SwimFinsSF

A meme a day or some such thing…

Just got tagged by MJ to do this meme-ey-thing and she basically dared me.. so here ya go lady.. more dirt than ya ever wanted to know! 😉

What were you doing 10 years ago?

January 1996, San Francisco:

The scary thing is that its not horribly different than now. Granted it was a different boyfriend and different digs, and slightly different job, but not like I was moose herding in Alaska… At that time I was still dating my now ex Lance and living in this tackey little apartment in the Haight (though it did have a great view and handy location – but ugly as hell and was tormented by the Landlord’s bitch of a daughter). At the time I was still at Apple however I was working on the Java VM for the Mac OS (Mac OS 9 at the time – MRJ) after having just left Copeland team (10 buck for the first person to know what the hell that was). Not remembering much more than that bout the time..

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The scoop for the record

I figured i’d log what was going on with my blog should someone else hit the problem… The basic problem was a few weeks or a month ago I started getting failures when using ecto to post to my blog. The failures showed up in an ecto error dialog as this:

Parsing Failure!

Could not parse response for “metaWeblog.editPost”. Please check the console log for more information.

Upon inspecting the log I saw this in the console:

500 Internal Server Error

Internal Server Error



The server encountered an internal error or

misconfiguration and was unable to complete

your request.

Please contact the server administrator,

xxx@swimfinssf.com and inform them of the time the error occurred,

and anything you might have done that may have

caused the error.

This stimyed me as the message basically told me nothing about what actually failed… I found a few posts indicating that it might be a file permissions problem on the server so I fixed permissions on every file I could find but that did nothing… I searched and searched and searched and finally thought to look in the server log itself… Server log contained this error

Out of memory!

Callback called exit at mt.cgi line 11.

BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at mt.cgi line 11.

[Fri Jan 6 08:04:04 2006] [error] [client 71.139.13.81] Premature end of script headers: /home/swimfins/swimfinssf.com/mt/mt.cgi

Looking at mt.cgi didn’t tell me anything – that line in the source is the ‘run the blog’ line (i.e. all of MT was run in that line so it didn’t help at all… So then I started googling again. This time I came upon a lone sparse article which indicated that this was caused by the server process running out of memory when trying to access the Berkeley DB databases I was using to store entries. The article indicated that I should switch to MySQL which I did.. and BINGO.. worked like a charm and increased the speed of MT at the same time…

Anyway.. not super interesting but I wanted to post it should some one else start googling after seeing the same errors. Hope it helps someone.

Happy hacking

Lets give this a test

i think I may have FINALLY worked out the server error 500s I was getting every flippin time I tried to post… If this post goes without a hitch then it means that I did. And it means that the server was running out of memory trying to access my entries stored in a berkeley DB database. the solution was to cut it over to a MySQL database. I’ll fill in the rest later (need to go to bed) but it took a lot of poking around to finally figure out what the hell was going on.. uggg.. my kingdom for intuitive error reporting.. jeesh…

Gene Shalit shows he’s a crusty biggot

This morning Kevin TiVo’d a review that Gene Shalit gave of Brokeback Mountain and, not to my suprise, it was … er… um… less than glowing… However what was surprising was the just nasty bigoted tone of the review. Now admittedly I’m a big fan of the movie however I also understand that not everyone will be and that its gonna get bad reviews. I even expect hateful reviews from places like the 700 club and the lot. But a review on NBC’s Today show that calls Jack’s character in that movie a ‘sexual predator’ crosses the line from bad review to being a flat out bigot. The only way you could come to that conclusion was to walk into the movie with an agenda to start AND THEN not pay attention during the movie. I’ve rarely agreed with his crappy reviews to begin with but I guess I’ve never picked up on him being hateful until now. NBC can’t get rid of him fast enough for my tastes…

I’ve got it on my tivo but i’m thinkin NBC’s lawyers will be on my ass if I post it so i’m just ganna hang on to it.. but stop by if ya wanna see it.. Screw it… Here is the clip i’m talking about. Check it out and let me know if kevin and I are overreacting.

Grrrr…. What an ass..

My little sis with her antlers

My little sis with her antlers

Originally uploaded by SwimFinsSF.

Just had to share this pic of my little sis… Cute pic but those antlers really don’t belong on her head.. 😉

Happy flippin new years

Ugggg… So New Years eve was supposed to be mellow… ended up having a couple of friends over to hang out and celebrate rather than going out and dealing with parties, crowds, and all that mess.. Unfortunately, right round noon on Satruday I started feeling like crap. As it turned out I came down with the same damn flu (or cold, or crepping crud, or whatever) that ruined Kevin’s Christmas… I managed to struggle through new years eve without being too much of a martyr (although Kevin did most of the work) but new years day through today I’ve been down for the count… And I feel really sorry for Kevin cuz MAN am I a baby when I’m sick..

Anyway… I’m starting to feel slightly better though I’m still layin low for fear this bitch will come back and smack me again… But I sure do appreciate kevin putting up with my crap…

But seriously – Happy new Years folks! :):)