This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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 This last weekend was Amy’s turn to pick the movie. Brandy declined to join us, but Amy and I watched the Wallace and Gromit movie.
I’d always generally liked the claymation thing. Hadn’t really watched much Wallace and Gromit though. But I was very quickly laughing. It was enjoyable light hearted humor. I particularly liked the rabbits floating in the suction tank thing and such. BUt Amy and I both laughed quite a bit at various points in the movie. It was a good choice by Amy. It was worth the watching.
I’m not much on rewatching things I’ve seen before, so I probably wouldn’t watch it again. But if a new W&G movie came out, I’d definitely watch it. It was fun.
Just got to the Frontline episode from last Tuesday on my Tivo. As usual for Frontline, it was very well done. Basically a summary of Cheney’s efforts over the years to strengthen Presidential authority and reduce or eliminate the ability of congress and the courts to restrict that power. There wasn’t much here that I didn’t already know, but it put it all together in a very compelling package.
I listen to some of the things said by Cheney and the various people surrounding him, and I am just dumbfounded. It is so 100% contrary to what seem like basic values like the rule of law, constitutional government, checks and balances, human rights, etc… These are very scary people with very scary ideas about what good government looks like.
I fear though that much of the damage they have done will not be undone, even after a change of administration in 2009. Even if that administration is of a different party. While Rudy would probably even try to one up what Bush and Cheney have done, I don’t frankly see Hillary flat out rejecting the powers claimed by this administration. No, she will just use them in different ways, not necessarily better ways.
Sigh.
In any case, it is well worth watching. The whole thing is available to watch on the Frontline website for Cheney’s Law if for some reason you forgot to Tivo it.
My mom had quite a close call with a tornado last Thursday. I just got my mom’s permission to post the emails she sent on Friday describing it.
tornado hit
(Ruth Brandon, 2007 Oct 19 02:48:47 UTC)
I write from Owensboro, Ky (a five hour drive west of Cincinnati this morning) where Steve Hecky, UCC pastor in Newport, KY, and I are attending the Kentucky Council of Churches. It has been quite a day. Owensboro has been hit all afternoon and evening by huge thunderstorms with flooding and tornados and high winds. Third Baptist Church where we were meeting twice had us to evacuate to the basement and this evening within five minutes of us reaching the basement the church was apparently slightly hit – We all felt the change in air pressure in our ears, heard the “sound of a freight train” overhead, power went out and we sang hymns until we were allowed upstairs. Cell phones and computers lighted the way!
We had sat in the sanctuary too long as the tornado warning sirens wailed – the preacher (president of the National Council of Churches in the USA) had just begun – but finally he was interrupted and everybody made it okay. Apparently a wall in the balcony of the sanctuary where we were worshipping was caved in – when we emerged the smell and cloud of cement dust was noticeable – they herded us outside where firefighters were coming in and it was pouring rain. One car was upside down and at least one other shoved out of location and damaged and debris was in the parking lot. My car – 25 or so feet from the upside down one – and most of the cars – were okay. We saw bricks in the street as we left that seemed to come from Zion UCC next door – will have to check Friday morning when there is light. Steve thought it was from Zion’s tower or steeple. We drove through miles of dark streets to our rooms at the Hampton Inn which was barely into the zone further south where there is still power – Power is out less than a quarter mile north but here all is well.
This evening when we headed toward the church from a restaurant, we drove through major flooding – the police closed that zone as soon as we – the last car – came through. We were fortunate not to stall out – it was very deep for about six blocks – clearly the storm drains were way beyond capacity. Hours later the floods are subsiding as the drains clear.
How is the meeting? – very fine workshops and speakers – The Rev. Michael Kinnamon was the keynoter and leader of two workshops – but at this point it is unclear whether we will be able to continue tomorrow and finish. The dangerous storms are said to now be over but …
About 21 hours later, she emailed again with an update, and pictures:
2 great iPhotos
(Ruth Brandon, 2007 Oct 19 23:50:52 UTC)
Sam – with daylight today – I am aware that I was within five minutes of death yesterday! This is the damaged sanctuary where we were worshipping plus a photo from outside – I and half a dozen others were seated exactly under this heap of debris where the balcony and tower landed – we would not have survived. We left only five minutes before the tornado hit. I am thankful today to be alive!
inside 3rd Bapt sanctuary after tornado
tornado damage – 3rd Bapt Owensboro, KY
All I can say is wow. And I am very glad she is OK.
