Nigel Babu

Author: nigelb

  • A Successful Running Week

    A Successful Running Week

    It’s been a long time since I had a week like this week. I make excuses for delaying my workouts and eventually not doing them. This week, I managed to have a break through, run 3 days of the week, and hit my modest weekly goal of 10 km. This is a spectacular feeling!

    From a run a few months ago

    I haven’t run a 5K in such a long time that I’ve decided to start the C25K program yet again. I keep going to somewhere around 4 weeks and break it for one reason or the other. This time too, I see travel scheduled right around then. I hoping to beat it this time.

  • No space left on device

    No space left on device

    I got paged a bit ago because one of our sites was down. This site does go down occasionally because of an issue with Solr. Usually, it just needs a restart of Solr and a restart of background queues. Obviously, that didn’t work this time around. I had a sneaky suspicion this was not the case since we didn’t have any Solr related alerts.

    This looked more like a problem with the frontend server and it was indeed. The logs said it was out of space, and df -h reported plenty of free space. Having been in this situation before, I knew it was likely to be inodes. df -i is handy to debug in these situations.

    No space left

    I narrowed down the problem thanks to this great answer on Stack Overflow by simon. Essentially, go to your root folder and run this command:

    sudo find . -xdev -type f | cut -d "/" -f 2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

    You may need to edit it to the following form to get it to actually work (thanks to Frederick Nord’s comment):

    sudo find . -xdev -type f | cut -d "/" -f 2 | sort --buffer=1G | uniq -c | sort -n --buffer=1G

    Now find the folder with the largest number of inodes and start digging deeper. In my case it was a cache folder that created tmp files for sessions, which wasn’t ever cleared.

    Image Credit: Crowd by James Cridland on Flickr.

  • I’ve Finally Moved In

    I’ve Finally Moved In

    Last weekend, I bought a bookshelf and day before yesterday, I finally moved my books out of boxes into the shelf. It looks beautiful and now I feel like I’ve truly moved in.

    Quite proud of this

  • Non-unified Builds on Try

    Last week, I was trying to fix a non-unified build bustage with glandium’s help and I kept failing to fix it in mozilla-inbound. I don’t usually build locally myself, so I had to push to Try. And there was no documentation on how-to do it. It turns out that it needs a custom mozconfig override (thanks dbaron).

    You need to add ac_add_options --disable-unified-compilation to the file build/mozconfig.common.override in one of your pushes. Probably easier, if it’s the tip. We updated the wiki with this small piece of documentation.

    This is mostly a note to myself. And perhaps for contributors who might search for it.

  • A review of 2014 and plans for 2015

    Success

    • Writing: I’ve written 30 posts this year compared to 15 in 2012. I’m not great at writing, but it’s getting better. This blog got 7,904 visits this year compared to 3,271 last year. I think it’s a bit of a fluke due to one high-traffic post. I’ve started writing 750 words a day, a lot of which turns into blog posts. This explains why I’ve been posting more often lately.
    • Focus: I’ve cut down on a lot of online life to focus on pretty much 2 things: Work and my contribution to Mozilla. Burnout is real and I’ve gone through it. Not doing that again 🙂 This year’s daily focus is going add an hour or two of studying to that list.
    • Read more non-fiction: I read at least 7 non-fiction books and they were all a great read. I fully recommend following The Farnam Street if you’d like recommendations.
    • Travel: I’ve been to Tanzania, Germany, UK, and the US this year. Here’s to more travels in 2015!
    • Accounting. For the last 2 years, my accounts have been a mess. I caught up this year and fixed them all up and I’ve paid back taxes until now and filed returns to date. This year’s challenge is going to be tracking my spending more tightly and budgeting a bit better.

    Not quite success:

    • An exercise habit. I love running now, though, I’m nowhere close to consistent. It didn’t help that I had quite a bit of travel and moved cities this year. I’m hoping the somewhat better stability this year will help. Since July, I’ve only had 15 workouts. I’m hoping to have about 120 work outs this year. That’s 3 workouts a week with a 20{13371f13f0bf161e7595c2ac5df92e005bed3de1d132ef646d0a44f3a1a9ee62} leeway.
    • Learn C. Going to try this one again. I tried unsuccessfully to learn Scala and Haskell. In retrospect, I should have focused on just C. That’s what I’ll try this year.
    • Learn JavaScript. I still don’t understand large swaths of it, but I built a thing with backbone! This is definitely on my goals for this year after C.
    • Cut down on the unnecessary from my online life. I’ve stopped committing to things I can’t finish, and given up commitments that I knew I couldn’t manage. My move from Google also went pretty well. Right now, I’m stuck with a bit too many servers. That’s a project to tackle this year.

    New Challenges

    • Work on my bachelor’s degree. For those of who don’t know me well enough, I’ve still not finished a bachelor’s degree. I enrolled in a course in June last year and I’ve been lazy about it till December. I’ve started working on it strongly lately. My goal is to set a habit of spending at least 1 hour every day for studies.
    • Build more things. I completely enjoyed building the Salary Converter in 2012 and hgstats this year. In 2015, I want to build more things and play with new technology for some time. The alternative is to improve the existing projects with some new technology. I’ve been wanting to convert the Salary Converter into a fully JS app.