Category Archives: Geek

Geek, Health, Life, Site, Work

Nope, Not Dead

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Just stupid busy.

I’ve been fighting with server bitchyness the last week or so now.  Apoc seems to have a memory issue somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find it yet.  I’m not sure if it’s hardware or an issue with the new Xen kernel I’m running from etch.  Eventually I will get this resolved. I still need to move the jabber server off the VM server and onto the new seraph.  Need to get another disk in seraph and mirror them too. So much stuff to do.

I spent yesterday layed out in bed with a fucked up back.  It still hurts this morning but I’m hoping I’ll survive the day.  I guess maybe it’s time that I actually see somebody about that.

2005 Golf TDI, Life, Streaming

On Parking Douchebaggery

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Apparently I can’t frame a shot with my phone to save my life, but at least I’ve got something. Had a douchebag crawl up Gia’s ass just off whyte ave last night. Brad had opted to not park behind me as he would have been past the sign; too close to the intersection and thusly, illegal. Didn’t stop this cunt-rag from parking 10 inches off my bumper. Only upside was I got to use one of the tickets I printed off of youparklikeanasshole. What did we learn from this? 1) Bring the good camera more often 2) It’s a good thing dave doesn’t own a big, metal vehicle 3) It’s time to make up some custom tickets to leave on windsheilds 4) People is bitches, and bitches must die. (Thankyou, ninjastan)

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Geek, Random Thoughts

Breaking up is hard to do

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Dear Digg,

We’ve had some good times.  You’ve given me a bunch of funny links and nifty pictures for backgrounds.  But frankly, I keep reading the comments. They’re making me dumber.  Until I can browse at +5 insightful, I think we need to take a break.

It’s not me, it’s you.  The real WTF is the comment system.

Just Another Dave

Geek, Hardware, Linux

The hotswap cage is here!

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I picked up the 5-in-3 Sata cage this morning at the suppliers, along with a 40pin to 44pin IDE adapter. The adapter is for a data recovery attempt on a laptop drive.

I’m going to test a few things with the sata cage tonight, hopefully. Preliminary tests last night hot-pluging a sata drive on a linux box at home on a promise controller didn’t look to promising though. Nothing showed up in the system logs, nothing seemed to recognize the new drive until a reboot. So even if the linux driver for the promise tx4 I have doesn’t support hot plug, having the cage will make swapping drives when they die much faster than the current process of pulling the 4U out of the rack, half-way disassembling it all, replacing the drive, and putting everything back.

It looks pretty too!

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.

Geek

Why do we have tech writers still complaining about this?

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I don’t get it. This isn’t exactly new.

We have SI prefixes for things. SI is Metric. Metric is Base10. SI has always been Base10. Just because some engineers some years ago decided to ignore the fact that SI is Base10, we now have people constantly whining about how their Terabyte drives aren’t really a Terabyte. For all real definitions of the word, they are exactly a TeraByte. If you want somebody to yell at, yell at the manufacturer for selling you something with a weird label, but don’t accuse them of selling you something with an incorrect label.

We have a proper prefix for Base2 number systems. It’s called, appropriately enough, a Binary Prefix. It stands for exactly what these people think SI Prefixes should mean. Just because somewhere along the way you let somebody convince you it was a good idea to use Base10 prefixes for a Base2 system, doesn’t mean it’s right. It’s wrong. It was wrong 25 years ago, and it’s wrong today.