Temptation Of Saint Aqualung

In a nutshell

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:42:00 +0300

xbtt sucks. I'll write more when the project is finished. Stay tuned.

Well, maybe it doesn't suck so much, but it:

is not a silver bullet
have some major design flaws

Checklists

Thu, 06 May 2010 03:52:00 +0400

They are totally useless. Unless you have to perform a certain task. If you don't list every little thing you have to do to achive your goal, you may miss a teeny-tiny part, like updating fstab after moving directories. And end up screwing with the server all night long instead of 10 minute job.

BTW, if you use pygrub with Xen, extra won't work and you won't be able to boot domU in single mode, for example. You'll have to specify kernel and ramdisk and comment out bootloader instead.

As Simple As That

Thu, 06 May 2010 01:50:00 +0400

It is that simple. You don't need to wait for people to start writing interesting stuff. You don't have to dig through forum posts searching for news people post whereever they feel like.

Just set some rules for participation and ask people to follow them.

Stop listening to those saying «Give people place to share thoughts, and they generate tons of content». I've been trying to do that for years. Forget about motivation. People are not traffic, they're individuals. Communicate. Ask.

Bedtime Physics

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 16:02:00 +0300

I woke up this morning and saw a note written by my hand, although I don't remember it: «Doppler's Effect».

I guess, some thought crossed my mind when I was falling asleep, and I hoped I could finish thinking when I wake up.

Alas.

Back to RentACoder

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:27:00 +0300

I've stopped freelancing for a while again, and now I'm back to it one more time.

I missed it. I left RAC over 2 years ago becase of several reasons. Most important are:

No challenge

When I stated there, it was all new and exciting for me. Finding clients, persuading them to hire me, working on real things I only tried on localhost before... But them I gained enough experience and improved my skills. Most projects looked boring for me. Others were too cheap (I know, a gig's a gig, but working for $20 overnight isn't so pleasing anymore).

Stability

I was working for two guys I met on RentACoder, Leif and Matt. They paid me enough so I didn't have to search for more projects. Also I found a full-time job which also paid off pretty well. I had enough money and enough work and also some free time: why would I need too work more.

Concurrency

Well, my skills are good. My rates are acceptable. But by the end of 2007 RAC was invaded by thousands of cheap Indian coders. I just couldn't compete with their rates. No offence to good coders from India: they had even harder time fighting both their cheap inexperienced colleagues and a stereotype about cheap coders...

But recently I moved from my parents house and could really use a couple extra bucks. And also I suddenly had much more free time (I still have no explaination for that!), so I though: Why not? And RAC was much better this time: more interesting projects, less scriptkiddies (I made 8 bids in first two days and won one) and decent prices. I'm glad and excited.

It's good to be back.

Strange keyboard layouts in virt-manager

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:15:00 +0300

If you use virt-manager with kvm (and likely other virtualization technologies, too, but I only tried it under proper circumstances with kvm), you may experience some keyboard layout-related problems. For instance, I got «>» sign instead of forward slash. This problem may appear when you use some non-standard (or even any non-«en-us») layout on your host system.

The solution is simple:

remove Graphics device represented by VNC server
add a new one, but set keymap to «en-us» instead of leaving it “same as host”.
restart you guest

(As of virt-manager 0.8.2, you cannot change VNC server settings, only remove it and add a new one)

Ok, NOW It Is Winter

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:44:00 +0300

That snow I mentioned in October went off really fast, and then there was sad sunless cold dry autumn. Simply terrible. Finally, it's snowing again.

Lots of thing changed since then. I moved and finally live alone. It's too late to keep living with parents in 24. And a lot of other things I can't recall now :)

It's Officially Winter Here

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:51:00 +0300

Ok, here's the first snow. No more cycling 'till April. Time to hibernate.

rsyslog

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:02:00 +0300

It's unique. What's it's uniqueness, you ask me? I'll tell you what is it. rsyslog's man page is more clear and easy to understand and to start with than documentation at it's website.

Heartbeat

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:01:00 +0300

We've grown enough to need high availability solution, so the first thing I've tried is Heartbeat. It turned out enough for now (although, I'll have to update a few init scripts), and I'll write a mini-howto on running Heartbeat inside OpenVZ container as soon as I have enough time for that.

For now, just one hint. If your node doesn't come up when it should, and /var/log/ha-log contains the following:

Setup problem: Couldn't find utility /bin/gawk

then it's most probably not really about gawk (it's very hard to find Linux system without gawk). It may also mean that you don't have which installed, while Heartbeat's scripts use it to find a real path to gawk. It's not that common, too, actually, but, for example, some OpenVZ templates do not include which package.

So, yum install which (or vzyum $VEID install which) brings you happiness.