words » Internet

Horrible Stack Overflow at Coding Horror

Jeff Fitzsimons — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:30:58 +0000

At sometime around 10:40am on December 11th, 2009, both Coding Horror and the Stack Overflow Blog disappeared when their host, CrystalTech, lost the VM on which they run. Coding Horror was immediately replaced with this:

Coding Horror experienced 100% data loss at our hosting provider, CrystalTech.

I have some backups and I’ll try to get it up and running ASAP!

According to his Tweets, however, Atwood soon discovered that all backups were on the very virtual machine which was lost.

This is all rather ironic, since Jeff himself blogged about how important backups are. The record of this is currently only available via Google Cache. Within the blog post, he did mention the potential of Google Cache as a backup system, so perhaps this is just his admission that second-rate backups are good enough for him:

while Google may be a great service, it’s only a so-so backup mechanism.

This, of course, has the Internet falling over in alternating fits of schadenfreude and irony.

My Fantastic Contraptions

Jeff Fitzsimons — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 03:52:09 +0000

A collection of solutions for Fantastic Contraption:

My Solutions:

Tube – a minimal tube crawler.
U-Turn – a floppy, crawling chariot.
U-Turn (again)) – a simple cart which uses leverage to apply force on the ceiling.
Back and Forth – an awful contraption.
Back and Forth – a better version which uses many wheels for low friction, and no bridge.
Higher – a ridiculously simple stick-flicker.
Around the Bend – a tiny triangle that flops to change direction.

Solutions by Others Which I Like:

Back and Forth – brilliantly simple because of it’s use of rotation reversal.
Four Balls – reciprocating machinery.
Four Balls – multi-stage machinery.

My Experiments:

Spinner – just a fast-spinning construct.
Glitching Spinner – a spinner experiment that glitches and goes horribly wrong.
Glitching Star – six glitching spinners, all tied together.
Super Glitching Star – a much more rigid version of the glitching star. Explodes into the finish.
Bizarre Spinner – a Mars mission that accelerates bizarrely.

Neat Flash Games for Nerds

Jeff Fitzsimons — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:32:47 +0000

These three games present interesting logic puzzles:

Fantastic Contraption – build a machine to get an item into the target zone.
Light-bot – provide simple commands to make your robot traverse obstacles (publisher site with annoying, talking banner ads is here).
Chronotron – solve puzzles using a time machine.

Color Test

Jeff Fitzsimons — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 07:07:28 +0000

I just took a fun test to determine how good I am at discriminating colors. Lower values are better. My results:

Your score: 8
Gender: Male
Age range: 30-39
Best score for your gender and age range: 0
Highest score for your gender and age range: 1464

Neat! Take the test here.

Craigslist Blocks Yahoo Pipes

Jeff Fitzsimons — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:19:31 +0000

Craigslist is one of the greatest sites in the world, and the entire Bay Area seems to revolve around it. Sadly, Craigslist’s search facility is extremely bad, seemingly only capable of searching within a price range and neighborhood. Craigslist supplies RSS feeds, but this still means I have to sift through a lot of information in order to find what I’m looking for.

Yahoo Pipes provides a way to filter and manipulate RSS feeds. It’s very visual, and relatively easy to use. This would be an excellent tool to prune down my Craigslist RSS feeds.

Unfortunately, as of some time in the recent past, Craigslist has begun blocking Yahoo Pipes. Perhaps someone wrote an overly-popular pipe which caused a tremendous load on Craigslist’s servers, or perhaps Craigslist thinks they’ll somehow lose income by allowing Pipes. Either way, it sucks.

The work-around which I’ve employed is to mirror the base Craigslist search on my own server, then feed the Yahoo Pipe from that.

This requires you to have a server which:

Is HTTP accessible.
Provides cron, or some other method of running a script at regular intervals.
Has curl, wget, or another HTTP-content-fetching utility.

Mirroring the RSS Feed

First, create an appropriate directory structure. For example:

mkdir ~/public_html/feeds

Next, test out curl or a similar content-fetching application on a Craigslist RSS feed URL. Don’t forget that quotes are usually needed around the URL:

curl "http://feedUrl" --output ~/public_html/feeds/yourFile.xml

Examine the content of the file and make sure that it’s the expected XML. If the file is very small, and contains text to the effect of, “this URL has moved”, then you may have forgotten to surround the URL with double quotes.

Creating Yahoo Pipe

To fetch this mirrored RSS feed, use the “Fetch Data” source and provide it the URL to your freshly-fetched file.

If the pipe can’t be read, verify the permissions for the containing folder hierarchy on your server. For *nix boxes, make sure the execute bit is set (chmod a+x ~/feeds).

Automating Update

Create a script file which will retrieve any and all feeds you wish to mirror. I place my scripts in ~/bin, so I placed the following into ~/bin/fetch-feeds:

#!/bin/bash

rm ~/public_html/feeds/yourFile.xml
curl "http://feedUrl" --output ~/public_html/feeds/yourFile.xml

Note that I delete the existing feed mirror before fetching the new one so that any retrieval error will be obvious.

Now, call this script from inside your crontab (Scheduled Tasks on Windows servers):

crontab -e

I update my mirror at 7am and 2pm with the following:

# Fetch Craigslist feeds at 7am and 2pm:
0 7,14 * * * ~/bin/fetch_feeds

Snake

Jeff Fitzsimons — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:09:35 +0000

This story was a very interesting read.

Worst Spam Ever

Jeff Fitzsimons — Tue, 27 May 2008 23:11:36 +0000

It’s not even really spam. I assume it’s an attempt to validate random email addresses by analyzing bounces.

Japanese Monster (Yunnie VLog)

Jeff Fitzsimons — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:20:10 +0000

I came across a series of Japanese videos on YouTube. Initially, they appear to be rather mundane and cute. By the 11th video, things take a different turn, and by the 12th video, they’re downright weird. The videos seem to be a promotion for Gears of War in Japan, but I have no idea what the connection could be.

Aeroflot comment

Jeff Fitzsimons — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 19:24:12 +0000

Cracked.com had a so-so article which mentioned Russian discount airline Aeroflot.

The winning comment was by Kostanza:

Google Translate: Heath Ledger is the Spanish Tom Cruise

Jeff Fitzsimons — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:24:19 +0000