In case you need to know the archive sources.list file for any server/pc still running debian Squeeze, here they are:
deb http://archive.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free deb http://archive.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-lts main contrib non-free
You should think about upgrading it though.
For some reason, grep, thought that a “HTML document, Non-ISO extended-ASCII text, with very long lines” was a binary, so refused to print contents.
TIL about -a. In grep, -a tells grep to process a binary file as if it were text. This means, if grep incorrectly thinks a file is binary, it’ll still work with it.
That cost me at least 2 hours of scratching my head, wondering why my regex wasn’t working as it should…
Interesting article about how people handle resilience in the New Yorker. Curious to see how research filters into the mainstream. Sounds a little like CBT , though, focusing on how a person perceives and handles thoughts.
Werner also discovered that resilience could change over time. Some resilient children were especially unlucky: they experienced multiple strong stressors at vulnerable points and their resilience evaporated. Resilience, she explained, is like a constant calculation: Which side of the equation weighs more, the resilience or the stressors? The stressors can become so intense that resilience is overwhelmed. Most people, in short, have a breaking point. On the flip side, some people who weren’t resilient when they were little somehow learned the skills of resilience. They were able to overcome adversity later in life and went on to flourish as much as those who’d been resilient the whole way through. This, of course, raises the question of how resilience might be learned.
http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-secret-formula-for-resilience
On the nature of sysadmin / ops crunch, exhaustion, and other things like learning programming languages and music.
Work projects have recently started to basically enter a crunch mode, whereby we’ve a tight deadline to complete. I’ve found, some days, I’m ending up being completely exhausted, to my surprise. Mainly I’ve been sitting in a chair and typed all day, working out problems in systems or configuration, nothing too taxing, and certainly not detailed programming, others are working on that.
Still, after 8 hours I find my mind slows, and everything is harder. Getting up and moving around buys a little time, as does caffeine, but I wonder, does anyone else working in IT get this sometimes? Especially when their project seems to require stretching of your mental capacity? Please do provide your thoughts below
Back when I coded for a living, I found when learning new programming language that I’d have to have silence around me, otherwise I couldn’t concentrate. All other times (dealing with support tickets, helping clients, or just actually programming), I need music. Which is a bit weird. I need background noise, else I find it uncomfortable to work.
Worked for a few days in central London last week, which was nice, we got a lot done, and working with one of my colleagues there is great. But whilst working, I noticed not needing music. The street sounds outside were pretty constant low-level, plus the noise of the office upstairs. I’m guessing my normally huge music consumption is related to needing background noise to tune out?
Re, Syria, refugees, crisis, fuckwits, and general shittyness. Minddump. Rant. Sweaing. Unfiltered.
Local facebook group currently discussing why Syrians aren’t forming guerrilla bands and trying to take back their country. Especially all fighting-age men. They seem to think that a country with rapidly being-bombed-to-shit infrastructure can even support guerrilla-style civil-war fightback. They think Assad and his goons would welcome civilians arming up and trying to fight for one of the factions. Isn’t that what started this shitstorm in the first bloody place?
I’m looking on, where at last count 12 fucking countries, including my own, is interfering there, bombing various factions they don’t like, providing weapons to who they do, because apparently no-one learned from what happened with Afghanistan? It’s a religious nightmare over there, and there is no good answers, but berating people running from the absolute mess for not “stopping and fighting” is about as much use as telling a fish it must swim in air.
ARGH. These people are idiots! Do they think weapons grow on trees! Do they think civilians, people like me, would be able to trust one of these factions enough to throw in with them? Do they think, under their “Men should stay and fight!!!!!” rule, that the men maybe want to get their family out of danger?
I don’t know any solution. I don’t know how I can help, bar trying to support those fleeing, so they don’t die of starvation or drowning whilst trying to simply survive. I don’t know what I can do. I’m supposed to just say “Oh, no, the people who sound/look/think a little differently from me, they’re bad, they should go away!”? Fuck that.
… I should probably stay off my local facebook group.
What follows is partially a mind-dump of thoughts and feelings relating to this, partially me telling my (religious) family that I’ve lost my faith, and partly needing to say these things somewhere. There’s a lot of “I’s” here. This is me talking about me.
So, the sharp eyed would have noticed that the word ‘Christian’ has been slowly vanishing from my profiles, across my social media accounts. This was not unintentional.
I lost my faith.
I used to have a church, I went to every Sunday, pretty much without fail. I spoke to the pastor there, told him I was struggling, I was loosing my faith, asked for help. Got pretty much unhelpful platitudes in return. Additionally, around this time, a petition was going around the church, against same-sex marriage in the UK. What we really needed was more hate, distrust, and disgust going around. The well-meaning congregation probably didn’t realise it, but that was the undertones I was hearing from them. I stopped going, “what God of Love would accept that?” I slowly, very slowly, drifted back into depression, with fewer tools to aid me.
I was shouting into the ether, asking for help from God, asking for guidance. Nothing came, nothing helped. My faith was slipping.
Eventually, the answer to the question in my head “Is there a God?” started returning the answer ‘No’. In my head, that question had been returning ‘Yes’ since 1998. My faith broke. You’d have thought it would’ve been a quick process, but it took many, many months, slowly, painfully, tearing away. I used to think there was a plan. I used to think someone bigger than myself cared. And slowly, over time, those thoughts, beliefs, started being evaluated ‘untrue‘ in my head.
