Email out, Houseboat mush out, etc.

[brooksmoses]

So, the server on which half my life is hosted seems to be having problems. As I understand it, the relevant support people have been pinged, but there's not as yet a prognosis or expected time of restoration.

Thus, at the moment, I am not receiving email. If you want to email me, send it to first-initial-last-name at speakeasy dot net, and that will detour it around the blockage.

Also, the "Houseboat" not-really-a-MUSH that I use to keep in touch with various of you is down, as a result of this. (Yes, I have local backups of the database, all 95 objects of it, if it comes to that.) My apologies to you all for the outage.

Finally, anything hosted off dpdx.net, which is my research page and various little bits of software I've got for download, mostly, is also offline.

Further reports as events warrant....

Edit: Seems to be back now. No idea what the problem was yet, though.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Houseboat has nothing to do with the integral of 1/cabin dcabin, does it?

Is it sadder that I think of that whenever I think of houseboats, or that I get bits of Mike Ford in my head whenever I come across reference to Salic Law?

[brooksmoses]

Sadly, no, it doesn't. Though that's an entertaining thing to work out from first principles why the the derivative of reciprocal cabins is funny.

I don't think either of those is at all sad, really (especially not occasions to get bits of Mike Ford in one's head!). But, then, I don't entirely get why that's houseboats as such. Why is it?

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

Though that's an entertaining thing to work out from first principles why the the derivative of reciprocal cabins is funny.

::thinks really hard::

::fails::

Mrr?

[brooksmoses]

It's funnier if I actually get the question right. Try the integral of 1/cabin d cabin.

Though possibly negative reciprocal square cabins -- which is what would be the derivative joke from a reciprocal cabin -- are funny too, with the right set-up story. (We give each other cabins, but they're not very hip or trendy cabins at all, and they're also uncomplimentary and pessimistic? Needs work, I think.)

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

Try the integral of 1/cabin d cabin.

::fetches calculus book with handy table of integrals since it has clearly been Too Long::

Ah. I see.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Because it's not a definite integral. So it's "natural log cabin plus the c [sea]."

[brooksmoses]

Oh. Right, yes. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Now please tell me you know what has long curved tusks and conquers Asia Minor.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

Oh, and if we wanted to IM you instead, would that work?

[brooksmoses]

Well, I was also somewhat avoiding the computer, on grounds of having a bit of a headache. Otherwise, it would have.

[ejalbert.livejournal.com]

"out of swap space", says the syslog. Might've been a runaway Perl script, but we aren't sure.

After a whole bunch of whining, I finally got someone to tell me how to get the server restarted at about 7:30 tonight. The "how" there consisted of getting the guy who runs Cernio to drive over an hour up to SF so he could hit the reset button, which happened around 10. We're going to try to figure out how to get remote reset capabilities so this doesn't have to happen again.

[brooksmoses]

And that sounds like one of those unfortunate sorts of problems where there really isn't much for logs left to poke through to figure out the reason, either. You need the CSI image-manipulation magic -- "If we zoom in on this pixel^H Apache log file, we can see in the reflection that this entirely-unrelated process was going haywire...."

Send along my thanks to the fellow who runs it for driving up there! That does seem at least regrettably close to "above and beyond the call of duty". And, yes, remote reset would be a very nice thing. (Would it be useful for me to ask our sysadmin what we use for such things, and whether he'd recommend it? With a rackful of embedded dev-boards that were never meant to be used anywhere but within arm's reach of the person programming them, we tend to exercise that capability a bit.)