Matthew's Blog

OCI: Don't Even Think About It

Back when Oracle announced their cloud offering, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), I was originally intrigued. I figure I’d give it a try, after all I’m not a big fan of AWS and I’m even less a fan of Azure. At the beginning I decided to forget about Oracle’s reputation, and, damn was that a mistake.

I stuck to the free tier, using only two low-powered instances to run a test application as well as a wiki. Everything was going great until this morning. My last time browsing my wiki was last night at about 21:00, and it worked great! This morning I went to look something up and I was greeting with a nice Connection Timeout error. “Great, the gollum service probably died again,” I thought. It should be an easy fix! I’d just SSH in and do a quick service restart.

Nerdy Site Improvements

Let’s skip right over how long it’s been since I’ve written a blog post and dive right into some recent changes I’ve made on this site. A lot of it is behind the scenes in the scripts I use to manage creating new posts, publishing drafts, deploying the site to my server and just today I wrote a quick ruby script that adds the current commit hash to _config.yml.

In case you aren’t already aware, I use Jekyll as my static-site generator.

Status update, August 2020

August has been a month of revival. Six months of staying at home during the coronavirus pandemic has taken its toll on most aspects of my life. I’m fortunate enough to remain employed. Working from home had introduced its unique set of challenges. Things like staying motivated and focused were especially hard during the earlier months.

I moved, at the end of April, out of my brother’s and into an apartment with a friend of mine. After three and a half months living here, I’ve learned some lessons for the next time I move in with someone. Hopefully, I won’t have to worry about it and in about 5 years I’m thinking about being a homeowner. I like Minneapolis enough to stay here.

Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter. Say their names.

All lives don't matter until black lives do.
  • The Black Trans Protestors Emergency Fund raises money for physical resources, bail, and medical care for black, transgender protestors, which will be redistributed to black, trans-led organizations.
  • The NAACP Legal Defense Fund supports racial justice through advocacy, litigation, and education.
  • The Legal Rights Center, a non-profit law firm based in Minneapolis, offering legal defense, educational, and advocacy services.
  • The Black Vision Collective in Minneapolis, a black, trans, and queer-led social justice organization and legal fund that provides education and training in black and brown communities.
  • The Know Your Rights Camp, an organization founded by Colin Kaepernick that provides education and training in black and brown communities has set up a legal fund for Minneapolis.

Support Organizations Working Against Police Abuse

  • MPD 150, a participatory, horizontally-organized effort by local organizers, researchers, artists, and activists helping organizers in other cities to establish practical abolitionist strategies.
  • Showing Up for Racial Justice works to educate white people about anti-racism and organizes actions to support the fight for racial justice and undermine white supremacy.

Support Rebuilding Efforts

Provide Community Support

This page will grow over time. Check back.

Mitigating Pi-hole ISE 500 Error on the "Long term data - Query Log"

When selecting a large date range on the long term data Query Log, say last 30 or even last 7 days, I’d be greeted with the following error message and some more information in Lighttpd’s logs.

‘An unknown error occurred while loading the data.’ alert dialog

And the relevant line in /var/log/lighttpd/error.log:

2020-06-07 19:40:24: (mod_fastcgi.c.421) FastCGI-stderr: PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 10489856 bytes) in /var/www/html/admin/api_db.php on line 422

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