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GRAFFITI -- August 16, 2004 thru August 22, 2004>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message. |
 
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August 16, 2004
0654 - Good morning. A busy, fruitful day yesterday. I did three loads of laundry through the day, including the bedding. I sanded and respackled Marcia's office. Then after the week's shopping, I resanded, vacuumed and damp-ragged the whole room. Then I went twice around the room with Killz latex primer, first with brush to do edges and corners, then again with the roller to fill the fields. By the time I'd finished the first coat, not only was the starting point of the first coat dry to the touch, but it was clear that I'd be much happier with a second coat of primer. So twice around I went again. Then I positioned a fan in the window to pull air out of the room, and let Molly in to do her inspection. I cleaned brushes, roller and trays, finished up with the laundry, did a little necessary cleaning in spots around the house, and took my second shower of the day. I was done by 8 PM, quite a bit earlier than Saturday night. Oh, somewhere in there I took the time to walk the dogs for about 30 minutes -- good for all of us.
Then I finally made supper. I broke up the large package of chicken breasts, packaging them in meal portions for freezing and leaving out two. Those I roughly diced and threw into a hot pan with a couple of tablespoons of peanut oil. After cooking the chicken until almost done, I tossed in half an onion, a handful of snow peas, and a handful of baby carrots, along with some teriyaki sauce. Cover and simmer for two minutes, then plate it. Yeah, it's a lot of food, but I was hungry, and only had a donut (maybe two) at around lunchtime. Yummy!
Here's Marcia's first report from the field...
---------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: Sunny Sao Paulo!! From: "Marcia Bilbrey" <[email protected]> Date: Sun, August 15, 2004 10:08 am --------------------------------------------------------------------------Greetings!! I am writing to you now that things are settled a bit-- at least, I'm in my hotel room!!
The trip was long . . . I couldn't get upgraded as I had wanted to because as I was told, I had the wrong kind of ticket. Fine. Instead, they assigned me three seats so that I could stretch out and sleep. No my flight wasn't crowded as I had expected it to be. My guess is that it was less than half full as a matter of fact!!
Visa check-in took about an hour and, Brasilians are separating American citizens because of the crap the US has been giving to Brasilians. (I don't know why we are-- they're certainly a nice enough people!) I had to do a fingerprint and a picture and then, it was on to customs. Of course, I hadn't anything to declare because I had only stepped foot in the country and, as expected, my driver was waiting for me. He held a sign with the company logo on it and my full name-- anybody could've claimed to be me, however, since he didn't ask for ID. Thankfully, no one else did and I was bustled to my hotel.
Ya know what? They don't worry about "13th floors" in Brasilian hotels!! I did feel a little weird about it, however, and asked to be moved to another floor. So here I am on the 14th floor. I've had breakfast and a shower and am cleaned up and waiting for Marli to come to take me shopping and lunch. It'll be good to see her again-- I had met her once before and we've talked on the phone a lot.
Amazingly, I'm not nervous about going to the office tomorrow. I'm excited about it and anxious to get to work! It will be fun to work more closely with them. The meetings with the old and new attorneys are on Tuesday and then Wednesday and Thursday, I am going to concentrate on training Marli and the country manager, Milton, on some things that they can do to speed their contracts through the mill.
I have been playing backgammon online and met a woman from here-- if I have time, I'd like to meet her for dinner one night. That should be fun-- the world is a lot smaller than you think, eh?
Anyway, I'm going to copy this email to Brian and he can link it on his website for an update of the "so far in my trip to Brasil" so if you see it there, don't worry-- you're not seeing double!
Take care and write when you get a chance.
Hugs,
Marcia
In late breaking news, Marli, who works in Marcia's Sao Paulo office down there, is also a quilter. Marcia says now that she's glad that she's going to have that spare suitcase for holding Wednesday's fabric shopping expedition. Now do you qualify that as gathering or hunting???
