Citibank and Averages
I was once again charged with a monthly service fee on my Citibank Savings account, it earns a generous 0.25% interest rate. The problem is that instead of taking the end of month or end of cycle balance to determine whether to charge a fee they take the average balance for the month. I dipped below that one day by transferring $200 to another account while making a deposit for $202.78 the same day. At the end of the month I was over the $500 minimum but that didn't matter. Since it took a day for them to process the deposit, but not the transfer, I get dinged. Talk about a customer focused business, its all about making things tilt in some inane ways to their favor. I really need to get on the phone and get this sorted out and finally walk in to my branch and cancel my account to go over to my credit union. I don't really want to get charged $6.50 every month when I have $500 dollars in a Savings account earning 0.25% interest. The insanity! But I guess that's how they make their money, by these weird practices to rip off their customers.
Roberto Benigni is Absolutely Crazy
And hilarious. Any interviews I find with him are very entertaining. On Conan. Long live Conan:
Fisheye/Crucible Performance Solutions and a DbException Error Workaround
Indexing a repository in Subversion takes a very long time. Especially if you have the Subversion repositories stored on an NFS and the size is over 15 gigs. Below are some performance improvements that worked for the repositories I've dealt with and some workarounds that might not have been previously documented.
For performance, if you have the repository on an NFS share that is also pointed to by the serving mechanism you should duplicate the repository locally using svnsync. This helps remove some of the overhead when dealing with the live filesystem on the NFS share.
Additionally, using PostgreSQL or MySQL in place of HSQLdb is always helpful! The new versions support these external databases, this reduces CPU usage immensely.
If you have a ton of code (who doesn't?), tag versions, then remove the versions at some point in a single merge you'll have to reduce the block size of the repository as it will eat a lot of Memory as it indexes all the files that have been deleted.
If you run into the problems with certain revisions not being indexed and the scanner getting hung in an infinite loop, and get exceptions like this:
com.cenqua.fisheye.rep.DbException
com.cenqua.fisheye.rep.RepositoryClientException
com.cenqua.fisheye.util.VisitorException
com.cenqua.fisheye.rep.DbException
sun.io.MalformedInputException
What you need to do, in Linux anyway, is set the LANG environment variable to UTF-8 and restart the Fisheye server. I had this problem and it took forever to find a solution to it. The environment variable was previously set to: UTF-8.en_us on the server I was dealing with.
You probably didn’t notice the server down last night.. But if you did…
I host this server with another person and we've been running low on disk space every couple of months and had to jump in and clear up some web logs. This has been happening for years. So I had the bright idea of last night stopping the server and expanding the space of the main drive. It appears our host had given us some extra space so it looked perfect. I shut down the system and started expanding the drive. After waiting 20 minutes I eventually fell asleep. I awoke at 2 am to find myself sleeping with the laptop and lights on. The laptop had lost juice (or the will to stay on) and needed a recharge. But I fell asleep again before going to recharge it, I wanted to rest my eyes for a minute or two more. But in the end the person I host with started the server and I checked and started the Apache server in the morning. Now all is well. Next time I'll be sure to get started earlier or wait until the weekend.
I still don’t get Twitter
Why not just have a blog of quick thoughts? Then you're not limited to 140 characters and you can say what you really want. Hell, we have these things called Hyperlinks so you can link to other people's posts directly, instead of throwing an @Person. Does Twitter even make sense?
Final nail in Citibank’s Coffin
I got dinged with a $6.50 "account maintenance fee" on my savings account with Citibank. This is the final nail in the coffin for me with them. I'll be switching banks within 7 days. Either a credit union or Schwab's Interest-Checking account (I need to be able to write checks or I'd stick with ING forever).
*UPDATE*: I've opened an account with Consumers Credit Union [Visit Site] for 4.09%, no mininums, some conditions to get that percentage.
Dell is now okay
My Dell laptop is now fixed. The might even give me a free battery they will have to ship out to me separately. But still, the other laptops my family has have lasted much longer, I will probably never buy a Dell again.
Also, droid.
