/dev/caffeine » life

Voted

cflipse — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:45:41 +0000

Popped down the street to my place of voting. Lines were nice and short — for my little chunk of the alphabet anyway. There was another line that was nearly out the back door of the school, but I got right up to the registration desk.

When I got there, they asked if I wanted a paper ballot. Yes, yes and yes! For those who don’t know, those touch screen, paperless voting machines scare the hell out of us programmers, for a variety of reasons that have been well covered elsewhere.

Fill in a couple of bubbles with the provided pen (just a cheap bic) and run it through the scanning machine, and you’re done. No muss, no fuss. And it works if you lose power.

Now, off to spend the rest of the day pretending to work, instead of watching poll results like one of pavlov’s dogs …

A breather, of sorts

cflipse — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 17:47:50 +0000

So, after a marathon at work, we deployed our first delivery of the appilcation I’ve been working on since July. It’s an enterprise application, on a private intranet, so no links. However, it’s fair to say that we’ll be getting hits from a wide variety of sources. It should be good to see how well it holds up.

Right now, it’s deployed using the standard-mongrel-rails-stack ™, using 2 mongrel servers, all on one box. Seems to be holding up very well. As a note, moving your session store off the disc and into the database (ARSeession) does wonderful things for performance. Down side: It appears that a Text field in oracle is capped out at 4096b. Which puts an upper limit on an individual session size. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s likely to bite us in the butt at some point.

To top off the deployment exctiement, I’m buying a house. Closing comes in on Wednesday. We’ve already been through and plotted everything out. New appliances are ordered and on their way, buying up lighting fixtures, picking out paint colors … it’s pretty much all done but the installation, which is scheduled for Friday.

So, after about a month, I finally get a chance to breath. So, what am I doing? Refocusing on Dark Sun stuff. Lots to do there, including actually following through on the site. At least that one will be public …

fireworks

cflipse — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 04:00:28 +0000

So, this fourth of july, I decided to forgoe the usual trip down to *mumble* for fireworks, and instead hang out at home. This seemed to be an especially wise idea when it started pouring down rain at about 4:00 this afternoon.

I live in a highrise, on the eleventh floor. While I didn’t get to see any fireworks shows up close and overhead, I did get to see over a dozen — probably close to twenty — fireworks shows from a distance, including the ones in Washington DC and Leesburg. It was really quite an impressive vista, since most of the fireworks shows started at about the same time… I think I might have gotten whiplash, looking from one horizon to the other. Definately a very interesting view of the night’s events. I attempted to take pictures of the fireworks — if any of them are any good, I’ll post them later.