Richy B. – Page 137 – Richy's Random Ramblings

Guess That Movie: LV: Maybe Baby

May 14, 2003

Guess That Movie Round 55 Righto, time for round 55 of the Guess That Movie competition tat-ta-ttta-ta! Now, just lie back and put your legs in these stirrups and relax…

Yep, I’ve decided to add “shock value” to this Guess That Movie image. Most of the men trying to guess this image will think “what’s so shocking about somebody squeezing a tube onto a cold, hard metal instrument?”, but I’m sure the women know where their instrument goes and most would prefer to be blissfully unaware of the whole purpose of that torture!

Yes – it’s one of those things the “G” people use (and I’m not talking Google employees here!) – but which movie has the image been taken from? If you guess that movie correctly (leaving your name/alias, email address and your guess), I’ll award you some points. Points start at 100 per image and decline over time (after the first 12 hours it goes down by 10 points, then down a further 10 points every 24hours after posting) – oh and wrong guesses have a 5 point penalty.

But what good are points? Well, get 500 points and you can claim a £5 Amazon gift voucher/certificate for the Amazon store of your choice (£5 will be converted into the appropriate currency at the exchange rates displayed on xe.net at the time of claim) – so you can get free books, movies and music just by playing a simple FREE guessing game! What have you got to lose apart from your dignity (I reserve the right to laugh at widely incorrect guesses and people that are “100% sure it’s movie X” when it isn’t 😉 ).

Go on – Guess That Movie!

A: Maybe Baby amazoncom:B000062XFI . Correctly guessed by Rob.

Snippet: Failure Fall out

May 13, 2003

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*snippet* Despite me pulling practically 36 hours straight at a keyboard due to the failure of the upgrade to our datacentres (I managed to grab a single hours sleep in that time period), I’m still getting a number of technical support queries and fault reports: I spent over 6 hours restoring a server from scratch and all customer data (longest amount of downtime we’ve had ever to my knowledge) and now it appears all the site administrator passwords weren’t backed up correctly. I’m having to reset them all by hand 🙁

Not fun at all. That and “nursing” the server has taken up most of my time recently (the restored datacentre peaked at load averages of over 60 yesterday after another reboot – to reinitalise the SSL system – and I had to watch it for 2 hours to ensure it settled) hence the unfortunately lack of blog entries.

I’m hoping the technical helpdesk will calm down shortly (we’ve got nine open calls at the moment and our “average” is one: I try and ensure it’s cleared on a Friday afternoon by emailing all people with open calls on a Wednesday morning for a “status update”), and I’m be able to resume normal blogging levels.

Now, if only I could find out what in the Ensim Pro upgrade would cause it to totally crash a server during the upgrade process (despite us testing the upgrade extensively before hand) 🙁

Not fun.

Guess That Movie: Scores So Far VI

May 12, 2003

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Another nine images, and another update of the scoreboard and Kymberlie is still in the lead with 2190 points now (so she’s entitled to another prize, but since she’s currently on vacation/holiday she won’t be able to claim it – plus it gives the rest of you a chance to earn some valuable points! LD is still 55 points off the “500 points claim point”, Super Beastmaster is just 120 points behind and “the only other person apart from Kymberlie to win points in the last set of rounds” – Dr G – needs 260 points.

Admittedly, Kymberlie did get a boost of 200 points for round 52: Loser as it had been over 6 days since I had posted it and there were no correct guesses – therefore I had it on “bonus points round” for a day and she just waltzed in and won the extra 200 points. Drat.

Anyway, Good luck and be ready for round 55…

Techy: Single Line Multiple File Search And Replace

May 12, 2003

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Whilst performing the server upgrades, Ensim Pro died and crashed the server forcing us to roll back to plain old Ensim on the Red Hat Linux box. After we had done that, we then had to restore all the customer data and I noticed a slight inconsistency in the data: for some reason, all the backup files had the wrong IP address stored in them! So after the backups were restored, I found the Apache virtual conf folder (/etc/httpd/conf/virtual) and executed the following command at the Linux shell prompt (as root):

/usr/bin/perl -pi -e ‘s/old_IP_address/new_IP_address/g’ *

This practically is a single line multiple file search and replace function and it works as follows:

usr/bin/perl start the Perl interpreter (the language this script is written in)
-p instruct perl to loop/repeat around the following instructions
i edit the specified files in place (i.e. alter the stated files)
-e “what follows is a single line command”
‘s/old_IP_address/new_IP_address/g’ a Perl regular expression to subsitute the text old_IP_address with the text new_IP_address on a global basis (if you omit the ‘g’ it will only replace the first occurrence of the old_IP_address found in each file). Change to /gi for a global, case insensitive search if you require
* change files matching this wildcard (*=every file and extension: you could use “*.html” just to change files ending in .html if you wanted)

I hope this little script comes in handy to someone else, but I still wish that I hadn’t needed to work out how to do it 🙁

Snippet: Upgrading Server

May 11, 2003

Author: Richy B.

Guess That Movie: LV: Maybe Baby

Snippet: Failure Fall out

Guess That Movie: Scores So Far VI

Techy: Single Line Multiple File Search And Replace

Snippet: Upgrading Server