December 15, 2006

Geek

My PC Has Moved To Hawaii Without Me

Okay, this is just weird.

Since I reinstalled my PC with Windows MCE, I've had time troubles. Windows shows the correct time. Most applications show the correct time. But some - I'd noticed this particularly with iTunes and Thunderbird - are three hours ahead. All my email has the wrong time on it, and iTunes keeps resetting my iPod to the wrong time.

I was just doing a bit of digging, and found that Cygwin and Firefox are also screwed up.

And also, it's not that it's 3 hours ahead - it's 21 hours behind.

My timezone is +1000, and currently in daylight saving time, so it's +1100.

And all these unixy-type apps think it's -1000.

Why? Well, I think it has to do with the TZ system variable being set; they're looking at that instead of the proper Windows information. But TZ just says +1000, so why would they do... what they're doing? And it's consistent across all those applications. And how do I unset TZ anyway?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:00 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

December 14, 2006

Geek

Ranma ½

Just picked up a budget server- ranma.mu.nu - for Minx testing and off-site backups. Half the price of Akane or Nabiki, half the CPU (it's an Athlon XP 3000+ vs. an Opteron 270), half the memory (1GB vs 2GB), 75% of the bandwidth, and 100% of the disk.

Yeah, budget server with a 500GB drive. Yay!

Now no-one go blowing up Texas, because that's where all the munu servers is at.

Kasumi and Ukyo will be joining the team in January or early February, and I'm looking at another budget server to be called Ryoga.*

I think I'm going to have to branch out to Maison Ikkoku and Urusei Yatsura before the end of '07.

* While all the other servers are in Texas, either Dallas or Fort Worth, Ryoga would be in Chicago.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:08 PM | Comments (46) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Bum

My uptime stat for Akane went down overnight.

The server itself didn't go down, so what most likely happened is someone did a DOS-lite and tied up all 200 Apache threads. Usually it's spammers, but sometimes it's a bad web spider.

I saw one the other day that was apparently fetching every page on one of the munu blogs in parallel. This is, of course, dead simple for the developer and speeds the indexing process up enormously; it will also take anyone stuck on Apache 1.x* effectively off-line.

Meanwhile, my soak test has delivered 1.5 million pages in 24 (CPU) hours. No signs of problems of any sort; I turned off caching to make it do more work, so it hasn't tripped over that bug.

Update: Ooh, another race condition in the SQL caching code that memcached will eliminate.

* Thank you CPanel.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:44 AM | Comments (38) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

You're Soaking In It

Running a soak test on Minx. So far, 16 hours, 1 million pages, no memory leaks or major errors.

Did find one tiny bug in the page-caching logic - if two people request the same uncached page in the same second, Minx will try to create two entries in the cache and the second one will fail. This gets logged but doesn't affect the output at all. The reason I'm going to bother fixing it is that it's bad practice to have any known errors; if there's a SQL update error in the log file it should be an abnormal condition.

Actually, what I'll do is just replace the SQL-based page caching with memcached. I didn't do that before because it's another server process I have to worry about, but it was something I was planning - memcached is designed for exactly this use.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:01 AM | Comments (52) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

December 13, 2006

World

The Law Of Unintended Consequences

See it in action:

In an extraordinary end to vote counting from the November 25 state election, the Victorian Electoral Commission yesterday awarded two seats to the DLP, which will share the balance of power with the left-wing Greens and the conservative Nationals.

The DLP — which has not won a seat in Victoria's Parliament since 1955 — received only about 2 per cent of the statewide primary vote. Yesterday's shock outcome was the result of favourable preference flows from almost every other party, including Labor and the Liberals.

In the 2004 Australian federal election, control of the Senate depended on the distribution of preferences from the Queensland Fishing Party, a turn of events that I think summed up Australian politics perfectly.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:25 PM | Comments (372) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Anime

Candybitch?

