From time to time I was getting the "[INFO] Error installing artifact: [your file name here] (Input/output error)" error message from Maven. It started happening at seemingly random points during maven builds but it seemed to favor bonking on large zip/war files. Then I started seeing "Result too large" errors. At that point I made sure I had a clean backup on the sever, rebooted, and crossed my fingers.
My machine failed to boot. It just sat there with the black and white whirly thingy Mac startup screen.
I chalked the problem up to I/O gremlins from the planet Zorng, so I called my IT group, who dropped the Disk Utility and Disk Warrior bombs on my SSD. After they were done, I had to manually refresh my Spotlight index, which took a few hours, but then things were back to normal. One other thing I learned: don't let IDEA attempt to re-index files until *AFTER* you've let Spotlight update its own index.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Ice dam prevention time!
The neighbors must think I'm a bit nuts for how often I rake snow off the roof. At least that's what I thought until I saw the guy across the street actually climb up on his roof in January with a shovel and start shoveling it off. I use a very long roof rake to clear snow and I stand on the ground. Getting up on an icy roof in January in New England strikes me as suicidal, but anyhoo...
When the weather is super cold, there's really no point in clearing the snow off the roof because it forms a nice, solid icy barrier. This is actually a handy type of insulation...but when things start to thaw, that's when the ice dam beast can appear. By that time, it's impossible to clear the snow off the roof because it has hardened to a solid icy mass. Even if you did chip away at it, you'd likely start hacking off roof shingles along with the roof, throwing out the baby with the bathwater as they say. So you gotta rake the snow off the roof when it's nice and fluffy. Otherwise, you're screwed come spring or that ever unpredictable February deluge of 3" of rain and 60 degrees (followed by another month of temperatures in the teens of course--welcome to New England).
So my advice is: roof rake early and often. Gently bash ice and snow out of the gutters whenever possible. You'll get no payoff (other than huge triceps) until it starts raining when you have a foot of snow on your roof. If you have a uniformly steep roof, you can probably safely ignore my advice. But if you have a very bungalow-y roof, with lots of changes in pitch and some relatively flat roofs, go get a roof rake.
We have a few feet of snow on the ground and the forecast calls for about 2" of heavy rain in the next few days. Here's when I get a bit bonkers, trying to clear yet more snow off the roof, running around outside, digging the downspouts out of the snow and trying to dig little snow trenches so that the roof water will drain away from the house.
It's great exercise. Kettlebells are a good workout for snow shoveling and roof raking. I'm hoping the effort pays off and we don't see any rain in the basement.
When the weather is super cold, there's really no point in clearing the snow off the roof because it forms a nice, solid icy barrier. This is actually a handy type of insulation...but when things start to thaw, that's when the ice dam beast can appear. By that time, it's impossible to clear the snow off the roof because it has hardened to a solid icy mass. Even if you did chip away at it, you'd likely start hacking off roof shingles along with the roof, throwing out the baby with the bathwater as they say. So you gotta rake the snow off the roof when it's nice and fluffy. Otherwise, you're screwed come spring or that ever unpredictable February deluge of 3" of rain and 60 degrees (followed by another month of temperatures in the teens of course--welcome to New England).
So my advice is: roof rake early and often. Gently bash ice and snow out of the gutters whenever possible. You'll get no payoff (other than huge triceps) until it starts raining when you have a foot of snow on your roof. If you have a uniformly steep roof, you can probably safely ignore my advice. But if you have a very bungalow-y roof, with lots of changes in pitch and some relatively flat roofs, go get a roof rake.
We have a few feet of snow on the ground and the forecast calls for about 2" of heavy rain in the next few days. Here's when I get a bit bonkers, trying to clear yet more snow off the roof, running around outside, digging the downspouts out of the snow and trying to dig little snow trenches so that the roof water will drain away from the house.
It's great exercise. Kettlebells are a good workout for snow shoveling and roof raking. I'm hoping the effort pays off and we don't see any rain in the basement.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Aphex-Twin induced insanity
Here's a way to make yourself go crazy: write code for 8 hours straight while listening to Aphex Twin. You could keep one song on repeat or shuffle. It don't matter. I love Aphex Twin, but I'm about to walk out the office in a fugue state.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Uncorking old emails
While putting the Christmas ornaments under the eaves, I stumbled upon some CDs of 10+ year old college email. My attic gets wicked hot in the summer and cold as ice in the winter, so I popped the CDs into my laptop just to see if they were actually readable.
Amazingly, they were. Amazingly for a CS graduate, I moronically left my email in a number of formats:
1. Some binary that might be an encrypted WordPerfect file from 1995. Or it could be the format DOS uses when you copy things spanned across multiple floppies. I can't quite tell yet, but I think I'm going to have to write some code to figure it out.
2. Pegasus Mail, circa 1996
3. Eudora from 1997
4. Outlook in 1998--good luck parsing a .pst file
5. Scattered clean text files from Pine
So what's a fella to do? Install VMWare or Parallels, find an old Windows 95 key and some more backup CDs with ancient versions of the relevant software, and hope to God that I can extract all the proprietary formats into a simple text format so I can just "more" the files while I knock back some cold ones.
