unhandledexception.net

Today I finally got a chance to order the remaining parts to the new machine I am building for myself. I’m calling it Aria. I plan to hook it up to my TV as a media center, as a file server, a torrent server and my occasional gaming needs which don’t really amount to much.

So, here are the specs:

• Gigabyte MA790GP-UD4H
• AMD Phenom II X4 940 3.0GHz Black Edition Quad Core
• Corsair Dual Channel TWINX 2048MB PC6400 DDR2 800MHz (1200MHz is just too insanely expensive right now)
• DiabloTek PHD650 650-Watt Power Supply
• 3 Hard Disks, 2x 80Gb in RAID 0 configuration for the OS and 1.5TB for data storage, A Bluray/DVDRW drive,

Throwing that into an Antec P182 I got awhile ago.

It will be named Aria, after the top secret supercomputer in Eagle Eye

Update: it should be in by Friday

Saw this in my inbox today…

So, I am skilled, got a good degree, my employer’s awesome. So that puts me in line for 6-10 years for a green card

Hello folks!

Lately, I haven’t updated the site frequently, mainly because I am very busy these days, and managing my site just keeps falling on the back burner. Lots of things have happened with me over the last year and a half, from relocating to Seattle, starting a new job, buying a car, buying a condo, to going out, having a good time with friends, trying to meed decent girls.

I wish I’d updated my blog, there’s so much to say, so little time to express it. To make matters worse, my Drupal installation seems to have gone south since Site5, my web host, migrated the site to another server and performed some updates with PHP, MySQL. So, I now paid the price for being lazy updating my blog software.

So, I am now ditching Drupal and switching back again to WordPress. I was able to migrate my old posts by hacking into the DB, but not the rest because it is a lot of work, and I don’t really care about it. So, if there’s something in particular you’re looking for just ask, I probably have it backed up somewhere, and hopefully I will be able to write more here.

For those who are interested, here are the queries for migrating drupal “stories” into drupal “posts”:

INSERT INTO wordpress.wp_posts
(ID,
post_author,
post_date,
post_date_gmt,
post_content,
post_title,
post_excerpt,
post_status,
comment_status,
ping_status,
post_name,
post_modified,
post_modified_gmt)
SELECT
@rownum:=@rownum+1,
1,
FROM_UNIXTIME(node.created),
FROM_UNIXTIME(node.created+14400),
node_revisions.body,
node.title,
node_revisions.teaser,
'publish',
'open',
'open',
concat('archive-post-',node.nid),
FROM_UNIXTIME(node.changed),
FROM_UNIXTIME(node.changed+14400)
FROM node, node_revisions, (SELECT @rownum:=3) r
WHERE type = 'story' and node.nid = node_revisions.nid

Then, for some reason, some posts were from 1969 . I looked in the DB and found there’s a post date and a modified date. The modified date was correct, so I assume at some point drupal or maybe even my old wordpress installation only kept a last modified date. Drupal keeps dates in unix time (number of seconds since Midnight, January 1, 1970) That explains it, the modified GMT date is 0 (bogus) and the last modified local date (GMT-4 for Montreal) is in 1969! So, for these posts copying the modified date into the post date did the trick:

update wp_posts
set post_date = post_modified, post_date_gmt = post_modified_gmt
where
YEAR(post_date_gmt) = 1970

Like everyone else probably, I am considering other options to commute to work. Biking seems to be a very attractive option, since I only live like 5 miles away, but in this part of the country, you must pay attention to the hills. So, a coworker gave me a site basted on google maps that computes the elevation given a trajectory:

But I have doubts as to the reliability of that data, so I decided to check out some topographic maps on the web. Topographic maps feature contour lines, which are pretty accurate indicators of elevation

Thing is, that stuff’s from way back! Centering this on Bellevue and Redmond, you see so much has changed!

Topographic Map of the Microsoft Campus

These parcometers are manifactured by CALE, a swedish company that apparently has operations in Quebec (I doubt these operations in Quebec started before the contract was awarded to them, but anyway). The way they work is you enter the number of your place, indicated by signs that replaced the old parcometers, pay, and receive a ticket that proves that you paid for the place. You have the option to pay using coins or with a credit card. Clever eh?

The idiocy starts when you want to pay using a credit card. So you shove it in the slot when it asks you to make a payment. But then, it still asks you to make a payment. No message informs you that it is authorizing it, or that you can remove your card. You have to guess. Remove it too early and it tells you that it’s not well inserted. Too late and it cancels the transaction. What’s the excuse? They didn’t think about that huh? Yeah.