The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Fat fingers

Today was a really bad day.

All I was trying to do was switch the servers from their normal power outlets to managed power outlets so we can do remote reboots if necessary. Things were going along smoothly until I got to our internal office server (that is also runs our trouble ticket system), a server with redunant power supplies.

I managed to somehow kill it.

Along with taking down (unbeknownst to me) half our name servers because I accidentily unplugged the power strip they were on; it also took down the video switch box, so with all this equipment suddenly not working, I thought thing were way worse than they were.

Sigh.

Fortunately, we had a little used server with identical hardware to the one I killed, so bringing that system back up was easy. And once Smirk found the unplugged power strip that fixed a whole slew of problems there.

I don't handle stress well.

Graphing websites

HTML consists of so- called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph. I've written a little app that visualizes such a graph, and here are some screenshots of websites that I often look at.

Via YARGB, Websites as graphs

He's even made the applet available for use. It's pretty cool. Here's the structure of my homepage:

[Graph of http://www.conman.org/people/spc/]

A fairly simple structure, and that grey blob in the upper left hand corner is the <HEAD> section with all the metadata for the page. For comparrison, here is The Boston Diaries:

[Graph of http://boston.conman.org/]

And again, that grey blob in the lower right hand corner is the <HEAD> section, with the multitude of metadata. This page is still well structured, but with a lot more content.

It's a pretty cool app.

Obligatory Picture

An abstract representation of where you're coming from]

Obligatory Contact Info

Obligatory Feeds

Obligatory Links

Obligatory Miscellaneous

Obligatory AI Disclaimer

No AI was used in the making of this site, unless otherwise noted.

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name, symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a protected and/or trademarked entity, the sole property of its owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied.

Copyright © 1999-2024 by Sean Conner. All Rights Reserved.