Category: Geekery

Colocation

I’ve decided to go for it.

I’m currently paying about $30 a month for a Virtual Private Server at linode.com. For that $30 a month I get the equivalent of 150Mb of RAM, 4Gb of disk, and a static IP that isn’t on any black lists. I’m guaranteed at least the equivalent of a 150MHz, but up to the maximum of the actual CPU on the machine, which is dual 3.2GHz Xeons.

The applications I run on there, particularly the Waypoint Database Generator, are severely limited by the memory limitations. I don’t come close to using all the bandwidth, and I’m not usually CPU bound. But as soon as that generator starts the memory swapping, it would use up all my io_tokens, and then the application would get i/o bound. The situation was totally untenable until somebody on linode started running a MySQL server and allowed me to use it. But I don’t like relying on this service that might go away at any time.

I’ve discovered that for about a hundred dollars a month, I can put a 1U server on a local colocation service. By going the colocation route, I can put in as much memory and disk space as I want. I still get the other advantages of the linode, such as a static IP and better bandwidth to the rest of the internet. The extra disk and memory means that I can run my own database server without getting swap and i/o bound. It also means I can move some of the disk hungry stuff like my Gallery server and this blog to it.

Yeah, it’s more expensive, but what I’m planning to do is set up the system with Xen. Then I can divide the box up into multiple virtual machines and sell shares. I’m hoping I can sell one share to start, and maybe another later on.

I’ve been perusing eBay, and it appears that $300 or so should get me a machine with 2x1GHz processors, 1Gb of RAM, and no hard drive. Another $125 or so for a 250Gb drive for the machine and another 250Gb drive to keep at home as a spare. Since the colocation site is here in town, I don’t need the ultra-reliability of the latest servers, RAID arrays, redundant power supplies, etc.

Ok, so I have to buy this machine, build it, and start setting up Xen. Then get my applications working on it. I’m also going to move this blog to “blog.xcski.com” and the gallery to “gallery.xcski.com” to facilitate moving them to the colo.

Maybe this will make Gravatars suck less

This morning, gravatar.com is throwing a wobbly, which it does with depressing regularity. When that happens, the front page of my blog loads fine, but anytime you click on an entry with comments it takes forever. I was wondering if there was a better solution, and a quick google reveals the presense of a “Gravatar2” plugin.

This one caches gravatars for all the people who’ve commented on your blog, and instead of going off to consult gravatar.com when a user views a post, it does it out of a cron job that runs in the background. This means the users don’t get slow page loads when gravatar.com is responding slowly. I guess I’ll have to wait and see if it actually loads and displays them properly when that site is responding again

If MMORPG gamers acted the way in real life that they do in-game

I guess I’m going to have to marry my girlfriend. Sure, I don’t know anything about her, but I’ve completed all the girlfriend quests and I need to level up.

I keep encountering players who just run from quest to quest, ignoring any of the detail along the way. It’s like the game is something to be gotten through as quickly as possible. I tried to praise the art and mood of the game on the forums, and got jumped all over by people complaining about the frame rate or how low resolution the beta graphics are, and how so many of the animations suck. It’s as if all the art and beauty that the designers slaved over is inconsequential because it doesn’t help them level up.

They’ve finally done it!

I’ve always said that no user interface could possibly be worse than that of Lotus Notes. Well, our company recently announced that you could access your Notes through a web interface on the intranet. Hooray, I thought, I could get rid of Cross Over Office and the bletchery of running a Windows emulator on my Linux computer.

Then I tried it.

First problem – every 5 or 10 minutes, it pops up a window to tell me that my session has expired, which requires me to click on it, then enter the first character of my user id in the pop-up authentication window, then tab to accept the Firefox fill-in of the user id and password, and click again on the login button. Then retry whatever I was doing. Ugh.

Second problem – every time I accept a meeting invitation, it disappears into the ether, and I get some warning about it being outside my available time. So I looked, and evidently I’m only available from 10pm to 3:30am. I tried to change that to something more sane, and my meetings didn’t come back. I guess they’re gone for good.

Third problem – after leaving the application running for three straight days, I start getting a Firefox popup saying that the script is unresponsive and do I want to end it. If I say “Continue” the operation I’m doing will complete, but I’ll get the same popup a few minutes later. If I say “End script”, the operation I’m doing won’t complete, and I’ll get the same damn popup when I *do* want to do the operation. Shift-reload won’t fix the problem. Even closing the tab the Notes client is running on and re-opening it won’t fix the problem. I suspect I’m going to have to exit Firefox, and that’s just ridiculous.

So I’m back to running Notes under CrossOver Office. Sigh.

The more I use Windows, the more I like Mac OS X

Last night I got home at 9:30, and decided to blow off steam by playing a bit of the MMORPG that must not be named.

While I was playing, the graphic screen went away and was replaced by the Windows desktop with a popup on it saying that updates have been installed and I need to reboot. I clicked the “reboot later” button and went back to the game. I figured that would be the end of it, but about 4 more times in the course of playing the game, it did the same damn thing. This would be an annoyance in a single player game, but when you’re playing with other people it’s infuriating to you and everybody else around you.

Why isn’t there a “REBOOT LATER, I REALLY MEAN IT AND STOP ASKING ME FOR FUCKS SAKE!” button?

Meanwhile my Powerbook was sitting there, needing to reboot after installing the new version of iTunes and Quicktime, and all it was doing to annoy me was the Software Update program icon was hopping up and down in the dock. I’ve never seen it change the video mode or do anything more obtrusive than that, even when I was playing DVDs.