Here’s a photo of Bob / utabintarbo riding across the S-shaped bridge which is part of The Pines at Stony Creek. He and I met up with the intention of getting some extra riding in before the normal Wednesday at 6:30 PM group ride, but after our first lap (and a naughty daylight backwards run through The Pines) I was so out of it that I had to stop and go home early. I think I’m getting the cold that Danielle had while we were in the UK, as I feel extremely tired, I’m coughing, can’t properly get my breath, and just feeling blah. I hope this doesn’t turn into pneumonia.

Riding was interesting as the leaf and snow covered trails were reasonably slippery, previously muddy areas were rock-hard narrow ruts, wet areas were now slick ice, and previously loose sand was hard as concrete fun. I had a very hard time making it through some normally easy areas, and I’m blaming this on being slightly overdressed for the cold weather and unable to breathe properly. Ah well, hopefully I’ll be better next week.

A couple of trips to Home Depot and Lowes has resulted in my purchase of some spray paint designed for frosting windows, a replacement light bulb for the ceiling fan in my bedroom, and new LED-based nightlights for the bathrooms. Tomorrow I’m hoping to remove the blinds in the bathroom and frost the windows. Hopefully that will go as well, which is how replacing the bulb in the ceiling fan went, making the room light up properly again.

On a very positive note, I had no problems uploading the image above, and I didn’t anticipate any after incorporating the fix mentioned in the bottom of this post about php-cgi hung as sbwait. It turns out that a default setting in lighttpd breaks particularly badly on FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE, but not previous versions. Changing it to a different setting suggested by one of the lighttpd developers has worked around the issue. This is good.

Here’s the sample of today’s chili sin carne which I pulled for purposes of “testing” to be sure the whole pot is ready for eating. It was made as follows:

1) Sautee a chopped sweet onion and bulb of garlic in ~3 TBSP of butter with three whole Kung Pao chilis until brown.
2) Add a bottle of barely carbonated Rochefort 10 Clone and reduce.
3) Add one 28oz can of Muir Glen Fire Roasted Diced Tomatos, one container Garden Fresh Jack’s Special Medium Salsa, one 6oz small can of Meijer tomato paste, and one 7oz can of Empacadora San Marcos Chipotle Sauce.
4) Remove chilis and add rehydrated beans, one bag of Morningstar Farms® Meal Starters™ Grillers™ Recipe Crumbles™, and about half a bag of Trader Joes Fire Roasted Corn. Bring to simmer.
5) Notice that the mixture is getting dry. Add another bottle of Rochefort 10 Clone, about 3oz of chili powder, and about 1 Tsp of fresh ground black pepper.
6) Simmer for about 2.5 hours, stirring every 15 - 20 minutes.

Suddenly waking up at 6:45am made it possible to eat this for lunch. Now I have to decide if I make rice and have it that way, or with chips and cheese. Or maybe I could make up some pasta for a better-than-authentic Skyline-esque experience.

It’s cold out, I’ve got some sort of UK-ian cold / sinus infection, and I’m wanting to eat at home as much as possible while on vacation. While at Meijer and picking up milk I decided to make up a pot of chili sin carne using my standard method, except with dried beans. Normally I use canned beans, but dried are cheaper and better tasting. Hopefully I’ll be using these 1.5 pounds (dried) of beans along with a clove of garlic, large sweet onion, container of Garden Fresh Salsa, a bag of Morningstar Farms beefy TVP stuff, failed-to-carbonate home-made Rochefort 10 Clone, Trader Joe’s Fire Roasted Corn, and random other things to make something which is hopefully tasty and sustaining.

It will likely be eaten one of two ways:

· Over rice cooked in an Indian style, as demonstrated here by the wonderful Manjula on her YouTube channel.
· With Garden Fresh Tortilla Chips and smothered in sharp cheddar.

It amazes me how much stuff good stuff people will throw out. Two weeks ago I found a whole set of women’s golf clubs set at the curb for pickup when I was taking my trash out, so I grabbed them. Now that I’ve got a bit of time, I wanted to post here and ask if anyone wants them. If not, they’ll be going up on Craigslist or to the Salvation Army or something. The clubs aren’t particularly new, but they are in good shape. There are some balls and tees in the bag, along with some animal club covers.

I’ve also got a hand cart for golf clubs that is also free, except this is an old, leftover item from when I was much younger and interested in golf.

So, would any of you like these things? Just let me know. The only thing I ask is that it be picked up fairly soon.

When uploading a quantity of photos to my gallery I like to use a tool like Gallery Remote to make it go easier. However, since moving to banstyle (and a newer version of FreeBSD and lighttpd and PHP) I’ve had Gallery Remote regularly hang at that “Upload completed: server processing…” message. It seems to happen after a few (typically two to five) images have been uploaded.

This problem has been bothering me for a while, but I was able to work around it by scping the files to the server then adding them locally, which doesn’t have this problem. Now that I have a bunch of photos from the UK trip to upload, I want to be able to use Gallery Remote again. This morning I set to getting working, but I seem to have failed.

