I'm 42; I'm going to start blogging again

So it's been close to two and a half years since I could be bothered to click the "new post" button here.

Some of the cause of this has been busy with far more important things like family, purchasing and moving into a new house, doing DIY projects around said new house, working my day job, sim racing, working on projects related to sim racing, board gaming, and frankly... not feeling like I've got much worth blogging about.

Lets step through some of the above:

My kids are turning into real people. They're 7 and 5 now. I think I'm teaching them important things. I hope I am, because they've started to teach me some important things. Number 1 is that sleep is important for general life happiness. Number 2 is that I've neglected my fitness for too long. I'm going to work on this every day from here on out.

The new house is amazing. It's on a flat block, compared to the very steep land of the previous place. It's got more space for the kids to have their area, a room that my wife can call her own, and a converted garage where my office / man cave is located. Gigabit fiber to the house. Honestly, it's incredible. I've thoroughly enjoyed building the massive garden bed with built in seating. Planting out the front lawn with native plants has been a recent accomplishment. We've still got a list of projects, but that's great. It's fun being a house proud person.

Day job is stimulating and challenging and my co-workers are incredible. It's been over 4 years now and I still gush like a paid shill whenever I talk to people about my job. I do feel like I need to step up and engage in a bit of "career building" ambitious effort. As I've found myself stuck in a "cruise mode" rut that I'm sure is being noticed. I'm going to work on that every day too.

Sim racing is really just iRacing, and while it's still my go-to entertainment I've sort of been in a lull for the last few months. I had been competiting at the tippy top of the Formula Renault 3.5 series, getting some good results in the "high strength of field" broadcast race that runs on our Sunday mornings. Alas, with the end of daylight savings this race time slot become too early for me. Since dropping out of that series I've been enjoying being very average in GT3 cars. The highlight of my week's racing continues to be our Thursday night open wheeler league, where this season we're running the Lotus 79. Good bunch of guys, and some great racing.

A fair chunk of the time I used to dedicate to actually sim racing, has now been spent working on projects related to sim racing. The big one is the iRacing Stats Discord Bot. I'd hacked this together as a simple way to allow my friends and team mates to access the race results database that I've been collecting over the last few years. Previously I'd utilised this to share end of season stats on the iRacing forums and my (also pretty dead) iRacing Blog, and scratch my own statistical itches when I've pondered such things as "who does the most races", "who has the best results", etc. After some very kind words from the small circle of people who were using the intial version of the bot, I was convinced that it was worth taking a bit more seriously and opening it up to a wider audience. The bot's home discord server now has over 2,000 members and I've got a good count of teams chipping in some money to cover the hosting costs involved with running the bot. I've learned a huge amount while working on it, and am really proud of the big push I've recently made to get what I'm calling "version 2" out into production.

A while back my wife and I decided that we'd try hosting some boardgaming nights. Initially this started with getting a group of 8 together roughly once a month to play through Pandemic: Season 2. It was a huge success and these sorts of nights have become a huge part of our schedule. My collection of games has grown and grown, edging into the "I think you have a problem" teritory. Luckily my kids are also into baordgames now and I'm sure that my investment into all these games will pay off over the years to come.

Welcome to 2019

2018 is done and dusted and I've spent some time over the last couple of weeks pondering things that I want to achieve in 2019.

I turn 40 in May and I want to have shed the spare tyre I've been building up on my waistline. I'm cutting down on my caloric intake and getting back into the habit of intermittent fasting, aiming for two days a week where I don't eat for 36 hours.

I also need to improve my general fitness, so I'm going to get back into the habit of doing the 7 minute workout 5 days a week, and swimming 500m+ once a week.

We have a few home improvement style projects around the house:

The most crucial one is dealing with the increase of ground water that has been seeping down the hill and onto our property. We've already dug 3 trenches to install ag pipe and drainage pits that have improved the situation somewhat, and yesterday I planted 4 Man Ferns which I hope drink up a portion of the water. I think we'll need to dig in another couple of runs of ag pipe.

We've got a plan to set up an outdoor dining area in the backyard, including a pizza / bread oven and table. Much of the effort has already been completed, but there is another big push required to get it completed.

Under the house needs a better flooring solution, including a ramp to make getting the lawn mower in and out easier. I also want to improve the storage system and work bench space.

Oh hi there!

