Everything In Between

• Walking to get lunch. Some homeless guy yells at me: I like your crazy hairstyle! At least that’s better than: Got 2 dollars to spare? #
• @echomikeromeo You’re making me nostalgic for the days when I sat in the glow of my iMac DV and watched the rain from my living room window. #
• Just learned real appreciation for MySQL query caching: best way to handle a legacy 5 second query that slows your server? Don’t execute it. #
• Wore my black cons, new black skinny jeans and H&M black button down shirt. OH MY GOD I AM SO EMO! AHH! @BloodyLaughter thinks I’m sexy. #
• Trying to decide weather I like Twitterific iPod touch app or the web-based Hahlo app better for tweeting. Wow, now I am just sad. So Emo! #
• I’m sleepy. I’m not sleepy. I’m sleepy I’m not sleepy. Oh boo! What’s wrong with me tonight? I’d get a midnight snack if only there was one. #
• I don’t want to belive it’s morning yet. Bed was soooo cozy. #

In a lot of places in the world, many people still have to pay for bandwidth costs. I’m one of those people who just can’t afford to download lots of stuff during peak hours when my bandwidth might quickly get shaped or, worse, I’ll get charged. Nevertheless, there are often plenty of legit reasons to initiate huge downloads.

In these cases, it makes sense to be smart about when I initiate these downloads. Being something of a UNIX-head myself, I wanted to use the age-old at command to download a Linux ISO during off-peak hours, which my ISP says starts at 2 AM. Much to my chagrin, I found that at doesn’t work by default on Mac OS X and, worse, the Leopard man page leads to a dead end (though it didn’t back in Tiger…).

Turns out that the system daemon that is responsible for checking up on at jobs has been wrapped with a launchd job. This makes enabling at on your system really easy:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.atrun.plist

Once you’ve done this, you can now use at as you normally have done. For instance, I could now schedule my downloads to happen during the off-peak hours:

Perseus:Fedora maymay$ at 2:15am tomorrow # now press return
curl -LO http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/x86_64/iso/Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso
# now press CTRL-D.
job 1 at Tue Jul 15 02:15:00 2008
Perseus:Fedora maymay$ atq
1	Tue Jul 15 02:15:00 2008

This is also incredibly handy for scheduling just about any resource-intensive task that you don’t have to do right now. To take it one step further, you can even let the computer itself choose when to run these resource-heavy tasks by using the batch command, which will execute commands much like at but will check the system load average instead of the system clock to determine if it should start the job.

Note that with the com.apple.atrun job loaded /usr/libexec/atrun is started every 30 seconds (unless you change the StartInterval key in the plist file). Since the atrun command checks a file on disk (that it places in the /usr/lib/cron/jobs directory) to see if there is any work to do, this will probably prevent your disks from ever sleeping, which could be a major concern for battery life on portables. Also, obviously, your computer needs to be turned on and awake for the job to actually launch.

For more information, check out the result of typing man at and man launchctl at a Terminal prompt. There’s also a really good Google Tech Talk about Launchd that will teach you a lot more about job scheduling on Mac OS X.

• First time wearing my new Converse shoes. They are classic black and white, weird, thin, and I can feel the ground when I walk. #
• These lingerie shops make me wish I had breasts. The sheer number of fun outfits easily available for dressing the female body. Jealous! #
• Buried by email that I don’t really want to think abt, have a bit of a headache and generally not feeling 100% right now but don’t know why. #
• Up way too late playing with iPod touch 2.0 OS software upgrade and App Store apps. Favorite so far is Apple’s own Remote app, of course. #
• When it rains it pours! Woke up to like 20 actionable emails this morning. If you don’t hear from me today give me a day please. Also, TZ! #

• Upsetting: Draconian ISP firewall rules. Happy-making: pink polka dots lycra panties, looking boyish w/shirts and girlish w/pants+underwear! #
• I just walked by a grocery store in Sydney’s Chinatown that was selling 5 (5!) edible vegetables that I have never even heard of before. #
• At Sussex Centre for lunch @BloodyLaughter accuses me of looking up girl’s skirts. I say I’d look up boy’s skirts too, if they wore them! #

