www.nickhodge.com

It has been a long 3–4 weeks.

From Doctor’s vis­its and other experts, this is most likely merely a viral infec­tion in the facial nerves. You can only take anti-virals within the first 36–72 hours – a time long, long ago. So its has been “just live with it”. Research has shown me that re-occurance of the oppos­ing side is pos­sible. How­ever, it is quite dis­con­cert­ing think­ing that your face is going to ‘flut­ter’ or ‘twinge’ with nervous abandon.

Today was a major break­through. Present­ing Win­dows 7 and Office 2010 to IT Teach­ers at West­ern Sydney TAFE. 3 hours of non-stop talk­ing, and only a couple of facial con­tor­tions. As long as I don’t smile, eat or look up — all is well. Things are on the improve.

Totally buggered, how­ever. Stuffed. Whilst I once presen­ted for 8 hours, at least twice, when on a trip to India in 2001 — and been at count­less tradeshows of 14+ hours of stand­ing around and spruik­ing — 3 hours is still a long time to be “on”

So its onwards. Good to have a nor­mal face back.

It is rather strange for me to be quiet. Espe­cially online and on this blog specifically.

Twit­ter is partly to blame: it is where my cre­at­ive mind finds an outlet.

Another is a little more sin­is­ter. And I use the word sin­is­ter also mean­ing left-hand-side

In April 2007 I talked on my exper­i­ence of Bell’s Palsy.

Over the last month, the left-hand side of my face didn’t go numb nor fall, but there has been an intense ache.

Now the right hand side of my face is show­ing some weird­ness. A nervous twitch­ing when I yawn, eat, talk, look up or smile. This twitch­ing lasts for 1–2 seconds and is notice­able, and changes my speech pat­tern. It is quite dis­con­cert­ing giv­ing present­a­tions and hav­ing your face go crazy. I am quite self-conscious about the visual effect.

From reports from other Bell’s suf­fer­ers, this is a poten­tial issue. Doc­tors report that this is a func­tion of the muscles and nerves of the face rebal­an­cing the weak­ness on one side.

So, its work­ing online and from home with a few out­ward bound events.

And rest.

So, if you don’t see my “in the flesh” or being pro­lific online. There is my reason.

All Lyr­ics are Copy­right their respect­ive Copy­right holders.

Fast Start:

To get an lyr­ics super­im­posed on image, use the fol­low­ing URL:

http://nickhodge.com/finnwords.jpg

For JSON, use the fol­low­ing URL:

http://nickhodge.com/finnwords.json

For SOAP, use the fol­low­ing URL to get the WSDL

http://nickhodge.com/finnwords.wsdl

Simple XML, use the fol­low­ing URL:

http://nickhodge.com/finnwords.xml

Back­ground

In 2002 I had a brain­wave whilst driv­ing to work. I don’t know where it came from, but here’s the res­ult of some late night coding.I think that Neil Finn is the world’s best singer/songwriter — and this ser­vice is a trib­ute to his work. There are over 280 phrases from over 70 songs Neil and his brother Tim has writ­ten in the data­base. This col­lec­tion spans from 1979 with the Split Enz album Frenzy to their most recent work in 2004 on his second Finn Broth­ers album, Every­one Is Here
To incor­por­ate the Ran­dom Neil Finn Lyric Server into your web page is easy. Just copy and paste the fol­low­ing HTML into your web page editor of choice. As an image:

<img src="http://www.nickhodge.com/finnwords.jpg" width="300" height="174"/>

or using iframe

<iframe id="finnwords" src="http://www.nickhodge.com/nhodge/finnwords/finnwordsengine.php" mce_src="http://www.nickhodge.com/nhodge/finnwords/finnwordsengine.php" width="175" height="175" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" frameborder="1" scrolling="no"></iframe>

---

If you would like to book­mark some­thing to see a quote on a daily basis, just use this URL: http://www.nickhodge.com/nhodge/finnwords/finnwordsengine.php

---

For those with an RSS Reader, add the fol­low­ing URL to your feed, and get a Ran­dom Neil Finn Lyric:http://www.nickhodge.com/nhodge/mungenet/mungenetrssengine.php?ver=2.0&content=finn

---

SOAP Server URL: http://www.nickhodge.com/nhodge/finnwords/finnwordssoapengine.php

end­point: getRandomNeilFinnLyric

para­met­ers: returnType a string con­tain­ing the text xml, json, html or text to indic­ate the return format

Here is some sample PHP5 using the SOAP (Web Ser­vices) func­tions to call in a Neil Finn quote

$parameter = array("returnType","html");
$soapclient = new SoapClient('http://www.nickhodge.com/finnwords.wsdl');
echo ($soapclient->getRandomNeilFinnLyric($parameter));

In deploy­ing the small Ruby on Rails applic­a­tion on an old Dell 8200 run­ning Debian-sarge, I decided to see how the applic­a­tion would per­form under load.

Apache comes with a great little applic­a­tion meekly called ab. ab is a small command-line tool that slash­dots your web applic­a­tion, and gives you a nice meas­ure (in pages per second, amongst other things).

Meas­ur­ing the per­form­ance of the Dell 8200 using the Mon­grel web server vs. my Mac Book Pro run­ning the same ver­sions of all the stack of soft­ware (except, obvi­ously the OS) — the speed dif­fer­ence is 16x. Now as these machines are about 4 years apart from each other in the Intel-world, 16 is exactly what you would expect: the per­form­ance doubles every year. Very wise pre­dic­tion from 1970 that con­tin­ues to drive this whole crazy industry.

