I've been putting the finishing touches on the first draft of my thesis. I'd like to get citations nailed down now so that I do not have to go back and fix everything later.

Instead of using the rather dated newapa package, I've switched my draft to the apacite package. The moment I went to generate a pdf, I was met with the following two errors.

Argument of \@@cite has an extra }.
...
Paragraph ended before \@@cite was complete.

Ran into an interesting and frustrating performance problem with a site at work today. Any OSX or derivative system (iPhone, iPod, or laptop/workstation) was seeing extremely poor performance when visiting a site using Tomcat 6 and Apache's mod_proxy (specifically mod_proxy_ajp) with a couple ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse directives.

Searching around a little I finally found this helpful post that seemed to describe the problem users were experiencing:
http://betabug.ch/blogs/ch-athens/933

Saw this rsnapshot error this morning on a couple new Xen domUs that I created last week:

[08/Mar/2010:08:12:53] /usr/bin/rsnapshot hourly: ERROR: /usr/bin/rsync returned 255 while processing root@foo.bar:/
[08/Mar/2010:08:12:53] touch /backups/hourly.0/
[08/Mar/2010:08:12:53] rm -f /var/run/rsnapshot.pid
[08/Mar/2010:08:12:53] /usr/bin/rsnapshot hourly: ERROR: /usr/bin/rsnapshot hourly: completed, but with some errors

I recently setup a Drupal 6.x installation with the apachesolr module. It was not as straightforward as I was expecting so I've made a few notes here. The most frustrating part is the Tomcat & Solr setup, after that the Drupal module works flawlessly.

I used this wiki page about Solr and Tomcat as a basic guide. First thing to do is to download and setup tomcat. I used the setup script we use at work for Tomcat (available here) to download and install Tomcat 5.5.27 in /usr/local/tomcat. Note that you can use any servelet container like Jetty, JBoss etc.

Thanks in part (1/2 exactly) to Richard Dawkins, justgiving.com have reached their goal of £11,000 with half that from Dawkins himself.

The aim of their campaign is to put advertisements on buses in the UK with the following message:

After hitting the front pages of various sites and their goal, donations have doubled in a single day to more than £ 25,000.00 as of this writing.

It's sad when a server has better uptime than Canadian Parliament. ~$300 million later and all that was done is a reboot of our government. Sigh.

This photograph is of the main room in U of T's multi-faith building/centre/whatever it is. The building (or maybe just interior space) was designed by Moriyama & Teshima, and I can say after having spent some time in the building this past summer, I'm officially a fan of theirs.

The image is from a few months ago when the building was pretty much deserted. I was out mapping GPS and Wifi points on campus and the Koffler Institute building (the multifaith centre now) was on my list. I had the place to myself for at least an hour. Wandering around and doing wifi scans, I saw someone had left this chair perfectly aligned with the wall panels in an otherwise empty room.

I didn't like this image at first, but I think the austerity and isolation of the chair sort of mirror my feelings about being in the building in the first place. I suppose I unconsciously rejected it at first because I'm not used to my photographs evoking my own emotions like that. It is interesting to hear what people have to say about the photograph without the personal context. For the most part feedback has been positive and to the effect that the feeling is of an aged photograph from the 50's or 60's.

Anyways, here it is:

Someone mentioned Fleet Foxes to me at the linuxcaffe a few weeks ago and I've just now got around to finding some of their stuff online. Their Sub Pop bio page describes their influences as drawing upon, to quote band member Robin:

the traditions of folk music, pop, choral music and gospel, baroque psychedelic, sacred harp singing, West Coast music, traditional music from Ireland to Japan, and film scores.

Fabulist! have an amazing claymation video that the band did of their song White Winter Hymnal.

Captain Obvious notes that a band member is formerly of Pedro the Lion and links to an amazing acoustic track called Tiger Mountain Peasant Song. I can't place it, but the introduction reminds me of something vaguely like Radiohead's Karma police combined with Great Lake Swimmers. Might just be the reverb on the voice and plain acoustic guitar, but it is a fabulous track! The harmonies on Quiet Houses do their Sub Pop bio description justice, have a listen to it too.

Without further ado, take a look at the video, and make sure there's a spot on the ipod or favoured portable audio device for a few of their songs:

From Nature's June 26 2008 issue (#453) comes more evidence from the Devonian period that fills in more of the gap in our understanding of the evolution from fish to land animals.

The gap in our understanding of the evolutionary transition from fish to tetrapod is beginning to close thanks to the discovery of new intermediate forms such as Tiktaalik roseae. Here we narrow it further by presenting the skull, exceptionally preserved braincase, shoulder girdle and partial pelvis of Ventastega curonica from the Late Devonian of Latvia, a transitional intermediate form between the 'elpistostegids' Panderichthys and Tiktaalik and the Devonian tetrapods (limbed vertebrates) Acanthostega and Ichthyostega. Ventastega is the most primitive Devonian tetrapod represented by extensive remains, and casts light on a part of the phylogeny otherwise only represented by fragmentary taxa: it illuminates the origin of principal tetrapod structures and the extent of morphological diversity among the transitional forms.

The Associated Press have a story on it, but I don't much want to support them with a link or text considering the job they did on the drudge report.

Well the weekend is over and DrupalCamp Toronto 2008 has come and gone. Thanks to the amazing group of volunteers and presenters, we managed to feed, clothe, and entertain approximately 150 geeks for two whole days with 26 different sessions ranging from theming and jQuery, to implementing Drupy, that is Drupal in Python. Thanks to the fine folks at The Faculty of Information Studies who helped me run around booking rooms, projectors, arranging furniture and access the the building over the weekend.

And more importantly, thanks to the folks who presented sessions and all those who attended! Without interesting material and interested attendees, the weekend would have been a write off. I'm already looking forward to DrupalCamp Toronto 2009, we'll have to start planning early in the spring to outdo this year's effort.