Checksum Arcanius

My venerable WRT54G (version 1) began giving me all sorts of trouble last night. Accordingly, it has been hard reset and firmware upgraded several times since then. If I screwed anything up, chances are there are services missing that you are used to having. But I think Web, FTP, SSH for both boxes, and Mail are all up. Did I miss anything?

A lot is going on in the next few days:

Friday: School, Drop Mario Off, Work, Dinner with Courtney, Bowling
Saturday: Drop off Mario, Pick up Jones, Ultimate/Frisbee Soccer, Tennis, Capitol Hill Block Party with the King County Libertarian Party
Sunday: Programming Assignment Checkpoint, Dinner with the early-arriving relatives
Monday: School, Work (lots of it), to make up for this week and next week
Tuesday: Family Reunion Begins
Wednesday: School, Family Reunion
Thursday: Family Reunion winds down, Programming Assignment Due
Friday: Hike with a few remaining family members

Then on the 16th, I leave for Provo, to take my brother’s stuff to Lansing, then I go to see Scott. Woohoo.

James D. Bryers wrote:
> Can we “mace” any Bush Supporters ?
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> James D. Bryers, Ph.D.
> Professor
> Department of Bioengineering
> NOTE: NEW ADDRESS !
> Mailing Address:
> PO Box 355061, Foege N310C
> 1750 N.E. Pacific Street
> University of Washington
> Seattle, WA 98195-5061
> TEL: 206.221.58.76.
> FAX: 206.616.97.63. (Shared Facility)

Sure!

Lets meet somewhere; I’ll wear my Bush/Cheney T-shirt and you can “mace” me. Sounds fun!

When is a good time for you?

~Ryan

I had avoided watching M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village mostly due to some terrible reviews I heard. I have liked his previous works, but for some reason became convinced that this one was not up to par. Well, I was wrong. I’m just kind of embarassed that I let movie reviewers influence me so much.

At any rate, I suppose that it is obvious now that I did watch it, and I would recommend it to anyone who hasn’t watched it yet. I enjoyed the suspense — the sense of terror rather than horror that was at times palpable. Well directed, without stunning acting performances, but good enough, and an enjoyable film overall.

4.0 on the Ryan Scale

I must admit that it sure appears that Israel is giving a serious beating to Lebanon, including its civilian population. However, something I heard my Dad say prompted me to look a little closer. Consider the following, published at many a major news outlet (emphasis added):

The level of damage inflicted by Israel appeared finely calibrated. For example, a missile punched a hole in a major suspension bridge on the Beirut-Damascus road but did not destroy it, unlike less expensive bridges on the road that were brought down. An Israeli strike hit fuel depots at one of Beirut’s two power stations — sending massive fireballs and smoke into the sky — but avoided the station itself.

Throughout the morning, Israeli fighter-bombers pounded runways at Beirut’s airport for a second day, apparently trying to ensure its closure after the Lebanese national carrier, Middle East Airlines, managed to evacuate its last five planes to Jordan. One bomb hit close to the terminal building.

Israel is very capable of bringing down expensive suspension bridges and destroying power plants, but all they do it make the bridge unusable right now and make the power plant unable to supply power right now. They want to put pressure on Lebanon — including its civilian population — but they don’t want a long-term humanitarian crisis.

For all of the “opponents” that the Lebanese could be facing, they better be glad they are facing an enemy that cares enough to avoid wholesale destruction. Unfortunately, I believe that it is likely that very few will ever understand Israel’s tremendous restraint.

Last list night, I noticed that my random photos were having issues. Delving deeper, I discovered that my entire photo gallery system was relatively broken. I changed a few obviosuly broken directory pointers, and things started working better. Unfortunately, the main Checksum Arcanius Photo Gallery page was stopping after only a few galleries, instead of displaying all 35 albums, as I had instructed it to. It wasn’t clean either — it appeared that the script had simply stopped running. Furthermore, I noticed that the random pictures script was dying saying that it was running out of memory.

This surprised me, since I wasn’t doing any actual image manipulation, only display of already exisiting images, and the php.ini limit of 8M should have been plenty, I thought, for this. Nevertheless, I tried increasing it, first to 16M. I reloaded apache and then my site. More of the gallery page loaded, but the random block script was still dying, this time using up all of the 16 Megs it was allocated. Never one to give up that easily, I bumped the number up two more times, until it stood at a ridiculous 128 megs. The main page started to work, but the random blocks were still dying from lack of memory.

I decided it was time to try Gallery2 again, even though my last experience was less than stellar.

Bad Idea.

Everything is still wrong with Gallery2 that was wrong with it before. And its a bigger memory hog than its younger sibling (Gallery 1.5) that I am currently using. When trying to import single albums, php died citing too many open files, and the memory usage soared into the hundreds of megabytes. Ridiculous.

So after giving the problem some time off, I came back to it tonight. I bumped the memory allotment up to 320 Megs, updated to the latest Gallery 1.5, and updated my custom random block script. The result was — finally — the random block cache was properly regenerated. I have since dropped the memeory limit back to a more “reasonable” 128 Megs; we shall see if this causes the site to break tomorrow when the cache expires. I tried 32 Megs earlier, but this amount still caused the main gallery page to fail to load completely. This is strange, because when this all was running on oasis (it has since been moved to frankenputen) the 32 Meg limit there worked fine, and I never had any issues. Could it be Ubuntu’s Apache or PHP is less efficient?

At any rate, I have decided that not only is Gallery2 still terrible, but Gallery 1.5 is not all that either. My plan is to develop my own photo gallery solution this summer,

My roommate Adam had the birght idea of leaving his computer on playing music, locking his door and window, and then leaving the house (although I didn’t figure that out immediately). Even though it was annoyingly loud, I didn’t give a fuss until I was ready to go to sleep a few minutes ago. I went and knocked, recieving no answer. So I knocked louder. Still no answer. At the suggestion of Kunlun, I checked outside, and sure enough his Jeep was gone. I called him, and he didnt answer. So I tried for a while to drown out his music with my own — which worked, but wasn’t a successful way to get to sleep. Finally, I had had enough. I gave one more series of knocks which could not be ignored, then told my other roommates “I’m going in,” which I proceeded to do. Hollow doors are depressingly easy to kick open, I have learned. Moments later, his speakers were off, his comptuer shut down, and his audio cables unplugged. The door even closed and locked afterwards, although it was somewhat worse for the wear. He might not notice, but for the angry message I left on his phone where I ended with “and no, I won’t pay for the door.” Mind you, this is before I had made the decision to go in. I don’t know if I would have used such fighting words had I already done it.