Dave Lachapelle

Found this article in the Hamilton Spectator yesterday, glad to see the project I’ve been helping to propose has finally gotten the go ahead and even got some press.  So, now its go time for CFL Media, and the next few months are going to be rough as we work towards re-launching all the CFL / Team websites under one banner – similar to how the NFL or NHL handle their sites.

I’m fairly excited to be at the center of this project from a technological standpoint.  We have a lot of great ideas, that will probably end up as written guides on my blog – for instance we are currently evaluating Varnish HTTP accelerators to help deal with the huge spikes in load we tend to have, being an event driven business.

Anyway, thats all for now – read the spec article here:

http://www.thespec.com/Sports/article/523528

Life is super insane right now – between work, wedding planning, building a house and trying to get some form of sleep, I barely have time for anything these days… I will try and make more time though if thats even possible.

Well, a bit delayed, but a happy new year to everyone out there who may find my blog.  Speaking of my blog – I have a few plans for updating it significantly over the next few months – I’ll be keeping the URL structure the same, but overhauling the layout and functionality to better suit my needs.

So, santa was good to be this year – got a lot of clothes and other fun stuff, bought myself a GPS from Best Buy on Boxing day – btw, if anyone ever decides it may be a good idea to go to any store on boxing day, its NOT.  I literally spent 2 hours in Best Buy – 1.5 of them waiting in line to pay for my item.

Anyway, so far, happy with it, I ended up with the Garmin 250W, I haven’t updated the maps yet – perhaps I’ll do that today, but thus far it hasn’t failed me.

Well, it has been a while once again since I’ve had an opportunity to post on my blog.  Things have been progressing well for me, both in my personal life as well as in my career.  Though I still find myself without much time to do everything that needs doing, I’m beginning ot get my life in order.

Tania and I are continuing to work on the wedding planning, which is moving along at a decent pace.  Tania found an idea for a centerpiece that I really like, but requires some construction work on our part, so I think I’ll likely build a sample and see how things go.  We also managed to book our limousines for the day of.  We decided on a 1961 Rolls Royce for Tania’s transportation to the church, and consequently our transportation to the photos.  We also managed to get a 20 person stretch hummer in the deal, so, all in all should be a good day.  We’re still working on the DJ and Decorations, which are kind of the two big things remaining.

Beyond that, work is going well for me – I got a promotion a few months back, and things have been doing well – though I never seem to stop working now-a-days.  I’m now the Director of Technology for MRX and the Ticats, which is more than a full time job.  Hopefully will have some extra help soon though.

Anyway – have to finish up building a site – I’ll post more details on it here soon.

So, I just encountered a very strange issue with PHP’s FTP function and thought I’d take a quick sec to write about the problem, in case anyone else is having it.

Essentially we have a module in our application that moves a few files around via FTP.  Now this works fine on some servers, but some have problems – ftp_put returns ”, and creates a 0kb file on the remote FTP server.  Turns out – after much diagnosis, that enabling pasv mode in some cases fixes this problem (ftp_pasv).

So, I have been struggling the past few weeks with Textmate and it being stupid slow on certain projects that contain a ton of files. Apparently every time Textmate gets focus, it re-scans the entire project folder for changed files – which really sucks if you’re alt-tabbing back and forth a bit to see changes you’re making to a project.

I finally did a bit of searching around and discovered this gem:

il maestro ignoto » Blog Archive » slow projects loading in textmate

To save some typing, you can just copy and paste this into your preferences:

!(/\.(?!htaccess)[^/]*|\.(jpeg|jpg|png|gif|mp3|pdf|swf)|\.(tmproj|o|pyc)|/Icon\r|/svn-commit(\.[2-9])?\.tmp)$

This will tell Textmate to ignore graphics and whatnot when it regains focus and greatly speed up the loading of your projects.

