Category Archives: Salesforce

Life

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Dinner today was a salad with mushrooms, grilled garlic-herb salmon, and some jalapeno cheese bread. It was fairly good.
I’m also currently working on a new incarnation of PPA TCG/Student Wars called People Wars:

Really though, I’ve lately been feeling like I’ve lost all my passion for things in my life.

I used to enjoy designing webpages. The last website I designed was my photos2 layout, and that was over a year ago.

I used to enjoy writing code in my free time. The last bit of code I wrote “for fun” was the backend for life.alanv.org, and that was mainly because I wanted a way to share photos (so more out of necessity than desire to code). I have a bunch of project ideas in my head that want to be turned into applications, but for which I can’t find the desire to work on.

I used to enjoy creating card games. Even as I work on People Wars, I keep feeling like it’s not something I really want to be doing. The past 3 or 4 TCGs I’ve started work on have stalled in various non-playable states. The older TCGs I used to like working on haven’t been updated in years (PSO TCG?).

I used to enjoy photography. Lately though, every time I pull out my camera, I feel more and more like I’m compensating for my utter lack of social skills. I rarely look through the photos I take anymore. I don’t really sort or tag the photos I take anymore. When I take photos, it no longer brings me the joy it used to. (Even the recent fourth of July and related photos were sorted mainly out of a sense of obligation rather than a desire to do so, and they still haven’t been tagged.)
I guess the purchase of the point-and-shoot was an attempt to get me interested again, but part of me is doubting that it will work… in particular after yesterday’s picnic where I kept finding myself wishing I had left my camera at home and was forcing myself to interact on a less superficial level.

I used to enjoy spending time around people. More and more, however, it feels like I’m incredibly out of place. There are times when, no matter what is happening, I can’t get myself interested. When there are people over I increasingly spend more and more time alone in my room clicking through the same 4 webpages or listening to the same dozen songs over and over. I simultaneously feel like I want more social interaction and social interaction would only serve to make me miserable and feel even more left out.

I used to be passionate about work and look forward to heading in to work every day. Lately though, it’s become more “same old, same old,” and I get up and get dressed and head to my desk every day out of necessity. Part of this may be the bad couple weeks I’ve been having WRT work, but I feel that it’s likely part of the larger issue where I’m losing interest in everything.

I guess I’m not entirely sure what’s wrong with me, other than I wish I had something I actually enjoyed doing instead of having a bunch of things I do to pass the time. Hopefully this is nothing more than a small rut and I’ll find my interests again. Maybe it’s time to go out and seek new interests. I want to enjoy, rather than simply live, life again. I just can’t seem to find activities that allow me to do that in the same way that I once did.

I should thank Greg, Tim, Ian, Mars, and Dan though. Sometimes I feel like you guys are the only thing keeping me sane, and when we play games or just talk, everything feels like it used to and I find myself being interested in things again.

Meh.

(I suppose this should include a small disclaimer that there’s still one thing I’m passionate about. You know who you are, and I hope that never changes.)

VM Fail

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Work today was full of fail.

It started out with a push-update to my Windows VM from IT. Simple enough, right? Well, this update somehow pushed my VM over the edge of hard drive usage and caused it to start reporting low space errors (the VM thinks it’s a 130GB drive, but it’s located on a 60GB partition, and it had eaten up around 59.7 GB). This meant I could no longer run automated tests in it, which was my primary work for today. Ok, fine, spend some time cleaning up the VM.

This, unfortunately, isn’t enough… since the VM HD files are in 2GB chunks, cleaning up stuff inside the VM and reducing the used HD space down to 26GB doesn’t reduce the VM files’ sizes any. So I attempt a defrag. The available space on the drive very quickly goes down from about 300MB to 110MB, at which point I decide this is a very bad idea and stop.

Spend the morning finding tools to resize the physical drive partitions to give the VM some more room (as it is now running in the 110MB of free space and is generally unusable). Finally fall back to Gparted and discover that the partitions are actually logical volumes, so I have to resize them within the OS. Great.

Spend most of the afternoon figuring out how to boot Ubuntu into a command line as root so I can unmount the appropriate drives to reduce the logical volume size of /home so I can increase the logical volume size of /. (Issues mainly stemming from the fact that all of the physical drive space was already allocated between the two logical volumes, so I needed to reduce one to increase the other, and reductions cannot be done while the partition is mounted.) Discover that I first need to reduce the file system size. Finally succeed at doing so and at giving / an additional 2GB of memory. This was around 4 PM. Success!

Finally get the VM booting back up, and it’s running mostly ok. I then stupidly decide to resize the HD size within Windows so it doesn’t eventually use up the newly allocated 2GB and die again (which is something most of the online conversations on VM sizes I’m finding recommend anyway). This kicks off and starts eating up the newly-allocated 2GB. Eventually, it has 0KB left on its partition, signals an abort, and kills the VM in the middle of the process.

So yeah, now I have a VM in an unbootable state on a partition with 0KB available space (so it can’t boot anyway). Awesome.
I filed a ticket to IT to either get a new VM or get help in adding a VM I have to the corporate domain, but that won’t happen until Monday. Blah. Unfortunately, as there was no VM backup and it was an image of my old Windows workstation, everything I had on there is lost. Oh well.

So yeah, I essentially got nothing done at work today because of stupid VM issues. As soon as I get a new VM working, I’m going to snapshot it and set it to revert to snapshot every shutdown.

Edit: For my own future reference, the relevant commands were:
umount /home
resize2fs /dev/mainvg/home 19609750
lvreduce -L -2G /dev/mainvg/home
mount /home
lvresize -L +2G /dev/mainvg/root
resize2fs /dev/mainvg/root somenumber

Work

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It’s been an interesting (and busy) week at work. I left work after 6:30 every day this week except Wednesday, when I left at 6 for a baseball game and returned for more work from 9:30 to 10:30.

Monday and Tuesday were some last-minute tweaks to the login page reskin (which you can now view at https://login.salesforce.com) and other miscellaneous foo. I don’t remember exactly why I stayed late those days now.

Wednesday was a patch release that I got pulled into. Ultimately, they found an issue and rolled back the release. It was also a A’s baseball game with various teammates. $2 tickets and $1 hot dogs are fun.

Thursday was the re-release of the patch, so I had to gackwatch that. After it went out, we found an issue with the new login page that I had caused by checking in an incorrect configuration. This resulted in an emergency release that lasted until 11:30, so I didn’t get home until 11:45. I didn’t mind staying, since I had caused the issue, but felt really bad for all the other people that got pulled into the mess. Meh. I guess we learned some valuable lessons about the importance of peer reviews and testing differences between internal and production environments. And at least the problem didn’t cause any breakages, persay… just annoyance. I’m also incredibly thankful that it was only a small config change, which meant the fix could be deployed in about 2-3 hours instead of requiring a full code release, which takes around 6 hours to stagger.

Today was the Sandbox release. I fortunately didn’t have to work it, but I stayed late anyway for the food and to finish up some refactoring work.

Next week will be similarly busy because I have some stuff I want to finish and get checked in before I leave for Thailand. Hopefully I won’t need to stay late often, though. I’m tempted to go in tomorrow to do some work because there’ll be leftover food from tonight and I really want to get the next project (which is awesome and a lot of fun) done, and also to verify the checkin I made today at 6.

I leave for Thailand for a month on May 23. Internet access will likely be spotty, so you should contact me through email.

I should sleep soon, as it is almost 2:30. I have been working on the redo of Student Wars v2 for the past 3 hours or so. It’s coming along nicely… I’ll post some cards next time.