How Fucked is My Database?
Stumbled across this awesome site:
http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/
In my case:
- MySQL: Probably pretty fucked.
- sqlite3: Concurrent connections? Yes. Good luck with that.
Yep. My favorite is the answer for NoSQL:
Making things work again.
After a few subsequent hacking attempts (and some successes!) I had to nuke this website completely. I managed to save most of the important things, but in the meantime I'm going to go with a generic template until I get everything working again.
I am now using Google Apps as my email provider which is giving me a ton of piece of mind, along with Ubuntu Hardy on the server as opposed to Gentoo. It seems as though that was a good choice to make -- I am up and running with all the services I had before in less time than it would take to emerge a base system! I feel really good with how the system appears to be working now. Hopefully it's a bit more secure too. I am running less services as a whole and am using a couple of security tools to keep people out. I am already seeing results of the SSHD blocking script that I am using to prevent password guess attacks!
Moving a Time Machine Drive
Something I've been working on doing for a little while is getting my 500gb (300 of it partitioned for this) Time Machine drive moved to a new 1tb drive for this purpose. Well, it took forever and a few tries but I have finally completed a backup on the new drive!
I was first told to use the Restore feature in Disk Utility by dragging the drives into the restore tab... but that didn't work. It gave me "Operation not permitted" errors -- which prompted me to turn off Time Machine itself which I had forgot! Unfortunately, that didn't fix the problem so I was forced to look for alternative solutions.
The next thing I tried was SuperDuper. It's a file copier that apparently supports doing moving Time Machine backups. At least, that's what I read on their and other websites. A few hours after trying that I got the files copied, but the permissions were all off so it made the Time Machine drive unusable. Frustrating!
Finally... I did it the long way. I had enough free disk space to make a dmg of the entire drive. I made one by selecting the original TM partition and hitting "New Image" in Disk Utility. After finishing that, I indexed the image by going to "Scan Image for Restore". About 2 hours later, I was ready to do the block level copy by using the Restore tab and checking the "Erase destination" box. Thankfully, it worked! I had one thing left to try but I'm really happy that I didn't have to waste more time getting it running.
Now to get RAID0 striping working on my 2 500gb drives...
Things are busy.
Over the last few months, tons of things have happened:
- Shipped 2 iPhone apps, working on shipping another
- Bought a new computer!
- Spent xmas in Arizona, went skiing.
- Gone all over the place visiting people
- Spent 15 hours a week commuting on New Jersey Transit
- Collaborated on Latest Chatty, an iPhone application for Shacknews.com
- Signed on a lease for an apartment in NYC!
I'm going to attempt to start making posts on the programming and things that I'm doing, but with all the stuff going on it's pretty difficult. Hopefully when things settle down (and I'm moved in) I'll be able to provide some more documentation of what's going on with things.
At the very least, here's some links to the stuff that I've worked on at Apple's AppStore:
LatestChatty - Chat and News Browser for Shacknews.com - I use this every day on the train... makes those 3 hours seem a little less depressing.
Cinsay Movies and Originals Video player for cinsay.com. We also did their website which came out pretty great.
The Grateful Dead This project was really interesting -- it required a lot of development expertise (There's Flex, CocoaOSX and Cocoa iPhone involved) and lots of memory and cpu conservation to get it done. I'm rather proud of this project as it took pretty much all the knowledge I had at the time to complete it.
At the moment, I'm in the middle of setting up git repositories on elrepositorio, and getting my 350gb TimeMachine backup over to a shiny new 1TB drive that will be single-purposed to that duty. TM saved my ass a few days ago -- I had one of the bad Seagate hard drives so all of my data was unrecoverable. However, my Time Machine backup brought back everything, and I mean everything to exactly the same state it was before the hard drive died. I can't recommend it more.
-Jeff
Bloggin’ Stuff
Sup.
So, things have been pretty busy around here, which generally means no blogging or site updates. While that won't change in the future, it is worth dropping a few things of note:
- SliceHost.com is totally completely 100% awesome. I have been with them for a while now and have had no downtime, no problems with CPU and Memory hogging from other VHosts (because there aren't any!) and the price is extremely reasonable for the service that you get. I am running apache2, git, svn, irc, ftp, mail, mysql, and ssh servers without any problems whatsoever. Additionally, for LatestChatty.app that I have majorly contributed to I run an API server that takes considerable CPU which continues to chug along on every request I make of it. It's pretty awesome.
- iPhone Development is pretty sweet. While I've been working on a lot of things for work, I still have found a little time to work on LatestChatty.app, which I'll write a blog post on eventually. It was on the Staff Favorites section of the appstore! I'm pretty proud of the work I've done in making the application stable. I can use it on the train without any significant problems... however the app has some issues with lots of data in UIWebViews which will be rectified shortly through various means.
I’m in Europe!
Everyone already knows this, but I thought I'd throw up a post while I'm an actual internet cafe. So far since May 19th we've been the following countries:
- UK (Britain)
- France
- Spain
- Morocco
- Italy
We're in Rome now, and headed off to Pompeii for a few days, then off to Greece. If I have time, I'll add a bit more of a reflection on each of those places, but I don't really have much expectation of that happening until I get back in early August. Ciao!
More site stuff done.
I managed to finish a few sections of the site, and get a simple unified look for the site.
It's also pretty bad. I'd be lying to myself to say that it's going to get any better anytime soon -- I just don't have the time as I'm getting ready to go to Europe and I have a few things to tie up in the meantime. So, after I get the Projects page up I'll probably be done for a little while. Oh, I also need to set up Spamassassin and get some links into the blog CSS. Those things will also get done. Then it's all coding until it's time to go!
It's 4:30am and I'm supposed to start driving to Rochester at noon today. Will it happen? Will I sleep through the alarm? Only time will tell! 
UPDATE (4/28): Did a bit more work today. I have to say I do miss working in the RIT library the most of pretty much anything related to this place. I'm pretty productive and Java's is right downstairs 
Oh and now we're up to WP 2.5.1, wee.
People are way more creative than I am.
Take a look at this:
These are made with perler beads, from what I presume is one bead per pixel. I might have to give this a try -- make a Birdo of my own. 
Here's some more images: http://flickr.com/photos/foglera/sets/1686827/
Cool Tech: MacFUSE
So, no one reads this blog but I thought I'd start a small series of posts that consist of things I come across: thus the category "Cool Tech".
What I'm writing about today is a pretty neat technology that I learned about only recently: FUSE. This, like all technology is an acronym that stands for "(File-system in USErspace)" and really has a lot of great potential in regards to how we interact with various sets of data. We, as users think of moving files around between directories in a hierarchy that we're all used to. Now, using this set of frameworks we can treat things that may not normally be treated as a FS as something we can now browse and interact with in a very easy way.