Iuliana Cosmina

Every time AWS disappoints me I realise how much this blog means to me. This blog started in 2006 as a joke. I was finishing the faculty and me and my partner at the tim, Rpx,w ere kinda sick of the university forum anyway, so we started this blog. He had the knowledge, together we had the resources and I had the passion for writing. He used to write as well in the past, but then he got hired at M$ and he was a little restricted regarding what he was allowed to write and how. So he gave it up. When this blog has started it was hosted on a server under our desks and the domain was rpx.kicks-ass.net.  It was moved to an Azure machine when he started his job at M$ and when he quit that job, I moved the blog to an AWS machine and gave it a new name because he hadn’t written for a long time also, so it wasn’t his anymore.

Our relationship ended, but we remained what we always were, best friends and even if a new study suggests that people who remain friends with their exes are psychopaths, well… at least now it is confirmed for us, after so many years of suspicions for the people knowing us both. :)  This blog has been our project for a long time, and although I am the only one providing content, he continues to help maintain it from time to time and contributing with AWS and moral support for me when AWS drives me nuts.

It’s been a long time since this blog was down for so long. The last time this happened was because of a hacking attempt, that got me into a paranoid mode and I basically messed up the AWS machine configurations and Apache rights trying to secure the blog. I secured it alright. :))  This time… it probably was something similar. A Chinese hacker or a hacker behind a Chinese proxy was doing a lot of requests trying to find a backdoor and turned my Apache server into a memory hungry monster. There is no excuse for me using Apache with the default settings though.

When I noticed that my blog kept dying, first I restarted the AWS instance a few times, then I configured Apache properly. But last night I found myself unable to access the blog. The Apache server was up, the database was up, but in the browser, I was unable to see anything. Nothing. Nada. Niente. Nichts! So I panicked. I did a curl while being logged on the machine through ssh and got a lot of HTML content. So the blog was up, but inaccessible to the real world. Why? I had no idea. But I had a suspicion. AWS has something called Security Groups  that can be used to define rules regarding who has access where. Also, the instance hosting my blog is managed by something called a Load Balancer, that sane people with a lot of traffic on their blogs, use it to balance the load of requests between to identical instances. But not having that many readers and only one instance, I just use it to secure the blog and make sure it can only be accessed via HTTPS. And this balancer is managed by a Virtual Private Cloud and that has its own rules as well. Anyway, long story short, following Amazon tutorials and advice on their forum, I’ve played with them and locked my self out of the instance via SSH as well. And that is when the real panic started. Yesterday I went to bed at 3 am, after trying to find a solution.
Continue reading “Back in action”

Humans are not infallible creatures. Actually, there is no creature immune to fuckups. This is what makes this world so beautiful and colorful. Trying to live a life without making mistakes is sisyphic. Believing you never made a mistake and you will never make one is moronic. I grew up terrified of making mistakes. Of course, the mistake concept was pretty malformed in my family as well, as a mistake was whatever event caused by me or my sister that my parents disapproved of. And their disapproval was manifested by more or fewer light-beatings, repeated beratings about it, eventually in public – because everybody knows, the more people hear about the fuck-up and agree it was a fuck-up, the more chances you will understand your mistake and the more the chances you will never do it again, right? If this is what you think, then please don’t have kids, because you will be a terrible parent. I don’t know for sure when I heard this expression but here it goes: “only he who does nothing, makes no mistakes”. Unfortunately for me, I heard it quite late, and until then I still had the inherited attitude of my parents regarding mistakes and people who made them. After hearing that expression I rummaged over it on and on. Sure, we all make mistakes, but mistakes have consequences. How can you forgive a mistake and the consequences are unforgivable? Well, you don’t have to. You just have to accept this is the way life is and move on. Being a grounded person means accepting that mistakes happen and being strong enough to accept the consequences as well. Mistakes are unavoidable. Accepting them and showing yourself available to help correct them and eliminate the effect of the consequences is the most healthy attitude. Nobody wants to make mistakes. So when pointing out a mistake to somebody, be kind and be graceful. This is probably the only way you will make it easy for them to admit to the mistake and correct it. I’ve written this post because I’ve written and errata for any of my books. Some of them have gotten pretty long. I sometimes had moments when I’ve felt ashamed and considered that maybe I shouldn’t write books anymore. But if I wouldn’t write them, there would be nothing for other people to read and learn from, and apparently, there is enough correct information in them that they can identify my mistakes. And from time to time, I even receive an email like the one below that makes my day. So I will continue to write books, and I will continue to make mistakes and I will write erratas even if I’m not paid to do it. Because at least I’m doing something. I am no longer afraid of making mistakes and I accept the consequences.

