Daley Ponderings

After a slightly hectic day yesterday, when I noticed some strange behavior on one of my servers, we released a new version of LifeType.  While I am not impressed that the bug existed in the first place, I think it is pretty neat that a development fixed was released within 4 hours of the bug being discovered, and an official release within 36 hours.  The last time we had a security issue, we released the fix in less than 24 hours, but it is harder on a Sunday.

The security issue itself wasn't all that interesting - we were checking a blacklist in a case-sensitive manner, and so filename.PHP was incorrectly allowed to be uploaded, and filename.php was correctly blocked. (More)

My friend Bonnie has this neat baby ticker on her blog, so I thought I'd look up mine.  Since I'm still getting used to the baby being as old as he is, it was surprising to me to see how big he looks.  I couldn't get the application to imbed in the post, so it's on our sidebar at the bottom under "miscellaneous." (More)

As long as you can turn off the sound, it looks pretty neat! 

(From GeekDad) 

Copying the rest of you cool bloggers, I installed feedjit a while back.  I originally thought it wasn't going to be very useful, since I assumed that all of the international hits were the many search engines that like crawl the blog all day long, or worse, spammers trying to post comments.

But, as I looked into it more, they look to be valid individuals finding the blog via search engines, mostly on the technical posts, particularly on the Test Director post.  Humorously enough, I gave up on Test Director a long time ago - too much work to keep it running for what it gives you.  Perhaps I should erase the post to help people not waste their time on it, as my information is most likely out of date.  It is unfortunate that Mercury doesn't support their own product, and so people have to find places like my blog for technical support.  It probably needs to be open-sourced in order to get better support.

I am sure this will excite many of our normal readers, but I have finally (after four years) switched my laptop to Linux.  Now that I am using it everyday, it is much nicer to be in this environment, instead of having putty windows all over the place.  Perhaps if I had a better window manager for windows, I would have been alright, but anyway...

I have a Sony PCG-V505DC2 for those search engines to help other folks trying to figure out any issues with installing Linux, and Debian specifically.

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"Oh, why are we not more holy!", he would exclaim with loving insistence.  "Why do we not live in eternity, walk with God all the day long?  Why are we not all-devoted to God, breathing the whole spirit of missionaries?

"Alas, we are too much enthusiasts, looking for the end without faithfully using the means.  Do we rise at four or even five in the morning to be alone with God?  Do we fast once a week, once a month?  Do we even know the obligation or benefit of it?  Do we recommend the five o'clock hour for private prayer, at the close of the day?  Do we observe it?  Do we not find that 'any time' is no time?

"Oh let us stir up the gift of God that is in us.  Let us no more sleep as do others.  Let us take heed to the ministry that we have received in the Lord, that we fulfil it. 'Whatsoever thy findeth to do, do it with thy might.'"

-- John Wesley, as quoted in Hudson Taylor's biography, "In the Early Years". 

We had Easter dinner at the Venables with four families (total.)  It was a fun time and we got home after it was fully dark.  As I was getting Noah out of the car I noticed that the sky was perfectly clear and the stars were shining as much as you can expect in a city.  I saw Orion and the Big Dipper and the North Star.   I told Jon and Jonathan they should go look for a few minutes, so they sat on the hood of the car for quite a while.  It was fun to watch them out there and it will be fun to hear the report of their conversation.  (More)

I should have given the phone to Jonathan.  That's who she asked for. But I hesitated because after the first greeting I had doubts about whether she was my sister or not.  So I double checked, "Which Jonathan would you like to speak to?"  "Um... Jonathan Daley."  "May I tell him who's calling?" "[name which I've already forgotten]" "From where? [if you're a client, I'd like to know which company]"  "Hillary Clinton Campaign."  Oh.  Good bye.  I should have given the phone to Jonathan.

When a customer says that he has a smaller project than the one I just did, don't pay attention, and think about the quote, rather than simply estimating the time as less than the previous project.

Yesterday, I did a project for a friend (one who let me have better access than average to the real estate listings) and it took an hour and a half and was 107 lines of code.  He wanted to pay for that one, but I thought it was a fair exchange for getting the real estate listing access.

Today, I did a "smaller" project, that was 367 lines of code, and it took 3.5 hours. Hrm.

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Last week, Noah opened the childproofed cabinets in the kitchen.  It was no fluke - he closed it after the first time, and then deliberately repeated his action.  So we have disabled those and instructed him not to open those cabinets (he is obeying so far.)  These are the "glass" cabinets, whose contents are breakable.  The "lock" is still on the under-sink cabinet, which Noah has not yet tried to explore. (More)

Last week I felt the baby moving.  This is always a fun thing for a mom, to feel that physical connection to the baby.  (More)

I woke up this morning to find Taiwan's Yahoo server rejecting emails that were supposedly sent using my server.  I originally figured it was the regular old spammer trick of using invalid return addresses until I noticed that it was one of my servers who was reporting the failure, rather than an external machine. (More)

I don't know if it is only relevant to Allegheny County or if it is more universal, but a friend asked me to write a parcel id (parcel/block/lot) parser to help him out in his real estate searches.  It was kind of a fun project (3 hours) and it was neat to see how well it worked out in the end.

It takes stuff on the right, and turns it into the stuff on the left:

0318-C-00080-0000-00 <= 318 C 080
0387-S-00002-0000-00 <= 387-S-2  387-M-148
0160-K-00013-0000-00 <= 0160-K-00013-0000-00
0124-P-00095-000A-00 <= 0124-p-00095-000a-00
1213-F-00377-0000-00 <= 1213F00377
0180-B-00041-0000-00 <= 0180-B-00041-0000-00
0495-F-00201-0000-00 <= Lot & Block 495-F-201
0009-S-00305-0000-00 <= 9-S-305
0309-D-00100-0000-00 <= 0309D00100000000

Code follows below: (More)

I hadn't ever thought of putting motors on an etch-a-sketch.

I found a nifty application (watch the youtube video for an idea of how it works) for playing around, and Jonathan and spent at least a couple hours today playing with it.  It simulates gravity, friction, inertia and things like that.  Jonathan enjoyed it and asked about it when we got home today.