• Crap, got distracted by cool new personal project ideas and am now later than intended to work. Bad me. #
• To my GNU/Linux geek friends: I want to manage a bunch of VMs and don’t want to use DNS. What’s a good primer to administering Avahi? TIA! #
• Impossible-to-guess thing of the day: how to escape a space inside a /etc/fstab entry? Use the ASCII hex escape code 40 instead. Yeesh! #
• Retweet: how do you escape a space inside a /etc/fstab entry? Use the ASCII octal (not hex, sorry, my bad) escape code 40 instead. Yeesh! #
• @BloodyLaughter has pulled me from noble goals tonight 1st w/steak dinner, then new Smallville DVDs, and finally blowjob. I had no chance. #

• Installing base set of CentOS packages on one machine, downloading Debian stable on another, and preparing FreeBSD ISOs on another. Now=Fun! #
• Back from lunch. Had spicy drunken noodles with extra chilli. It’s so nice that fresh sliced chillis are considered a “condiment” here! #
• Booyah! VMware Server running on CentOS with headless management and X forwarding out of the box. Now that’s quality source aka open-source! #
• @garbageman14 Last weeks in NYC? Where are you going? Didn’t you just get a new apartment a few months back? #
• Should be asleep but am not at all sleepy. Going over old emails, and old blog posts. Sometimes I think I didn’t give myself enough credit. #
• I think it is STUPID that people in the BDSM scene only send planning email to doms (not subs) ‘cuz they are “supposed” to make the choices. #

• Was so comfy, I didn’t want to wake up. On the other hand, I have to (boo), and it’s an absolutely gorgeous day (yay). Up and at ‘em it is. #
• Eep! It is cold outside even though it’s so sunny. Somehow I managed to wear 3 layers of clothes but also sandals. My toes are cold! #
• I’ve discovered the best way to do ticket dependencies in vanilla Trac. Add [[TicketQuery(keywords~=#55)]] in ticket:55′s description. #
• @BloodyLaughter and @unspeakableaxe Get a (dungeon) room! One with windows. Where we can see what’s going on inside. #
• Augh, so cold. I have a bad headache, too. Should have eaten more than a piece of toast at work today. Time to get some food. #
• Ohhhh. This xkcd.com makes me sad. http://xkcd.com/447/ I have not done my great work yet. :( I fail. #
• @ferric Srsly? Does ‘closes #55′ have to be like ‘msg^=closes #55′ or can it be anywhere in the commit message? I will have to try it out. #
• Yawning. Today’s plan: build new dev server on quad-core box with CentOS and VMware Server, test homegrown filesystem auditing scripts. Eat. #

• Broken window theory at work: There are SO MANY problems with this site I’m charged with fixing that I really, REALLY don’t want to bother. #
• Blaaaaaaaaaaaah. #
• @essinem I want to start doing KinkOnTap.com again—and I have a few options for the technical how—what I need is participation. Interested? #
• Reviewers wanted for my new web dev book (on XHTML+CSS). You get: free book. I get: honest review and incoming links to book’s page. DM me. #

• Today was slooow, but very successful. Definitely a good way to start the week. Have lots of work ahead…needed the motivation…can now focus. #
• Tweeting in 140 characters has become a competitive sport. Who fits the most stuff in the least words? We do! (ba dum dum dum!) We do! #
• @avahdi Yea, a full drive can remove virtual RAM capacity, thus forcing the computer to page in and out frequently. Net effect: slow. HTH. #

• Ow, my stomach. #
• At Uber, preparing for @BloodyLaughter’s knife preso. Am sleepy, unsure how I feel about this right now. We’ll see how we go. #
• Knifeplay class went pretty well. I actually had a fun time since I could just step back and let @BloodyLaughter drive. Now at dinner. #
• People watching from a cafe on George St. Discovering the sad lack of attractive men who aren’t Asian and sadly Asian men are not my type. #
• What an awesome weekend! I’m now a bit apprehensive about the coming work week. I fear I’ll miss @BloodyLaughter too much. But that’s good. #