Been a little while since I’ve posted I realize – been quite busy lately.  So, I picked up a new toy today for my fileserver / it just arrived today, I ordered it quite a while ago.  I had one more hard drive than I had bays, and I wasn’t using any of my optical bays – so I decided to buy a 3-4 drive bay converter.  Specifically I got one of these: http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=22889&vpn=CFP51%2DB&manufacture=Silverstone%20Technology

Really nice piece of hardware – very well packaged and organized.  Anyway, I proceeded to shut down the fileserver to install the drive, got it all set back up – drive detected, go to boot ubuntu, and guess what it won’t boot.  I end up at a busybox prompt.  Really not cool.

It would appear there’s some kind of bug in the ubuntu kernel or one of the recent ubuntu updates that is giving me grief – I know its not the new drive because I unplugged it and continued to have the same problem.  Specifically if I try to boot up, it gives me an error saying it can’t mount /root – Device or resource busy.  Well, I mean, really, how can the drive be busy, there’s nothing open on it.

So far I can almost get it to boot up but I think I’m going to leave it for the night and see if I can come up with a solution.  Currently to boot it up I have to do this:

mount -o ro /dev/hda1 /root

ctrl-d

That will at least bring me to a prompt, but for some reason I can’t access any of my drives – they’re all saying device or resource busy.

Again – Really not cool.

Well just a few video clips for all you System Administrators out there, Happy System Administrator Day!

Hate to say it Nintendo, but just about everyone “told you so”…

Gizmodo UK : Wii Storage Problem ‘Urgent’ Admits Nintendo

At least now you’re admitting there’s a problem, instead of the year of plugging your ears and saying “la-la-la we can’t hear you… no there is no storage problem… no we won’t add a hard drive accessory to the Wii”.

“We have said publicly that we’re looking hard at the storage
situation, that we’re working on a range of solutions. We have nothing
to announce now. But certainly it’s an issue we are aware of and we’re
working to find a solution and we will. We have a consumer base who
loves virtual console. We have a user base who really is enjoying
WiiWare content.

So for us really our challenge really is how do we satisfy all
these consumers who are loving all of the product we make available on
a download basis? As we continue to have things, as you point out, like
‘Mario Kart’ that has its own channel when you’re playing from an
Internet perspective, we’re just making this challenge tougher and
tougher. So in our view this is becoming much more of a mainstream
problem, which is why we have a sense of urgency to solve it.”

So, if its such an urgent thing to fix the storage problem now, why wasn’t it a year ago when everyone was saying that it really is a problem? That and if they aren’t going to add a hard drive, what else could they do? Maybe make use of the SD-Card slot and finally allow people to play games off their SD cards?

Well, I’ve seen a few new comments come in to my blog about Rogers’ craptastic billing department, so I figured I’d follow that one up with another small rant about Rogers’ services. So, on July 4th, I got a letter in the mail from Rogers, seems they love sending out mail, aside from their bills I tend to get 4-5 letters a month from them. Guess I know where they’re spending all the money they’re gouging from consumers. Anyway, I digress… I got this letter in the mail: “Important notice regarding your home phone service”. Great, they’re going to increase the price of their service.

To my surprise, its a notice saying they’re going to be upgrading my analog service to their new amazing “digital” service, because they can no longer maintain the analog phone lines. What a load of crock, I was actually a Sprint customer back in the day when Rogers bought them out, and I’m fairly certain that as a result of the buyout, Rogers had to maintain the analog phone lines. That being said, Ma Bell happens to own the lines and leases them out to Rogers, which I would guess cuts into their ever so precious profit margins. So, it would make sense, from a business perspective (aside from the whole giving Bell back their monopoly), for Rogers to try and stop paying the expensive leasing fees and give everyone VoIP, which costs them essentially nothing.

Anyway, the whole point of the argument, monopolies aside, is that I got the letter on July 4th. They are making the change to my line on August 1st according to the letter. Now, the real problem is that I rely on my analog phone line for my DSL, which I get through Sentex. Would seem Rogers can’t even get their act together to give their customers even 1 months notice of changes to their services. Unfortunately, you can’t cancel any contract without a month’s notice, GREAT GOING ROGERS! So, now, I’m forced to cancel my service with Rogers, get Bell to take over my phone line, and look, Rogers has lost another customer.

Really, wake up people, why can’t you get your act together and be a decent service provider like you used to be? Rising prices, crappy service, for what, a few “value adds” here and there? No thanks.