Fire and forget

One of my goals at work for any of the "infrastructure" that I maintain is that I'd like it to run without interaction for 6 months. I want the other developers to not have to know how much disk space there is, what resources other projects are using, what crappy files some of of our tools use, etc. I want everything to be fire and forget. Unfortunately I'm not there yet, but I'm working on it.

Accented chars in calendars

I've been working on a side project where I scape a bunch of pages and change the info into an ical file so that I can use it in google calendar. More about that project later.

I ran into some problems with accented characters (of course) always showing up broken. I think that I have a solution (not 100% sure yet because it takes a while for google to refresh a feed). A super helpful post mentioned that "The HTTP/1.1 standard says that if content-type is text/* and no charset is given, the character set (encoding) is ISO-8859-1 (latin1).". A quick "curl -i" on my url and sure enough the http header only had Content-Type: text/calendar.

Mostly I've always dealt with server code, not configing apache, and especially not on a host where I may not have access to change config. A little bit more searching lead to a post about changing the .htaccess file. Added a line saying AddType 'text/calendar; charset=utf-8' ics, double check with my curl command and the file is returning the correct header.

This took me a bit of digging because I thought that it was something wrong with how I was writing the file and needing to change the libs that I was using. Apparently I was just screwing things up because I was opening them with textedit which showed the files as broken. Opening them in ical (which I don't use) showed everything correctly. A day of searching leads to new knowledge and a 3 minute fix. Ah, software...

Update: it worked.

Lego - It's the arrangement, not the pieces

I don't usually blog about things like comics, but I've had xkcd 659 open in my browser for a couple of days. It's the arrangement that's important, not each piece. This comic makes me happy and sad at the same time.

Clutter up my life

When living with someone there are rubbing points. Differences in comfort zones for little day to day things. How often the lawn is mowed, where the toothpaste tube squeezed from (end vs middle), if silly hats should be worn all the time or just during special occasions. We have those things. I think that our biggest rubbing issue is the amount of clutter we feel comfortable with.

Perhaps some background first. Laura comes from a home where everything is exactly in its place and things are all lined up, including the carpet. Everything looks new. I on the other hand come from a family that's the opposite side of the spectrum. Tidy-challenged. Neatphobic. Organizationally inhibited. Messy-abled.

I understand that things being messy drives Laura crazy. It must be like being in a room packed full of people and everyone yelling. You can't think. Chaos. I try to help keep things tidy but every item that I put in its place moves me farther from my comfort zone. When things are all put away I feel like I'm standing in the middle of a darkened stadium with only an incandescent penlight with the battery running out. Luckily for us we've got several places that are compete disasters and when I'm feeling a bit bonkers I can just go there. So if you ever see me moving a comfy chair into the furnace room, you know I'm just satisfying my ancestral yearnings to be surrounded by clutter. And sheet metal, but that's a different story.