Category: Web Culture

For the web development that I’m doing at work, I use Zend Studio 5.1 Professional. When I work from home I use the built in FTP client to access my files. No problems there.

Well, usually.

I knew something was wrong when I went to the web to view the files I had worked on previously and noticed that the page would only half-load. I ssh‘d into the server and ran a df. It showed me 100% usage of the hard disk.

As it turns out, I had broken my daily backup cron script. Every day it was backing up the backups directory. And consequently, it was doubling in size each day. The natural progression here is that it fills up the entire hard drive of the machine. Which, as it turns out, is exactly what happened and this, of course, is a major problem.

So I deleted the huge backups such that I would have some free space on the hard drive. I then went and looked at the two files I was working on. One was just the next sub-project I was working on and was very early on in development. The other was the index page for a large application I’ve been working on. Things were still kind of wonky it seemed, so I decided to restart the server – this isn’t a production server yet, so it wasn’t a big deal.

And then there were problems.

After the restart I went back to the web and looked at the two pages again. Hmm, I had the same problem: half loading pages. What was going on? So I went back into Zend Studio and brought up the two files. What did I see: a zero-byte file and another file that looked as though it was cut right in half. The second half of the file was simply gone. Grrrreat. For whatever reason, when the hard drive filled up, it must have erased those two files. How that happened I have no idea.

Ok, no big deal, I’ll just grab the two files from yesterday’s backup.

Wait a minute; I just deleted those backup files because they were ginormous. Awesome! Now, the most recent backup I have is a week old.

The moral of this short narrative is a time-tested truth: backup often and make sure that the backups work.

Thankfully it only took me 2 HOURS to get everything back to normal. Huzzah.

I’m a big fan of Yahoo!’s LAUNCHcast Radio Player. For 30-something dollars a year, I get all the high quality radio I can listen to.

However, every now and again the player will forget to present the song information but will continue to play music. It’s just a little quib and is usually fixed by refreshing the player. I recently discovered a way to refresh just the information and not restart the song.

Since the player is simply an Internet Explorer browser window, you can use the keyboard shortcuts for Back and Forward. The buttons themselves are not there because the player removes all toolbars, status bars, and sidebars, however the functionality of those buttons are still there.

So, what is it?

Hold the Alt key and tap the ← (left arrow) once.

That’s it!

Update
Turns out that doing that will only take you to the previous song information. Damn.

Out of 51 signed up, I took 7th in the first ever Designer/Developer Poker Tournament. I want to say Good game. to everyone who played; I had a lot of fun. Hopefully, there will be more in the future – even if it’s for money; I’m down.

As a more important note, I beat Jeff quite handily. That, in and of itself, fills me with those little kid joys – like eating funnel cake for the first time.

Oh, and if I “offended” anyone during the game – I was the most talkative, I’m convinced (others have confirmed) – I appologize, though I don’t think I have. I did have this zinger, it ended like this: … your mom!. I was pretty proud of myself.

Anywho, that’s about that.