March 30, 2010
at 10:27 pm
(General)
Well I have not had the honor of having a troll on my site in a long time. Looks like the entire subnet 66.76.0.0/16 which belongs to Suddenlink Communications, looks like it’s current owner is Cox Cable Internet, gets a lifetime ban for being a complete moron, not reading the articles before commenting and being a general pest.
I don’t think people understand, this is ‘my’ website, and I maintain it. I run the server, and I don’t have a hosting company do shit for me. Yes, that means “What ever, I do what I want.” — Eric Cartman.
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March 29, 2010
at 10:26 pm
(General)
So Roy and I are out getting lunch at the Florida Mall, but in our haste to get at the steakums, we forgot that it’s spring break… So yeah, fuck that and we found another place to get some food.
Pulling out of the mall, in the middle of a four lane intersection of Orange Blossom Trail (OBT) and Sand Lake Rd. is a elderly woman, walking down the center curb of OBT hunched over a walker peddling for money from people in the turn lane like a bum. What..The..Fuck. Wow. We really have hit a new low, or a rise of the peddling grandmothers… Hmm. Interesting concept.
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March 25, 2010
at 10:24 pm
(General)
Found another Neoware Thin Client at work here that has the embedded 32MB DOC (Disk on Chip) Windows CE type Operating System. Like the first one that Anthony and I rigged, I had to ghetto rig an IDE cable to another 256MB IDE Flash Card. Currently the flash is attached to a desktop to install the operating system, before it’s placed inside the thin client and closed up.
Oh yes, without the proper cable it’s ghetto, but it does work! Each pin was cut by me and once all pins were the same, put into the cable and pressed onto the chip. It’s temporary, as the pins will come out and the flash card will then press on to the IDE port inside the thin client.
I’m going to put DSL (Damn Small Linux) on this thin client and see who wants it here at work. I have no use for it, but it’s something neat to rig up.
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March 24, 2010
at 10:24 pm
(General)
Awhile back, (awhile being a few years now) Anthony and I wrote a document processing system in PHP for the company. It takes in XML data and merges this with OpenOffice documents as templates to create final dynamic merged PDF documents for printing, email, and storage on disk. It has been running ever since, processing a few hundred documents a week.
This system actually replaced another one that did close to the same thing, but required Microsoft Word, licenses for Office, and multiple servers and Windows installations and .NET programming. It was horrible, slow, and unstable. Which lead us to create the new system.
A few days ago I was asked to add another template to the server, which happens a few times a month. But this time the document to be added was a PDF file already, very complex actually. Having multiple form fields and such. I tried to recreate / convert it to OpenOffice but it always comes out ugly. So instead of working around this, I went ahead and added some more code to the program to take in the XML data as usual, and for this one document (or more in the future) to merge FDF data into the PDF.
Searching around where to start, and found a good site: http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.20/20.11/FillOnlinePDFFormsUsingHTML/index.html which gave some very useful information. What I really needed was the php function he offers here: http://www.pdfhacks.com/forge_fdf/. Take a look, it’s kinda neat.
It is in production now, and working very well!
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March 23, 2010
at 10:23 pm
(Code)
Every now and then at work I have to dig through a few scripts to find some off the wall command that is run at a specific time, and to run it manually. Today I had to find a few commands so I opened a script that controls the shutdown of all databases, and found a nice block of comment code that was left from a friend, best damn UNIX guy I know. I’ll post an excerpt of it here, taking out the stuff that I should really not make public for obvious reasons.
#### DO NOT try to fix this! ###
# The following loop is absolutely painful, and I know you THINK you
# know a better way to do this, but trust me, it won’t work. It will
# LOOK like it worked, and you won’t know the difference until you have
# to restore from the backup you created and it fails.
#
# The —– command used to shut down the databases completes
# successfully (return code 0) BEFORE the database is actually shut
# down (if you don’t believe me, call ——– ——— Corporation
# and ask them 000-000-0000. Therefore we cannot start truncating
# the —– just because —– completed successfully. The ——
# command used in this loop returns an exit code of 0 if the database
# is shut down, and some positive value otherwise. In this loop we
# go through all of the databases, add up the exit codes for each one,
# and repeat until the sum is 0 (meaning all databases are shut down).
# It would be easier to grep ‘ps -ef’ output for the ‘——-’ database
# server process, but so far we can’t get ——- Tech Support to
# confirm that no other process could be modifying database files,
# so this is the only method that has the ——– stamp of
# approval.
#
# — BEGIN brain dead loop –
Sorry, I just love finding odd bits of code from others during normal day operation.
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