I was going to put something more creative for the title. I was trying to think of what Dragon Warrior (that old NES RPG game) said when you leveled up. I always thought it was grammatically weird...something like "You have increased in level"

Anyhoo, I took my RHCE exam earlier today and just got my results! I passed yay!

Tags: rhce

Lately I've become a huge follower of Above & Beyond's A State of Trance. It can be digested in a number of formats including a podcast. So I've been listening to that on the way to and from work religiously. They play some amazing stuff too! Trouble is, the stuff is almost too awesome. They often play tracks that have yet to be released to the public, which means I have to wait like a month before I can legally acquire the song.

This has happened to me at least three times and it's annoying! I would totally buy up some of these songs in a heartbeat were they available. The chance of me buying them at a later date, while still pretty good, isn't near as good as being able to buy it on the spot. It's quite annoying! And I'm torn. On one hand, it's cool I get to hear really new and awesome trance music. On the other, I can't download it outside of the podcast which makes it hard to enjoy on its own (and difficult to do things like broadcast it on my radio show at work).

Oh well. Beggars can't be choosers :)

Tags: asot, podcasts

I am writing this on my new iPhone! I was a bit worried about the cost of the data plan, but by lowering our voice plan closer to what we actually use, and with my Rackspace discount, it should not go up much. I was surprised that there were still some available, although the Apple store actually had plenty. Yay!

Tags: apple, iPhone

I'm not usually a spontaneous person, but last weekend I made an exception. Brandon, Amy, Corey and I all went to Comedy Sportz San Antonio last Friday. A friend of mine from work does improv there. It was damn funny, by the way! Afterwards we went to dinner and started chit chatting. I mentioned that the IndyCar race at TMS was the next day. We were originally not going to go because Corey and Amy were both going to Sam's bachelorette party. Thing is, Brandon and I didn't have anything to do. In fact, we were talking about just going Go-Karting. Well, when I mentioned I was going to watch the IndyCar race, Brandon asked why don't we just go?

So, we called all the people we could get ticket hook-ups from, ran home to pack, and left at about midnight. We got to DFW at 4am, slept in his truck until 8am until we could get the key to his dad's house (he was out of town) from his neighbor, had breakfast, took a nap, went to Fry's, and went to the race. It was awesome! I took some better pictures this year than last, mostly due to my faster lens, and Brandon got some good video with his camcorder. The race itself we hella bad-ass! Way fun even given that there was a really long green flag run.

We really enjoyed it and, I have to admit, being spontaneous was pretty fun! I might mention more about the race once I finish working on the photos but for now, take my word for it - if you like racing, you gotta go to one of these things! Brandon liked it so much that he said he might even start to follow IndyCar (he's been a NASCAR guy in the past). By the way, Indy cars go way faster then NASCAR cars. I'm just pointing that out :)

Tags: tms, irl

Andy Samberg is a comic genius. I've had Motherlover and I'm On a Boat stuck in my head for days now and they keep getting more awesome the longer they are stuck in my head! I recently bought his album (actually it is released under his comedy troop name, Lonely Island) off iTunes. I wanted to buy the CD but couldn't find it.

Anyways, it's awesome, full of dirty words, and win!

Tags: snl

I ran into a very interesting issue with a customer recently. The customer was storing JPEGs in MySQL (as BLOBs obviously) and was wanting to setup some additional MySQL slaves. Nothing crazy there. So I did the normal steps of scheduling a mysqldump with the --all-databases and --master-data options. Trouble is, the next day when I start importing the dump, 'mysql' bombed up with "ERROR at line X: Unknown command '\0'". I used 'sed' to pull out the lines around the error and didn't really notice anything out of the ordinary. After a bit of Googling, one suggestion was to do a simultaneous backup and restore (basically a "mysqldump .. | mysql -h ..."). In this case, since I was using an existing slave to do the backups, this was something that was feasible to do. Unfortunately, the result was the same.

It turns out that 'mysqldump' will not always product a dump that is always BLOB friendly. To get around this, the '--hex-blob' option must be used. This option causes BLOBs to be written to the dump in hexadecimal notation. That is to say, each byte in the BLOB is converted to a hexadecimal string, thereby making it safe for importing, although this will likely inflate the raw dump by quite a bit. This is the first time I have actually run into this problem so I went ahead and gave this a shot. So far, it seems to have done the trick - the import completed without issue.

The thing I'm curious about, however, is why is this not default? The man page and online documentation also appear to be quite terse in regards to this setting. If it is unsafe to backup BLOBs using mysqldump without this option, seems like it should always be enabled. I would rather end up with a larger dump file (which could be compressed anyway) than end up with a backup that might not be restorable. In fact, while I am on that subject, I also wonder why '--quote-names' is not enabled default...

UPDATE: Turns out, this may have been related to this bug which affects MySQL 5.0.81 and 5.1.34. The issue is when importing a series of large BLOBs in one compound statement. Rolling back the version of the 'mysql' client will resolve the issue. Also, '--quote-names' is, in fact, enabled by default.

Tags: mysqldump, BLOBs

I was thinking about this while trying to go to sleep last night. It's been some time since I saw the final episode of Battlestar Galactica, but it keeps popping back into my head. Why did they choose to end this supremely good show, with all its twists and turns, the way they did? It was completely predictable, which would have been fine by me, except that it was done in a way that just seemed kinda lame. And I've been trying to put my finger on why. I think there where a couple factors, but the biggest one, I've decided, is one thing: balls.

Namely, there were none. After the big climax between the first and second parts of the last episode, everything just became fluffy bunnies and rainbows. I'm not saying that settling on Earth wasn't an appropriate ending. It just seemed more like retirement than an adventure. Everything just fell into place in a predictable and ho-hum manner. It wasn't worth the time I put into watching it, nor the torment of having to go through this over and over again. In fact, I would have been perfectly happy stopping at part 1 of the last episode. That would have been an ending fitting of the series. And, it would have broken the cycle.

The only good thing about the last episode was the montage at the very end. That was actually a neat way to tie in both the song (All Along the Watchtower) and the fact that, yet again, we are repeating the never-ending cycle of humans versus machines. That was clever, and would have been a perfect cap to the story, if it were not for such a shitty way to end things before that point.

If one compares the mini-series and first season to the last episode, I think the point I'm trying to make becomes clear. Unfortunately, the ending is what it is. A disappointment that will haunt me every-time I think of the series. Which is a shame given that the series itself was extremely good.

Tags: bsg

It's been quite a while, but the Internet Ray-tracing Competition has finally been brought back to life! Looks like the new site is under testing. Woohoo!

Tags: pov-ray