A New Year, A New Job

December 31, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Since I mentioned it over on blogdowntown I guess it's time to say here as well that on Tuesday I start a new job. Tuesday I start at Cartifact, a mapping company here in Downtown Los Angeles. My job description isn't entirely written yet, but in general I'll be responsible for helping the interactive maps move forward in a productive manner and working to systematize the backend process that generates the basic maps used in production. Oh yeah, and I'll also be working on making something a lot more friendly for a website than that flash movie that's up there now. — Continue Reading...

Wonderful Wonderful WIFI

December 30, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I'm the kind of guy that needs to check email everyday, even if there's really nothing special I'm expecting. And yet it's been since Saturday evening since I've touched the Internet. Weird.

Now I'm sitting in the Columbia Metropolitan Airport enjoying free wireless access. It's the best kind too -- straight up DHCP and a masq'ed pipe to the net with no click-through screens or blocked ports (at least that I've seen). It did bounce an ssh connection of mine after only a little inactivity, but that's nothing I can blame it for. I almost wish my flight was even more delayed.

Almost. I want to get back home.

And we're back

December 23, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Stupid spammers killed my server last night. They hit this blog with 10k+ spam comment attempts, successfully leaving several thousand (maybe 5k or so) before the machine simply gave in under the load and started killing random processes to try and free up some memory.

And yeah, there's a memory leak in eThreads. I've known about it. It's not big. But when you multiply it by 10,000 it's not tiny. I know, I can set apache to reap processes over a certain mem threshold, but obviously I didn't set that up.

I'll get them yet.

Two Nights of Music

December 15, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I've been quite bad about going to see live music lately. I could make all sort of excuses about being busy and about evening classes, but really Kathy and I just haven't gotten out to see anyone play lately. This week, though, we went twice.

Justin Rosolino -- who I've mentioned before -- was in town, and Monday night he played a few songs during the Monday Songwriters Night at Room 5. The following night he had a much longer set with Christopher Williams at Genghis Cohen.

Though it was fun to get a chance to hang out with Justin a bit, the real stars of the Monday night were the four main acts: Jay Nash, Adrianne, Tyrone Wells and Mike Barnet. Amazing stuff.

I'm going to officially lazy-out from writing more to just say that all six acts were a lot of fun.

Random: Kathy and I were sitting there knowing we had seen Tyrone somewhere recently but with no clue where. Then finally it clicked for me that he had led worship at our church just a few weeks ago.

In There Somewhere

December 14, 2005 by Eric Richardson

For something that I happen to be doing tonight, I needed to extract full-resolution pictures from Yahoo! Photos. They make that hard to do because I'm sure they're big fans of the revenue they get through their print services.

Turns out, though, that it's not impossible. They have a "Print at Home" feature, and if you load that little pop-up window and view source you'll find a couple image URLs embedded in the javascript. One of them, arrImgLandscape0 has the full-res URL you're looking for.