Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Apart from the Kingdom of the Lord there is not on this earth any nation that is superior to any other. Should it happen that a strong Government finds it may with impunity destroy a weak people, then the hour strikes for that weak people to appeal to the League of Nations to give its judgment in all freedom. God and history will remember your judgment." -- Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia (b. 1892-07-23, d. 1975-08-27), 1936

"Apart from the Kingdom of the Lord there is not on this earth any nation that is superior to any other. Should it happen that a strong Government finds it may with impunity destroy a weak people, then the hour strikes for that weak people to appeal to the League of Nations to give its judgment in all freedom. God and history will remember your judgment." -- Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia (b. 1892-07-23, d. 1975-08-27), 1936

Doing a little better today, but still feel like I'm moving at one-quarter speed, on account of not having been able to stay asleep long enough at a time, last night. Still have way too much to do and fearing too little time to do it in, but this morning I finally knocked off one item I'd been stressing about ...

The automatic QotD-posting script[0] was a little fragile, in that if any one site it was trying to crosspost to was down or really glitchy, the script would get stuck trying and retrying to post to that site and not get to any of the ones later on its list. When this means I have to go thump it by hand when I wake up and the QotD is merely a few hours late some places, that's just a small annoyance. But I didn't want to leave it vulnerable to that problem while I run off to Pennsic, as I won't be logging in all that often and the state of the queue could get rather messed up if the problem were to occur and persist for a few days. So when I woke up this morning after my two hour sleep (*grrr* It wasn't even two solid hours, as odd dreams and odd pains took turns interrupting) and I didn't really feel like I could move much with the way my arms and shoulders hurt, I figured it was time to start banging out code.

The new version is probably more complicated than it should be -- I'm considering it the first draft of the new approach, and if I wind up throwing it away and starting over sometime in August, no biggie -- but in my tests so far it does seem to be working. It fires up several background processes, and each of those does the "try to post, retry if Clive (the client I hacked) returns an error code" loop on its own at the same time as each other; I also made the timeout incremental (well, geometric actually) because my old wait-two-minutes thing was kinda stupid.

(I'd coded the two-minute timeout when most of the errors I saw were brief connectivity glitches and cosmic-ray errors, and a few quick retries usually sufficed, but every so often a site goes offline -- or is still present but broken -- for a few hours or a couple of days, which means that I get a womdigious email message from the cron daemon, full of "failed, trying again" messages, when the problem finally gets fixed or I kill the process by hand, and I'm tying up more resources on the machine where it runs than really do any good (probably not enough for the admins to get annoyed, but it still feels wrong. So now it starts at two minutes and the delay is multiplied by the square root of two each time it fails, so one-time glitches and fairly brief site outages will still result in a successful retry after a very short time, and when a site does down for eighteen to fifty hours, my program will back off to a more reasonable interval instead of banging on the door constantly screaming, "Let me in!" But I should probably put a cap on the delay, and I do need to go fix a bug (or just a missing feature, depending on how you look at it) in Clive, where if the next day's quote does get posted during the previous day's wait-to-retry delay, the one that got delayed won't get posted at all[1]. But even if I don't fix that before I leave for Pennsic, it'll only affect one site at a time, rather than screwing up all of the copies of my journal.)

Anywho, the reason I'm bothering to tell all y'all this[2] is that despite the tests I've just finished running, there's always the chance that I've overlooked some condition that will bite me come 5:25 tomorrow morning. So if tomorrow's QotD doesn't show up on time, or the same quote shows up two days in a row, it's probably because I need to polish the new autoposter.

I've had a bunch of really cool ideas for it in my head for a while, but most of them will have to wait. This change is less nifty, but was something I really wanted to have in place before Pennsic.

[0] Uh, I'm pretty sure most of you have either already heard me talk about this or figured it seemed obvious from the usually-consistent posting times, but every so often I'm reminded that it's not something non-geeks automatically think of as a candidate for automation. Anyhow, sometimes I have two or three days worth of quotes already lined up in the queue, and other times I have two or three months worth set up and ready to go. And the cron daemon is my friend. Someday in the (very distant, I hope) future, this may wind up being a little creepy and upsetting for the rest of you, but until then it's a signficiant convenience.

