test please delete

[zeitghost]

Sausages on finger rolls for lunch

You resisted the urge to purchase a foot long sausage roll from Morrisons?


First lot of washing out of the drier.

2nd load of washing out of machine and into drier.

3rd load of washing in washing machine.

The endless joy of my life is progressing well.

[NickFitz]

You resisted the urge to purchase a foot long sausage roll from Morrisons?

I never have any reason to go to Morrisons now there's an Amazon Locker at the petrol station. Shame, as I'd be into trying one of those just to see how cheap the meat tastes

First lot of washing out of the drier.

2nd load of washing out of machine and into drier.

3rd load of washing in washing machine.

The endless joy of my life is progressing well.

That reminds me - better get the work shirts in the wash

[NickFitz]

There's a full page advert in Viz for a festival coming up on Bank Holiday weekend down in Kent. I idly read through the acts, as you do. Turns out an old friend of mine's playing on the Sunday

[SueEllen]

Lunch was 12p bread labelled "white tin loaf" which was actually wholemeal with ham and cucumber.

On a lighter note I've finished for the weekend so am dragging a bike out for a ride along the river.

[WTFH]

There's a full page advert in Viz for a festival coming up on Bank Holiday weekend down in Kent. I idly read through the acts, as you do. Turns out an old friend of mine's playing on the Sunday

The Sunday is my one day that I'm not playing a gig that weekend. Instead I believe I'm playing cricket.

[NickFitz]

Just found out the football company are starting their shenanigans again. At least they're doing it in London tonight rather than around here, but I suspect it won't stay that way for long

And if they're at it, the rugby football people will probably start up again too

[zeitghost]

"Beat the Devil". 1953.

Beat the Devil (1953) - IMDb

What an odd film. Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre.

Currently halfway through having paused for the ZeitFridayTea.

And it turns out that the car that got extremely written off was a Hispano-Suiza.

One dreads to think how much that would be worth these days.

Back then it was just a very old car of little worth.

In other other news, the washing has been completed for this week.

When did Friday turn into washing day?

In other other other news, the drizzle is getting heavier and the cloudbase is sufficiently low to prevent one from seeing the other side of the valley.

There's tidy then.

[NickFitz]

Well, that was fun

When I set up my thingy that listens to my Twitter feed and saves any interesting links it finds, I just saved everything in the database. I also just had the database on the same server as the bot, and also the web app. I knew this would cause problems eventually, because it's only an AWS EC2 server with a tiny disk.

Recently, the disk finally filled enough that the web app stopped serving anything other than 500 errors. So I set to work fixing stuff, by firing up a proper database server to which I could migrate the data using Amazon's newish Data Migration Service (DMS).

This, of course, ended up taking ages. To start with, having tried to restart the "local" database server to see if that helped, it was unable to do so due to lack of free space. I ended up creating a new disk volume, attaching it to the VM and mounting it, copying all the database files across, and symlinking to it. This allowed the database server to start running again

Then I had to make it accessible to the DMS. This ended up taking ages because of AWS's (admittedly good, but complicated) security setup. In the end I just opened it all up to the world; after all, I still had a backup of the database sitting on the original disk

Anyway, this finally got the DMS to be able to connect to both ends of the migration, and it's now chuntering away replicating hundreds of thousands of rows of data

Interestingly, the DB server managed to keep accepting new data (inserts) from the background process that reads the Twitter stream until late last night, but apparently couldn't handle the data reads thrown at it by the application server. Go figure

Anyway, I suppose I ought to tidy this damn thing up a bit and write the stuff to purge old data that I should have done months ago

Time to make dinner

[cojak]

Bloody hell Nick, you're a proper cloud user! No mucking about with RAID for you.

How much does that cost you a month?

[NickFitz]

Bloody hell Nick, you're a proper cloud user! No mucking about with RAID for you.

How much does that cost you a month?

Not sure, as I'm still getting it all set up. For the last couple of months it's run at almost exactly $20/month - I get the alert I set up to warn me of reaching that amount on the last day of the month. That's just a very small EC2 instance. With the database server running 24/7 as well (again, not a big one, but a bit bigger) that should go up to about $60/month or thereabouts. It may be a little less, as there's things like data I have stored as well that all add to the cost, but that tends to be in the pennies

I'd forgotten that a few New Years ago, I recorded my Twitter timeline with microsecond precision, so I had a dataset from the busiest time of the year on Twitter to play with - the idea was that I could play it back at my own code in real time, to see if it could handle it. That's been sitting there taking up 16GB all this time, and I think it's cost me maybe twelve cents a year or so to keep it around

EDIT to add: the migration of the tweets table is now up to over 600,000 tweets and climbing