If you are using daemontools, and come across the following error even though the supervise directory and all related files exist:

svc: warning: unable to control /service/dev: file does not exist

Then you can do the following:

1. Use ps -afx to display a hierarchy of processes… really quite cool.
2. If procreadtitle is running in the process list, then do the following:
ps axww|grep readproctitle
3. That should display the error that is preventing the service from starting. If you are using daemontools with openacs, then the problem might be a misconfigured run file, or that you haven’t set the right permissions on the server log files.

I’ve been looking around for a way to draw a horizontal bar chart using CSS, and this is probably the nicest example I’ve come across.

Average Joe’s T-Shirt




Close up.


Originally uploaded by ncarroll.

The National Breast Cancer Foundation City Treasure Hunt is on again this Saturday, and this year we have been a little more organised. For starters we came up with a slightly better team name. Last year we were called “Terrence & Phillip”, something Nathan got from South Park. There was much confusion at check points when the event officials kept asking what our team name was and we’d say “Terrence & Phillip”, and they would reply “yes, I have your names, what is your Team name?”, to which we would say “Terrence & Phillip”, and the ongoing dialogue just goes in circles. Needless to say that we lost countless seconds trying to communicate the team name across.

So this year we chose a more streamline name for the team, which was inspired by the movie Dodgeball. No, we didn’t name the team “The Purple Cobras”, although Nathan did have a strong preference to that. We decided to call ourselves the “Average Joe’s”.

I decided to make t-shirts with the team name on the front so that we can just point at the t-shirt when we are lying on the ground recovering from a run between checkpoints. After a crash course on Gimp, I went ahead to create the Average Joe’s graphic. The image was printed on to an iron-on transfer using a desktop printer. The transfer was then ironed on to the t-shirt, and hey presto the photos show the end result.

Spent most of the weekend working on a site design for dotfolio.org. I wouldn’t claim to be a graphics designer, but the site came out quite well if I must say so myself. The design was kind of inspired by the theme of this blog, which seems to be the trend these days.

One of the problems with the site is that it doesn’t display well for IE browsers. I can’t be bothered supporting IE browsers as they are cancer to the Web. The fact that they don’t support Web standards like CSS2 and XHTML very well, is a real pain for web developers, and you only realise this after spending some time learning to develop a fluid site using CSS. So if you want a much better Web experience, then ditch IE and use a standards compliant Web browser like Firefox.