In short, what happens is that after an upload hangs I see one of the php-cgi processes stuck in a status of sbwait, as can be seen in this screenshot:

81073 c0nsumer        1   4    0   116M 20988K sbwait 3   0:01  0.00% php-cgi

Digging around I found this thread where someone else indicates that they are having the same problem, and only on SMP boxes. (Note: banstyle.nuxx.net is four-way SMP using SCHED_ULE.) I also came across this report to the lighttpd folks regarding this issue. The consensus seems to be that when using a config such as mine, with PHP as a FastCGI and lighttpd, this occasionally happens. I’ve seen no reports of the issue occurring under Apache.

Since I’m able to reproduce the problem I did so, attached gdb to the seemingly hung php-cgi process, and grabbed a backtrace:

(gdb) bt
#0  0×00000008010a476a in read () from /lib/libc.so.7
#1  0×000000000057d5fc in fcgi_read ()
#2  0×000000000057e306 in sapi_cgi_read_post ()
#3  0×00000000004c84a4 in fill_buffer ()
#4  0×00000000004c88b5 in multipart_buffer_read ()
#5  0×00000000004c9c08 in rfc1867_post_handler ()
#6  0×00000000004c6ee5 in sapi_handle_post ()
#7  0×00000000004cc30c in php_default_treat_data ()
#8  0×00000000004cc7eb in php_hash_environment ()
#9  0×00000000004bff47 in php_request_startup ()
#10 0×000000000057f8c6 in main ()

(gdb) f 0
#0  0×00000008010a476a in read () from /lib/libc.so.7
(gdb) info frame
Stack level 0, frame at 0×7fffffff9c50:
 rip = 0×8010a476a in read; saved rip 0×57d5fc
 called by frame at 0×7fffffff9db0
 Arglist at 0×7fffffff9c40, args: 
 Locals at 0×7fffffff9c40, Previous frame’s sp is 0×7fffffff9c50
 Saved registers:
  rip at 0×7fffffff9c48

Based on the input from some folks online, it’s looking like that is php-cgi doing what it’s supposed to and just waiting for more data, which means that the problem is likely somewhere in lighttpd. I’m not really sure where to go from here, besides wait for the lighttpd folks to (hopefully) fix the problem. With any luck I’ll be able to update this post later on with a solution. For now I’m going to contemplate the difficulty of going (back, in many ways) to Apache.

For reference, I’m running lighttpd 1.4.20 and PHP 5.2.6, both installed from ports, configured as described in my article about running lighttpd with PHP as FastCGI with each user having their own PHP processes.

UPDATE: So, it seems that there is a “fix” for this which was suggested in this aforementioned bug report. Setting the option server.network-backend = “writev” along with the already set (in my case) server.event-handler = “freebsd-kqueue” in lighttpd fixes it. I’m not sure if both options are needed to resolve the issue, but it seems that the default setting for server.network-backend of write is confirmed as broken under FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE with lighttpd <= 1.4.20.

I wasn’t expecting snow upon returning to the US, but here it is. It was snowing so hard that the camera kept focusing on the snow, and I was cold enough that I didn’t want to do anything about it. The hot water heater is coming up to temperature, the wall says it’s 63°F in my office (up from 52°F when I got home), and I’m just feeling a bit cold. I think it’s about time to sort out some Thai food, maybe some beer, then relax and get to sleep. Having to wake up early to catch The Tube to Heathrow for an 8:50 AM flight, which ends up meaning that I’ve been up since 11PM EST. This should make for an interesting evening.

Also, I think I have to declare LJ and blog bankruptcy and just mark everything for the last nine days read.

This has been an interesting, and good week. Danielle and I just finished up eating piles of curry and onion bhaji and we’re now watching the original version of The Italian Job from a PAL VHS tape in Dominic’s living room.

I’ll write more about this past week later, along with photos not taken with my cell phone, but I will give one preview: I have pooped in one of the same places as Alan Turing.

It’s a good thing I don’t want to retire any time soon.

This is a scan from one of my 401(k) statements, one which I received today. This isn’t all of my retirement savings, but it’s a good chunk of it. It’s a bit disheartening to see that, across all six funds this is in, everything has basically collapsed.

Here’s a portion of the 2/3 cup of Lemon Drop Chile Peppers which I cut up tonight for use in my multi-year hot sauce project. These were grown on my front porch, planted along with the flowers grown here in 2008.

I’ve done a bunch of stuff since cutting them up and washed my hands a few times, but I’m still too scared to use the bathroom and touch particularly sensitive bits. These are very, very hot; just below habanero according to descriptions I’ve read online. When I tried to eat one slice this size in the past, the first initial bite sent my mouth into alternating numbness and horrible pain.

Here’s a photo of tonight’s dinner, a masala dosa from Rangoli Express in Sterling Heights, MI. It was served with sambar and coconut and tomato chutney. I stopped here for dinner after swinging by the ATM. Food is always good and the people working there are quite friendly. It’s one of my two favorite places in the Detroit area for getting Indian food.