I think I won't paint Marcia's office tonight. Instead, I'll try to get that blasted Mailbox project done. I'd have been much more efficient about it if I had gone all the way through from start to finish. Additionally, as some of you know, the process of writing stuff down, and making sure that all of the steps are documented takes way more than 2X the time needed to just do a thing. So I'll do my best, it depends in part on my day. I'll start at one customer site, setting up email for a user that's only been using Web2Mail, and now they need to start using LookOut. Then I'll head up to Gaithersburg for the balance of the day, pending any changes. Have a great day yourself, okay?
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August 17, 2004
0702 - Good morning. Yesterday's relaxing day turned out not to be so relaxing. After a successful workaround application (more on this in a moment) at the third client site yesterday, I bailed out an hour early to make life a little easier on the dogs. I got home, the happy dogs bounced around for a while, then I let them roam about in the back yard while I did the poop-patrol. With that done and in the trash, I broke out the mower and took down the back 40 again. With as much rain as we're getting, it's still growing like gangbusters. No summer dormancy, two years in a row. Sigh, but it looks fairly nice. Then I took care of breaking down the cardboard and getting the recycling, front lawn trimmings and trash out to the curb for tomorrow's pickup. Next chore up was washing Molly's ears. She really, REALLY hates ear drops. I can't get them in. I will probably have to pay the veterinary technician to take care of the dog. But I did get the ears and the rest of the dog significantly cleaner - I gave her a bath. She's considerably more energetic than Lucy, and gave me and the rest of the room a bath, too! Then I got in my shower, made burritos for supper, did the dishes and called it good ... at 9:15 PM.
The problem I was running into at the customer site is a client-server program issue. The client portion sits on an x86 box, does image retrievals one after the other from hundreds of web cameras, scales it for the web, then writes it to the webserver, iterating through all of the available cameras. Now the server side has a process that handles two jobs. One is interfacing to the Informix database that has all the active camera information in it. The second job of the server side process is sending requests to switch camera inputs to the right equipment. It's the server side (running on an E450) that's really the problem.
The server process (a Perl program grown organically) forks a child for each requesting client process. If the client keeps the socket open, then the server child process keeps rolling, handling requests for camera switches and database lookups. For the "normal" child process that handles something other than the camera-to-web clients, the child does fine. On the other hand, the children forked to handle the camera requests (a) don't die, and (b) leak memory like a sieve. A running server child forks at about 9M of running space (by the time it's allocated the necessary storage for "cached" copies of the database information). Then with each iteration of the main loop, it seems to leak between 8K and 24K of RAM. Over a 24 hour period, that adds up with those children to about 340M running processes, each. Once, left running without restart over the weekend, the server ground to a halt, out of swap space (eaten by the server children at well over a gig apiece). Yikes!
Yes, I've been through and through the server code. Unfortunately, as I noted, it's organic code ... meaning that it's grown to handle new functions as time has passed. That's right, it's a Swiss Army program, and a real bear. The main loop doesn't SEEM to have any paths leading to a possibility of allocating resources that don't get released again before the end of the loop. Doesn't seem to, that is, except for the pesky memory leak. We had one bandaid on the lashup: a cron job that killed all of the server processes once a day, then restarted the parent server. One by one the clients would reconnect and new children would fork - no more catastrophic swap errors == good! But that is inelegant, and caused problems with some client processes running on Windows boxen that expected the server socket to remain available until notified otherwise.
I thought to myself today, why not have the camera client processes cycle the sockets from their end, once on each pass through the camera list. It's a bit more effort on the server side, since every couple of minutes it has to tear down the old child, then fork a new one and attach to the new port. But by comparison with quickly generating processes with more than 8 integer digits of memory usage, this is a great solution. Longer term, I plan on really understanding the code in question, then one at a time, splitting off the server functions to handle disparate clients with unique, smaller, easier to maintain server processes. But 7 years worth of programmatic accretion won't be replaced in a day, or even a small number of days. One thing I could definitely use a pointer on is any feedback about decent tools (Open Source, please) that I can use to memory profile a Perl process.
