The Laughing DM

Twitter Updates for 2010-03-12

DungeonMaster — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Here comes the rain again … That's good 'cause we need it. A lot. #

Chrome Confusion

DungeonMaster — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:44:01 +0000

I went to visit the web site for one of my favorite bands (Judas Priest) tonight, and found that my favorite browser, Google’s Chrome, was a bit confused. It helpfully offered to translate the web site.

Chrome Offers To Translate

The only problem with the offer to help is that the web site isn’t actually in German.

Actual Web Site

Twitter Updates for 2010-03-03

DungeonMaster — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Oh, goody. Power outage. Wonder how much work I lost? #

Power Outage and Linux

DungeonMaster — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 01:40:57 +0000

We had a power outage today that, naturally, took all of the computer systems down. The outage by itself was a bit unusual as the power kept going down and then coming back on. This repeated every few minutes for the better part of 45 minutes.

When the outage was over a Linux laptop that runs Nagios wouldn’t come back on the network. Well, it would come back on the network well enough to get a DHCP address from the router. But that was it. It couldn’t see anything. It couldn’t even ping the router once the IP address was assigned. It didn’t really come back until I #$%&ed around with the network settings for a while. I’m not even really sure what I did to get it back.

The whole even vis-a-vis the Linux laptop doesn’t make any sense. It really should have come back fine considering that I shut it down during the first cycle of the power outage. That laptop doesn’t have much in the way of a battery and it doesn’t make much sense to have it wasting power on wireless trying to get to systems it will never be able to reach during the power outage. The system has been shutdown before and it has always recovered just fine.

I remain baffled.

Still Here

DungeonMaster — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:06:48 +0000

I just noticed that the entire month of February was about to slip by without saying anything. Well, I can’t let that happen.

Actually, I’ve been really, really busy overhauling another web site. It’s finally done.

Burned Out TnT Store

DungeonMaster — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:29:35 +0000

I’d been meaning to upload this picture for some time. It was taken near St. Cloud, MN during our trip there during the summer of 2009.

"TNT" Store

We had pulled off the freeway to get some coffee and saw this, a burned out “TNT” store. We started laughing like crazy as I’m sure many others did over the months that the building was under repair.

The store’s actual name was “Treasures N Things”.

Ignorance

DungeonMaster — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:00:07 +0000

Why is ignorance self-reinforcing?

Drupal Image Oddity

DungeonMaster — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:20:03 +0000

In working on porting a hand coded web site to a Drupal web site there are a number of pages that need to be ported to the “Drupal way” of doing things. One strange item that I ran across was was this image of what Drupal rendered for an image. Admittedly, the src URL wasn’t correct. What was unexpected was that instead of showing a placeholder the src and alt attributes were showing.

Drupal Image Oddity

Typically when I setup a page with images I like to use a style like:

Using multiple lines makes it easier to see all that is happening with the image.

Apparently this confuses Drupal in some way. Drupal would not render the placeholder for the image until all of the attributes for the tag were placed on the same line.

Twitter Updates for 2010-01-20

DungeonMaster — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Cool. In a Noah's Bagels where Black Sabbath's Iron Man is playing. #

Twitter Updates for 2010-01-11

DungeonMaster — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:00:00 +0000

Ouch! I just got hit by a neutrino! #