Brian and I spent Christmas with my mom and the rest of my family in Pittsburgh this weekend. We had quite a few (tame) adventures. The first began before our trip even started – I left work at 2:30, Brian left work at 3, it took us both about 2 hours to get to my house (it’s normally an hour tops for me during evening rush hour). We were now faced with leaving the DC area at 5pm – which looking back on it was not a good idea – it took us about 5 hours to get to my mom’s – 2 of which to get from my house to Frederick – a normally 20 min ride. We stopped for dinner in Keyser’s Ridge at the truck stop, and finally arrived at my mom’s about 10:30 or so.

I was up early to take my brother shopping for my mom, and then when Brian woke up, we headed downtown to ride the incline and then hit the Carnegie Science Center to watch the Omnimax (Adreneline Rush), and the Planetarium. I think we both had lots of fun

Saturday, we went to the Pittsburgh Zoo where we saw the 4 month old tiger cubs (pictures coming soon!), and the new polar bears. It was a cold day, but not too bad, and the zoo was *empty*. We couldn’t even buy a bottle of water, everything was closed. We capped off the day with a stop at the 61C cafe in Squirrel Hill, and a stop at the liquor store to get some red wine for dinner.

Christmas started rather late as we waited for everyone to crawl out of bed and out into the living room. Mom got her DVD/VCR combo and some candles from Chad, Chad got his DS and a game, along with a sweater and a shirt, Brian got a cookbook from my mom, and a goofy bendable tripod from me. I made off with two turtlenecks, a nice cashmere sweater, a cover for my mixer, a few DVDs from my brother, and a beautiful set of wine glasses from Brian. He had ordered engraved glasses from the artists at the Ren Faire with a Celtic Knot on them – I like them, and they’re blue

Christmas evening, Brian met practically the rest of my family (all of my dad’s side) for dinner. I got to hold Kailyn Ray (my cousin’s 6 week old baby), and feed her. She was a bit fussy though with all the people around. My aunt had gotten Brian a sweatshirt (a nice big one ), and I got scented soap. My cousin had drawn my name in the gift exchange, and she got me a shirt with matching sweater as well as a cat ornament.

Tuesday morning, Brian and I got on the road home soon after we were both awake – which wasn’t until about noon, but that was OK, we were on vacation My aunt on my mom’s side decided not to meet us in the mountains because they were expecting snow, so Brian didn’t meet *all* of my family, but pretty close. We did hit snow up in the mountains, although not bad, and easy to drive through, and we made it to my place by about 5.

We spent some time talking and goofing off before heading out to dinner at Ziki. We then had some water in my new wine glasses (Brian still had to drive home), and enjoyed each other’s company for a while, just sitting, gabbing and petting the cats. It was a good weekend

Ok, so I can code – I’m seriously not a developer. I usually don’t like it, so I don’t do it for a job. I have done it in the past, I know how to do it, and I’m darn good at finding bugs. I helped out a company yesterday on a 4 hour conference call (through lunch!) to find a bug in how their code was using LDAP over SSL. Today, at 4:00, I get an e-mail asking me to describe the issue and how we fixed it so that they could document it properly, no big deal – I’m usually gone by 3 on Fridays, but this’ll only take about 2 min to dash off an e-mail, so I respond. Then, about 4:30, I get this e-mail from the same company saying that X is not working. I have no clue what X is, I didn’t write the software, I only looked at one small piece (maybe 400 lines total) of code, and I have no idea how it works. Not only that – I wasn’t even sent an error message or why X wasn’t working.

I’m not in my office until 8am on Monday morning.

Today, I learned why my machine at work was becoming unbearably slow – especially when doing something with certificates – like sending or receiving signed and encrypted mail. I have my settings set to check the OCSP server if there is one, or, if not, to check the CRL to make sure certificates are valid and not revoked. Week by week, my system had been getting slower and slower. I figured it was because the CRL of one of our clients was growing above 4MB, and kind of let it be. This past month, sending an encrypted e-mail to someone took almost 5 minutes just to check the validity of the certificate! I actually started to search around and see what was up.

I knew it was something to do with certificates and CRLs based on when the slowdowns were happening, but my new Pro at home wasn’t having similar issues, and my keychains are synchronized between the two machines, so I’m dealing with the same certificates. I initially thought it was just a difference in processing power: 1.8GHz G5 3GB of RAM vs 2.0GHz dual Dual Core 3GB of RAM, and shrugged it off. Then I realized, I really shouldn’t be doing *anything* that can tax the G5 that much. I know I have 5 bajillion windows open at once, but most of it’s not actually using the processing power.

I did some Googling to see if Tiger was caching the CRLs – downloading 4MB each time seemed stupid, but possible. I found that Tiger does in fact cache CRLs in /var/db/crls/crlcache.db and certtool y k=/var/db/crls/crlcache.db will tell you all about the CRLs in the cache. I looked at my cache, and I noticed a CRL that had expired in June of 2005 (?!?!?). I also noticed that I had over 500 CRLs in the cache. It was definitely caching alright. It was also neglecting to remove expired CRLs! When you’re dealing with 4MB CRLs that are issued every 6 hours (expire in one week), that’s a *lot* of disk being used for nothing. I had found my problem – now to find the solution.

Tiger has this nifty command called crlrefresh – it manages the CRLs in the cache. It’s intended to be called from cron (or periodic), but on my machine, it wasn’t. So, I refreshed the cache and purged the old CRLs (crlrefresh r p) which took almost 3 hours, but left me with 8 CRLs. I now have a script running this command every week in periodic (put it in /etc/weekly.local), and will hopefully not have any more problems with it.

I also wrote an e-mail to a contact I have with Apple’s x509 group to see about getting it resolved in either a patch or at least Leopard.

From Magnio:

Xmas Stocking

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The Air Chambers,
originally uploaded by elwing.

My new Select Comfort Sleep Number bed was delivered and set up yesterday. I’m supposedly a 45, but that was measured without my memory foam and fiberbed on the matress, and the lady at the store said it’d most likely be different with the extra padding. She also told me that for the first five nights, to sleep on the mattress with a +15 number and slowly reduce the number by 5 until I got to 45. This is supposedly to keep you from getting sore as your body adjusts to a new way of sleeping.

I only got to spend about 2 hours in my bed last night thanks to my final paper, but I did enjoy it. I’m a little on the stiff side this morning, but that could be things other than the bed. I re-figured my number, and it seems to be a 50 with the fiberbed. I tried setting the bed to a 60 (15+45) like the lady suggested, but the bed was just way too hard for me, so I went to a 55, which was still stiffer than I like, but comfortable. I think that recommendation is from people who were sleeping on a stiff bed. I was sleeping just fine on a soft one that was sagging (trust me, it wasn’t stiff), and while I can sleep on a firm bed if I need to, I prefer not to – there’s a reason I like my fiberbed.

I plan on sleeping at a 55 for the rest of the week and see how it goes. The cats seem to have picked their sides – Bootsie likes the soft side with me, and Smokey likes the firm side.