Category Archives: Random Thoughts

Geek, Random Thoughts, Site

Decisions

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I’ve been debating what I should do with my hosting setup.  I had the thought earlier today that I could accomplish all I currently do with a single Virtual Private Server from one of a large number of providers, for less money than I currently pay.  But there is the distinct lack of geek factor in doing that.  I’d much prefer to be the guy hosting the VPS instances and renting them out. The utility of the half rack of stuff I have is only half the reason I do it.  I like playing with the hardware.  I like having my own servers that run on my own terms.

The month to month costs for space and bandwidth aren’t bad, I could certainly have much more expensive hobbies. It’s the extra incidentals that have been killing me lately though.  Dead hard drives every now and then in addition to the occasional upgrade has been taking its toll.  I don’t know whether it makes more sense to just rent a VPS and mothball what I’ve got or find a couple of people willing to pay for hosting or their own VPS to subsidise leasing a couple of new servers.  Hell, if I could find a couple of people willing to chip in I could probably keep running with my current hardware.  I’m not really looking to make buckets of cash on all this.  I’d like to approach breaking even at some point, though.

Something to ponder, I guess.

Geek, Hardware, Linux, Random Thoughts, Site

A bit of housecleaning

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I’ve made a couple changes to the site after I upgraded to the new release of WordPress. The drag and drop arranging of the sidebar widgets is pretty neat and I was able to add in the last.fm dealy pretty painlessly. Just created a new text box and pasted in the embed code from last.fm.

I’ve cleaned up at home a bit. Got a pipe rack in off ebay so I re-arranged the shelves here to fit that in. Pictures here.

I’ve had another hard drive failure downtown. It’s one of the recently replaced units too. Luckily I got it through our supplier at work so it’ll be painless to get a new unit in. I’m really debating getting a SATA 4in3 hotswap cage for that machine. I’ll think about it this weekend. If I do get it now, I can get them to order it in and I can install it when I swap the drive sometime this week.

It also looks like I’m preparing to revamp the entirety of my setup downtown. Time to move on from VHCS to the new fork. ISPCP Omega. I’ve installed a fresh copy of etch in VMware at home that I’m going to test it on. As soon as RC3 comes out with the migration script, I’ll be moving node1 over. Once that’s settled down, I think I’m going to move email hosting for my friends domains to be managed by VHCS instead of ISPMAN as it currently is. Once that’s done, I’ll be able to make a decision as to what I should do about my own email. I suppose I could even do it under VHCS too.

VOIP stuff has stalled for now. I had trixbox working under VMWare for a while, and I got it to tftp stuff to the CP7960 without issue, but there were latency issues and the voice prompts were getting garbled. Though I have to wonder how necessary it will be to run asterisk at home.

More later… back to work.

Random Thoughts

Economics 101

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“We teach there are no absolutes, no right or wrong. And I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including by abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children.”
Now, I’m no economics major, but from what I remember, limited resources derive their market value from a number of factors, including how many of them are on the market. So if there are fewer children (via abortion) wouldn’t that raise the inherent value of the remaining children, instead of diminishing it?

I’m a bad man.

PostScript: Considering the consumerist nature of our society, and the resulting binge-buying that goes on during product shortages, this could be also applied to the original topic of the linked article. School Shootings. Such unexpected disruptions in the availability of CommoditizedChildren (CC) send the value of CC much higher not only due to quantifiable drop in availability, but also because of the sudden increase in demand as people are reminded about how much their supposed to like their CC. Because of this deeply ingrained reaction to product shortages, much like the Tickle Me Elmo, soon we won’t be able to buy CC at any price, because people will horde them and backorders will pile up.

Geek, Life, Random Thoughts, Work

Recap

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It’s been a while since I’ve written anything of any substance so I thought it might be prudent for me to post a bit of a recap of the last little while.

I took my brother and his gf to get Lego Star Wars 2 at EB games Wednesday night. They did the right thing and bought a legit copy. I picked up a cheap copy of the incredibles game (though the original, not the second one which was a two player that I thought I was getting and carla wanted to play…) A few minutes after we get home pete comes down saying he can’t get it installed.

After a few minutes of yelling at it, I start googling for the error and we realise that a large number of people are having issues with this release. It’s a know problem that Lucas Arts hasn’t released a patch for. Luckily, there is a fix for this, and we can thank the pirates for it. They fixed this a little while ago, and basically we copied all the files off the cd, replaced one of the files, burned that off and installed from our new master. Works like a charm.

Go Lucas Arts, you cocknobs.

Went to Edson yesterday for a pitiful amount of work. Though I did get to listen to a number of great interviews from IT Conversations. There were to guys I listened to that had incredible passion for what they were talking about (Asterisk and Identity on the Web), and while listening to them I was thinking to myself, I remember when I used to sound like that. Fast forward a number of hours and I’m on campus waiting for Carla to finish up so I head up to RATT and meet up with some LSD folks. Lo and behold, I find myself preaching for damn near an hour on the history of the open source movement. That made me rather happy as it’s been a long time since I’ve gotten to rattle of the tale of serendipity that is the coming together of the GNU project and the Linux kernel.

When I get a change to sit down again, I think it might be time to impart on the world my thoughts on the shooting in Montreal.  I’m going to warn you all now, there’s going to be a lot of seething anger, and I’m going to bring up a lot of shit about Columbine that most people have forgotten.  And I’m going to become part of what I hate. I’m going to take what should be a time for mourning and turn it into “current event focused prosumer generated content in the blogosphere”.  I think I’m going to go puke.