Had a spare moment to myself today and was trying to recall some tid bit and realised that the easiest place to dig it up was actually on my own site; fuzzyslogic.com — imagine my shock when I loaded the page to find that the latest content was from 4 months ago...

The whole point of the system I'd rigged up is that the site would magically contain all the content I'd posted on my other sites, added to my favourites on many other sites, or added to my "snippets" collection.... something which I just sort of continuously do.

A quick bit of troubleshooting later, it turns out that my exception handling for when one of these sources dies wasn't great. Soundcloud appears to have changed something and broken the way I was collecting favourited tracks and it was crashing the site updater. As I don't actually use Soundcloud to find new music any more, I've killed off the collector. Though, not before fixing my exception handling so that if another source has issues in the future it won't bring the whole show to an end.

Not that anyone cares, I'm pretty sure no one actually visits fuzzyslogic.com except for search engine bots.... right?

Oh, and me when my memory of where I saw something on the net fails.

As a side note, I no longer use Soundcloud because Drew tricked me into signing up for a 90 day free trial of Google Music and I found it so excellent that I've actually allowed them to direct debit me to continue using it. I could insert the "Fry shocked" gif again, but I'll spare you.

In other, other news... this is the first time I've "blogged" in nearly 2 years. More "Fry shocked" gif could be used. I sort of miss it as an outlet.... maybe I'll start again. Or maybe not. Come back in a month and check hey?

Tinkering

I'm once again tinkering with the way fuzzyslogic.com works. My latest grand idea is centered around two wonderful python projects; a static site generator called Nikola and an excellent replacement for my beloved Yahoo Pipes! called Riko.

This post is just a test to see if my new system can ingest content from blogger. More updates once I have edged closer to something worthy of showing the world.

2 hard things in Computer Science

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.

Leon Bambrick aka @secretGeek

Bye Bye 2015

2015 was a pretty big year for myself and my little tribe. We moved back to Australia after living in the US for 3 years, this time settling in Hobart, Tasmania. Another new city (and state) for all of us, but it quickly felt like home. As much as I'll miss being an hours drive from one of the world's best skydiving dropzones, I'm very happy to be back in my home country.

Looking back on 2015 it all seems like a bit of a blur. Beyond the obvious craziness of packing up our lives and moving across the planet, having our little baby grow into a toddler was pretty epic.

Looking forward to 2016 and things are sure to get even more crazy.

Hopefully in the next few hours we'll get confirmation that the final hoops have been cleared in buying a house. We'll be packing everything up again for another move in February, the upside is that should be the last time we'll need to do that any time soon.

Once we're in the new house we'll be making it feel like home and preparing it to handle a family of 4; our second child is due in May. I'm sure the place will feel like a mad house with an infant and a 2.5 year old in it, but I've got the feeling that it'll be wonderful.

Hello Old Friend

I've kicked fuzzyslogic.com back into some kind of life; essentially hacking together a very simple replacement for the fairly complex system I had in place previously. I actually feel pretty proud of what I've got running as a replacement for the old Yahoo Pipes! version of the backend for the site. At some stage in the near future I'll post a more detailed explanation of it over on my Fuzzy's Projects Blog.

Time to Rethink fuzzyslogic.com

I built the current version of fuzzyslogic.com with the idea that it had to be able to handle the fact that internet services come and go. I made it simple for me to switch from one hosting provider to another and be able to add and remove the collection of content from sites and services as they came and went. These features have worked wonderfully; when I moved to the US I switched from an Australian host to an American one, I've switched from using wordpress to blogger for my blogging service, I've switched from spurl to diigo for online bookmarking.... etc.

However, there was one single point of failure in all this; Yahoo Pipes. It is an amazing system that not many people have heard about, basically it allowed me to feed in a stack of rss feeds, munge them all together and spit out data in a format of my choice.

Now Pipes being shut down.

At the end of August 2015 the back end system for fuzzyslogic.com will stop pulling in new content because Pipes won't be there to do it.

I'm forced to consider what to do. Since I built all of this around Pipes I've learned to love a python library called Beautiful Soup, which I could use to build a custom system to replace what I was using Pipes for.

However, I have to stop and consider the fact that I haven't really been making much use of fuzzyslogic.com anyway. Combine that with the fact that no one else actually visits the site anyway..... then maybe I don't really need to invest any effort in keeping it running.

I could kill off the host all together and shift the domain name over be hosted by my registra or simply point it directly at the fuzzy's logic blogger site. This would be saving me US$5 a month and never having to worry about updating a web server or even monitoring one.

