow the story.