[1] The problem is that LJ et.al. don't appear to let you just post a backdated entry if a later entry already exists, unless you set a "yes I really mean to do this" bit someplace (the "date out of order" flag), and (as of the version I've got which I think is current) Clive doesn't appear to have any way of setting that bit. So I need to go read up on the LJ API, to learn how it's supposed to be done, and then find the right spot (in a different section of the code than I've been tinkering with so far) to hack Clive to do the right thing. Either that, or give up on trying to backdate delayed posts -- which would mean that different mirrors of my journal would have entries in different orders.

[2] OMG, I must be even more tired than I realized, if I'm thinking in a dialect which uses a singular "y'all" (thus requiring "all y'all" as the plural) -- Sheepie has pointed out (and I think realinterrobang has done so as well) that the more tired I am, the more Southern my accent gets, but "all y'all" isn't even my own dialect. (It's a near enough neighbour that I'm used to hearing it, but it's not one I normally speak ... uh, I think.)

Doing a little better today, but still feel like I'm moving at one-quarter speed, on account of not having been able to stay asleep long enough at a time, last night. Still have way too much to do and fearing too little time to do it in, but this morning I finally knocked off one item I'd been stressing about ...

The automatic QotD-posting script[0] was a little fragile, in that if any one site it was trying to crosspost to was down or really glitchy, the script would get stuck trying and retrying to post to that site and not get to any of the ones later on its list. When this means I have to go thump it by hand when I wake up and the QotD is merely a few hours late some places, that's just a small annoyance. But I didn't want to leave it vulnerable to that problem while I run off to Pennsic, as I won't be logging in all that often and the state of the queue could get rather messed up if the problem were to occur and persist for a few days. So when I woke up this morning after my two hour sleep (*grrr* It wasn't even two solid hours, as odd dreams and odd pains took turns interrupting) and I didn't really feel like I could move much with the way my arms and shoulders hurt, I figured it was time to start banging out code.

The new version is probably more complicated than it should be -- I'm considering it the first draft of the new approach, and if I wind up throwing it away and starting over sometime in August, no biggie -- but in my tests so far it does seem to be working. It fires up several background processes, and each of those does the "try to post, retry if Clive (the client I hacked) returns an error code" loop on its own at the same time as each other; I also made the timeout incremental (well, geometric actually) because my old wait-two-minutes thing was kinda stupid.

(I'd coded the two-minute timeout when most of the errors I saw were brief connectivity glitches and cosmic-ray errors, and a few quick retries usually sufficed, but every so often a site goes offline -- or is still present but broken -- for a few hours or a couple of days, which means that I get a womdigious email message from the cron daemon, full of "failed, trying again" messages, when the problem finally gets fixed or I kill the process by hand, and I'm tying up more resources on the machine where it runs than really do any good (probably not enough for the admins to get annoyed, but it still feels wrong. So now it starts at two minutes and the delay is multiplied by the square root of two each time it fails, so one-time glitches and fairly brief site outages will still result in a successful retry after a very short time, and when a site does down for eighteen to fifty hours, my program will back off to a more reasonable interval instead of banging on the door constantly screaming, "Let me in!" But I should probably put a cap on the delay, and I do need to go fix a bug (or just a missing feature, depending on how you look at it) in Clive, where if the next day's quote does get posted during the previous day's wait-to-retry delay, the one that got delayed won't get posted at all[1]. But even if I don't fix that before I leave for Pennsic, it'll only affect one site at a time, rather than screwing up all of the copies of my journal.)

Anywho, the reason I'm bothering to tell all y'all this[2] is that despite the tests I've just finished running, there's always the chance that I've overlooked some condition that will bite me come 5:25 tomorrow morning. So if tomorrow's QotD doesn't show up on time, or the same quote shows up two days in a row, it's probably because I need to polish the new autoposter.

