Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

After over a month outage, I am happy to say that all the eTango blogs are back up and running. We suffered a malacious attack that destroyed the disk partition that had the MT database stored on it. We were bad, bad people and didn't have a backup of the data. Luckily the actually output directory of the web sites was on a different, unaffected partition. Taking these files and some custom Python scripts to parse the files and reinsert them into MT using their XML-RPC API. It was quite the experience and gave me good practice at regular expressions and using Python's xmlrpclib. On top of this attack, Billy's apartment (where this site is hosted) lost ADSL and POTS service for almost 5 days. That sucked complete ass. Hopefully the next outage will be long coming and that we will have successful backups in place by then.

The blog's not up for more than a day and we already got a piece of comment spam. Unbelieveable.

test. test. test. Just seeing if the entry in the sidebar wraps to the next line or overflows to the left.

Every year, my mother's side of the family gets together just south of Myrtle Beach, in Garden City, SC. We have been doing this for well over 15 years. The crowd ranges from 20 -30 people ach year and is a great way for everyone to catch up. Garden City is perfect for this since it features large ocean side houses for rent and provides some semblance of privacy. There are some people on the beach but not like what you see in Myrtle Beach proper. Also, Garden City is just minutes away from Murrell's Inlet, SC which has some fabulous seafood resturants.

Of course, more pictures are available.

Tim Bray has posted a nice piece of nostalgia for the IBM 360 Mainframe. Although, I am much to young to have actually used one of these machines it does have a special place in my heart. In colleges, this was the instruction set we used in our assembly language class (programs were run on a simulator running on a VAX machine, but that is another story). Somewhere in my files, I still have one of the green cards he mentions in the article. The class was a real eye opener for me (and the rest of the class....a lot of them were rethinking their choice of majors).

Nowadays I don't want to touch assembler of any sort but I still look fondling back on that semester for some reason.

In the process of getting this site back up in running, I ran into an issue with my scripts to reinsert the blog comments into the database. My first comment would go through, but subequent ones were blocked. Turns out that the latest version of MT 2.x includes a comment throttling system. This MT support form post gives a good explanation on how to modify or disable the comment throttling. In my case, I just had to disable the throttling while I ran my script and then turned it back on when I was finished.

4th of July weekend was partially spent watching the Reds battle the Indians. It was so long ago that I don't remember who won. I do remember having a good time. Oh yeah, and there was fireworks (but my pictures of that were awful).

More pictures are available.

Barb had us over for a little cookout. Much chicken was consumed. Angela and I brought Sophisticated Spinach Salad (I should post the recipe for that).

More pictures are available.