leoboiko’s computing log

ping secure.vexcorp.com
    PING smeagol.vexcorp.com (200.160.255.84) 56(84) bytes of data.

Wait.

> PING smeagol.vexcorp.com (200.160.255.84)
> smeagol.vexcorp.com
> smeagol

Oooh!

for i in aragorn gandalf frodo sam sauron melkor morgoth eru saruman balrog nazgul gollum; do
  host $i.vexcorp.com
  done|grep -v 'not found'
    gandalf.vexcorp.com has address 200.187.151.90
    sauron.vexcorp.com has address 200.160.255.100
    morgoth.vexcorp.com has address 200.160.255.101
    balrog.vexcorp.com has address 200.160.255.86

This is very embarrassing, but to this day I’ve never payed attention to the semantics of these two files. When I wanted to look at something, I’d just grep /var/log/*.

Turns out the log files are just a convention spelled out in /etc/syslog.conf (read syslog(3) and syslog.conf(5) if you don’t know syslog). These are the relevant lines in Debian defaults:

*.*;auth,authpriv.none      -/var/log/syslog

*.=info;*.=notice;*.=warn;\
    auth,authpriv.none;\
    cron,daemon.none;\
    mail,news.none      -/var/log/messages

The first line means: send all classes of messages (“facilities”) to /var/log/syslog, except the auth and authpriv facilities — these are sent to /var/log/auth.log instead (“auth” is just the deprecated name of “authpriv”).

The second line means: send all messages exactly at the levels of “info”, “notice”, and “warn” to /var/log/messages, except those from the listed facilities.

So /var/log/messages ⊂ /var/log/syslog; and, further, messages only contains generic non-critical messages. I have no idea why people use that, but there you go. If you want a complete log, you should look at /var/log/syslog and /var/log/auth.log.

When I first designed this blog’s Wordpress theme, Lispy, I was very happy with how the end result turned out.

Now I hate it.

I want a blog with:

• No administrative debris
• No sidebars
• No categories
• No tags
• No “blogrolls”
• No Ajax or useless Javascripts
• No RSS feeds
• No authentication mechanisms other than HTTP’s

I want a blog that is:

• Fully RESTful, cacheable, cache-aware
• Fully W3C-compliant
• Able to do content negotiation for language and media-type
• Knowledgeable about APP, and of course with Atom feeds for everything
• Implemented in a proper language. That is, no PHP, no Java, no JSP, no ASP.

What, there’s none with all those unfeatures? Damn. Why can’t the world just write software like I want? Oh well, out to be unsatisfied until Tomayko release his Rack + Sinatra thing. Or until I build one myself…

One thing I noticed in my first international trip is that people who hang in Google Talk, ICQ, MSN, or IRQ have activity patterns based on the time of the day, just like animals. Some are diurnal, or officecular; some are nocturnal, or even caffeiners (extreme nocturnals); some are crepuscular, that is, before-and-after-officecular; dialupers only appear after midnight, and schoolers after lunch, etc. Thus, if you undergo a timezone shift (real or figurative), your IM contact list landscape will surprise you as much as when you hike at night for the first time.

Timesinkers sorted by how much time they cost me:

WoW > reddit and the like > feeds > books > IM, IRC discussions > Guitar Hero

Timesinkers ordered by how satisfied I feel after spending time with them:

books > IM, IRC discussions > Guitar Hero > feeds > reddit and the like > WoW

It’s almost inversely proportional! I don’t think that’s a coincidence. You have to spend a lot of time with World of Warcraft or news sites because they’re so unsatisfying, and keep you hooked for the next low-probability random reinforcement. Feeds are more focused to your interests, so you don’t need to waddle that much in a sea of stuff you don’t care about. Conversations with your friends are always interesting, and of course so are your books.

This gives a good guideline for optimizing your timewasting: if it doesn’t make you feel happy, it’ll probably take too much time, too. I stopped playing WoW altogether when I noticed that an hour of Guitar Hero was more fun than a whole month of grinding; and then, suddenly, there was life after work again.