I've had a bunch of really cool ideas for it in my head for a while, but most of them will have to wait. This change is less nifty, but was something I really wanted to have in place before Pennsic.

[0] Uh, I'm pretty sure most of you have either already heard me talk about this or figured it seemed obvious from the usually-consistent posting times, but every so often I'm reminded that it's not something non-geeks automatically think of as a candidate for automation. Anyhow, sometimes I have two or three days worth of quotes already lined up in the queue, and other times I have two or three months worth set up and ready to go. And the cron daemon is my friend. Someday in the (very distant, I hope) future, this may wind up being a little creepy and upsetting for the rest of you, but until then it's a signficiant convenience.

[1] The problem is that LJ et.al. don't appear to let you just post a backdated entry if a later entry already exists, unless you set a "yes I really mean to do this" bit someplace (the "date out of order" flag), and (as of the version I've got which I think is current) Clive doesn't appear to have any way of setting that bit. So I need to go read up on the LJ API, to learn how it's supposed to be done, and then find the right spot (in a different section of the code than I've been tinkering with so far) to hack Clive to do the right thing. Either that, or give up on trying to backdate delayed posts -- which would mean that different mirrors of my journal would have entries in different orders.

[2] OMG, I must be even more tired than I realized, if I'm thinking in a dialect which uses a singular "y'all" (thus requiring "all y'all" as the plural) -- Sheepie has pointed out (and I think realinterrobang has done so as well) that the more tired I am, the more Southern my accent gets, but "all y'all" isn't even my own dialect. (It's a near enough neighbour that I'm used to hearing it, but it's not one I normally speak ... uh, I think.)

Urgh. After my coding session, I figured I'd really better work on finding out where in the house my various Pennsic stuff has found its way to over the past eleven and a half months. Pulling out piles of tarps, coiling rope, shuffling computer equipment out of the way to get to music books ... problem is, this is one of those "I don't feel too bad until I stand up days, and my arms had that rubbery, "I did way too hard a workout yesterday" feeling before I started. (And no, I didn't do any heavy lifting yesterday, I just feel like a healthy person would if they had done so greatly to excess.) I was doing all of this naked, 'cause the house was really too warm for clothing (and there's nobody here to get offended by the sight of my except Perrine, and she doesn't seem to care[1]), but I was wearing Croc-like shoes because my house is not a great place for bare feed. And the sweat was running down my body and collecting in my shoes. Ick. :-(

(Last night, my cell phone shorted out while I was talking, because my sweat had dripped into it and pooled in the SIM socket.

Then a thunderstorm blew through, traded some temperature for some humidity, tossed in a breeze as a special offer, and the house got significantly more comfortable, at least in the parts where I can open windows. Alas, I've already hit the "about to fall over and knock other things over on my way down" point. If I'd realized the (relative) coolness would arrive so soon, I might have delayed starting the effort. Then again, I don't know whether it would have helped enough, as the heat was just one small part.

I'd hoped to get out to Bowie this evening. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to stay on my feet long enough to shower and walk out to the car. But I did get partway through my packing list, and that's important -- I have a hard deadline for departure, so I can't just take an extra day to pull myself together. Losing all of yesterday was Not Good. (I'm driving a truck out for a merchant, as usual. If I were driving my own vehicle, I don't think I have enough money to pay for the gas. As it is, I'm going to have to be very careful with my grocery shopping, and I don't think I can buy both a tire and groceries. It's going to be an interesting War in certain respects...

...Including trying out a new used tent that syntonic-comma grabbed for me from Freecycle. It's not going to fit on my platform. So my choices are to forget about the platform and having a flat, level floor this year (in addition to not having any money for lumber, I don't think I have the energy for a construction project -- but maybe next year), which also means moving up the hill a bit and forgoing the shade; or hauling the platform anyhow and either letting part of the tent hang off the platform (hoping I don't wind up damaging the floor) or figuring out a way to set it up with one lobe collapsed so that the rooms I wind up using will mostly squeeze onto the platform. It'll be interesting.

