Four days of work for 0.8% improvement

interdubs technology

Four days of intense work for less than a percent of improvement sounds not like a great use of my time. But I am actually very happy about the outcome: I was able to increase the success rate of clip meta data detection in INTERDUBS by 0.8%. This is great since it went up from 98.8% to 99.6%. Or looking at it from the other end: two third of all flawed detections were and will be corrected with the improved code. One of the benefits of having 100,000s of clips online is to be able run simulations and stats while improving the code. There is a wide variety in what people like to use as their encoding and file format. I’d rather do some more -invsible- work on the backend than to lecture my clients on how exactly they should encode their files. There are recommendations. Sure. But why fail if you don’t have to?

Even though this application of Grubers Broken Windows is seemingly invisible, in the end it certainly is not: A well running system just needs less support per client. Actually so far I was able to decrease the total time spent on support. Despite the fact that the client based tripled last year.

keyboard illumination control

Apple

Couldn’t read the keyboard under the current lighting conditions. And manual controls for changing it did not work. Enter: Lab Tick.

45 seconds later it’s all good again. Very nice when stuff just works.

iPhone support and when people had it

interdubs

INTERDUBS supported the iPhone 40 days after it came out. Last week Wiredrive came out with their iPhone support. Graphically that looks like:

I don’t think that much can be gained by not acting quickly. At this point my clients have already solid experience with their clients in how to use the iPhone, and how not to. We could make good use of those twenty months.

pretty picture

interdubs

In an act of ‘active procrastination’ (aka as coding things that nobody needs / wants in order to avoid real work) I wrote a view on my database that would sum up the number of INTERDUBS clients over time.

I was very suprised to find the (somewhat smoothed) result to identify so clearly both growth phases that INTERDUBS had so far. In the beginning I did have only a very very rudimentary public website and growth was only word of mouth. This was intended so that I could spend enough time on the needs of everybody that came on board.

Once what people needed was pretty well covered I made the public site a bit more meaningful and growth increased. Nicely enough support efforts have remained on a constant level: New users need a hand here or there. Often enough it is possible to avoid issues from being repeated by adjusting the code to what the users do expect.

enabling NFS server for OS X Server

misc

In server admin after I had turned on the NFS service I still found a status like:


nfs service is: running
nfsd is: stopped
portmap is: stopped
rpc.lockd is: stopped
rpc.statd is: stopped

Turns out that the other daemons spring into action once you share the first Volume.

learning from history

linux

shells keep a history. The default seems to be to keep 1000 lines. I have not found a reason to make this huge. And while at it time stamp it as well:


HISTFILESIZE=2000000
HISTSIZE=100000
HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T '
export HISTTIMEFORMAT HISTSIZE HISTFILESIZE

in your .bashrc will keep 100,000 lines (2MB “omg” ) of history around and will also time stamp it nicely. That and the grep command make for some nice shortcuts on memory lane.

configure: error: Kerberos libraries not found.

linux

When I wanted to build php with imap it did complain about:


configure: error: Kerberos libraries not found.

Turns out that this some fallout from lib64 vs. lib differences. So I found
this blog explaining exactly what was going on. Very helpful. Especially the


sh -x ./configure ...options go here...

trick can be very very helpful in the future.

gray screen on boot up, posix_spawnp /usr/sbin/mDNSresponder no such file or directory

Apple technology

an OS X server got unhappy and seemingly did hang on bootup on the gray screen with the rotating ‘progress’ indicating.

Booting it with text mode enabled (holding command V) revealed that the machine would loop with the following error message snippets:


posix_spawnp ... /usr/sbin/mDNSresponder ... no such file or directory

ls -lsd /
0 drwxrwxr-t 43 root admin 1530 Dec 20 03:57 /

Booting into single mode (command -s) and then doing the suggested fsck and mount -uw / revealed that the permissions actually were set to:


drwwrx---

Meaning that others have not even read permissions. This makes the mDNSresponder seemingly unhappy. I would guess that it quickly gives away its root privileges after launch for security reason. Running what the internet suggested


chmod 775 /

did fix the issue.

.exrc not working in OS X 10.5.6

Apple technology

I have no idea why, and it os most likely me. But traveling with the same user to another laptop .exrc stopped being looked at for vi. Strange. .vimrc still works. So I put my settings in there and continued to work. Not sure what’s going on. Not time to investigate.

#5 wins

Apple technology

So now I am on laptop number 5 ( Titanium, 12″ G4, 15″ G4, iBook G4, 15″ first gen Macbook Pro) and I am considering to get a second one to put it away so that I can keep on using this kind of machine once I have worn this one out. Storing a computer for 4 years before you use it for the first time is a stupid thing. I still consider it. Apple might have peaked with this machine.

I got a refurb Al 17″ (pre unibody) and it works like a dream. It’s non glossy 1920×1200 screen is gorgeous. Hey even the trackpad works, and the keyboard is a match to the fingers. All things I didn’t like about the unibody flavor. And the price is pretty sweet for a 4GB Ram (nice one) 300GB drive machine I paid $2100.

Being able to drive a 30″ screen and the better sound of the built in speakers are other benefits that I did not consider but certainly appreciate. And the thing is cool. The 15″ was heating my fingers. But only when it was cold. I hope this gfx card lasts longer than the one in the machine before.