It pains me to write this.
Has anybody ever done backups for Apache Lucene? (In particular, Solr, though I've no reason to believe that means anthing special for backup/recovery.) What did you do to do that, in broad strokes?
Note that I'm interested in responses in accordance with 's rules here. I do not want to know what you think might work after you google those terms. I am interested in what you already did iff (no spelling error there) you have created backups of a lucene database (index, whatever you want to call it) that were usefully recoverable.
If you don't have a real answer, please, just say nothing.
The NetBSD flamewars are tired, and don't get me started on my local LUG, but this shit has got the lulz that just don't quit.
I especially like the image on the second post:

Now, I get the immediate joke. Duh. But there's a second joke there, if you've read your Hemingway. First, that's with the cape, its not a muleta. If the bull is so worn out it can't even charge without tripping after nothing but pics (and maybe one set of banderillas, but it doesn't even look like a single set has been planted yet), this is shameful. The matador has done no real work at that point, so if the bull can't even manage to stay on its feet, he's totally corrupt as a performer: he's had his picadors bleed the bull so hard it is no longer an adversary but only a victim. There is no art in this.
As a side note, I think that's Mexico or Brazil rather than Spain, but that doesn't make much of a difference in the corruption of modern bullfighting. The bull is at most three years old (it's TINY!), and its horns are fake (they look sharp but they've been cut and shaved, without even bothering to blacken the ends, because nobody even bothers to look any more).
That's enough rambling, more than enough for those of you who've never read Death in the Afternoon (or The Dangerous Summer), but I think the image is a very eloquent exposition on the current state of Web 2.OMFG. Maybe it was inadvertant on uncov's part, but I'd like to hope they knew what they were saying, since it was so very clever…
Cf.
I dropped three movies in the mailbox at the same time.
The one, which I reported mislabeled as described in the referenced post, with the Swordfish sleeve and the Apocalypto content, as well as two others. Netflix has reported the other two “received” and generated “For Fri:” emails based on them. The one that was never what I asked for? It's still not received. There is literally no way it didn't get to them at the same time: the envelopes were all put in a mail slot inside the central PHL USPS building with the same addressee at the same time.
Whiskey tango foxtrot, Netflix.
(And yes, I still can't re-add the movie they never sent me and bump it to the top of my list, if I actually cared to do so, since it's still “at home”. The interface still also gets a Fail.)
Update: Okay, it showed up a day later. So stuff they have to handle manually, rather than just scanning the barcode on the returned DVD (potentially through the window on the envelope, if you're conscientious about putting the sleeve back in the right way forward) and repackaging it, takes an extra day.
I guess I'd kind of prefer they actually made sure the DVD and sleeve matched every time, but I can see how this falls under Cray's (apocryphal? The only citation I can find is me) “Divide is better Fast than Right”.
PostgreSQL's pg_dump[all] commands always output to STDOUT. Their man pages laud this as a great idea: you can do whatever you want with the output data, including piping it to something that reformats it. Good for them. That's exactly half the utility I wanted. You can't supply any sort of flag to redirect their output to a file besides a standard shell redirect.
The thing about shell redirects is that they assume zero layers of indirection in the shell. N layers of shell indirection require something like 1+(N * 2) layers of escaping (but maybe not, all the time, depending on how you escape and how you quote, and whether you use single- or double-quotes, and don't get me started on backticks… Never mind which shells eat \ escaping and which don't, and when some do and others don't). When those layers are sudo, ssh, and su postgres -c, it gets really complicated. Some of those eat escapes, some don't, some do with but not without a tty attached (which isn't really the same as “interactively”). Every single time I have to do this, I have to start blackbox testing from the ground up.
Just give me a mother-fucking -o, bitches. Please. Thank you.

Just in case the half of you that don't already know better than you'd like to admit were wondering.
Yes, I know you can't read anything. I don't actually have quite enough monitor that I can read what's in the windows when I do that, but I can choose the host I want based on the title bar.
Mark: yo so whats this?
Mark: SELECT garnish FROM recipe WHERE drink = 'manhattan';
Mark: ?
: haha
: Well, that's obviously a maraschino cherry
: On the outside edge, an orange slice.
Mark: yeah, heh. but actually its a maraschino query
groans.
: How long did you work on that one?
Mark: been saving it for a rainy day
Be glad they're into finding you better wine rather than stand-up comedy…
Update: Just when we thought we were being funny:

As some of you may have already noticed, Valleywag is my new favorite source for chuckles about the celebrity A-list side of what I suppose is “my industry”. I'd been a Ditherati subscriber for quite a while, so when Paul and now Owen moved over to the Gawker (no link necessary, I assume) monolith and started churning out way more content faster, I was obviously happy.
And they've pointed to some real gems of other regularly updated snark recently. Joe the Peacock's An unordered list of thoughts I had during a conference call with a potential client today is the single funniest thing there, but he's funny enough to get added to the RSS feed for a bit. Like:
IF YOU SAY “Drink the Kool-Aid” ONE MORE GODDAMN TIME, I'M GOING TO BURST THROUGH THE WALL AT YOUR OFFICE, KILL YOU IN A VERY UNSIGHTLY AND BLOODY WAY, AND THEN SCREAM “Oh, YEAH!”
This happened to me again (I think maybe their QC's gone down hill as their subscriber count has gone up), sending me Apocalypto instead of Swordfish, so I went through the motions to say “that's not what I asked for, you goons”.
Back then, suggested, 'I suspect that we both selected what is meant to be “right disc, wrong sleeve” instead of selecting “you sent me the wrong thing”, which includes “wrong disc, right sleeve”. Bad UI, no biscuit!'
He's right, there are two options:
- “The DVD is not what I ordered” ('s “you sent me the wrong thing”; I read this to be “wrong envelope and wrong DVD, just wrong all around”, but it's what I chose this time),
- and, “The white sleeve and DVD don't match” ('s “right disc, wrong sleeve”, which I read to apply just as much to “wrong disc, right sleeve”, which I think has got to be the far more common case, since the bar code for processing and then redistributing NF DVDs is on the sleeve, not the disc)
I didn't actually have a lot of hope in getting the “it's unplayable send me another one right now” immediate dispatch, but I went ahead and tried the first of those (I used the second before). Sure enough, doing so gets you exactly the same result:
Thank You for Reporting the Problem
- Please return the DVD and sleeve in its postage-paid mailer.
- To reorder the movie, place the correct movie back in Your Queue in the first position. We will ship you the next available copy.
No further action is required.
Which, as I stated before, is bullshit: this doesn't remove it from your queue, it's still listed as being “at home”, so you can't “place the correct movie back in Your Queue in the first position” because the interface won't let you have a movie on your queue twice (or at home and also on your queue).
Still lame! Fuck you, guys!
Scott Adams fails to live up to third-party captions. But, you know, he's actually got editors and such.