I received my new MacBook Pro at close of business on Tuesday. I didn't take it home with me. I worked on it briefly yesterday, and am now all the way migrated. The migration was almost disappointingly easy. All my data migrated over firewire, and only stuff that I had installed from source was missing at the end of it - which amounts to Apache, and very little else. I imagine I'll run across things that are missing as I go along, but so far that's been the only one, and I didn't have to turn on the old laptop once today.
I've been using Apple's Mail.app as my primary mail client ever since Thunderbird gave up the ghost about 6 months ago. No, I don't remember what the problem was with Thunderbird.
Lately, and with increasing regularity, messages which I have read get marked unread when I'm off looking in another folder. When this happens, I have to mark them as read multiple times before they stay marked that way.
I'm not sure if this is a problem with the client or with the server, but it happens on two different mail servers, one of which is running Exchange, and the other is running Cyrus imapd, so I tend to lean towards blaming the client.
I've been unable to find reference to anyone else having this problem, but it's pretty hard to know what to search for.
Anyone else seen this?
Clay Shirky has an interesting article about Second Life, and it's gratifying to know that I'm not the only one.
Yes, I tried Second Life. No, I didn't get it. I mean, sure, I got it, but I didn't see what the appeal was. It felt like a MUD, but a lot harder to use, and not nearly as gratifying.
I was a dedicated, perhaps even addicted, LambdaMOO user for a couple years. I spent *hours* there, when I was working at Lexmark. I'd start test scripts, and they'd take 30 minutes to run. While I was waiting, I was building stuff on LambdaMOO. And one or two other MUDs.
But after a while, the only point of it was the people that were there. That's what it always comes down to. The Internet, for me, is about communication. Turning communication into an elaborate game doesn't make communication less the goal. Particularly when the game has no point. MUDs were games, in one sense, but there wasn't an objective, really, other than creating cool stuff. And I got pretty good at creating cool stuff and scripting it to do interesting things.
Second life was interesting while I had a handful of friends there. But now when I log in, there's nobody there I know, and so therefore nothing interesting to do. And because I can't, for the life of me, figure out how to build anything, and I don't have anywhere to build it, there's absolutely nothing of interest to do.
If, as Second Life claims, there are 2 million people there, I have no idea where they are, since I can never find anybody.
Andy Ihnatko, over at the Chicago Sun-Times, has an interesting article about the new Microsoft Zune, and all the reasons to avoid it like the plague. Most compelling of these, to my mind, is that the Zune software - the only way to sync the device - doesn't have any mechanism for subscribing to podcasts. Which leaves me wondering, what's the point?
(Via Cory)
Dear LazyWeb, I could use some help. I feel like I'm asking the wrong questions, and need some nudges in the right direction.
noodl has been very helpful, I think, but his suggestions appear to be answering the question I'm asking, rather than the one I mean. I think.
We have Mongrel + Rails + Apache + proxy_balancer on Server Q out in the DMZ. Mysql is running on Server Z, inside. There's a firewall rule to allow Q to talk to Z on the mysql port. So far so good.
After N minutes, the firewall times out idle connections between Q and Z. N is configurable, of course, but that doesn't fix anything, because people go home over the weekend, and N will eventually be reached. So increasing N postpones the problem, but doesn't fix it.
The problem is thus. After the N minute timeout is reached, the connections to mysql drop. Subsequent requests to the Rails application do not result in the database connection being reestablished, as expected. (At least, it's what I expected, but perhaps I need to adjust my expectations.) Requests to Rails after this point result in an extended wait period, followed eventually by a proxy timeout. The only way to reestablish the mysql connections (that we've found) is to restart the mongrel cluster.
Functions put in a before_filter to reconnect do not seem to be getting called. Indeed, the before_filter doesn't even seem to be reached. It's as though the hangup is happening in some stage before the before_filter - Rails is trying to contact the database, and is waiting indefinitely for a response.
Placing a reconnect in the before_filter works, and reconnects, as long as the mysql connection is up. (Not useful, but interesting.) However, after N minutes are allowed to expire, and the connections drop, that code does not appear to be getting invoked at all.
So it's entirely possible that I'm asking the wrong questions, but my hope is that one of my knowledgeable readers will see this post and immediately say, Oh, sure, that's the well-known problem that is solved like *this*, and *here* is the question you really should have been asking.
Please? :-)
