• erebus: dual core AMD, 2GB of memory, 2.5TB of storage, shiny new SSD storing the Arch Linux install
• citadel: hexa-core Phenom 2, 6GB of memory, 150G Raptor, SATA 6Gb/s, and USB3 (still Gentoo)

After spending 2-3 days reinstalling, the new server is basically finished. It still has a 2TB btrfs partition that died and is waiting for the fsck tool. I am also ordering a new rack (21U) to store everything, since I am moving out of my current home office.

Now that I have returned, I hope to make a more public presence, starting with smaller, more technically specific blog entries.

Well, a few weeks ago, I found that one of the primary drives was failing. I moved data off only to find out the hard way that the destination drive, which used btrfs, has no means of recovering journaling errors. The btrfsck only reports that errors exist. This was a crippling setback that I was able to correct with a backup.

Then, I went to update the system, which was one of the things on my list before the hardware gaffes, and I found that Gentoo restructured it’s use of spawn-fcgi. Now if you want to run spawn-fcgi with lighttpd, you will need to setup an init script. See Naib’s final comment.

Also, I found that the PHP extension configuration had changed. Rather than installing other packages, they are now USE flags. For example, instead of installing php with +pdo and then pdo-mysql, you just install php with +pdo and enable the pdo_mysql.so extension module. Oddly enough, I didn’t need to uncomment the extension directives in my php.ini, as they seemed to be autoloaded because of .ini files in the ext-active directory.

I don’t intend on abandoning lighttpd just yet, so I had to migrate to the new configuration. Now, the conf.d script for lighty is under /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf. I had to manually merge my old config into this because there were just too many differences. One gripe I have about merging Gentoo ._config files are most changes are to either comments or whitespace.

So when the dust finally settled, I have my system running again. All my long term data is now stored on different drives, and backups are scheduled weekly. This whole incident has made me want to setup a Linode account and point voidreturn.org there as a fallback.

So I’ve collected some useful snippets and some garbage snippets. I’ve never bothered to put them in a repository because they were just small bits of code that were not intended to retain a long lifespan. When I got my Dell Mini10, I started writing snippets on that machine as well. Since I did this away from home, I couldn’t rely on my fileserver to be always available. I needed an easy way to organize my codebits so that I can see them on multiple machines.

I decided it was time to set up a repository, which will go nicely with my new domain. I set out to setup a server similar to GitHub but found that wasn’t as straight-forward as I had hoped. I asked a few questions in #git (irc.freenode.net) and received a few mixed answers. I ultimately was getting the following error:

Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/test/.git/
Enter passphrase for key ‘/home/s1n/.ssh/id_rsa’:
fatal: ‘/test.git’ does not appear to be a git repository
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

No matter what I tried, I always ended up with an error along those lines. Then I found this guide, which has a great rundown for “impatient” users. Turns out, that path after git’s ssh:// URL is the path. That is ssh://someuser@server/path/to/repo.git has the repo.git in the /path/to/ folder on the server hostname available as someuser. I made a symlink in / to the repository folder and everything was ready to go.

Now I should be able to run my own git-daemon for my miscellaneous codebits and thoughts without having to publish them in a public repo. Maybe in the future, I’ll install a GitWeb browser, but right now, these are really considered private thoughts and I don’t think I want to share them.

I bought a domain name (two actually).

I am now the proud owner of voidreturn.com and voidreturn.org. Right now, I am using the .com because of the name recognition that comes with it, but I think the .org sounds better. I even setup Google Apps so that I can have a mailserver without running the server (I highly recommend doing this unless if you have a personal site).

I am still running my own webserver because I just don’t like the idea of not hosting my own stuff. Internet connections are cheap and fast these days; I have 15 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up, more than a personal site would ever really need. I realize that it’s not as reliable and can be more time consuming, I’m a control freak (why do you think I still run Gentoo?). Over the next year, I will most likely upgrade my router to a 1U server and upgrade the storage space in the file server to count in TB instead of GB.

Also, you may have noticed that I updated all of the old links and installed a broken link checker. Broken links now appear with a strike-through. Even the name of the blog has been updated along with an apropos quote by Emile M. Cioran.

I’ve been using the dyndns.org address for nearly 10 years; it’s sad to see it being phased out. It will still be available but will basically redirect to voidreturn.com. Nothing is static, everything is evolving.

Well, I’ve decided to partake in the Iron Man perl blogging challenge. Once a week, every week, I will post something, anything, about perl. This should be easy because it’s basically all I’ve been programming in lately and it’s easily my favorite language. My official start post is right now.