Sam and Ivan talk about:
- Blackwater in Iraq
- Checks and Balances
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I gave up on the blank screen on EC2 after plodding through some things for a bit, figuring that most likely it was a difference in configuration between the system there and my main system. I reinstalled mysql to a fresh directory on Cronus, then after “zapping gremlins” from the backup file was able to restore the database. I then had to go in and add permissions back to the relevant database user by hand. But then boom AbulWiki was back in business.
Woo.
Perhaps I’ll still spend a little more time trying to get it to run on the EC2 instance. Or perhaps not. If I don’t by the end of this weekend I’ll just kill the instance. But it was a fun exercise anyway.
I’m also going to make a couple updates to how I do the daily mysql dump of the wiki. Namely, make it save the backups indefinitely with date based names rather than only keeping the last two days worth.
I think I’ll go set that up right now.
But WOO! I got it back. And seemingly with no data loss, which is always a good thing.
So now I can hear Brandy say “I told you so”. :-)
According to my calculations, Amy will be exactly 12 years old at 03:21 UTC today. That’s 4382.90639 days old. That moment is just over an hour from the moment I am posting this. Woo. Go Amy! Woo Woo!
And now we’re going to dinner out at one of the places she likes to eat along with one of her friends from school.
So off I go…
I was going to use my old laptop Zeus, but instead I’m trying to get the wiki back up and running on EC2. I got the signed up. Got the EC2 instance up and running with an image pre-populated with apache, mysql and php. I transfered over all my wiki files, and the last mysql dump I had. I restored from the dump. At first it gave some db errors because there was one place where the host location was hardcoded. Then I changed that and also the user grants in the db to get around that.
Now I have no db errors, but a blank white screen.
More debugging to go.
If I get it all up and running, I won’t KEEP running it at EC2 for a variety of reasons. It will just give me the confidence to wipe my current setup on Cronus and rebuild there. But EC2 is proving to be a handy quick way to get another “machine” up and running to try some things out on.
With the data transfer and everything, and me having run the instance overnight while I slept too, so far it has cost me $2.38 to have this EC2 instance up and running.
On Wednesday something screwed up my mysql database that I have AbulWiki on. I didn’t notice until this morning though. By that time my daily backups had run twice, so I didn’t have a last good version. To say the least, I freaked out a little bit.
I’ve spent the last couple hours on it and I was able to start up mysql in a safe mode and do a data dump and I don’t think I’ve lost any data after all. Which is good. Very good. I also found a data dump I’d done ten days ago in another place. Also good. But what is bad is that I still can’t get mysql to start except in the read only safe mode. Which means I can’t make the wiki actually run of course.
According to the errors in the logs, the issue is a corruption in one of the InnoDB tables. The start up in innodb_force_recovery mode lets me do a mysqldump and get everything. And it looks like there is no actual data loss. But then it looks like the next step is supposed to be to drop the tables that are causing errors on start up, and then restore from your backup. But whenever I try to drop tables, mysql crashes and restarts and the tables are still there.
After running in circles, I’m starting to think I just want to wipe out mysql and reinstall from scratch, then restore my (hopefully) good dumps. The mysql dump I just did in safe mode is refusing to be read by MySQL Administrator due to character set issues. Hmmm…. The one from 10 days ago can be read. As can a backup I did using the Admin tool instead of doing mysqldump on the command line. Actually, both of those were done with the Admin tool rather than mysqldump. Sigh. In either case though, I can’t do jack until I can get mysql to start in regular mode rather than innodb_force_recovery mode.
And I am late to work. I need to go do work stuff now rather than bang my head on this.
But it seems clear what I’ll be doing tonight when I get home.
Fighting with mysql and hoping that these data dumps I’ve done are really usable and I haven’t lost anything (or at least not much). Looking at the mysqldump ones (which are human readable even if the GUI restore tool isn’t happy with them) they look OK, but…
Sigh.
Bleh.
Not happy Sam this morning.
Gotta go to work.
There is a wind storm tonight in Seattle. The news was all about how they were going to close the bridges over Lake Washington because of the high winds. They were also talking about power outages.
Brandy was in a gas station earlier and overheard some Department of Transportation folks talking about how they were likely to do it “soon”. So I left work a little early so I’d be on the right side of the lake if that happened.
Traffic sucked a little more than usual heading home, but the bridge was open, and I got home, then worked from home for a bit.
The winds are dying down now. We didn’t lose power. And I don’t think they ever ended up actually closing the bridges.
Oh well.
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