This morning I ran the entire US Option market (all 48 OPRA channels) on one 24-core (hyper-threaded) box. This was a big test for my ticker plants as we have never had it all on one box, and not dropped a thing. Pretty sweet. Sure, it's a decent box, but it's not a ridiculous box - a Dell for under $10k is not crazy, considering you only need one of them.
So good news. I'm glad. Great shot in the arm going into the weekend.
This morning OPRA, the Options Price Reporting Authority, is changing their distribution from a 24-line multicast feed to a 48-line feed to make it a little easier to balance the load and allow for receivers like us to actually do something with the data we get. So this morning when I got in I changed all the configuration data from the 24-line set-up to the new 48-line set-up. In truth, I'd had the configuration for a while, I just didn't update the config files as I didn't need them. Today is the first day I need them, so they'll be live and ready for me.
Progress... there's no stopping it.
Yesterday afternoon I had a hiccup on the networks and the NXMachine session I had from my desktop to one of the servers in the data center was disconnected. Unfortunately, attempting to get it back proved fruitless. No matter what I did, it was saying that there was an authentication problem. Yet just 10 mins ago I was connected and doing fine.
Reboot didn't help. I could SSH into the box, but I couldn't get the NXMachine session going. The UnixEng guy tried, but he wasn't all that good at debugging this software, so I had to work on another box for the rest of the day.
This morning I came in ready to try and solve this guy on my own. What I did was recheck everything. Make sure the box where it was working and the non-working box were set up right. I checked the scripts, the files - all seemed like it should work. Then I noticed the file owner in the /usr/NX/home/nx directory. It was owned by userID 999 and not the user nx. Oh... this couldn't have been it...
So I went through the entire /usr/NX directory comparing a working machine to a non-working machine. Every place I saw the userID 999 I did the chown nx and after I cleaned up those ownerships it worked! Sweet!
Lesson learned: check the file ownership and permissions.
This morning I had an interesting little problem - WordPress 3.1.1 was released with a few nice little fixes, so I went to HostMonster to update my installs. The problem was that since that odd little 3.1 double upgrade, I was unable to upgrade to 3.1.1 because SimpleScripts was saying that the version number was wrong. Not cool.
I'd been upgrading every time SimpleScripts instructed me, but the second upgrade to 3.1 didn't seem necessary, but I did it anyway - and everything worked. But it wasn't without consequences, it seems. So I had to cancel that update - which wasn't obvious, but I figured out, and then I had to upgrade to 3.1.1 within the WordPress site, and then try to upgrade in SimpleScripts.
This second (unnecessary) upgrade finally detected that I had the version that I was updating to, and it just updated the version number in SimpleScripts. This was a big "Whew!" on my part, and it's nice to know what my options are in dealing with these updates. So it's all up to 3.1.1 and things are smooth once again.
This afternoon I saw a tweet that VoodooPad 4.3.2 was out, so I hopped right on that. The release notes are nice, but I also noticed that it's getting ready for the Mac App Store as it's now signed by Apple, which is a nice touch, I suppose.
I haven't had any problems with this guy, but it's nice to see the progress anyway.
I've been playing with the Apple App Store a bit today and I'm really surprised at the number of apps that I use that it contains. I mean really surprised. The problem is that most of them are detected as "Installed", but if the Bundle IDs are different, as it is with MarsEdit and TextWrangler, then it's not. But in the short-run, it'd be better to have them all not recognized. Basically, if the Bundle ID exists, and it's not in the "Purchased" list, then it should be tagged as "Grandfather" or something. It's on the box, but it's not really recognized properly and won't be updated, etc.
This, in my opinion, is the biggest problem with the App Store: the inability to "import" or "register" purchased apps with the App Store so as to "fold them in" to the App Store umbrella. They could do this with a quick serial number check, or a service that Apple provides that checks to see if it's really licensed to a person... something. They really should try to fold in all the legacy folks.
But I'm guessing that they look at this as a transient condition. The next major release of any one of these apps puts me in the position to buy it from the App Store. No upgrade pricing, however, as I'm not "upgrading". But it's probably in their mind that this is transient, and will be a slight grumbling for a little while and then die down.
Maybe... but all the apps I have provide upgrade pricing, so it's not in my best interests now to buy them new. I would like to think they'd figure this out.
I noticed this morning that Dropbox 1.0 was finally released. This is a major move for something I've used for quite a while. The story is impressive in what they have done and are now capable of doing. I'm a believer. It's like github for syncing clients. Very exciting to see the 1.0.10 release and start to use it.
This morning I see that BBEdit 9.6.2 is out with a pretty extensive list of fixes. I have to say, it's a sweet editor, and I wish it was embedded in MarsEdit, but hey, that's another wish for another day. Still... great editor for the Mac.
While it's not my favorite graphics manipulation application on the Mac, GraphicConverter has shown itself to have some invaluable tools. Specifically, when we moved this past summer, I had a lot of documents that needed to be processed to and from the different parties. GraphicConverter did all this far simpler than anything else I had. It was simply amazing.
So when I got an email the other day about a totally revamped version - a year in the making, I thought What the heck, it's been good for me, stick with it and got it. It was a $26 upgrade, and it seems reasonable for that price. Like I said, it was a lifesaver several nights when I was dead tired and messing with these documents was not the first thing on my mind.
It's got a cleaner UI, and it seems to have everything I used. Support the folks making great Mac software. Nice.
I'm not a big fan of Flash, but I've had to develop in it, and I know that every little bit helps, so when I saw this morning that they had an upgrade, and it's even the hardware accelerated version that should decode H.264 in hardware, but that's not a lot of what I do, so maybe it's not all that great to get excited about it. Still... it's at least fixing security holes... So I got it.