I worked very hard during college, but you wouldn't know it from my email trail. It appears I just sat around whining very, very verbosely about women. Even accounting for typing about 90 wpm, the sheer volume of email I produced and read makes me think I misspent my college life writing and reading email at a time when people thought you were a complete loser if you used ntalk or ytalk. Fast forward 10 years and now you're a loser if you don't use IM in one form or another. Huh? We were definitely ahead of our time.
A weird thing happened to me while reading what should have been safely defused emails from distance of 10 years: I got pretty stressed out. I had some unhealthy relationships (physically and email-wise) with this one girl in particular and after reading a few of our exchanges, I started sweating as if the conversation was happening right now. The only thing I had to anchor me in the here-and-now 10 years later was the fact that I was reading the email in a slightly different font on a Mac and not on a DOS terminal plugged into Pine. But I was reading it in Terminal.app, which tells you something about the staying power of the command line.
So to all you young'uns out there with your fancy communication tools: extract and save everything in ASCII. And wait 20 years before re-opening the emotional mine field that is your college email.
That last bit of advice might not apply to anyone except folks in college between, say, 1992 and 2001. First discovering email during college is sort of like first discovering your genitals at the age of 19. All of a sudden there's this incredible tool at your disposal, you have no idea what the rules surrounding it are, it's the source of pleasure, fun, regret, fun, pleasure, shame, regret, pleasure, and by the way, you're drunk and high often while you figure out how to use it, and no one else knows or has any experience with it, so you all stumble around equally ignorant, diddling anything that moves. Eventually people start catching the clap and figuring out what the boundaries of email are.
Hence the outrageous amount of oversharing in both my inbound and outbound college emails. Back in the mid nineties, there wasn't a trivial way to share things online. Heck, some email programs didn't even have a GUI, much less a "forward" feature or BCC. The boundaries around email were very similar to those around mail: mail was private, so email should be private. Because of this assumption, people tended to be much more revealing on email, at least in my experience. There's a lot of self-incriminating stuff in my college email. I doubt college kids these days make the same blunders because the assumption these days is that anything in a computer is inherently unsafe, and if you email a picture of your hoo-ha to someone, that shit is going to be all over the interwebs in no time.
Kids these days learn the same lessons I learned about email, IM, and texting/sexting, but instead of learning them while getting stoned at the age of 20, they figured them out while drinking apple juice in preschool. I think that qualifies as "progress".
Amazingly, they were. Amazingly for a CS graduate, I moronically left my email in a number of formats:
1. Some binary that might be an encrypted WordPerfect file from 1995. Or it could be the format DOS uses when you copy things spanned across multiple floppies. I can't quite tell yet, but I think I'm going to have to write some code to figure it out.
2. Pegasus Mail, circa 1996
3. Eudora from 1997
4. Outlook in 1998--good luck parsing a .pst file
5. Scattered clean text files from Pine
So what's a fella to do? Install VMWare or Parallels, find an old Windows 95 key and some more backup CDs with ancient versions of the relevant software, and hope to God that I can extract all the proprietary formats into a simple text format so I can just "more" the files while I knock back some cold ones.
I worked very hard during college, but you wouldn't know it from my email trail. It appears I just sat around whining very, very verbosely about women. Even accounting for typing about 90 wpm, the sheer volume of email I produced and read makes me think I misspent my college life writing and reading email at a time when people thought you were a complete loser if you used ntalk or ytalk. Fast forward 10 years and now you're a loser if you don't use IM in one form or another. Huh? We were definitely ahead of our time.
A weird thing happened to me while reading what should have been safely defused emails from distance of 10 years: I got pretty stressed out. I had some unhealthy relationships (physically and email-wise) with this one girl in particular and after reading a few of our exchanges, I started sweating as if the conversation was happening right now. The only thing I had to anchor me in the here-and-now 10 years later was the fact that I was reading the email in a slightly different font on a Mac and not on a DOS terminal plugged into Pine. But I was reading it in Terminal.app, which tells you something about the staying power of the command line.
So to all you young'uns out there with your fancy communication tools: extract and save everything in ASCII. And wait 20 years before re-opening the emotional mine field that is your college email.
That last bit of advice might not apply to anyone except folks in college between, say, 1992 and 2001. First discovering email during college is sort of like first discovering your genitals at the age of 19. All of a sudden there's this incredible tool at your disposal, you have no idea what the rules surrounding it are, it's the source of pleasure, fun, regret, fun, pleasure, shame, regret, pleasure, and by the way, you're drunk and high often while you figure out how to use it, and no one else knows or has any experience with it, so you all stumble around equally ignorant, diddling anything that moves. Eventually people start catching the clap and figuring out what the boundaries of email are.
Hence the outrageous amount of oversharing in both my inbound and outbound college emails. Back in the mid nineties, there wasn't a trivial way to share things online. Heck, some email programs didn't even have a GUI, much less a "forward" feature or BCC. The boundaries around email were very similar to those around mail: mail was private, so email should be private. Because of this assumption, people tended to be much more revealing on email, at least in my experience. There's a lot of self-incriminating stuff in my college email. I doubt college kids these days make the same blunders because the assumption these days is that anything in a computer is inherently unsafe, and if you email a picture of your hoo-ha to someone, that shit is going to be all over the interwebs in no time.
Kids these days learn the same lessons I learned about email, IM, and texting/sexting, but instead of learning them while getting stoned at the age of 20, they figured them out while drinking apple juice in preschool. I think that qualifies as "progress".
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)