About the time my notebook died (or started dying; it was a pretty drawn-out process) I was fortunate enough to discover a new distraction for my daily commute: Podcasts.

You may have heard of them.

I started with Ace's Hoist the Black Flag, which I really enjoyed, but which has sadly slipped from weekly to monthly to, as far as I know, indefinite hiatus. Then I tried listening to Instapundit - who has some great guests, but is not a particularly interesting speaker himself - and some of the conservative radio hosts like Hugh Hewitt, but not being conservative myself I could only take those in small doses.

Then I discovered that Penn Jillette has a daily radio show - and that all the episodes since it started in January were available online. So that got me through the Time of Great Suck at work (August and September, basically, during which I pretty much disappeared from view).

And when that ran out, I found that there are even podcasts about anime. I've sampled about a dozen of them, but the two I keep coming back to are Anime Pulse and Electric Sista Hood*.

The girls at ESH like to hear from their listeners, so I stopped by their web site and told them how much I liked their show and that they had a listener in remote, exotic Australia.***

One of the things they do every week is give away candy - I think it's ESH custom M&M's - to someone drawn from the people who've left messages during the week. And this week they announced that the winner was... Well.

And yeah, I used my real name on the message.

The only thing is, what with me being in Australia and all, the M&M's would have to eat each other during the voyage to survive, and when the candy finally got to me all there'd be in the bag is one big mean-looking M&M that I wouldn't dare eat so I'd just leave it sitting in the back of my freezer for ever and ever.

So... Listen to the show. And one day you too might be a candybitch.*****

* The best** girl gaming and anime podcast.
** The fucking best -
*** Where I live is about as ordinary and suburban as you can get, and there are probably hardly any kangaroos within half a mile of my house.****
**** Possums, now possums we got. Bastardy things. Flying foxes we got. Kookaburras we go. Sulphur-crested cockatoos we got. Rainbow lorikeets, no worries. And I'm sure I could find an echidna or two if I looked. But mostly, what we got is possums.
***** Assuming that it really is me. Which confusion would have been avoided if I'd used my nom-de-blog, but that would just lead to other confusions.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:14 PM | Comments (369) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Portable Woot

Via Haibane.info, Fujitsu have announced 250GB and 300GB 2.5" drives to ship in the first quarter of the new year.

They're 4200rpm, which is a shame - you really can tell the difference between that and 5400 - but a 300GB notebook drive is still cause for celebration.

Particularly if you mainly use your notebook for (a) carrying about multiple Linux distributions running under VMWare, and (b) watching anime during your daily commute.*

Amelia-chan has 120GB, which isn't too squeezy, but 300GB would open up whole new vistas of, well, stuff.

And Toshiba are about to ship a 100GB 1.8" drive. I for one welcome our new teeny-weeny storage overlords.

* I travel by train. I don't really recommend this if you drive.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:10 PM | Comments (406) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Anime

Anime Day

You know it's coming!

I'm all set with my Sailor Mercury doll.*

* No, not a figure, a doll. It was a gift. My family is weird.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:51 PM | Comments (62) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

RSS Fixed!

It's only been broken for, what, six months? (Checks.) Four months. Now that's efficiency.

(I was just getting going on the new Minx in July/August, and then my job ate my brain, something I'm still recovering from.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:17 AM | Comments (85) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Notes

The memory leak does seem to be fixed. That's good. Running with Psyco cuts the time to load my blog from 4.31 seconds to 3.27. It's not amazing, but it's free.

And when I say "load my blog", I don't mean "load the front page of my blog", I mean load my blog. With inline comments. Which are dynamically sanitised.

Also, I've found that an Athlon XP 2800+ running Minx can dish out 25MB of HTML per second if the pages are cached. Given that the servers we'll be running on are four times the speed, and the fastest internet connections we can get are gigabit ethernet, I think that'll do.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:37 AM | Comments (1020) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

December 12, 2006

Geek

Work Work Work

I don't officially start working on Minx full-time until next Monday, but this evening I picked it up and converted it to use CherryPy 3, which is now in RC1.*

They've changed a few things. Quite a few things. And I was just starting to get seriously annoyed with them when I fixed the last difference and suddenly my code worked.

