Moving On
I had originally planned a much more tasteless title for this post, but in light of recent events, I had to change it.
So I spent the last few weeks feverishing working on my Database Systems work. I had a project due, an overly lengthy assignment due the following day, and the final exam the following week. As if that weren’t enough, I had decided this was going to be the exam I was going to give one more shot at, so I signed up for the qualifier. That was yesterday.
Let’s see, after I received an A in the Databases class, I took 7 days off total to study for the qualifier. I spent an average of 8 hours a day studying. I rewrote all of my lecture notes into a huge pile of flash cards, about 200 of them. Then I reread the book (2 and a half times total). Then I worked through all of the problems that had solutions available. Then I worked though other university exams. I found this treasure trove of tests for similar qualifiers over at Stanford. University of California at Berekely had a nice stash of exams as well (few mistakes though). I practiced working under time constraints. I polished my SQL skills though there are MANY ways to answer problems usually.
In the end, the exam was over before I knew it. 90 minutes was barely enough time to come up with answers, not to mention check my work for mistakes, which were bound to be made. Plenty of people were still there with about a minute left. I’m really hoping that other people had a hard time finishing, even though there were only 4 problems. I also found out there were several people (of the large 18 person group taking it) who had not just taken the course. They all had studied material from the reading list the professor said would not be on the exam (decided to exclude it and I asked him about it). I wasn’t too surprised about the questions, but I’m hoping the other students were.
The reason why I had to change the title of this post was because I originally was going to name it “Another One Bites The Dust.” Last week, I finalized my plans to make a surprise visit to see my grandmother, aunts, and mother in Kansas for their Mother’s day get-together. However, in the last few days, my grandmother’s health has taken a serious turn for the worse. She’s dying of many complications, but she is unable to fight off pneumonia right now. My aunts all decided to remove the oxygen supply and let her pass away. They took her off today and she is likely to pass within the next few days. Her birthday is on the 18th.
I might have to fly out a little early tomorrow, depending on my grandmother’s health. Meanwhile, Sunshine has traveled to the last of rising stars (LA) to be with her friend for graduation. I have the house all to myself and all I want to do is watch Detroit crush Dallas, again.
Happy Birthday Indeed
Today I turned 26. I am almost half my parent’s age, and I was born at 1:15 PM on a Cinco de Mayo. Today was a surprisingly good day.
It started off by getting a surprise from sunshine. She apparently hurried while I was out running yesterday (amazing weather) and blew up over a dozen balloons and placed them in my car. She also put my birthday card in there as well. She pulled a fast one on me; I’m impressed she did it without raising any suspicion. She also informed me that I will be receiving a pair of custom Oakley sunglasses (I’ll be getting the polarized black iridium with carbon fiber frame) to make my summer a great one.
I missed the vanpool, but I found my grade in my Database Systems class. I received an 88 of 100 on the final (to match my 80 of 100 on the midterm), which beat the average by 14 points. I was basically gauranteed an A at that point, which I was informed of when I met with my professor. We discussed the material for the qualification exam and he is omitting the material I understood the least!
Unfortunately, on the way to the campus, I had to break up a fight. You’re probably thinking, “who would I catch fighting?” As I waited at a stop light near campus, I saw one guy beating the holy snot out of a smaller guy. When I say beating the tar out of him, I mean the smaller guy had been hit so much and so hard he couldn’t keep his balance and actually fell into traffic. I pulled over and yelled at the guy doing the thrashing to stop and it became clear he had a serious case of ‘roid rage. Even though he was trying to talk to me, he was yelling. The smaller guy’s face had litterally been beaten to a pulp. If another guy and myself hadn’t stopped it, there would have and may still be, a death because of this. The smaller guy climbed out of what we thought was his car and into the car next to it and drove off while we were calling 911. The cops never showed and neither guy had stuck around. I hate to think the smaller guy died of such a bad head injury.
My family made sure to call me just after sunshine and I enjoyed some killer home-made Mexican food. We stayed in and enjoyed some House on TV.
Lastly, I just found out that Nine Inch Nails has released a new album. To make things even sweeter, when you register, you can receive the FLAC copy completely free of charge! What other musicians do that?! I have finished downloading the FLAC (not the MP3) version as I type this.
Happy birthday to all of you out there who had a birthday, and congratulations Mexico on the sweet victory over the French.
New Shoe Smell
I finally bought a new pair of running shoes last weekend. I have been using the Brooks Adrenaline GTS for a while; I’ve gone through 3 pairs now (on the 4th).
I went to my local Run On! and pestered the saleswomen to fit me for various shoes like I do every year. That is, once a year, I go to Run On! and try on a bunch of shoes to see if any of them suddenly fit and feel better than my last pair. Every time so far, I’ve kept with the Adrenaline because they fit like a glove and I have yet to experience any pain. Granted, I keep the milage at or under 30 a week right now and I stick with a reasonable pace, but I put them through the ringer. The last pair I just switched from had turned a dingy brown and have been worn through about 700 miles or so (had them since last August). Around January, I had to start using my expensive inserts to prevent injury. I always get lectured about how I should replace them every 400 miles, but like the dentist telling me to floss, I usually blow it off.
