UPDATE [2012-10-03]: RightScale has ongoing issues with the stability of their command-line tools. In particular: rs_run_right_script sometimes fails with a timeout error. You can’t just retry, because sometimes the script you were trying to queue was queued despite the error, and there’s no way to tell. rs_run_right_script sometimes fails with an error “Failed to process… Read More »
Bob Sutton writes about how earlier this summer, United Airlines (which is the merger of the old United and Continental) lost a 10-year-old girl. Aside from the exact details of how they lost her, the story is surprisingly similar to what happened to my daughter in 2009. It is depressing, but not surprising, to learn… Read More »
UPDATED 9/4/2012: I accidentally had a hard-coded AWS_VOLUME_IDS setting in the script, which I inserted while debugging my own copy of the script and forgot to remove before posting the script here. I’ve removed it. D’oh! UPDATED 8/19/2012: The logic in my original script for determining which backups to preserve was incorrect. It is updated… Read More »
At my current gig, we’re hosting our blog on Amazon EC2, at least until we have become so wildly successful that a single EC2 instance can’t keep up with our blog traffic. We wanted to make sure we wouldn’t lose our blog in case of an EC2 failure, so we configured our (Linux) blog instance… Read More »
In 2008, I wrote about the Macular Degeneration Association (MDA), a questionable charity whose actual mission seemed to be more about lining the pockets of its founder and his cronies than about supporting macular degeneration research or people suffering with the disease. The charity doesn’t look any better now than it did then. Here’s an… Read More »
UPDATE [2013/01/08]: As of the recent Galaxy S III update to Jelly Bean (Android 4.1), most of the text below is obsolete. The connect-within-3-seconds limitation appears to no longer exist, and you can connect to and disconnect from the phone multiple times without unplugging and replugging it. I’ve tested mtpfs, go-mtpfs, and simple-mtpfs with my… Read More »
I pre-ordered a Samsung Galaxy S III from Verizon Wireless a couple weeks before they started shipping. Between when I placed the pre-order and when they started shipping, I had to change my credit-card number, so the number that Verizon had was no longer valid. I didn’t realize that they hadn’t actually charged my card… Read More »
I bought a ThinkPad laptop from Lenovo recently. The actual laptop hardware is quite good… it feels solid and it has a nice screen, nice keyboard, good weight to performance ratio, good price to performance ratio, and great battery life. Alas, things were not so smooth after the laptop arrived. In fact, my post-purchase experience… Read More »
Ken at Popehat reports on Pittsfield judge Bethzaida Sanabria-Vega ordering a local blogger not only to stop writing about the daughter of a local public official who was the perpetrator of a hit-and-run accident which nearly killed someone and got off virtually scott-free after the courts “lost” some of the paperwork related to her case,… Read More »
UPDATE [2013-02-13]: According to this article on Craigslist, as of February 10, 2013, they have implemented and are testing the idea I described below for fixing the problem described in this posting. I recently placed a for-sale ad on Craigslist. I anonymized my email address in the ad, which means that the published email address… Read More »