A bit more banging on various bits and I have a copy of my blog running on my home network.

Now I'm building a dev environment on my new notebook. I already have CentOS 4.4 on there (under VMWare), but when I'm developing I spend a pretty significant amount of time benchmarking code, so I need a reasonably precise timer, and running CentOS under VMWare does not give you that. At all. You can, with a little effort, set it up so that the clock doesn't run at either half or double speed, but accurate sub-second timing is not on the cards.

In testing previously I've found that Fedora is substantially better behaved in this respect, so that's what I'm installing right now.

VMWare has a helpful 25-page document explaining why the clock doesn't work when you're running Linux under VMWare, but personally I'd rather they just FIXED IT.

Well, okay, granted that I'm running a free operating system under a free virtualisation system under a rather clunky desktop operating system on cheap consumer hardware and have no right to expect the damn contraption to boot much less keep accurate time.

Nevertheless.

Update: Okay, so FC5 doesn't want to play nice either. Bah.

* Note to self: Check to see if that memory leak in Psyco has been fixed under 2.5. They did say that there had been a bug fixed relating to that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:42 PM | Comments (91) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Anime

Another Nonexistent Sequel

The second El-Hazard OVA.

As Steven notes:

El Hazard: The Magnificent World (i.e. the first OVA) had a superb ending. (Which the second OVA promptly rototilled. And the TV series, a sort of remake, changed it completely.)
The worst example of this rototilling I've seen has to be the Fushigi Yuugi OVAs, which retroactively destroy the entire point of the TV series. But El-Hazard 2: The Awakening of Kalia does its best - worst - whatever - to wreck what came before.

If, after the first OVA, you want to see more of El Hazard, go straight to the second TV series. That actually follows on from the OVA, not from the first TV series, and its actually fairly good. And the 13th episode is rather amusing.

[Goes back to installing operating systems, as he's been doing for the past two weeks. We hates operating systems. We hates them.]

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:24 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

December 11, 2006

Anime

Apparently...

Rumours of the release of a third Tenchi Muyo OVA series are false.*

* I don't care what you say. It doesn't exist.**

** And have things ever turned out well when a show was revived after a ten-year gap?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:10 PM | Comments (747) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Uptime, Downtime

We've had the occasional blippage here at munu over the past four years, most recently the Wednesday before last, when Akane decided to take a short nap for no reason that I've been able to determine.

And sometimes people report blippages that I didn't notice, or that I know weren't munu's fault because I was on the servers at the time.

So to help track such things, I've enlisted HostTracker, which checks the availability of your site from 32 locations all over the US and some other parts of the world, and presents you with a nice little button, like so:

Akane

remote web site uptime and availability monitoring tool
     Nabiki

uptime

You can see the Akane-outage there. Nabiki kept right on going, but since Akane is the primary munu DNS server, some people couldn't get to the Nabiki-hosted sites (Ace of Spades, The Jawa Report, the skeptic sites) anyway.

I've had other reports of outages, but they seem to be localised to people on particular (crappy) ISPs, and not related to the general availability of munu. We had a big problem with this vis-a-vis Insight Broadband at the old hosting company, which I eventually managed to get Insight to fix. (Shortly before we moved again...)

So, if you can't read this - if you have trouble getting to any munu sites, sometimes or all the time - leave me a comment. I'm going to be running a lot more sites next year, and having people not able to get to them is likely to prove counterproductive.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:48 PM | Comments (481) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Also Wik

I got my notebook working with my MCE wireless keyboard. Just install the MCE Rollup 2, and Robert is your mother's brother.

This doesn't seem to work with XP Home, or at least, I couldn't make it work. With XP Pro it worked first try.