As I wound up the "chores" for the evening, I went looking for a way out of the maze I'd let myself into in designing and building the Mailbox. Big mistake ... or not depending upon your viewpoint. I found a better tutorial for you: ISP-style Email Service with Debian-Sarge and Postfix (2.x) by Christoph Haas. This accomplishes all the goals that I wanted for the project, and it appears to work out of the box, from the looks of things. I'll have to actually walk through the whole thing before I can say the magic phrase, "Works for me!" I'll let you know when I've done that and if I have any enhancements to his setup. No, it doesn't use Web-Cyradm, but all of the other bits are there. Give it a go...
Now I'm off to Gaithersburg, then down to Rockville later in the day for a stint at the top of a building, working on resuscitating a recalcitrent antenna controller PC. It might even be fun, if it doesn't get to hot up there... Have a great day!
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August 18, 2004
0711 - Good morning. Yesterday I didn't work on anything I planned on, since there was a problem child in the 25 year old mainframe department. After much hair tearing and gnashing of teeth, we ended up having to execute a power-off restart to get the machine to a known good state. There are three people left in the world who really understand this old stuff, and they've all got Alzhiemer's, I think. But I digress...
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Above, a few more snaps with the new camera. A couple of nights ago, there's Lucy looking up from the stairs on the back porch. Then yesterday morning bright and early, sunrise from behind the clouds while the dogs had their second outing of the morning, after their breakfast. And finally, from yesterday evening, the new color of Marcia's home office walls. It appears a bit uneven because it was still drying at the time of the shot. It looks better now, but still a bit flat - it needs something and I'll figure out what that is, soon enough. That and I'd better finalize the design for the desk surfaces and storage areas pretty soon, too.
I'm not even going to try to guess what I'll be doing today. Thanks for the feedback on the Perl programming stuff, I might try to get into that a bit today. And thanks as well, but no, I haven't heard anything else back about the book yet. I get back to people pronto, then don't hear back for days or weeks. I hate that, and I have a sinking suspicion that I'm not going to like the offer for the advance at all. But then I'd like to be pleasantly surprised. We'll see how it goes. Did anyone else go check out that mailserver HOWTO I posted the URL to yesterday? Any luck?
Okay, time to roll. Have a great day!
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August 19, 2004
0718 - Good morning. I took half a day off work yesterday. After a morning in Gaithersburg, I went lumber shopping and picked up all of the wood for the base units I'll build for Marcia's new desk and credenza. I also got the last trim pieces that I need for the room. Those I primed and painted yesterday evening, along with finishing up painting the balance of the installed trim after taking off the tape. It's coming together, slowly but surely. Tonight I'll work through getting that new trim installed, and start fabricating the desk pieces. Between now and then, I've got XP to install on a machine or two (but not SP2 yet, there's still more testing to be done on client systems - we didn't expect MS to break their own freaking applications, nor those of the major anti-virus vendors). Now to hop in the shower and get out of here, the dogs have breakfasted and been out twice already, and I've finished my morning coffee. Have a great day!
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August 20, 2004
0917 - Good morning. Much of my working day yesterday was spent backing up configuration directories and doing careful updates to production Linux boxen. I also modified a number of backup scripts to include MySQL dumps in their running, and tried to figure out what the best upgrade path is for the several RH8 boxes that are under my care. Fedora Legacy stopped supporting RH8 (and 7.2) a while back, and it's time to get off the stick about finding a way forward again. I suspect in most cases that I'll wait for Debian Sarge to go stable in September, then migrate the services and data to fresh Debian installs.