I’m working on an interesting new library that I’d like to think can change things in a big way for the open source community. I’m working on this with a fellow perl6 monger. Oh, you didn’t catch that? Yeah, I helped start the first Perl 6 Mongers group, right here in Dallas. DFW.pm is basically defunct; one of the problems that plagued it was the venue. Rather than trying to cater to everyone across this horribly sprawled metroplex, I think it would be best to just focus on a few key areas. We may rename it later, but Dallas.p6m seems fitting.

Speaking of which, I will be attending YAPC::NA 2009. My wife and I will treat this as our mini-vacation, since we haven’t taken one in 2 years! I contemplated giving a talk, but I decided I’m too new to this whole presentation thing and I’m not sure I have anything to really say. Hopefully next year I will have something interesting to give a lecture or talk over.

The semester is almost over and I’m still swamped to the gills. I’ve been neglecting everything lately due to the overwhelming amount of work I’ve been assigned. I will be really happy to make it through to the summer for some time off. I’ll still be working on my thesis, but that’s not nearly as pressing as normal class deadlines (unless you advisor makes you redo stuff right before you defend).

I’ll be posted more things this weekend about some of the really neat things I’ve been doing lately. Let me leave you with a small taste. I’ve unsuccessfully installed IPCop on a virtual machine; I’ve integrated more with the Rakudo development community because I have special permission to take a laptop to work. I received my results from the qualifier I took last semester. Lastly, I’m making my own GTK theme.

Lots of juicy bits that I can’t wait to blog about.

Anyways, it’s been hell getting everything setup. IPCop seemed to clear out my dyndns setting and wasn’t updating even though the site had been up for 2 weeks. I’ve been crammed with too much work in the last month for my current class, so I haven’t had time to do much.

We have moved into our house, but maybe 50% of stuff is unpacked, so we’ll have to finish that after the semester is over. I don’t have any pictures of the new house, but I will eventually post a curbside photo.

Back to the grind. Good to be back and up finally.

On top of all of that, we are in the process of buying a house. I’ll do another write-up this weekend about my experiences doing so, since there may be some other first-timers out there who’d like a scientists’ point of view.

Anyways, I’ve got a few posts scheduled for the weekend. I also have regular maintenance on erebus scheduled (cleaning, updates, security, etc). Lastly, I am going to update zero-blog and finish setting up the photography section already. I’ve been screwing around with that for a year and it’s time I just hurried up with it (I spent the few hours organizing and labeling my photots, so I don’t have any good excuses not to finish).

Don’t touch that dial; it’s a three day weekend coming up!

First up, I made a minor change to the site. I am now sifting the main content feed through FeedBurner. This means I will hopefully get a better idea who’s reading the blog. All I know right now is the tiny bit of information from the WordPress Stats plugin and that Google Reader thinks my blog is the most obscure thing I read. You may have also noticed that I updated the plugins and fixed the obsocialbookmarker plugin to provide links to some of the aggregators I’ve heard of. If I’m missing your favorite, do tell.

Also, I hit a milestone with my last post; it marked my 500th blog! That’s right, I’ve written way too many words that way too few people read. I’ve had some ups and downs, a few contintributors who have long stopped contributing, even watched as my wife set up her third Blogger account. Here’s to the next 500 posts!

The reason why I have not posted recently was more out of a superstition. Monday night was an incredibly intense game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Red Wings and the Penguins. It lasted for well over 100 minutes, into three overtime periods, and ended with a disappointing goal by the Penguins. Fear not, the Red Wings went back to Pittsburg to steal the cup from them on the Pens’ own ice. The celebration afterwards was riddled with boos and hisses, but it was still a sweet victory to see my boys bring The Cup home for the 4th time in 11 years.

Lastly, I never got to posting last week’s pace charts. Monday was tough because I stupidly decided to run in the afternoon and it easily broke the 90′s. The other runs were tough but managable. I’m still struggling with the long run. I felt better than last week, but only slightly. I think I am going to try and focus on maintaining a pace for a long time because I see to have trouble beyond 3 miles. Hopefully, this is just a decreased stamina due to the extended break and not loss of ability. I also need to see about excluding the walk breaks during the intervals as it greatly skews the graphs, so I decided to change to a non-continuous bar graph so it would display something useful.

I’m blathering, so here are the charts:

If you see this, the quick solution is to check if you have a wp-content/plugins/plugins.php file. For some reason, I had this lying around; it should instead be using the wp-admin/plugins.php. Removing this file gives you the new fancy plugin page.

The strange thing about this is I had to dig around in the code to find what the real file should have been. Why it was loading that incorrect file, I have no idea. No one else seemed to report this problem, so I figured I’d mention it here so perhaps the Google Sitemap would help others find this solution.

Update: As I posted that, I found out the hard way that ask.com is no longer working with the Google Sitemap. If you are using this plugin, disable this in the Settings page.