wiredfool

This is not my problem. This is your problem. I don’t really give a damn about your licensing service. Except, of course, when it messes up and I have to deal with it. Sometimes I can just close and reopen Photoshop, but it looks like this time I can’t.

This time though, It might be my fault, because I’m moving things to a new drive in the laptop. Though, I have to point out that it’s taking more time to deal with Photoshop than everything else combined.

You might ask why I tried moving, rather than reinstalling right out. Well, it took two calls to Adobe to get this installed in the first place, and I was trying to do this in the evening, when I have time, there are no kids awake, and I don’t have to worry about work. But. Adobe’s not open at night.

Gah. What a waste.

It’s really the season. 12 pints yesterday, picked, washed, and processed, and that was just one of our patches.

I’ve been using spread and whackamole for IP address failover on Debian Etch, but I’ve noticed that they’re not 100% reliable in my setup, in some cases hanging when I’m trying to query who owns a node, and in others, just not picking up the ip address that’s shared between two machines.

What I’m doing involves an active machine (or vmware instance) and a hot spare running the same code and ready to take over instantly. There’s generally very little state, as these are inbound load balancers or outbound gateways. Where I have lots of state, like database, the failover mechanisims are a little different.

I’m testing out ucarp as a replacement. It has it’s good points — it’s one piece that’s reasonably easy to setup, and bad points that it’s not exactly high profile. The current version (1.5) is a released version of the snapshot (1.5_0802222) in lenny/testing and has some significant bug fixes, so I’ve pulled the source package in from lenny/testing and the distribution from the main distribution site and compiled it on etch for a quick backport. There’s one patch line that failed — the options accepted on the command line, and that appears to have been integrated in the upstream package.

The package from lenny worked reasonably well in testing, but showed some issues in production related to not being able to “Can’t do IP\_ADD\_MEMBERSHIP”, which is necessary to recieve the multicast packets. This was fixed in 1.5 final.

Ucarp is a little different than wackamole. Wackamole just grabs an ip address when it detects that it needs to, Ucarp runs a script when it determines that the ip address needs to be aquired or dropped. This was something that I had wanted with wackamole for poking at daemons and such. The debian port has integrated the control of ucarp into the /etc/network/interfaces file, so straightforward configurations can be done completely in that file.

In /etc/network/interfaces

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address 192.168.10.91
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        gateway 192.168.10.1

        ucarp-vid 90
        ucarp-vip 192.168.10.90
        ucarp-password foobar
        ucarp-advskew 1
        ucarp-master yes
        
# ucarp controlled.
iface eth0:ucarp inet static
        address 192.168.10.90
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        

The options on ucarp bear explaining:

* vid: 90 an id. ucarp will communicate with any other instance using this id, so this needs to be consistent between the master and the spare
* vip: the address to be managed
* password: A shared password between the instances
* advskew: Lower numbers will win the election of which instance should be the master
* master: if this instance should startup as the master

This approach seems to work well for some tests, the failover time for pinging is 3-4 seconds total. But for apachebench and funkload, it seems that once they get an arp of the machine that’s getting taken over, that one stays resident until the next invocation of the app.

This was really good. Blackberries and mint from the garden, Following a grilling session of potatoes and zucchini from the garden, as well as some other stuff.

One of the things with webapps now is that they load a ton of extra stuff, javascript, css, images, static pages. Lots of extra stuff. The work site has something like 15 includes of one variety or another on each page, and a bunch more that are loaded as needed on one or two pages. That’s a lot of latency.

One way to fix it is caching and expires headers, another is to minify and compress the javascript and css, and another way is to just get the files near the user so that they can load all the items without round trips to the server. Big sites do this with a CDN, a content distribution network. But two drawbacks of that approach are that they’re not from the same site for origin purposes, and you generally have to pay for a CDN, and that’s out of the reach of smaller sites. On the other hand, they do it without you noticing, and gears does require confirmation and trust.

Google Gears has a local server and cache space that are intended for use in taking applications offline for later syncing with the cloud. But it’s just as useful for serving bits in conjunction with the online version. The important thing is that everytime there’s a request for one of the files in the cache, gears will serve it locally. That’s a lot less latency.

Best of all, it’s pretty easy to setup. You include the gears_init.js file, create a local server and assign it a manifest. The manifest controls everything that gears will download once and cache, until the version number in the manifest changes.

The javascript changes, cribbed from wordpress’s version of this and the google docs.

<script type='text/javascript' src='gears_init.js'></script>".
<script type='text/javascript'>
       if ( 'undefined' != typeof google && google.gears ) {
             var localServer = google.gears.factory.create('beta.localserver');
              var store = localServer.createManagedStore('cdn-store');
              store.manifestUrl = 'gears-manifest.txt';
              store.checkForUpdate();
       }
</script>

And the manifest file:

// site-manifest.txt
{
  "betaManifestVersion": 1,
  "version": "1",
  "entries": [
    { "url": "gears_init.js" }
	{ "url": "common/prototype.js" },	
	{ "url": "common/scriptaculous.js?load=effects" },	
	{ "url": "common/effects.js" },	
	{ "url": "and so on and so on...." }
  ]
}

I’m not sure that this is a total game changer for the general web, but for sites that are apps where the users both trust the site and spend a significant amount of time there, it’s a win. This is already being used for the admin interface of WordPress 2.6. I can see it being used in a lot of places with rich interfaces where the users are highly invested in the site and latency is a concern.

So, a couple of weeks ago, there was this big photo shoot in an old hangar that Chase Jarvis and some of the flickrites put together, with a bunch of rented pro lighting setups donated by Glazers, and a bunch of models and breakdancers and bmx riders and stuff. And I haven’t put anything up here yet, but then again, I still haven’t gotten my light stands out of the trunk either.

Chase just released pics from another hangar 30 gig that he did — this one with less people and more music. Songs for eating and drinking where he got a bunch of really talented musicians and a talented cook together in the hangar, and shot pictures and video of the result.

From the Chase Jarvis Hangar 30 Shoot

From the Chase Jarvis Hangar 30 Shoot

From the Chase Jarvis Hangar 30 Shoot

Well, the stuff (spinach, carrots, beets, chard) that I planted in at the beginning of August is doing well. It all sprouted really quickly, since we had a week of every-other-day rain. Nothing like heat and rain to do that. Unfortunately, it’s bringing out the slugs as well.

Then yesterday, we had a big harvest. A cauliflower. big. Two Broccolis, small and larger. A handful of beans. A carrot, a parsnip. A decent sized zucchini, 10 lbs of red potatoes, some chard that was getting de-bolted, and 4 pints of blackberries.

All of it good sized, all perfect looking and the sort of thing that would sell in the non-organic must look beautiful section of the grocery store.

The sunflowers are mostly about as tall as I am, the infrareds are out, the verigated ones are close behind. The giants aren’t out yet, and it’s getting hard to tell how they’re doing since I can’t see the top anymore. The pole beans have started to have little 1/4 inch beans show up. And the pumpkins are nuts. Huge and sprawly. And not small pumpkins either.