I've been trying to figure out where to cut back on stuff I take to War. I realized that part of the problem is that as far as packing goes, I'm sort of ... three people. I pack as a musician, and then I pack as a photographer, and then I pack as a vacationing geek. (Only "sort of" three people, because the garb, tent, bedding, groceries, etc. are still just for one.)

Well, it's time to see whether this sit-down break has been long enough for me legs to recover sufficiently to get me back down the stairs again safely. It's time to refill the bedside bottle of ice-water. And then to decide whether I feel too wobbly to drive to Bowie or not. (I was hoping to raid Mom's pantry for Pennsic groceries, and ask her for money for a tire.)

[looks back over what I've written so far] Yup, procrastinating and really tired.

Tomorrow I get to wrestle Perrine into the cat-carrier. Friday I get to wrestle inanimate objects onto the truck.

Urgh. After my coding session, I figured I'd really better work on finding out where in the house my various Pennsic stuff has found its way to over the past eleven and a half months. Pulling out piles of tarps, coiling rope, shuffling computer equipment out of the way to get to music books ... problem is, this is one of those "I don't feel too bad until I stand up days, and my arms had that rubbery, "I did way too hard a workout yesterday" feeling before I started. (And no, I didn't do any heavy lifting yesterday, I just feel like a healthy person would if they had done so greatly to excess.) I was doing all of this naked, 'cause the house was really too warm for clothing (and there's nobody here to get offended by the sight of my except Perrine, and she doesn't seem to care[1]), but I was wearing Croc-like shoes because my house is not a great place for bare feed. And the sweat was running down my body and collecting in my shoes. Ick. :-(

(Last night, my cell phone shorted out while I was talking, because my sweat had dripped into it and pooled in the SIM socket.

Then a thunderstorm blew through, traded some temperature for some humidity, tossed in a breeze as a special offer, and the house got significantly more comfortable, at least in the parts where I can open windows. Alas, I've already hit the "about to fall over and knock other things over on my way down" point. If I'd realized the (relative) coolness would arrive so soon, I might have delayed starting the effort. Then again, I don't know whether it would have helped enough, as the heat was just one small part.

I'd hoped to get out to Bowie this evening. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to stay on my feet long enough to shower and walk out to the car. But I did get partway through my packing list, and that's important -- I have a hard deadline for departure, so I can't just take an extra day to pull myself together. Losing all of yesterday was Not Good. (I'm driving a truck out for a merchant, as usual. If I were driving my own vehicle, I don't think I have enough money to pay for the gas. As it is, I'm going to have to be very careful with my grocery shopping, and I don't think I can buy both a tire and groceries. It's going to be an interesting War in certain respects...

...Including trying out a new used tent that syntonic-comma grabbed for me from Freecycle. It's not going to fit on my platform. So my choices are to forget about the platform and having a flat, level floor this year (in addition to not having any money for lumber, I don't think I have the energy for a construction project -- but maybe next year), which also means moving up the hill a bit and forgoing the shade; or hauling the platform anyhow and either letting part of the tent hang off the platform (hoping I don't wind up damaging the floor) or figuring out a way to set it up with one lobe collapsed so that the rooms I wind up using will mostly squeeze onto the platform. It'll be interesting.

I've been trying to figure out where to cut back on stuff I take to War. I realized that part of the problem is that as far as packing goes, I'm sort of ... three people. I pack as a musician, and then I pack as a photographer, and then I pack as a vacationing geek. (Only "sort of" three people, because the garb, tent, bedding, groceries, etc. are still just for one.)

Well, it's time to see whether this sit-down break has been long enough for me legs to recover sufficiently to get me back down the stairs again safely. It's time to refill the bedside bottle of ice-water. And then to decide whether I feel too wobbly to drive to Bowie or not. (I was hoping to raid Mom's pantry for Pennsic groceries, and ask her for money for a tire.)

[looks back over what I've written so far] Yup, procrastinating and really tired.

Tomorrow I get to wrestle Perrine into the cat-carrier. Friday I get to wrestle inanimate objects onto the truck.