Random things

Identifying hard drives

I’ve had a Linux server at home with a lot of hard drives in it for many years.  One of the most frustrating things about this has been when a drive eventually fails, it’s a pain to identify exactly which drive it is that has failed.  This seems obviously in hindsight, but I recently realized that “hdparm -i /dev/sdx” will give you the serial number of a drive.  So since I was replacing the root disk with an SSD, I figured that I would put a label with the serial number on the front end and back end of all of the drives so that I could easily identify failed drives without unmounting them in the future.  The upside here is that apparently hard drive manufacturers have been putting labels on the front end of the drive for years.  The labels have the serial number on them, along with a barcode that I assume also decodes to the serial number.

Rails 3.0.0 and rubygems 1.3.5 issue

If you’re running into a problem like this:

coneill@test:~/buildbot# bundle install
/sw/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/rubygems/dependency.rb:52:in `initialize’: Valid types are [:developmen
t, :runtime], not nil (ArgumentError)

Then your problem might be that you’re running rubygems 1.3.5.  I ran into this yesterday, and couldn’t find any good leads on what the problem might be.  This morning tried upgrading rubygems to 1.3.7 on a fluke, and that fixed my problem.  Actually, this seems to affect a number of things, since I first ran into the problem when trying to run “rake db:create” the first time.  I’m guessing that bundler has an unstated dependency on the newer version of rubygems.

Now at tumblr

Migrated posts from Wordpress to Tumblr, but didn’t seem worth the effort involved to move comments also. 

This doesn’t meant I’ll post more often, but at least I won’t have to deal with Wordpress security issues.

Aerogarden Labels

I bought a three pod Aerogarden a while back, and I’ve been experimenting with growing my own seeds in it. I came up with an Omnigraffle template for the labels to go on the top of the seed pods. It’s a double sided template where one side is a label for you to write on and the other side is a cutting template. You can run it through in duplex mode if you have a printer that supports that, but I’ve found that depending on the printer you can get better alignment by running it through the printer twice. Originally I had printed this on card stock, but in hindsight that was obviously a bad idea. It ended up waterlogged and started molding after about two weeks. I ended up ordering some Rite in the Rain waterproof paper which is supposed to be mold proof.

Here is a picture of the Rite in the Rain labels:

More photos: Flickr

I glue these on using rubber cement. I’m not 100% sure with that, because Download Template: PDF | Graffle

Canceling should be as easy as signing up.

I’ve been a Quicken Bill Pay customer for 5 years, probably closer 10.  Their product generally works pretty well, but it hasn’t changed much in the last 5 years, and the generally crummy UI led me to look around for something better.  This morning I signed up for Paytrust hoping it might be better since the web page looked slightly better and people seemed to give it decent reviews.  I quickly realized that it’s just another front end for Metavante like Quicken Bill Pay is.  In fact, they’re both owned by Intuit.  I immediately sent an email to support saying I wanted to cancel my account, and got the following and email containing this:

If you still wish to close your account after reviewing some benefits of our service which are listed below, we ask that you please contact us at 1-800-729-8787 so that we may maintain the security of your account throughout the closure process. Your feedback is important to us.

Their website is secure enough for me to be able to empty my bank account from, but not secure enough to cancel my account from?  I smell bullshit. A friend of mine suggested a while back that we should have some law in place that says unless there is extenuating circumstances, you should be able to cancel any subscription service via the same medium you used to sign up for it.  Perhaps legislation is going overboard, but this “I think you’re too lazy to call us up and cancel” tact that many companies seem to take is really bad customer service.  You’d think they would realize that ultimately it just leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths about their company.  I can’t see companies ever doing this unless they’re required to.

Better Metacritic RSS feeds

So I think Metacritic’s game reviews are a great idea, but their RSS feeds only have the title of the game, and a very short sentence. That’s a not great, but the bigger problem is that they publish games to their RSS feed immediately, but don’t score games until there are at least 5 reviews. To work around that, I’ve put together Atom feeds that you can use instead of the official feeds, which include the short blurb that Metacritic provides, but most importantly these feeds don’t publish review information until there is a critic score associated with the game. Here is a list of the feeds that I’ve put together:

• Xbox 360
• PS3
• Wii
• Nintendo DS
• PSP
• PC

You can find the code that generates the Atom feeds at github here.

Metacritic RSS

So I think Metacritic’s game reviews are a great idea, but their RSS feeds only have the title of the game, and a very short sentence. That’s a not great, but the bigger problem is that they publish games to their RSS feed immediately, but don’t score games until there are at least 5 reviews. To work around that, I’ve put together Atom feeds that you can use instead of the official feeds, which include the short blurb that Metacritic provides, but most importantly these feeds don’t publish review information until there is a critic score associated with the game. Here is a list of the feeds that I’ve put together:

• Xbox 360
• PS3
• Wii
• Nintendo DS
• PSP
• PC

You can find the code that generates the Atom feeds at github here.

CAP Theorem

We’ve been doing architecture for geographically disperse, highly available systems at work for a few years now.  We have mostly been coming up with “things that work” without spending a lot of time on research.  I ran across Werner Vogel’s post on this sort of thing a month or two ago and thought it would be worth mentioning.  It really crystalized for me some ideas that intuitively made sense to me and it is something I can point other people to.  We were talking about the architecture of a new system today at lunch and I realized that I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone when I originally read it. 

Werner’s entire post is well worth reading, but a more succinct explanation of just the CAP Theorem can also be found here.

Paul’s first 3d movie

I took Paul to see Journey to the Center of the Earth this afternoon. I had forgotten it was in 3d until we were walking in and they handed us polarized 3d glasses. He seemed to really enjoy it, although I didn’t notice until the credits that he was dodging things coming out of the screen :)