When I was in college I had a teacher; she was ancient. She was teaching databases and she was probably there when they were invented because her knowledge of data relationships and normalization was extensive. My colleagues used to criticize her for her childish voice, for how she dressed, for how she taught. The poor woman could do nothing right apparently, just because she never married, she was a spinster. It’s so strange how people assume behavior from basically … nothing.

I also had another teacher that never married, a man. Men spinsters that manage to be functional adults are automatically labeled as drunken geniuses, that dedicated their lives to their passions and that is why their personal lives never happened. But old women that never married, they are obviously crazy-sour man-hater good for nothing bitches.

Ha ha, see what I did there? I just underlined a sexist double standard.

Clearly, the two cases are limited to the Romanian culture. Not sure what preconceptions other cultures have about spinsters. Another thing that is common in Romania is to mostly isolate people that skip the marriage step.  Spinsters are viewed as misfits and sometimes a danger to existing marriages. Because in our culture it is considered “not normal” to be single and obviously if you tell people you’ve chosen and accepted solitude, you must be actually lying and the only reason you try to stay close to people that are married is so you can steal somebody’s husband or wife. Isolating and casting out people that end up alone is a social phenomenon.  I’m not even sure if the root of how we view single people has a religious or a political reason. Because church and political regimes have at least one thing in common: they love the traditional family, the one made by one man and one woman, the fundamental cell of any society, that leads to the creation of new people, believers for the church and taxpayers for the state.  This is quite a big discussion, but the core idea is that being single after a certain age is bad and everything while growing up, teaches you that the worst thing to be as an adult is … alone.

Seriously, my parents biggest fear was that I and my sister will never marry because we were ugly and poor and we would become a burden for them. Since I was a child I remember my mother teaching me how to do everything around the house, because those were the skills a good wife had to have. And their fear transmitted to me too, because I am a little abashed looking back at my romantic history, because I am pretty sure, most of my decisions in my relationships were caused by that fear. And no, they were not good decisions.

Anyway, more than four years ago, a series of unfortunate events and bad decisions (not all mine) left me for the first time in my life in the state of being single after a really bad and brusque breakup. I’ve had moments when I blamed myself, I’ve had moments when I blamed him. When you are in pain, blame is like a ball in an out of control pinball machine. No matter where you throw the damn ball it will always hit something until it finds the path out. Truth is we were not compatible, not unless both being extraordinarily stubborn counts.  We would have hurt each other way worse if it hadn’t ended when it did and I am forever grateful to the lover after me.

And this is how my long walk on the lonely road began.

Honestly, I’ve never expected for me to be single for so long. But then again, I’ve never really tried that hard not to be. I’ve written books, I’ve traveled and I’ve filled all my free time with things I’ve wanted to do for so long, that there was not much time left to … date. But that’s not important right now.

What I want to tell you is that the lady teacher that I previously mentioned, was always nice to me. She had this childlike voice and never avoided answering a question, even if the answer was “I don’t know”. She had never been anything else than sweet and kind. By comparison, the male teacher was quite bitter and cynical. So, really, if I end up like her it’s not a bad thing.

The loner life fits me for the moment. It has fit me for the last four years.  I’ve embraced solitude as a normality and I don’t really care if me being single hurts the church or the economy. I did not choose this, but I’ll be damned if I let it make me bitter, sour or cynical.

Some people have to walk alone. And that is something to admire not chastise and ridicule.