Archive for June, 2007

Dodged a Bullet

By | 30 June 2007 | Rant, Technology | 3 Comments

Always make sure that when you are running a web server locally, that you are running everything as the web user. Up until recently I just had it running as myself, because it was quick to setup, and I did not want to screw with it.

Well, after just watching my screen get flooded with permission denied errors as php trying to “rm -rf /” me, I am glad that I recently set it up correctly!

Also, make sure that when you are using a piece of a framework you did not write, make sure that it checks to make sure the path you are sending it to delete is valid, not just the root of the entire system.

Good grief.

Up to Date

By | 29 June 2007 | Humorous | 1 Comment

This site is more up to date than vanlandw.com.

Update: This site is once again, king of the hill.

Which came later? The chicken, or the egg?

There is nothing cool going on today (6/30)

Harsh Mistress

By | 27 June 2007 | Rant | 2 Comments

Michigan really needs to learn how to moderate its season better. From my perspective, there are essentially two seasons in Michigan: winter and summer. Granted there is usually a week or two that you could consider Spring and Fall, but not enough to notice. But, I digress.

Today is one of those miserable stifling days that occur just to break your spirit. In Grand Haven we are experiencing the cruel trade off of living next to the lake. AKA, slightly lower temperatures with dramatically higher humidity.

After I lifted weights today, I ran down to the end of the pier from the Y. If you ever want to see effect of the lake in full effect, do that some time. You can tell the different as you as you take about five steps off the pier. There was probably around a 10-15 degree difference in air temperature between the Y and the end of the pier.

It annoys me to think that just a few months ago my nerves were frayed from driving in white out conditions.

Doing Lines

By | 24 June 2007 | Humorous | 3 Comments

vanlandw cat

Wes, I think you need to keep a better eye on the cats.

Where MacBook’s Go to Die

By | 24 June 2007 | Technology | 4 Comments

OS X 10.4.10

Last week I was attacked by the “you don’t always need to upgrade to the latest version” theory.

Shortly after I upgraded to 10.4.10 on my MacBook, things began to rapidly slow down. My system monitor would register < 10% CPU utilization, and 73% of memory was free. So, the machine should have been blazing. But, it wasn’t. In fact, it was going slower than my 1 GHz model. I started to run diagnostics, and discovered some serious corruption on my HDD.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find my old license key for DiskWarrior, so I had to shell out the full $100 to get the latest version. Regardless, like always, DiskWarrior did the trick. The only problem was that it happened again, almost immediately afterward. So, I had to screw around some more to figure out the problem.

It appears that 10.4.10 corrupted my kernel cache, as a result of this corruption, the OS was screwing up my file system something fierce. So, I did the next logical thing, purge everything cache for everything on my system. :wink:

After purging everything, I fixed the file system again, and then ran all the standard maintenance scripts. Now everything is back up and running normally, thankfully.

Beware unneeded system updated. There be gremlins about!

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