sean {e} lavelle.com

I thought I would share what I've been listening to recently.  Between the no-fi of the Japandroids and Wavves to the Dubstep of Black Chow and Darkstar, I have a feeling that this list might not appeal to everyone, but there are some good ones on there.

Posted via email from Sean’s posterous

Foreign Policy has a reall interesting pice about what was going on today (Dec 29th) in 1999.  Looking back on it it looks almost like a different world. Some examples:

• Something called Inktomi was the world’s largest search engine.
• Everybody was clamoring for the new file-sharing program Napster
• llinois State Senator Barack Obama campaigned for a spot in the House of Representatives.
• Boris Yeltsin was preparing to step down and make way for the young pragmatist Vladimir Putin
• You could meet your loved ones at their arrival gate.
• China’s GDP was $1.4 trillion, half of Germany’s.
• Beltway pundits believed Al Gore and George W. Bush were centrists who would govern similarly.

Full story here

Posted via web from Sean’s posterous

I saw this video today and it is really interesting. There seems to be some debate about how accurate the video is. The connecencous of most of the commenters that I’ve seen seems to be that this is a pretty broad generalzation and not completely accurate. But alot were say that they had either seen money counted like this or actually did count money like this. The thing that got me though,  was that people actually do count money differently depending on where you come from.  Give it a look:

Posted via web from Sean’s posterous

I weep for you if this makes you laugh as hard as it made me laugh...

… Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide. The <center> cannot hold it is too late. The force of regex and HTML together in the same conceptual space will destroy your mind like so much watery putty. If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes. HTML-plus-regexp will liquify the n​erves of the sentient whilst you observe, your psyche withering in the onslaught of horror….

Have you tried using an XML parser instead?

whole thing at Stack Overflow (via Coding Horror)

Posted via web from Sean’s posterous

Tap tap tap…

…is this thing on?

via This isn't happiness http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thisisnthappiness/~3/SM-LOkGDItU/263699137

Posted via email from seanelavelle’s posterous

It’s been two weeks since we got back from Yellowstone and I am now only finally getting around to putting up a post about it.  I do have good reason though since I was out of town the weekend we came back and then started a new job last week. Anyways, Yellowstone was awesome. If you’ve never been there, I would highly recommend it.

Old Faithful

We camped for 5 nights there. 2 nights in Canyon Campground and 3 nights in Bridge Bay Campground. Both were nice, but I like Canyon better.  It was near the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River and centrally located to the park.

Yellowstone was somewhat crowded for a national park (I’m used to the Zion and Canyonlands where if you see one other person on the trail that day it is crowded) but the scenery is spectacular and there is tons of wildlife to see.

Bald Eagle

Since it was fly fishing country, I tryed it out and found I really enjoy it. I didn’t catch anything and managed to hook myself in the back several times, but it was something that was alot of fun. If you are out that way and want to give it a shot forcheap, there is a Walmart in Idaho Falls, ID (on the way to the park from Salt Lake City) that sells a beginners kit all pretied and setup for $25 dollars. I plan to try to post a little more about fly fishing when I get better at it.

Me fly fishing

Some of the things to remember if you head out there:

• The gysers can get crowded. We went early in the morning to see Old Faithful and there was almost no one there. That is totally time to do it.
• It gets COLD there. We were there in the first week of August and it was in the 70s during the day but dropped to the hig 30s low 40s at night.
• The wildlife is somewhat used to people, but it doesn’t mean that it is harmless. We saw lots of idiots getting 15 feet from a 2000 pound buffalo for a picture. This is a BAD IDEA.
• Also make sure any food you have is put away. There are bears, including Grizzlies.
• Yellowstone like is beautiful and a lot of people don’t visit it. It is the largest high altitude lake in the country and really worth checking out.
• Most of the bears we saw were in the north central part of the park around Tower Junction.
• Most of the buffalo we saw were in the Hayden Valley.

Here is the link to the photoset I took at Flickr

Jess wanted to do some fishing last night, so we drove down to Griggs Reservoir.  I don’t really fish, but I really enjoy going sometimes since the light at dusk can be so good for taking pictures.

I find that the more I shoot and edit pictures, the less I care about them being an accurate representation of things. I’ve been finding my “arty” shots have become a lot less photo realistic and more impressionistic, and I am pretty happy with the results.

Here is the full set on flickr.

Last night, my wife had one of the most hilarious conversations on twitter I have ever seen. A friend of hers had signed up for a twitter account earlier in the day and just followed her.  He also chose to turn on the option to receive tweets as text messages.

I have included the timeline unedited for your enjoyment. The names and pictures have been removed to protect the innocent, but otherwise has not been edited.

For reference, my wife Jess’ name is blotted out in pink

Her friends name is blotted out green

Other conversations are blotted out in blue.

Read from the bottom to the top:

At the end, she finally called him and explained what was going on.

Well,I finally bit the bullet and did a complete from the ground rebuild of the site.  This involved exporting the database, wiping all the databases (I’ve acquired several after all the incarnations of this site) wiping all the files after a backup and then reinstalling and importing the database into a fresh database install.  All in all, it was not too bad, but not exactly child’s play either.

The good news is now everything seems to be back to normal. No more weird php errors in the dashboard, and as an added bonus, the Export function which was for some weird reason giving me a 0 byte size file, is working correctly again.

I’ve been holding off posting anything since I wasn’t sure if I was going to lose the whole site or what. But now that things are fixed, I should be back on a much better posting schedule.

Just a quick note. Today I upgraded this site to WordPress 2.8 . As usual I used the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin, but after the upgrade was finished I started getting weird gzinflate / guncompress errors.

The site worked fine but I would see the errors when I tried to upgrade a plugin. Searching the boards told me a lot of people were doing a manual reinstall and this seemed to help fix the problem. A little more digging turned up this thread on the WordPress Support forums: Error when upgrading to WP2.8

The moderator suggested downloading and replacing the http.php file. Once I did that, the error disappeared and everything ran smoothly. So give that a shot before you do a full manuel reinstall.  It might fix your problem.

UPDATE: So it appears that the problems have not totally disipppeared. I am still getting the errors every once and a while. The bigger problem I am seeing is that i am unable to do a XML export of the posts or a database backup.  For some reason, the XML file that is exported is 0 bytes in size every time I export and the database backup I export through the dashboard is corrupt.

I’ve tried fixing  this through a manual upgrade of 2.8 but that does not seem to be working.

Since the site seems to be up and running correctly, I am not going to panic yet.  My next step this week is going to be to dump the SQL tables of the database, backup my themes and plugins and do a full reinstall.