Well, I have a confession to make. Every time I buy a new pair of shoes, I spend a while sitting in front of the TV smelling them. The smell of new shoes is exhilarating, intoxicating even. I’m not sure what it is about the smell, but brand new shoes smell so good to me. Perhaps it’s my brain realizing the smell as a vision of all of the miles and meditation ahead of me. I feel like Cinderella would if she bought a pair of glass running shoes instead of slippers and found that the prince was a runner as well. I bet he couldn’t get 700 miles out of glass running shoes though.
The best part of new shoes: the joy of feeling like Superman again for a few weeks while they wear in.
Save More History
For the longest time, I’ve put up with grief with the bash history when using multiple terminals. It never seemed to store the history to ~/.bash_history properly. I never invested the time until this morning when I had to find a command in my history for the 100th time only to find that it wasn’t there.
After searching around Google for a while, I eventually stumbled on this gem. Moral of the story: unset HISTSIZE for unlimited history, set histappend to always append the history and not overwrite it, and modify your PROMPT_COMMAND to flush each command to the history file.
Now, in following the spirit of showing the latest in the history, here’s mine:
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
82 ls
81 cd
40 eix
30 vi
28 svn
22 ps
21 dmesg
14 killall
12 su
10 gphoto2
Bear in mind, this only had the default 500 lines before today, so the history is only the most recent commands. I’ll do an update some months from now when my history file grows to an enormous size.
Removing The Cruft
So after using Gentoo for some 5 years now, I’ve learned there are many ways to manage the cruft on my system. I usually use eix and sift through what it shows as installed. When I find something that I don’t think is being used anymore, I check it with equery depends. If everything looked fine, I removed the package and checked the system by using revdep-rebuild.
There is an option (-i IIRC) that will show all installed multi-slotted packages. That is, if you have 6 versions of the kernel installed, it will show you them. This is a pain in the ass if you manage 1 system for 4 years as I have. I have not done in install in a very long time, but instead update my system on a near monthly basis using Gentoo’s Portage system. The downside is it has the tendancy to leave old unused crap on your system.
Then I discovered a tool that was handy at detecting old packages, even old slotted/unused packages, and removed them. Udept is a rather satisfying tool to stumble-upon. It is very adept at identifying unused junk and cleaning your system of it. It has options to purge the system, perform a recursive dependency check, prune your world file, and much more. While I’m not entirely sure I want to maintain a slim world file, the rest of the tool’s capabilities are inferior to none. Granted, it collects much of the capability that is already present with the gentoolkit, but those tools are loosely banded. Udept neatly ties all of that up into one sweet package that can help you keep the crap off your riced-out desktop or server. Best of all, it’s in portage.
After running it for the first time, it found about 3 dozen packages that I agreed needed to be removed. Give it a whirl, and enjoy never having to install your OS again.
Netbeans Married To Subversion
So this week, I tried out theNetbeans module for Subversion repositories. I’ve used the CVS module before with a great deal of success before, so I was somewhat shocked to have so much trouble using Subversion.
Mainly, the problem I had was with user account authentication. To commit about 10 files and a few directories, I had to authenticate around 15 times, occasionally several times per file. It took me about an hour to import a basic project. The repository location is not the base path, similar to the Create New Project path, but rather the actual directory name the files are committed directly into. That is, if you select http://repo/folder and try to commit the files alpha and omega from source directory orig, you will get http://repo/folder/alpha and http://repo/folder/omega. That doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, but at least it will build correctly as a fresh checkout.
I was also somewhat upset to discover the Java herd for Gentoo has apparently decided not to provide any mechanism for downloading the Netbeans modules similar to all sorts of other applications and their plugins (gstreamer anyone?). I installed the module from the official Sun repository, so I hope they’re placed in the .netbeans folders.
Extra WordPress Plugins Script
File this one under just-in-case-your-run-into-this category. I have been running WordPress from the svn repository for a while now and was just recently burned. I found that I could no longer enable or disable plugins. I was just given a message that the action failed, with no reason whatsoever.
If you see this, the quick solution is to check if you have a wp-content/plugins/plugins.php file. For some reason, I had this lying around; it should instead be using the wp-admin/plugins.php. Removing this file gives you the new fancy plugin page.
The strange thing about this is I had to dig around in the code to find what the real file should have been. Why it was loading that incorrect file, I have no idea. No one else seemed to report this problem, so I figured I’d mention it here so perhaps the Google Sitemap would help others find this solution.
Update: As I posted that, I found out the hard way that ask.com is no longer working with the Google Sitemap. If you are using this plugin, disable this in the Settings page.