Pete's Log: stupid sunspots
Entry #1409, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)(posted when I was 28 years old.)
I wonder if yesterday had some major solar activity, because things were just kinda weird around here.
I was working on a perl script that downloads a bunch of data via DAV, and previously this had been a rather well-behaved script. Yesterday it was suddenly full of Heisenbugs. Investigation led to the discovery that the xml coming back to me seemed to have random data errors (e.g. in one case a getcontenttype tag was closed by a gatcontenttype tag). I couldn't figure out why this was happening, and eventually just gave up and worked on other things for the day. I should also note that I had some intermittent network connectivity issues yesterday.
Today the script is running fine again. Damn sunspots.
The HTTP::DAV module for perl kinda pisses me off, though. In its initialization code, one of the things it does is
BEGIN { *LWP::UserAgent::redirect_ok = sub { 0 } }
which caused me all sorts of confusion, since simply adding use HTTP::DAV caused my existing http logic (which relied on redirects working) to fail. Booooooo.
There's a big London log entry in the pipeline. Other than that, life's been fun lately. I've been to Cologne and Frankfurt in the past couple weeks. And I've been spending a lot of time with Sara. Yay. The Leonids are supposed to peak this weekend, but the weather for Munich is looking to be cloudy. I can only hope the weather people are wrong.