Chris Easton

Citibank and Averages

Chris Easton — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:54:13 +0000

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

Chris Easton — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:17:46 +0000

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

Chris Easton — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:31:08 +0000

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…

Chris Easton — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:08:23 +0000

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.

ATI Radeon 5770 Issues

Chris Easton — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 01:51:45 +0000

I recently upgraded my computer to take advantage of a great deal at Fry's. Plus the darn thing was running slow sluggishly even after upgrading the RAM to 6 gigs. I upgraded from an Athlon X2 3200+ to:
Intel Core i7 860
MSI X58 Pro-E Motherboard
6GB OC-Z DDR3 Ram
ATI Radeon 5770 1gb From XFX
Windows 7 Professional x64

When first assembled everything seemed fine. I ran memtest86+ to make sure the ram and everything was fine. I ended up getting a bad stick of Ram and had to send in an RMA to get it replaced. I will probably never buy OCZ Ram again, it seems so sketchy after my previous encounters with them. In any case, the computer is running much much better now and seems generally more responsive. I can run multiple Virtual Machines without problem whereas previously it'd slow down for the first and struggle with anything more than one. But I've got a small problem; see, the video card apparently has a problem that ATI is looking into (I will post my sources later) whereas the graphics are a bit glitchy and will eventually cause the computer to lock up and gray screen. This is really unfortunate because its been two weeks since the last revision of drivers and I'm currently stuck with a malfunctioning computer. I found a workaround though that might not work for everyone. I noticed the problem when running fullscreen 1920x1200 on my 24" monitor but not at lower resolutions. When the screen was filled the top part of the screen would get random glitches/refresh problems and after about a day of running it actually crashed on my. I lowered the resolution to 1920x1080 and besides the black bars at the top and bottom of my screen everything is running well. So that might work if you have the same problem. Now to hope they fix this issue in the next driver release...

Update! The recent drivers fixed the problems. Now I'm back to full resolution without flicker and no crashes (yet).

I still don’t get Twitter

Chris Easton — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:06:02 +0000

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?

Google and China, possibly no more?

Chris Easton — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:28:34 +0000

According to this post on the Google blog, Google has decided to stop censoring search results on their Google China site (http://www.google.cn/). They are going to go to the Chinese government and basically say they are going to pull out of China or they will run the non-filtered search engine. This is quite a brave move for a U.S.-based company and I wish more companies would shrug off China because of their Human Rights and Censorship stance.

Even more interesting is the fact that this decision came because Google detected an attack against their systems that originated in China. And it looks like the China-based attack went after Anti-Censorship Activists in both China and those outside of China who are against Chinese censorship. I applaud Google for doing the right thing and confronting the Chinese government for its censorship laws. I only hope this gives some REAL change to China and isn't just dust in the wind.

On a side note, I'm trying hard to completely stop buying Chinese-made goods. My actions are likely just dust in the wind, but at least I feel better that I'm not supporting the crazy that is going on in China (basically slave-labour, human rights violations, Tibet, censorship, etc.)

Final nail in Citibank’s Coffin

Chris Easton — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 01:59:42 +0000

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

Chris Easton — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:48:30 +0000

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.

Dell M1330 Problems (again)

Chris Easton — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:09:04 +0000

My Dell M1330 laptop I bought around last May (in 2008) broke again. The first problem it had was the Video Card was toasted. I found this out when the laptop booted with vertical white lines sometime in early October or late September. After Googling for hours, I came across the problem others were having with the Nvidia card and some possible solutions. I opened a ticket with Dell and they had an extended warranty for the Nvidia card found in my notebook. They happily fixed the problem and sent me my laptop back last month. A couple of weeks following the return, and maybe 5 or 6 uses, the laptop stopped charging and nearly drained the battery because I didn't notice the laptop was "unplugged" since it was plugged in. I was able to plug it in and bend it slightly up to get the battery to charge a little, but shortly after that, it would not charge anymore. So I've been stuck with a brick for 2 weeks. After chatting shortly with a Dell Rep and finding out the motherboard needs to be replace, which won't be covered, and searching for a new laptop but not being able to spend the money on a new one. I decide to contact Dell again about this problem to plead my case. Finally talking with a nice support representative, they offered me a $179 "special warranty" that would send a tech out to fix the laptop and cover it for another year. This offer would not be put into writing to be thought over, and could not appear again if I called back. Okay, thats not very cool, you kind of have me stuck though, what am I to do? Try again... After telling the problem over and over again, which is basically the motherboard needs to be replaced again, they were able to accept it back for a motherboard replacement. Luckily the logic that: The motherboard was replaced for the Nvidia-card problem, the motherboard's DC plug was broken and the motherboard needs to be replaced, they are linked and it should be covered. So they'll (hopefully) be sending me another box and fix the problem and the laptop will be happy for another couple of years. I promise to take it for walks.