Gonzo sed code

In the last few weeks the juxtaposition of two things has made me laugh a bit.

First, there is this quote from Neal Stephenson's REAMDE:

Like any Russian, Sokolov enjoyed a game of chess.  At some level, he was never not playing it!  Every morning he woke up and looked at the tiles on the ceiling of the office that was his bedroom and reviewed the positions of all of the pieces and thought about all of the moves that they might make today, what countermoves he would have to make to maximize his chances of survival.

Soon after I read this I encountered SedChess, which is a wickedly awesome implementation of chess implemented in sed.  This is a fabulous hack, somewhat akin to producing fine carpentry with a stapler!  I was totally unsurprised when I first saw this hack on github that all of the comments were written in Russian.

The last fabulous hack I can recall in sed was dc.sed, which was a nearly complete implementation of "dc".


I've written some gonzo code in Perl....but I bow to people who have the patience and skillz to write gonzo code in sed....

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Mind the Gaps!

We had a nice ride yesterday. There were "only" two hills too!
It is so nice to ride with a great group of friends!

Another Pig Ride!

Another Pig Ride! Woo-hoo!

I think I saw a Sasquatch on Mt. Delight...

...but luckily I was able to out-climb the beast...

Raid Rockingham 2013

It was a nice ride.  I experienced one flat, but I rode with a great bunch of people. 

The Death of a Hard-Drive

Have you ever wanted to see a hard-drive die on a production system?  Yeah, me neither...

The other day I was called upon to try to figure out what was going wrong on a heavily-utilized production system.  I dimly recalled looking at this system several months ago.  From my notes, I recalled that the system was acting a bit sluggishly back then.  I even made a few performance improvements at the time.

Fast forward to this past week...  The performance improvements that I made months ago helped get the system through a critical period, but now the system was acting sluggishly again.  So, I analyzed the logs.   There, in the logs, was a periodic warning that the hard-drives were acting a little bit flaky.  I do not have any sort of physical access to this system ; the logs are all I have.  The problem is that this periodic warning seems to have been occurring for a long time now, and there seems to be some resistance to replacing the hardware in this system.  So, I really had to make some strong case to prove that this system was taking a nosedive and needed immediate action.

I decided to create a graph that shows the frequency of this system's warning message over time.  Here is my graph:

Every point on this graph means "something bad happened".  And...I think it is clear that this graph shows that "a whole lot of new badness is happening"....and that this system needs some serious fixing.


I'm crossing my fingers right now...