Ubuntu and Flash
I've finally gotten Flash working on my Ubuntu 8.04 installation of my laptop. The main issue is using x64 to take full advantage of my processor and ram. The guide I used is from the ubuntu forums and consists of a very simple script.
Link: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=772490
Cash for Clunkers
I'm looking to turn in Beatrix, my 1991 Chevrolet S-10 Blazer, during the Cash for Clunkers event for a fuel efficient Volkswagen TDI Jetta Sportswagen. The only problem is the psychological attachment thats developed between me and my car for the past 7 years I've been driving her. I wonder if my Health Insurance covers the counseling I'm going to need or if Obama's healthcare plan will... In all seriousness though I'd really really like to keep the body of my car. I know they are supposed to kill the engine and transmission as part of the program, but I'd like to keep everything else (they can keep the engine and tranny) to try and tinker in a year or two and give her new life with a fully electric powertrain. I'll ask the dealer if I can buy the frame, body, etc. after they destroy it for $500. But, anyone think that will work? (I already know I'm crazy, so I won't ask that...)
Well thats a good idea
This is a neat idea that has an implementation and is used on the net: http://recaptcha.net/
To prevent bots from spamming websites most website owners have this thing called a "captcha". This requires a human to read a graphic and product two words. This is somewhat hard for machines and easy for humans (in most cases). This site actually picks up on the words from digitizing books that the machines can't read and asks the humans to decipher them. So by using sites with this Captcha we're helping digitize books and also prevent spammers. And as a byproduct helping spammers help people digitize books.
Under the floor… Another floor!
Home improvement, what a fun, fun, fun, time consuming activity. Okay, its not too fun sometimes and it takes a lot of time. Anyway I ripped up the old flooring. And I use the term ripped because the wood was so brittle and wet it basically broke apart when I pulled it up. Took a good 2+ hours too. Part of the problem was there were screws holding it down that can't be removed with a screwdriver and are very very rusty but its gone. I was surprised though at how wet it is, and I found another floor underneath! I can't believe that, it was pretty funny. Made me really think though about how much additional work this is. But it must be done. Pictures of new floor to remove included below...
The asbestos removal company is also done, but I'm not too happy with my subfloor, lots of suspected water damage (that is probably pretty old..):
Pulling my money out of Citibank
I've decided I will soon pull my money out of Citibank. I'm not pulling it out because I'm afraid of losing it when the bank goes under or is bought up to make a mega-bank. I'm doing it because I really despise their practices as a bank. They've received billions from the government because they were mismanaged and were greedy. They were more interested in making acquisitions of other banks than they are at restructuring themselves or anyone unlucky enough to have a mortgage with them. They also charged me $50 to keep my GM stock with them, which is a new fee, when my $1200 investment years ago is now worth $90. They want to charge me $50 to move it to another loan broker or $25 to sell my stock. That is the reason I'm planning on leaving Citibank, I'm being a consumer and I'm upset with the way the bank is handling their affairs. We should all do the same if we dislike the policies of our banking institutions instead of waiting for the Federal Government to step in and "save us".
Credit Card Processing Company Loses Your Info, Blames Hackers
Looks like another Credit Card Processing company has lost customer information including names, credit card numbers, security codes, etc. Linkage. And again, its the fault of hackers that your information was lost. But what I want to know is, why don't they have better security for this type of information? Or maybe they shouldn't store it for long long periods of time on a computer (paper in a safe maybe?) so that would prevent a hacker or deranged employee from letting this information out? I always wonder.
Quick update
I just realized a lot of my uploaded images are missing, I'll try to fix that... soon..
Lots of spam
I have over 1100 comments to go through, most look like spam. Will it ever stop?
Also, my zune died yesterday, it made me sad. But now its running again, but I imagine it'll break soon though. My reasoning is that I turned it on with half a charge and held it up to my ear. What I heard was the Zune crying which meant the hard drive was probably spinning and doing nothing which could degrade its quality. But hey, I got it for 95 bucks at woot.com so I shouldn't complain.... too much.