On the home front, wiring and lighting took center stage. I was in and out of the attic, and working up over my head for most of several hours, and boy am I sore today! It is a very good thing indeed that I was able to just turn the alarm off this morning - I decided to "take today off". Of course, that means I'll work physically much harder than if I'd gone to work, but at least I'll have a hope of getting this office done for Marcia before she gets home next Thursday. I mean, it takes Norm Abrams what, two days to build an entire bedroom suite? It shouldn't take me more than three days to build and finish four base cabinets and two desk surfaces, right? We'll see.
Now on with the day... Have a fun Friday, yes, that means you!
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August 21, 2004
0850 - Good morning. The trim is up, and putty in the nail set holes. Down in the woodshop, I've got all the major cabinet carcass pieces cut to size, and the two desktops cut rough - getting those down to finish size is early on today's project list. But first I'm going to head out to one of the local home centers - I am out of white latex caulk (which I need for the trim-to-ceiling interface) and I'm going to look at pneumatic brad guns. One of those sure would make the whole furniture assembly process easier, and I'll have other uses for the compressor anyway. Fun, but tiring. I was done with dinner by ... um, about 10 last night, and sacked out by shortly after 11. The security system guy came by, and we debugged the latest alarm sensor problem, too. All working fine again, now. Okay, lots of topics, one paragraph, bad form, but I want to get rolling. I need to have all of the furniture assembled and into finishing before the end of tomorrow and that's a bit of a tall order. You have a great day, okay?
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August 22, 2004
0814 - Good morning. More progress...
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I've been a busy boy. By the time I was done with the shopping, and did some more finish work in Marcia's office, it was after noon before I made it downstairs to start working on the cabinets. And you've guessed it - I'm not putting up some of the finished product pictures since I want Marcia to be at least a little surprised with my work. But above are a few of the in-process cabinet making shots. You may recall that I left off with cabinet blanks and desktop roughs. I got the desktop surfaces down to final size, then put them aside again. The next step was to cut the toe kick notch out of all the cabinet sides. So I clamp a piece of guide wood to the fence, and clamp each workpiece upright to the miter fence. Screwed to the front of the sliding table you can see my panel-cutting gauge - that gave me the lead-in distance I needed for the panel final sizing.
Next I set up the stacked dado head blades, and cut all of the shelf dados as well as notching the backs for the rear panels that will make a very late appearance (I willl be cutting the backs to size and finishing them off the piece, then nailing in as the last step). Then I set each of the shelves in place, glued and set with brads from the new pneumatic nailer. The middle picture above is the stack of cabinet carcasses assembled. Then I started trimming out the carcases. All the trim is poplar. There's a face frame, a shelf edge, and a band at the bottom. All glued and nailed, then I applied the wood filler. When that sets, this piece (shown above, right) is ready for sanding, staining and polyurethane. So four cabinets, two desk surfaces, and shelves above. This is going to be a close thing...
I've got the weekly food shopping to do, but not much, since I bought large last week, and froze most of it. Then I'll drop by the home center and pick up a couple of small things (the caulk I forgot yesterday, and more wood filler). Then it's back to the woodshop to finish up the trim on the cabinets and desk surfaces. Then while those setup I'll build the over-desk shelving. Then I'll sand out the cabinets and desk surfaces. Next I'll cut the back pieces for the cabinets and shelving. By then I'll be able to sand out the shelving. Then it's down to finishing. If I get all that done today, it'll be a bloody miracle, but I can dream...
Of course, the phone rings last night... Well, it must have rung, but that would have been downstairs in the woodshop, where I'd taken the main floor phone. So there I am, watching TV with the dogs sometime between 9 and 10 when suddenly Marcia's voice starts talking out of the answering machine base. No phone, no way to let her know I hear her. She leaves a very short message, too short for me to run upstairs and catch anything but dial tone. Argh!! Maybe today...
It's a glorious sunny morning, much of the humidity of the last few days has blown out of here and good riddence, I say! Now I'd best be on my way, lots to do and little time.
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
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