The only other things I've been using the web server host for is running my RSS aggregator which I can replace with another service such as inoreader.com, running an IRC bot in a channel which has recently been replaced by our group using Slack and storing random files (which I can use any number of cloud storage places for).

I've got a little over a month to think about it.... but at this stage I'm leaning towards shutting down the web server.

2014

Already a month into 2015 and I haven't really found the time or inclination to do any kind of 2014 wrap up post. I think mostly this is because last year was epic for a whole bunch of reasons which are completely unlike any I've included in a previous year wrap post. Normally I talk about games, movies and tv shows. I sprinkle in some stuff about technology and news.

Last year I became a Dad.

Games, movies, tv shows and technology all seem a little less important now.

I don't really want to post about all the amazing things, lessons and hurdles we faced as new parents; as proven by the fact that I set up daddyslogic.com and posted to it a total of about thrice before realizing that I was better off spending the energy being a Dad than posting about being a Dad.

The people who care about my trials and tribulations as a new Dad are on Facebook, where I've spammed a near continuous stream of photos and quips about the whole ordeal.

The one thing I will say is that I have found time to get deeply addicted to online sim racing, specifically iRacing. I started a blog for that too; fuzzysracing.blogspot.com. My interest in sharing thoughts and information about that topic hasn't waned yet.

Google Thinks I'm Interested In

You can find out what topics Google thinks you're interested in via this link.

Here's mine:

Action & Adventure Films

Android Apps

Android OS

Antivirus & Malware

Arts & Entertainment

Audio Equipment

Banking

Blu-Ray Players & Recorders

Bollywood & South Asian Film

Business & Industrial

Business & Productivity Software

Cable & Satellite Providers

Camcorders

Camera & Photo Equipment

Cameras

Cameras & Camcorders

Chips & Processors

Computer & Video Games

Computer Components

Computer Drives & Storage

Computer Hardware

Computer Memory

Computer Monitors & Displays

Computer Security

Computers & Electronics

Consumer Electronics

Dance & Electronic Music

Data Backup & Recovery

Desktop Computers

Electronic Accessories

Email & Messaging

Flash Drives & Memory Cards

Game Systems & Consoles

Games

Hard Drives

Headphones

Home & Garden

Home Theater Systems

ISPs

Ink & Toner

Input Devices

Internet & Telecom

Internet Clients & Browsers

Jazz

LCD TVs

Laptops & Notebooks

Mac OS

Memory Card Readers

Mobile & Wireless

Mobile & Wireless Accessories

Mobile Apps & Add-Ons

Mobile OS

Mobile Phones

Movies

Music & Audio

Music Recording Technology

Network Storage

Networking

Networking Equipment

News

Online Video

Operating Systems

Photo & Video Software

Power Supplies

Product Reviews & Price Comparisons

Recording Industry

Security Products & Services

Shooter Games

Smart Phones

Software

Software Utilities

Sony PlayStation

Sound & Video Cards

South Asian Music

Speakers

Stereo Systems & Components

TV & Video

TV & Video Equipment

Tablet PCs

Televisions

Travel

Voice & Video Chat

Web Services

Webcams & Virtual Tours

Windows Mobile OS

Windows OS

Xbox

Not bad.

insight not incite

Insight not incite. Just a thought.

Podcast Sync

I listen to audio books and podcasts using a SanDisk Sansa, I prefer this over using my mobile phone for a few reasons. The main ones are:

• battery life; the sansa lasts weeks with out a recharge


• it clips onto my collar and I use a very short set of headphones

I use the Juice podcast receiver application to download and manage my podcast subscriptions. I have it rigged up to download new podcasts every day and delete any file over 14 days old (for some podcasts I set up a longer purge time).

I then have a batch file which calls xxcopy to sync the mp3 files from the podcast download folder on my laptop onto the sansa. Here is the batch file:

[code]@echo off
set SN=19088743
set "extDrive="

for /f %%D in ('wmic volume get driveLetter^, serialNumber ^| find "%sn%"') do set extDrive=%%D

if not defined extDrive echo Error finding external drive & pause & exit /b

xxcopy C:\Users\fuzzy\Podcasts "%extDrive%\PODCASTS" /KS/H/E/R/Q/BB/ZE/oD0/ZY/YY/EXC:\Users\fuzzy\Utils\podcast-exclude.txt[/code]

Now there are a couple of things which you'd have to edit if you were going to make use of this:

• plug in your mp3 player


• check what drive letter has been assigned to it


• open a cmd window (start -> run -> cmd)


• execute the following: wmic volume get driveLetter, serialNumber


• copy the serial number listed next to the drive letter of your mp3 player


• edit this number into the line in the batch file to replace my serial number: set SN=19088743

You'll also need to edit the paths to your podcast directory on your PC and the output directory.