The process of loosing my faith itself was hard, painful, and very unpleasant. Mixed into this is Guilt. A lot of Guilt. I feel I’m letting my family down, who’re all actively believing practising Christians, mostly Evangelical or Anglican.
Slowly, my sense of self has been adjusting, my moral compass set free from what the Bible says, what my interpretation of it said, what Pastors, theologians I trusted said. I still have morals, if anything they’ve become stronger, no longer linked to an external force. Mostly, they’re the same as current liberal evangelical Christian base ethics, but stronger against homophobia. I can certainly rant about people being horrible to one another quite a lot, if you care to listen sometime.
You might’ve worked out the gap, between my profiles changing, my faith breaking, and today, is not insubstantial. Though it was a painful process over months, it was complete back in 2014.
Why the gap? My family. I didn’t want to tell them. I’m afraid of the reaction, I’m afraid of getting treated differently, badly. It might be a silly fear, but it’s there nonetheless. In fact, I’m wimping out by writing this here and posting it to my social media instead of contacting them. My Mum knows, I told her a while ago, I was tearing myself into bits, I had to confide in someone, but apart from that, not even the Brother I love to bits knew, though I suspect he worked it out a while back. He’s very very intelligent.
I’m scared. I’m lonely. I’ve great friends, who have been helping. I’ve great work colleagues, one of whom in particular is the most intelligent person I’ve ever met, and though he can be a pain in the neck (he knows it), his advice has helped me greatly. The friends I’ve made in the IndieStone community as well have helped me greatly.
I’m currently coming out of this bout of depression, the stormclouds are slowly, achingly slowly, being inched away. I can see the sunshine again, more and more; The dark thoughts about suicide in the night haven’t troubled me at all recently. But, I’m still filled with guilt. Guilt over dropping my faith. Guilt over not being the son, cousin, brother, grandson, nephew, my family expects me to be. Guilt at saying “No, a lot of the moral ‘rules’ of the modern Church are stupid, and I reject them entirely.”
I’m still left with a void. I knew faith, I knew that assurance and belief, and now it’s gone.
So. That’s why loosing my faith sucks. I had to say it. And I had to vent.
If you’re my family reading this, I’m sorry, I couldn’t say this in person, I couldn’t say it via text or phone call. I’m too scared. I’m in too much pain right now. Don’t judge me, please.
At this point, I’m fairly certain my faith loss is permanent. There’s a reason I’ve been describing myself as Agnostic/Don’t Know though. I truly don’t know if there is a loving God, I don’t know if any religion is right, if none are. However, whilst I’m coming out of a really dark place, I’m also not really open to conversion attempts, nor anything other than discussions about faith over a drink somewhere warm and comfortable, and the important bit here *in person*. 🙂
Saying that, I’m filled with love for my family, my friends, and hell, pretty much everyone on this weird, wonderful, strange, horrible, horrific planet.
I signed up for the closed-beta of let’s encrypt earlier, so this blog is now encrypted. So far, so good. I’d quite like to use the SSL certificate it provides in my Jabber server, but I’d need to automate renewal.. and it’s not *quite* there yet.
Let’s Encrypt’ll hit open beta soon. Looks like the only feasible way HTTPs will be supported widespread. Even with domain validated SSLs, ssls cost too much at the moment, and are too much of a hassle.
If you get an error like:
Fatal error: Call to a member function select() on a non-object in /home/username/public_html/app/code/community/Fishpig/Wordpress/Model/Resource/Page.php on line 119
Then, check you’ve not just changed a MySQL username, without updating the fishpig configuration, or otherwise Fishpig can’t access the MySQL database for some reason. It seems to store a MySQL login in Magento config. I’ve not yet found exactly where, I’ll update this post with more once I understand more about what it’s doing.
It presented as the main Magento site throwing the following error:
exception ‘Zend_Exception’ with message ‘dbModel read resource does not implement Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract’
Which it seems that most everyone will tell you to clear your cache to fix. You *will* need to clear your cache, probably. Just, after fixing the MySQL connection issue.
The following line is to make it easier for people googling to find this post:
Fatal error: Call to a member function select() on a non-object in /public_html/app/code/community/Fishpig/Wordpress/Model/Resource/Page.php on line 119 magento fishpig
This post my making sure https://xkcd.com/979/ doesn’t happen from me.
I’ve recently got into playing Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate on the 3ds, and this term comes up from the community from time to time. It’s a little cryptic to ‘grok’, unless you’re deep in the community, so here’s a quick post explaining it.
Put most simply, it’s a quest/monster hunt run done as fast (and insanely) as possible. As my good friend Visi explained:
“It’s basically where you take in heavy bowguns and stunlock the mob”
So, bowguns being a weapon you can deploy, and stunlock, force the monster to be constantly stunned; locked into stun.
And that’s it. If you want to know what ‘hame’ means, read on…
‘Hame’, also known as はめ in japanese, is the vulgar term for having sex, or in other words fucking. So, in Monster hunter terms, a hame run is a run in which you fuck the monster over.