Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham has a poll on his website about the yet-again proposed smoking ban in Washington, DC. If you support local businesses, go vote ‘no’ immediately. It’s on the bottom of the left-hand sidebar.
They had a booth, stickers and t-shirt campaign
Note to self: Never complain about restoring from backup again.
I’m curious if Ben and Aaron can account for their whereabouts this evening and if a witness could corroborate. (no you’ll never live that down)
Update: Go figure, the wikipedia so-sorry notice updated itself with more details a few times since I posted 😉
What happened?
At about 14:15 PST some circuit breakers were tripped in the colocation facility where our servers are housed. Although the facility has a well-stocked generator, this took out power to places inside the facility, including the switch that connects us to the network and all our servers.
What’s wrong?
After some minutes, the switch and most of our machines had rebooted. Some of our servers required additional work to get up, and a few may still be sitting there dead but can be worked around.
The sticky point is the database servers, where all the important stuff is. Although we use MySQL’s transactional InnoDB tables, they can still sometimes be left in an unrecoverable state. Attempting to bring up the master database and one of the slaves immediately after the downtime showed corruption in parts of the database. We’re currently running full backups of the raw data on two other database slave servers prior to attempting recovery on them (recovery alters the data).
Update 19:20 PST: We have at least one database server with intact data. When we have a second up and running, we’ll be able to put the site back online in read-only mode as we continue.
Watching this trailer / preview of a documentary on sampling has made me late for work.
Check it out.
New job title:
Grant Stavely
Senior Network Engineer
Sirius Team Leader
Ben and I gave a lot of thought as to how to name the teams over our regular post-planning-meeting Thai lunch, given no easy way to differentiate them like location, specialty, or technical skills. My first thought was to use Gem names. My team was going to be Team Emerald, Ben was going to lead Team Ruby. Papers were drawn up, people that prepare Excel documents prepared Excel documents. During the initial brainstorm, Ben suggested star names but was shot down after he listed off a few geeky star names; boss: “Algol? nobody has heard of these things, next idea?” At another meeting, star names came up again and I suggested a few more recognizable stars (see how it was my idea? j/k) and the decision was made to change themes.
New business cards have been ordered.
Ben’s team is called Team Polaris.
Most geeks have specialties or focuses - in a large part due to the differences in how our brains function. I’m a very narrative person and have a poor memory for terminology, numbers, dates, times, etc… This makes for me being really bad at some things but I’m a quick learner at others.
This narative introducing kerberos, the centralized authentication system 9/10 of you use every day at work on windows NT networks, reads like a Dick and Jane children’s novel, only I learned something. Cool.
I know I would look silly but curses to the gene’s I’ve been handed that prevent me from having the ability to grow mutton chops like that! Or was it the big G himself?
Yay.
I can’t decide what I think of the cludge that they are using to link to a map while during the query process keeping it all out of the url. It looks like the only extra data on the link is the level of zoom/pan.
I love the pan-ability.
I picked up a bluetooth keyboard this evening on the way home to use with my powerbook. :love:
I uh, get a lot of “wow you type really fast” from people. I don’t know why, I think it’s actually that I type really noisily, not necessarily quickly.
I type fastest on spring loaded old IBM KA-CHING KA-CHING ZING-ING-CHING keyboards and the like and when copying something already written. I got this keyboard because I like a full sized and in the corner Control key (Sorry Powerbook you are the best laptop kb evar but it’s just not good enough) with some separation between Caps Lock and A (vim hateses) that isn’t warm to the touch under my already sweaty palms. Oh, and 10-key is nice.
A few weeks ago I bought and never bloged about my new Airport Express. Get one if you use your laptop to listen to music like I did and was tired of being confined to the 20’ mini-stereo extension cable. It looks like wireless speaker extensions w/ amps are between 100 and 200 a pop, on the way.