Movin’ on up!

I’ve joined the 21st century.  I purchased my own domain: http://adrianhannah.net and my blog is moving there.  I’m going to stop posting here.  For those of you who subscribe to my blog through as RSS reader of some sort here or the new feeds:

• Everything: http://adrianhannah.net/feed/
• Work Posts: http://adrianhannah.net/category/work/feed/
• Personal Posts: http://adrianhannah.net/category/personal/feed/

Work: 2-Jul-2008

We met with Jeff from Opus Web this morning about doing the front end of research.me and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed.  He knew what he was talking about, he asked some good questions, and he showed off some good examples of his work.  I’m looking forward to what they come up with for us.

I checked the memory usage on askel today and found that there is very likely a memory leak involving Apache.  “top” reports that each apache process is occupying between 7.5% and 7.9% of total memory.  When I first logged into the system there was ~18M of free memory.  After restarting Apache “top” reported the same %mem usage for the Apache processes.  However, the free memory spikes to ~89M and starts going down again.  I have decrease the memory usage parameter for PHP from 4M to 2M to see if that will have an effect.

When reimaging one of the machines in Erie, I found that there was an error in my network image file.  I apparently forgot to specify a partition within the Ghost image from which to restore from.  This was easily fixed and the file replaced.  The parameters for the file have been updated in the staff wiki.

I switched all the window machines in Superior from .we to .coe in DHCP and TC.

Work: 1-Jul-2008

I started imaging the window machines in Superior, as of right now it will take roughly 6 hours to complete so I will look into it tomorrow and verify that it worked.

Askel has been having a problem recently where it starts to chug after a few days.  James asked me to look into it and it appears that the Apache processes are grabbing up all the available memory, if apache is restarted the problem goes away.  I surmise that it is PHP that is yanking all the memory.  As a stop gap, I lowered the allowed memory per process for PHP from 8M to 4M.  I will be checking up on usage over the next week or so.

I was also made aware (yesterday) that the script I wrote to scrape the weeks entries from this blog and email a digest to my boss wasn’t working.  The cron job I had set up to run it, was on a machine that was recently decommisioned and not on one of our servers (as it should’ve been).

Work: 30-Jun-2008

Users started inputting data into the research.me admin website today and they started finding bugs in the system.

• When uploading a PDF for the abstract of a publication, the site would tell the user that it was not a valid PDF.  This was simply a problem with the set up of an if statement in the upload code.
• Upon completion of uploading of PDF’s for publications, the user would be told that the publication had not been saved to the database yet.  This was actually an error with saving the publication information to the database.
• There was an error with adding a user for the dashboard.  The site would say that user had been successfully created, however it hadn’t been.  Again an error with the query, which was easily fixed.

From Friday, I had said I would be imaging the window machines in Superior.  However, there was a conflict regarding the PXE image and the Ghost image.  It turns out that the ghost client that is embedded in the PXE image needs to be the same version as was used to create the ghost image.  I rebuilt the PXE image with the proper version of the client and will image those machines within the next few days.

Zombie Apocolypse

On one of the video podcasts I watch last week, they had a viewer email that posed the following scenario:

You are in a mall when zombies attack, you have the following:

1). A weapon

2). A song blaring on the PA system

3). A famous person to fight along side you

What do you choose?

I’ve put some thought into this and here is my answer:

Weapon

In zombie movies, inducing severe trauma to the head is commonly accepted as the to “kill” a zombie.  This includes beating it about the head, severing the head, or shooting the head.  While using a weapon like a sword, axe, or baseball bat seems to be the most efficient way of dispensing of zombies, there are 2 problems with this method.

1. Melee (Hand-to-hand) combat takes physical endurance, eventually you’ll get tired against a tireless opponent.
2. To get in close enough to use your weapon, you expose yourself to being attacked by the zombie.  Which opens you to being bitten (which is how one becomes infected and in turn becomes a zombie).

In these movies, pistols and rifles seem to be slightly less effective than a shotgun.  Rifles and pistols tend to be quicker to fire and quicker to reload.  Rifles are also accurate for some distance, but unwieldy at close range.  A carbine (something like an M-16) would be ideal for both point-blank and long distance combat, however it would take a few well placed shots to the head for each zombie.  Shotguns, though “slow” to fire and slow to reload, are the most effective firearm to use.  They cause a great deal of damage (especially at close range) and don’t need a great deal of accuracy to hit the target.  Because of this, I would choose the Franchi SPAS-15 Shotgun.  It takes all the positives of both a shotgun and an assault rifle with none of the negatives.  It is semi-automatic, magazine fed, and bolt action.  This means an increased firing rate and quicker reload (4 rounds/sec, 5 sec magazine change).  Plus, once your run out of ammo you can always use it as a club.

Music

This was particularly difficult, because every song I thought of I was pretty sure I’d get sick of after like 3 repeats.  So the stipulations I came up with for this one were that it had to be a longer song (longer time interval until the song started over), have good flow (as in you can listen to it without noticing it or notice it restarting), and be at least mildly invigorating (the other two were much more important to me).  This left me one obvious choice: Amarok by Mike Oldfield.  Its a 60 minute song with slap bass, nonsensical lyrics, drums, and weird noises all over the places.  It is a song that is very easy to ignore, or just groove to.

Person

The guys from TRS pulled out fictional people, which I think is cheating because you could say something like Alice from Resident Evil since she’s designed for dealing with zombies, or River Tam from Firefly for the same reason, or Robocop because he can’t get infected (now that I think about it, his gun would be pretty sweet to have to fight the zombies with).  But I thought of real famous people I’d want fighting with me.  Most of the people that came to mind were people that would either be not as bad ass as the characters they play, or bad ass at close combat and thus worthless to me.  Then my memory clicked and I remembered something… when Angelina Jolie does a movie, she goes through the most rigorous training she can and as much of it as she can to prepare for a part.  In Tomb Raider, for example, she trained with the SAS to get a good grasp on martial arts and weapons handling.  So not only would I have a competent zombie killing partner, I’d also have a sexy woman with me too.  Which would make the whole “Everyone is dead or a zombie and we’re all going to die” undertone of the situation a whole lot easier to swallow.