The C:\Users\fuzzy\Utils\podcast-exclude.txt part is the location of a text file which contains a list of any folders which I don't want to include in the sync.

Windows 8.1 Upgrade

I had a few issues while attempting to upgrade my laptop from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1.

1. If your harddrive is encrypted with something like TrueCrypt, you'll have to decode it, apply the upgrade and then re-encode it.
2. A batch file script I use to sync podcasts between my PC and mp3 player had once gone a little nuts and written some files to my system reserved partition. This meant that there wasn't enough free space in there for the 8.1 upgrade to do its thing. I had to use a GParted Live CD to work out what was wrong and clean up the podcast mess.

Once the install of the 8.1 upgrade was completed the first thing I attempted to do was connect to one of the servers I manage via remote desktop. I usually do this by selecting the appropriate entry from my start -> run history. Imagine my joy to find out that all the entries for all commands had been removed. Thanks MS.

Mobile Phones

I've posted previously about how I was very late to the smart phone "revolution" and as my experience of living with an Android device in my pocket has continued I thought I'd give a little update.

As quick Too Long; Didn't Read update, here the 5 key reasons I'd continued using an old nokia handset while the waves of the smartphone sea crashed around me:

1. I'm at a computer for around 12 hours a day.
2. When not at a computer I actually like being disconnected from email, the web, etc.
3. Simplicity. I don't waste brain cycles on apps, updating, upgrading, replacing, recharging.
4. Size. The nokia 6100 I used back home in Australia was the smallest and lightest phone nokia have ever made. It was also practically unbreakable.
5. Cost.

The change came when my new employer declared that they'd pay all the contract fees of a phone plan, including the upfront cost if it was under $50. Therefore, if I was happy with an older handset it would cost me nothing. If I wanted a new shiny Galaxy S4 or HTC One, I'd have to fork out the $200 upfront cost.

I can report that I've had my 1st taste of the "upgrade cycle", just this week I moved from the HTC Droid Incredible which I had been given by my employer as a temporary phone until I worked out what I wanted for a longer period. The Droid was a good entry point for me, not large enough to annoy me as I carried it around in my pocket.

My plan was to wait until the Galaxy S4 was released and cross my fingers that the S3 would drop down into the $50 upfront bucket. Initially verizon lowered the S3 from $200 to $100. I was disappointed, but I'd got used to the Droid and even though it was running the old version of android I figured I'd just stick with it and keep an eye on the $50 bucket.

The S3 had a special draw for me, beyond being an excellent handset; a barometer. This would allow me to use the BASEline flight computer app to track my skydives.

Color me surprised when on one of my random checks of the verizon page I noticed that the S3 was now $50. I organized to get switched over to the S3 and have been wonderfully surprised. Yes it is bigger in my pocket but it is lighter, which is more important. I'll accept the size increase because the screen is so much better to read from. Android 4 is really quite an improvement and the overall speed increase is huge.

I've also got to admit that I've become extremely addicted to Real Racing 3. I did not expect to find that one of the best racing games ever made would be for a mobile device.... and free.

In other mobile phone news, if I had ~$700 to blow to buy a handset outright, I think I'd be very interested in the Ubuntu Edge. I think they're on the right path and that the end game for mobile devices is that they will become true "convergence" devices which can replace desktop computers for general computing tasks.

A Few Changes

motd

Ubuntu Dynamic MOTD

I'm just finishing off moving all my web sites and related things from one VPS host to another. The new host had customized the message of the day on the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS image which I had installed. It had helpful links to support and what not, things that are only actually helpful the first time I logged in.

As I went through the process of removing all this I had to learn about the update-motd system, since I quickly found that the solution wasn't a simple:

[sourcecode language="bash"]$ sudo echo "" > /etc/motd[/sourcecode]

So I cooked up a bash script to spit out some information about the system every time I log into the server. The output looks like this:



Create or edit update-motd's 00-header file.