What has this to do with Com­pound­ing interest? Exactly 22 years ago one of my kind, late great-uncles star­ted a bank account for be with the grand deposit of AU$200. Which I’ve sub­sequently for­got­ten about.

Mum found the Deposit book­let some­where, and sent it to me. Today that account is worth about $640. This is a com­poun­ded interest rate of 5.4%. In another 22 years it will be worth AU$2,023 at the same rate.

Now, if it had com­poun­ded at Moore’s Law over the last 22 years: the amount in the bank would be a grand $6,276,211,921,800.

Now I know why I work in IT, not finance!

What a fun few days! I repor­ted earlier I was in the midst of Ruby on Rails. The small pro­ject is com­ing along fine. Even though I could quickly build in Python or PHP, its time to learn and immerse myself in a new lan­guage — and more import­antly, a new platform.

This plat­form is more than just code: it is also the con­cepts of ver­sion man­age­ment, agile devel­op­ment, fast deploy­ment and easy roll back.

So the configuration:

Debian-sarge: from a new base install. Added to this is sub­ver­sion for ver­sion man­age­ment, post­gr­esql for data­base stor­age. Tweaks are required to get this part work­ing and ready for Ruby on Rails.

As Debian has a strict policy for “stable” pack­ages that can be installed into their stable OS, you have to munge /etc/apt/sources.list to point to serv­ers con­tain­ing “test­ing” or “unstable” pack­ages. This causes heartache as there are all sorts of bits-and-pieces on these serv­ers that may con­flict. So frankin­stall time.

What is “frankin­stall”. I am sure the lin­guistic source is from “franken­stall” or “franken­stein”. Basic­ally, you down­load the sources, ./configure && make && make install your­self. The res­ult is a half-package man­aged deploy­ment, half source com­piled and installed — leav­ing the admin­is­trator to mas­ter the sys­tem. Thank­fully, 18 years of Unix means that this seems the best, anyway.

Then comes the myriad of con­fig­ur­a­tion files:

As I planned to deploy behind Mon­grel and Apache; I had to upgrade to Apache 2.2 (to get proxy_balancer), Ruby 1.8.5 (to get the latest Mon­grel 0.3.13.4 with Mongrel_cluster 0.2.1) and Cap­istrano for remote deploy­ment. Apart from the source, the best resource for all this text file tweak­ing is at Coda Hale’s site, with some extra double-cross check­ing from Rimuhosting’s wiki.

As I have split our Debian server’s IP into dif­fer­ent parts for secur­ity, some extra work was required on the application’s deploy­ment under Apache (essen­tially, get­ting Vir­tu­al­Hosts cor­rect) and ensur­ing that the /log/ dir­ect­ory was cor­rectly linked to the cur­rent release in the applic­a­tion deployment.

In the end, our Debian server now is a source-code repos­it­ory and applic­a­tion deploy­ment plat­form — with a mongrel_cluster for mul­tiple users behind safe and secure Apache.

So why do all this?

Today Liam is using Gary’s Mod to build a cus­tom envir­on­ment in Half Life 2. Dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tion, dif­fer­ent tweak­ing I guess.

Post cup nood­ling around doing not much at all and decided to down­load the trial ver­sion of Par­al­lels Work­sta­tion for Debian Linux. After some aptitude fix­ing pack­ages that were not installed; finally man­aged to get Par­al­lels booting.

Next step: attempt to get the X11 appear­ing from the cli­ent applic­a­tion (installed on the Debian server) to the dis­play server on my Mac.

Some­thing with the video is hosed; and it’s pos­sible that Vista won’t work over the X11 connection.

Any­way, that killed some bits on the Big­pond and a couple of hours.

Go Delta Blues. Up $237.00

A com­ment from Dan on Dis­til­ler 7 vs. 8 Per­form­ance over on Accel­er­ate your Mac! To sum­mar­ise: a 463Mb .ps file Dis­tills in a third of the time.

Liam and I returned from the new Clint East­wood dir­ec­ted movie, Flags of Our Fath­ers.

It is less phys­ic­ally intense than Sav­ing Private Ryan, as it tells the stor­ies of the men sur­round­ing the rais­ing of the US Flag over Mount Suriba­chi on Iwo Jima in Feb­ru­ary 1945.

The movie cap­ably tells this story; and to a lesser extent the bonds between men thrown together under intense cir­cum­stances. The story is his­tor­ic­ally accur­ate, as is Band of Broth­ers. Rep­res­en­ted to a greater accur­acy is the psy­cho­lo­gical leg­acy war leaves.

A wry quote from Neal McDonough to Barry Pep­per: “We’ve done this before”. Neal was in Band of Broth­ers and Barry in Sav­ing Private Ryan.

Stay for the cred­its: actual pho­to­graphs are shown; and detail how close the real film is to reality.

Update, 9:20pm Watched Sav­ing Private Ryan to con­trast the two movies. Spiel­berg is a true artist. Whilst the two stor­ies are dif­fer­ent, one being based on actual people; the sound, vis­ion and cine­ma­to­graphy of Sav­ing Private Ryan is a league ahead.

Today is Mexico’s National Day for Tim Bur­ton.