Quoting Deming: A bad system ...

A bad system will beat a good person every time.

W. Edwards Deming at a February 1993 seminar.

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Mirth: recover space when mirthdb grows out of control

I was recently asked to recover a mirth instance whose embedded database had grown to fill all available space so this is just a note-to-self kind of post. Btw: the recovery, depending on db size and disk speed, is going to take long. The problem A 1.8 Mirth Connect instance was started, then forgotten (well neglected, actually). The user also forgot to setup pruning so the messages filled the embedded Derby database until it grew to fill all the available space on the disk. The SO is linux. The solution First of all: free some disk space so that the database can be started in embedded mode from the cli. You can also copy the whole mirth install to another server if you cannot free space. Depending on db size you will need a corresponding amount of space: in my case a 5GB db required around 2GB to start, process logs and then store the temp files during shrinking. Then open a shell as the user that mirth runs as (you're not running it as root, are you?) and cd in...
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Buffett on bad news

Besides Entropy , the Buffett/Munger duo is another rabbit hole I find myself going down into often in these last days of the Xmas break. I liked this quote in particular: We can handle bad news, but we don't like them late
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On Quantity

A few years ago I told my therapist that I felt conflicted about thinking about work when I was not at work. For example, while doing the dishes, being at the park with the kids, or riding the bike with them. As my therapist encouraged me to do ( what is the question? he would patiently ask when I would share a statement without a question), I then asked him: "Does that make me a bad father or husband?" What he said next, had a huge impact on how I felt about some of my actions. He asked me back: what is the one universal attribute that can make anything good or bad? I gave up after a solid 5 minutes, and then he revealed the answer to me: it's quantity. How much are you thinking about work? All the time, or every once in a while, when idling? Do you feel that it's so much that you are neglecting something or someone else more important (including myself)? It's like chocolate, he continued: one spoon is ok, the whole jar not quite. Or wine: a glass is probably fi...
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