[sourcecode language="bash"]$ sudo vi /etc/update-motd.d/00-header[/sourcecode]

And here's the source of the bash script:

[sourcecode language="bash"]#!/bin/sh

[ -r /etc/lsb-release ] && . /etc/lsb-release

if [ -z "$DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION" ] && [ -x /usr/bin/lsb_release ]; then
# Fall back to using the very slow lsb_release utility
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION=$(lsb_release -s -d)
fi

UPTIME=`uptime | awk '{if ($4 == "day," || $4 == "days,") print $3, $4, $5; else print $3}' | awk -F: '{print $1, "hrs", $2, "mins"}' | sed 's/,//g'`

LOADAVG=`uptime | awk '{if ($4 == "day," || $4 == "days,") print $10, $11, $12; else print $8, $9, $10}'`

PROCCOUNT=`ps -l | wc -l`
PROCCOUNT=`expr $PROCCOUNT - 4`
IP=$(/sbin/ifconfig eth0 | grep "inet addr" | awk -F: '{print $2}' | awk '{print $1}')

echo -e "
==============: System Info :===================
Hostname: `hostname`
Address: $IP
Distro: $DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION
Kernel: `uname -r`
Uptime: $UPTIME
Load Avgs: $LOADAVG
Processes: $PROCCOUNT
==============: Memory Info :===================
Total: `cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal | awk {'print $2'}` kB
Free: `cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemFree | awk {'print $2'}` kB
Lowest: `cat /proc/meminfo | grep LowFree | awk {'print $2'}` kB
===============: Disk Info :===================="
df -h[/sourcecode]

Hyper-V 2012 Failover Cluster: Live Migration Fails

I love hyper-v. I especially love hyper-v running on windows server 2012 in a failover cluster configuration. It truly is a wonderful environment to administer windows servers. With this said, the error logging leaves a lot to be desired.

I've just spent the better part of two days trying to work out why live migration of servers between cluster nodes wasn't working. The error message which Microsoft helpfully give you when this happens is simply:

Event ID: 21502
Source: Hyper-V High Availability
’Virtual Machine <VM NAME>’ Live Migration did not succeed at the destination

And over on the hyper-v host you were trying to migrate the virtual machine onto you'll get the equally as amazing Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-High-Availability-Admin log entry of:

Source: Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-High-Availability
Event ID: 21111
Description:
Live migration of 'Virtual Machine <VM NAME>' failed.

Oh thanks, it didn't work because it failed.

Finally after reading many a technet article and support thread I stumbled onto the fix. It was simple. Here's the details for anyone else who suffers this problem:

• On any node in your hyper-v cluster, open up Failover Cluster Manager


• Select the cluster name


• In the bottom right corner of the manager window, click Take Offline


• Again in the bottom right corner, under More Actions, click Repair


• This will bring the cluster back online and magically fix the mysterious problem causing live migrations of VMs to fail

Best of all, it will do this with out any disruptions to running VMs. Enjoy!

Flipboard

I recently posted a long ramble about being very late to the smartphone "evolution". One reason, of many, which I'd held off for so long was because I could predict the amount of time I'd "waste" messing around and tinkering with the phone and the apps installed on it. I was right.

I'm sure that it won't really be news to anyone that Flipboard is an amazing app. I'm such a fan of feed based news and information ingestion that I have used my own rss aggregator for years, so obviously one of the first apps I needed to find was an rss / news reader. Flipboard won out over Google Currents and the handful of other rss readers I checked out.

With that said, I had to put together my own specially crafted rss feeds to be truly happy. What I've done is create new feeds of my favourite sources using yahoo pipes which have images included in the body of each post, so that Flipboard displays the image, headline and snippet in a good looking way. I then added these rss feeds to my Google Reader account. While Google has announced that Reader is being killed off in July, it is currently the best way to get new feeds added to Flipboard. Just add your G.Reader account in the accounts settings in Flipboard. Then you can add each separate feed to an icon link on the main Flipboard screen for easy access.

Here's the list of feeds which I've created:

• NASA Picture of the Day


• Planet Formula 1 News


• BBC World News


• Bad Astronomy


• Tech Block

Fuzzyslogic.com Goes Responsive

Since I've finally got a smartphone I figured I should finally get around to haxing together a responsive design for fuzzyslogic.com. So now you can visit my crappy site on your phone. Yay!