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Sun, 18 Dec 2005

It’s ethnic insensitivity week here at barillari.org

If you spend enough time looking at the census database, you’ll find some wonderful surnames. Favorites so far:

  • Balls (15928d in frequency)
  • Oshita (29879d)
  • Peniston (50053d)
  • Penister (50054d)
  • Ohotnicky (50168d)
  • Ohno (50169d)
  • Takeshita (59819d)
  • Dickus (64576d)
  • Penison (69214d)

Update: Should anyone accuse me of being unsympathetic to people with unusual surnames, I will only note that I have heard just about every possible perversion of “Barillari” in my public-school days. No, I’m not going to repeat any of them here.

19:24 EST | permalink | /issues/census-taking

Mon, 12 Dec 2005

Another few hours of my all-too-short youth irretrievably lost

[Warning. Hardcore nerd post.]

In the process of writing a web application with mod_python, I had to restart my web server. A lot. Apparently, Apache 2 (the web server in question) doesn’t like this, and starts dying on boot with error messages along the lines of

[Mon Dec 12 02:23:17 2005] [emerg] (28)No space left on device: Couldn't create accept lock

…although the disk had plenty of free space and no shortage of inodes.

I Googled this quite a bit. A number of sites suggested looking for zombie semaphores with ipcs and deleting them with ipcrm. But when I ran ipcs, all I got was 

$ ipcs

------ Shared Memory Segments --------
key        shmid      owner      perms      bytes      nattch     status      

------ Semaphore Arrays --------
key        semid      owner      perms      nsems     

------ Message Queues --------
key        msqid      owner      perms      used-bytes   messages

It took me way too long to realize that ipcs was showing me the semaphores that I (user=jdb) owned, not the ones that the web server (user=www-data) owned. [Slaps forehead.]

Oh well. Live and learn.

So, to actually trash all of the unneeded semaphores (why is there a limit on these, anyway?), become root, stop apache, and type something along the lines of:

for i in `ipcs -s|grep www-data|tr ' ' '\t' |cut -f 2`; do ipcrm -s $i; done

02:30 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web

Sun, 11 Dec 2005

Occupational hazards

In an extreme case, a federal district court ruled that a helicopter pilot could be required to convert to the Muslim religion in order to fly over certain areas of Saudi Arabia that are closed to non-Muslims. The court ruled that the requirement was a bona fide occupational qualification justified by safety considerations because Saudi Arabian law prohibited non-Muslims from entering Mecca, and non-Muslims who did so risked being beheaded if caught. [Kern v. Dunalectron Corp, 577 F.Supp. 1196 (N.D. Tex. 1983), aff’d 746 F.2d 810 (5th Cir. 1984).]

In Bagley & Dauchy., The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law, 2nd ed.

14:21 EST | permalink | /world/saudi_arabia