Tag: computers are evil

configure-make-make install

Posted on By admin 2 Comments on configure-make-make install

One of the things that I like about my job is that I usually don't need to waste time fiddling with system administration.

Usually.

Except for now.

I have a bitchin' piece of code that works perfectly on my laptop setup, where I am the master of my domain. I can install dependencies on the fly and make sure that the latest libraries are there.

Of course, this is not so on our production machines where I am a lowly user and at the whims of the BOFHs.

For the past 2 days, I have been trying to compile and install a piece of software. For the past 2 days, I have been trying to compile and install the libraries that I need to compile and install the first piece of software. This would be so much easier if I had root access and didn't have to install to non-standard paths and having to ensure that the friggin compiler uses the latest versions of the libraries, not the obsolete ones.

I need a hug.

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A sign of maturity

Posted on By admin 3 Comments on A sign of maturity

Some of you will have received links/memes from me in the past pointing to truly weird shit (bonerbunny comes to mind). I make no secret that through various means, I come into contact with stuff that most people wouldn't even dream of. Yet today, I have found my match. A link that sounds so horribly vile that I daren't even click on it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you http://www.ratemyvomit.com/

(and if you do go look at it, please, don't tell me about it).

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Excuse me, what?

Posted on By admin 6 Comments on Excuse me, what?

I've been looking into my website stats again. According to Google, these are the top search queries that are directed to my website from Google:

garfield
coldplay
coupe de cheveux
bizarro
animal porn
dilbert powerpoint
batman quebecois
bogeyman
porn
garfield comics
scotch
get fuzzy
bookmarks
comics sexy
dilbert strategy
doritos
garfield “new year”
happy new year
vote

I'm sorry, but animal porn??????

Edit: ok, I figured it out. People are scary. If you go to google images and try this query: http://images.google.com/images?q=animal+porn+site%3Awww.flubu.com&hl=en you'll end up with a picture of a loaf of bread. The picture is called “bread-porn.jpg” and since the title of my LJ blog is “the beaver is a proud and noble animal“, it fits the bill.

But still, jaysus.

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A quick entry

Posted on By admin 7 Comments on A quick entry

A few quick bits that I will expand on later:
– Lugging 30 pounds of prezzies is fucking heavy
– Met Michel and Sara at Weinsteins. Food porn. Watermelon porn. All good.
– My cat is now fucking HUGE! yet still insane and addicted to catnip.
– I have been awake for 2 hours and doing computer tech support for 1.5 of them. Such is my lot in life.

More later, must go eat.

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Canadia – day 1 – The more things change…

Posted on By admin 4 Comments on Canadia – day 1 – The more things change…

The key points from yesterday:

  • International air travel is boring. We spent 7.5 hours sitting down at 36,000ft
  • The little screen above us had shit-poor picture quality and the larger screen at the front of the cabin was projecting in sepiatone. WTF? I watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and it was painful because it was between fuzzy reception and blurry sepiatone. Fun.
  • Customs at Ottawa airport were interesting because I didn't know if I should declare myself a visitor or a resident. Given that I don't have a current address in Canada, I had to declare myself a visitor to my own damn country :)
  • It's somewhat amusing that all our clothing fits inside a carry-on bag, but we still brought a fucking huge and heavy suitcase full of prezzies.

I finished wrapping most of the presents up this morning while Katy was having a nap. It's good that she's finally getting some rest – it'll do her good. I want this trip to be stress-free and fun-filled. I'm looking into how we're going to get to Montreal tomorrow. I'm thinking the train, because that would drop us off directly at Bonaventure, right at the Salon des Metiers d'arts.

It's weird a bit to be back in Canada. It seems that I really settled into Cambridge life. When I walked into my folks' house, I saw all the old surroundings and all my old stuff that I couldn't bring. Like my TV. Damn, that thing was big. From talking to Katy, it probably wouldn't even fit inside our flat.

As to the title of this post, I'm currently fixing my dad's computer :)

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I can't be bothered to think anymore

Posted on By admin 2 Comments on I can't be bothered to think anymore

I am officially stopping my work day now.

This day hasn't been the best one in a while. Lets see the high points:

  • The 3am 100-meter bread-machine dash to take a loaf of bread out of the machine before it gets soggy to hell and gone.
  • Almost missing my bus this morning.
  • Realizing that the workflow I started last night before going home, which had been running all night, was using the wrong codebase and therefore was more than useless.
  • Having a fire drill sprung on me.
  • Having a meeting sprung on me.
  • Spending the rest of my day wrestling with an interoperability problem of having to get java to talk nicely with C# and perl and then realizing that it's fucking impossible and a huge pain in the ass.

So yes, right just this minute, I wish I was home and a bit drunk.

Update: To round out this day, I fell asleep on the bus and when I woke up in a rush to get off at my stop, I left the plastic bag with all my lunch tupperware of the week and two forks. Go me :(

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Ain't it ironical?

Posted on By admin 2 Comments on Ain't it ironical?

I've been doing a big push to get major work done on my ontology lookup service before I leave for Munich tomorrow. I added a ton of new features and loaded an assload of new and interesting data on it.

Since this was all in development, all that code and data is on my laptop. It works fine. It takes about 2 hours to load 33 ontologies, 120000 terms and 790000 relationships between those terms. That's fairly decent – loading about 1000 terms a minute. Now, being all happy to get it done and wanting to deploy the friggin thing, I turn to the production servers. You'd think it would be blazingly faster, given the size of the things.

Of course not.

My load is about 10 times slower.

So I'll have to work late tonight if I want the last hour not to have been a complete waste of time.

Blergh.

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Welcome to monday morning

Posted on By admin

Nice way to start a week.

Get into work, check my email, do some routine sanity checks on the servers… only to find that PRIDE has been down all friggin' weekend because the database server went belly up on friday night. Nice. The log partition was full. Nicer. Tables got corrupted. Nicest.

I hope this isn't an omen for my week.

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