Nirmal Jayasinghe

There’s a field mouse burrowing outside our house these days. It’s about 3 days since he moved in. He burrows and borrows at a certain corner of the garden, which is his job. I watched it a bit last night, he’s highly busy, going down, comin’ up, pushing rocks’ n stuff about, sniffing, and the like. Previously we had one at the backyard and he was a major pain, diggin up mud and making the place a mess. But this one seems cooler and cleaner, he has his own corner, and you’d rarely notice ‘em unless his little pile of dirt. Personally I think he’s cute n happy we have atleast someone moving in the garden other than the lawn-mower, but not everyone thinks the same.

Mom is hysterical about him. She expects it would burrow so much that half of the house would come down, and is determined to get rid o’ em. Every morning this week she’s been like “Your friend has been at work last night” and the like. Dad likes him but doesn’t wanna show in public I guess. I tried to convince mum that after borrowing a week or so he’d get bored and move away, ‘course he’s not gonna stay there forever, but No. It has to go.

At least I managed to withhold capital punishment at last night’s Congressional Defense Review. So tonight Dad’s ‘Outdoorsman’ type pal, uncle Bh, is coming along with a cage so it could be caught and taken away. Sigh. Hope you’ll find a nice, ‘Hundred Acre Forest‘ kinda place to live in.

Yesterday a public HTML folder on a production website got ‘vanished’. It was queer: I was uploading stuff and tweaking this and that for awhile when suddenly around midday, whilst trying to FTP some new code up, I happened to notice that the public HTML folder which used to lie on the account’s root folder had simply vanished.

I promptly tried to load the site to a browser instance but got the 404 File Not Found Error. Knowing something was badly amiss, I got another engineer take a look at it, and he confirmed it. I immediately broke the news to administrators and we tried everything from FTP service restarts to server-wide restarts, but nothing.

Throughout the whole thing, cPanel account access was thankfully retained. I looked at the stats, but didn’t find anything queer [other than a curious last visitor called robots.txt]. D couldn’t figure out what went wrong either, and I did some independent research as well, but still against a dead end.

At the end we decided to delete the complete account and start afresh, and it took almost the rest of the evening to re-establish the database, code, etc., etc., Today I’ve a mind to contact the server administrators to see whether they have anything interesting. Let’s see.

The other stupid thing I came across was a phantom session variable. It started life on my local test server. It’s a PHP/MySQL application, fairly simple, nothing complex or fancy, but there’s this session variable I set in a certain script which is apparently invisible to Mozilla based browsers. Queer. I set an asserting piece of code to fire up if the session is not set, and the assertion always fires in Mozilla or Firefox, but work fine in IE and Opera, those being the only browsers I brought into play so far. I had to work around by using methods such as GET and form fields to do otherwise, but still it bugs me. Either the bug report is stupidly wrong or I’ve done a silly silly mistake, but I can’t have overlooked it this long a time. It’s been there since first observation. Queer indeed.

circles card wallet by misseskwittys

Yesterday D lost his wallet. Actually on Monday. He has no idea whether it was snatched on the bus or he dropped it somewhere or whatever, which originated many pathetic jokes on the poor D [including the fact Lak was accompanying him home that day], but anyways he’s been relieved of it all right. Although it contained less than $6, as usual he lost all his national/university IDs/ATM cards/credit cards and the typical lot. More than anything he mourns the wallet, which apparently was given to him by (after a lot coy smiles and feet-shuffling and nagging) a certain ‘cousin’. We recommended a formal complaint at the politzky cause being caught without an ID these days won’t land you anywhere before one notorious military detention centers here.

This bugged me: previously I used to leave my card pack home and take only the necessary, but now I’ve grown old and lazy so I carry the ’six-pack’ of credit/ATM/ID/library/you-name-it all-in-one. After a ride home jumping everytime someone brushed me, I emptied the contents of me wallet into my desk, and now I only carry two cards permanently, NID and credit. Everything else is optional as security precaution. Considering the next one in line here for a major loss is me [Ru lost an expensive 'black' Nokia, Suse an Nseries, AJ was robbed at knifepoint by an 'Ayya' etc., etc., and now Big D. Brrr..], better be prepared as far as possible.

Amazingly D’s sis had lost her wallet six times, and got it back with everything important each time. Hope some of her luck might’ve had brushed of on D.

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Postscript [14JAN2008] : Today while grabbing some lunch I happened to elaborate how I drove around Colombo yesterday teetering on luck cause my license was back at home while I could swear I pocketed it, D happened to confess (to the dismay of the engineering team for wasting their mourn) that his wallet was in fact been lying around at home!! 

Usually I stay up in a festive mood till the new year’s dawn but last night was an exception. The resolutions got scrapped at around 10-1030pm I guess. I wanted to do an al night AJAX hackathon but was too sleepy for that as well. Swayed around being jolted about by fireworks, and finally hit the sack but was kept awake by late night wish SMSs, and crackers galore at midnight. The phones were overflowing by the morning.

Although boring, the new year seems great. School’s behind me which was ‘sort of’ a major pain, and I’ve have started ‘life’. This has been in a sense introduced a certain dullness as well. Not having a challenge up at every time, well it’s not something I’m used to. ‘Settling down’ is not a option with me, if it wasn’t school I always had my own challenging project going on. Now I feel out of steam, perhaps grad school will wake me up. That’s a hope.

This was my first proper festive day at office; we had a literal “food festival”, not helped by the least by R’s birthday. We started with earnest, but ran out of steam quickly; perhaps milkrice first was a bad idea. The birthday cake was too chocolaty, and we still have a half share left for tea. There was an excellent mixture of miscellaneous sweets and the like, but we couldn’t touch a lot, a whole box of chocolate cookies, and numerous more cakes remain. Riz said we’d be gorging down for weeks. Maybe.

Now I feel a bit sleepy, after gulping down Rover’s excellent tea. Work is excellent; the movie I’ve put to download is complete. Mmmm…

I’ll have to floss vigorously today.

A very happy new year to all!