Checksum Arcanius

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.

Go get ’em.

Ryan: I hate retard roommates
Joe: what’re they up to?
Ryan: ok, I grab some milk
Ryan: and its not cold. I’m like, wtf mate
Joe: uhh
Ryan: so I go back to the fridge. Someone has it turned all the way down. its been that way for at least a couple of hours, judging by the temperature of my milk (not warm, but not cold)
Joe: why…
Ryan: and I think I figured it out. The roommate thinks “1” is coldest
Ryan: when clearly, “9” is the coldest
Ryan: there’s no other reason for it to be there, as he just put his own stuff in there
Joe: umm…
Ryan: anyway, I know that if I were to bring it up, the roommate who is to blame would get defensive, so its really not worth it
Ryan: so its back to normal, but omg retard roommates
Joe: wow
Joe: good job him?
Ryan: and my milk fscking isn’t cold
Ryan: I’m pissed off
Ryan: I only like cold milk
Joe: well.
Joe: yea
Joe: who like semilukewarm milk?
Joe: that’s nasty
Joe: hot milk is ok
Ryan: yeah, just above that temperature where its not quite cold
Ryan: so, its above above cold
Ryan: not even just above cold
Joe: yeah
Ryan: meh
Ryan: anyway
Ryan: how’s your fridge?

I saw the second Pirates of the Caribbean with Scott Torborg last night. It was nice to see it get fairly good reviews from the general movie-going audience (who I trust far more than the critics), so I was looking forward to it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t at all what I expected. It was not a bad movie, necessarily, but it had none of the lightheartedness that made the first one so endearing. It was indeed much darker; as I heard someone call it, “Pirates of the Caribbean 2: The Empire Strikes Back.”

However, I’m torn as to whether darker was really necessary here. Certainly it made the movie seem less flippant and more important; but that isn’t really what I was hoping for. I wanted to feel good at the end of the day, not pensive. Alas, it was not to be as the darker side of human nature reared its ugly head again and again.

Certainly some of the nastiness of the opening scenes was completely unnecessary, and almost all of the humor seemed to be a reference back to the first film, which actually was funny in its own right. Also, there was too much to get done in the story that tried to hard to do too many things at times that it frayed at the edges. And although I didn’t like the major choices made by the characters (by design, I am sure), it is also, ultimately, what made this movie work at all: The fallibility of all is perhaps the greatest uniting theme of humanity.

Which brings me to the World Cup. Italy beat France, while I was rooting for France. But more shocking than the loss to Italy for us Francophiles was the loss of Zinidine Zidane to red card for a truly absurd foul in overtime. A great player, who seemed to be always cool under pressure, the captain of a team of veterans, made perhaps the greatest mistake of his career in his final game. So how does this fit in with the Pirates? Well, as I see it, we all make mistakes — and we all deserve a shot at redemption. I hope Zidane proves to be apologetic and conciliatory, and I believe him doing so will help him be remembered for his wonderful career instead of his final moments of competitive soccer. And Elizabeth Swan, Norrington, Barbosa, and company will get their chance at the redemption in a year or two as well.

Is, of course, being able to commit minor “crimes” without worrying about getting caught. Since cops never come here, my roommates and I felt pretty confident exploring the explosive qualities of Everclear (190 proof alcohol) and depth charge firecrackers. It turns out that everclear, while it burns very well by itself, and fuses, while they burn very well by themselves, do not burn well when combined. It was a sad night in Seattle indeed.

I’m a little embarrassed at how long it took me to figure out the I-90 express lanes. Having grown up on the Eastside, I thought all express lanes were like I-90’s: always going the wrong direction, generally space that could be better used for traffic going both directions (by adding an additional lanes to each side), or perhaps not even there at all. Later on, I learned that I-5’s express lanes generally work better. But this still left me confused about the real purpose behind I-90’s express lanes.

A while back, I figured it out. An image I saw in the Seattle Times today confirmed what I had been thinking. From Sound Transit via the Seattle Times:

This digitally manipulated photo by Sound Transit shows a proposed light-rail system that would run alongside I-90 across Lake Washington.

(Further edited by yours truly.)

And I even like the walkway.