William Reardon’s Blog

What Rick walked into the other morning.

The full BOCOG press release.

I liked Driving Miss Daisy.

Earlier in the week, I needed to extract some performance data from our apache logs. Nothing too crazy, so I whipped it together in Perl.

The log files I needed were placed nightly on a server, so I whipped up a shell script to snag them & bring them locally as well. I need to delete files non-error logs (containing my metrics), and decompress things, but overall it worked well.

Only it required me typing in four commands.

Each day.

Being a geek, I was offended by this & decided to take the five minutes to automate all that as well. After all, I’m smart.

Only that part were I delete files that aren’t error logs?

Well, that included my script.

I had to run ls a few times before I could believe it.

D’oh. So much for smart.

Licking my wounds, a few hours later, I decide to suck it up & just set about writing it again. I fire up emacs and then remember — emacs automatically makes backups! I head over to my autosave-dir directory and — YES! — there is my file!

I think I need to fire-up doctor mode & say thank you.

I hate zombies.

It’s rare you’ll hear me use the word “hate”, but I use it here. I hate zombies.

I don’t like the concept, I don’t like that guttural noise they make, and I certainly don’t like zombie movies.

As a kid, like all kids, I had to watch Thriller, but man. It freaked the beejezus out of me.

I later saw Night of the Living Dead and had nightmares for two weeks. Two weeks!

So working the weekend to get ready for the Beijing Olympic ticket sales, what do I see walking down the street?

Why a pack of 200 zombies.

I don’t know if having a desk with a view of the the Sunset Strip is a good thing, but I do know I need a shotgun.

UPDATE: Explained.

When I took my first Spanish class in high school, the most interesting bits were the unexpected differences. It was just learning a different set of words for nouns, but nouns had gender? There’s a plural form of “you?” As well as an informal vs formal?

It’s been a similar experience learning how live entertainment & ticketing works throughout the world. Along those lines, a bit ago I set off for a business trip to Germany, Spain, Ireland, and the U.K.

In Germany, it’s fairly common to give someone a set of tickets for a gift. And despite being such a modern country, people don’t like to buy their tickets online. Instead, they’ll visit a ticket shop like Theaterkasse Schumacher.

The agents are friendly & helpful, and have an intimate knowledge of local venues. Tickets are extremely popular as Christmas gifts and around that time of year, lines will often be out door.

In Spain, our first visit was to fnac — similar to an upscale Best Buy in the States. Tickets are sold from a special counter in the lobby, and that Friday afternoon the line ran somewhat deep.

What caught me the most off guard was the popularity of pro wrestling — or as it’s called in Spain “Pressing Catch.”

It’s hugely popular with families and sells out quickly.

I don’t want to go on the cart.

So where are the pics from Ireland & London?

Well, there, my friend, is the rub.

When you read the history books, you get the feeling the Black Death was something in the past, and the plague is gone now. Not so.

I picked up a fairly awful bug. I’d swear it was ebola or bubonic, but my doctor says it’s more likely it’s just the flu.

I really didn’t even get much of a chance to see Barcelona. Instead, any time out of my hotel room was spent at various farmacias, searching for orange juice, and trying to find a store that sold humidifiers — all in a place were I only spoke broken Spanish. There was a lot of “Excuse me, Sir, do you have the machine that puts more moisture in the air?”

So sadly I ended up having to fly back a big early. But there I learned a very valuable life-lesson I’ll share tomorrow.

When I flew into Hamburg this weekend I knew it was windy.

What I didn’t know was how windy it had been earlier that morning.

UPDATE: Fixed link, this time hosted on nbc.com. Thanks for the pointer, Chris!

Be sure to watch the leading ad, people. This is what the writers went on strike for!

Like a lot of folks, I use a ‘toread’ tag on del.icio.us to keep track of things I want to read, but just don’t have the time.

The other day I noticed I currently had 270 items to read, the oldest going back to ~2005.

Clearly my eyes were bigger than my stomach. Er, than my eyes. Wait… nevermind.

Anyway.

Oddly the best time to catch is up on Online reading is when I’m offline. Specifically, when I’m on a long plane ride.

Instead of waiting for the airlines to figure out the whole Internet-on-a-plane thing, and since I have some pretty long flights coming up myself, I decided to hack something together using Perl & wget. After all, wget does a lot of the heavy lifting already, so really it should be just a matter of gluing wget together with delicious.

With that, I give you mirror-toread.pl.

You can run it as

./mirror-toread.pl <username> <password>

It’ll take a while to run the first time, as it throttles requests to 1/second.

Afterwards, you should have an index.html & a ‘Toread’ directory containing whatever you’ve tagged with ‘toread’.

I should mention a pretty gnarly hack, done in an hour or so. It ain’t pretty. And it ain’t perfect.

I had wanted to find the “next” link for articles paginated, but I realized it’s be easier to bookmark the “print” version in the future. Video and the like isn’t handled well. And so on.

But hopefully it’s good enough. We’ll find out next week when I head to Europe (where the history comes from).

“In time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda. I do not believe we should be too quick to criticize the actions of a belligerent nation. There is always the question whether we, ourselves, would do better under similar circumstances.

…

“It is not only our right, but it is our obligation as American citizens to look at this war objectively, and to weigh our chances for success if we should enter it.

…

“The campaigns of the war show only too clearly how difficult it is to force a landing, or to maintain an Army, on a hostile coast.

…

“When these facts are cited, the interventionists shout that we are defeatists, that we are undermining the principles of democracy…

…

“I say it is the interventionist in America, as it was in England, and in France, who gives comfort to the enemy. I say it is they who are undermining the principles of democracy when they demand that we take a course to which more than 80 percent of our citizens are opposed. I charge them with being the real defeatists, for their policy has led to the defeat of every country that followed their advice since this war began. There is no better way to give comfort to an enemy than to divide the people of a nation over the issue of foreign war. There is no shorter road to defeat than by entering a war with inadequate preparation. Every nation that has adopted the interventionist policy of depending on some one else for its own defense has met with nothing but defeat and failure.

…

“When history is written, the responsibility for the downfall of the democracies of Europe will rest squarely upon the shoulders of the interventionists who led their nations into war uninformed and unprepared. With their shouts of defeatism, and their disdain of reality, they have already sent countless thousands of young men to death… And they have led this country, too, to the verge of war.

…

“War is not inevitable for this country. Such a claim is defeatism on the true sense. No one can make us fight abroad unless we ourselves are willing to do so. No one will attempt to fight us here if we arm ourselves as a great nation should be armed. Over a hundred million people in this nation are opposed to entering the war. If the principles of democracy mean anything at all, that is reason enough for us to stay out. If we are forced into a war against the wishes of an overwhelming majority of our people, we will have proved democracy such a failure at home that there will be little use fighting for it abroad.

…

“The time has come when those of us who believe in an independent American destiny must band together and organize for strength. We have been led toward war by a minority of our people. This minority has power. It has influence. It has a loud voice. But it does not represent the American people.’

– Charles Lindbergh, April 23rd, 1941