Having achieved this, it was time to try out the notebook as a media center PC. At this, it gets 2/5 overall but 4/5 for me. It has neither conventional analog (S-Video, component) or digital (DVI, HDMI) outputs, but it has VGA, and so does my television.

The VGA signal quality is fine, as you'd expect, but this wasn't true of my old Compaq notebook, which had visible movement artifacts in any large white areas. I thought it was the cheap VGA cable, but it's not.

Sound output is fine - if you are running from battery! The power supply puts a lot of noise on the headphone socket, which is the only audio output. You can configure that socket to produce SPDIF, which should eliminate the problem, but my TV doesn't have SPDIF input. (I think.)

Since I can get six hours of video playback from one charge, I'm not going to worry too much.

And so, I finished watching Kamichu! over the weekend. And put up shelves. A little shelving, a little Kamichu!

Kamichu! is very very good. More on that later.

Having shelves is also very very good, particularly when you've spent 18 months without.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:30 PM | Comments (24) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Three Out Of Five Ain't Bad

I've had my new notebook for a few days now, time enough to get a good feel for it. So let's break it down into its components and see how it adds up.

Acer TravelMate 4202WLMi

Screen: Very Good (4/5)

It's big enough (15.4"), bright enough, and has no dead or stuck pixels. It has an anti-glare coating, which is great if you have to deal with glare, but does make the image slightly less sharp and the colours slightly less intense. So it depends on what you want to use it for, but it's more than adequate for programming and watching videos.

Processor: Good (3/5) to Very Good (4/5)

It's a 1.66GHz Core Duo. It's reasonably quick, though coming from a 1.4GHz Celeron M I don't notice a significant speedup. What I do notice is that when VMWare is running busily in the background, it has no effect on whatever else I'm doing. Which is exactly what I was after.

So for me, it's great; but people who aren't running large-scale web applications in a Linux virtual machine at the same time they are watching Kamichu! might be better off with the cheaper but slightly higher-clocked single-processor models.

Disk: Very Good (4/5)

120GB, 5400RPM, SATA. Works exactly as you'd expect. Nice and roomy, and reasonably fast for a notebook drive.

Battery Life: Excellent (5/5)

Okay, this was the worst feature of my old notebook, at least lately, when it would use 10% of the battery just recovering from standby (which admittedly could take a couple of minutes, another fun feature of its general brokenness). So I might be inflating the score by contrast.

But still, on my way to work today I installed the Express editions of Visual C#, C, JScript, and Web Developer, the trial versions of Flash and Dreamweaver, and VMWare Server. At the end of that, it was reporting over 5 hours left. That's not bad.

The big power drain is the screen. Run it at full brightness constantly and you'll only get 3½ hours or so. On the other hand, if you have it processing something and have the screen blanked most of the time, you'll get six hours easily.

Keyboard: Sucky (1/5)

This is the fly in the ointment, the wasp in the jam jar. The keyboard is crap. The feel is average; not great, not terrible. The layout, though, is terrible. The keyboard curves, "ergonomically", so none of the keys are quite where they should be. There is no space at all between the main part of the keyboard and the page up/down keys on the right; the inverted-T cursor keys have two useless keys attached to them [$ and €] so you can't easily use them by feel.

And due to the size of the notebook itself, the whole thing is positioned annoyingly far in, making it hard to type when I'm lying in bed. Which may not be a problem for most people, admittedly.

Bundled Utilities: Crap (0/5)

Not merely worthless, the bundled software actually detracts from the value of the machine. However, it is easily removed by installing a standard copy of Windows, something that's not exactly in short supply at Pixy Central.

Game Performance: Not tested, probably Sucky (1/5):

It's Intel Integrated Graphics, folks, and that means quality lousy gaming. I did manage to play Neverwinter Nights on my old notebook (also with the Intel 950 chipset), but when things got busy it ran like a slug.

Overall: Good (3/5)

Overall, it's a bit meh. It is a budget notebook, and it's fast and has a big disk drive, so it's not a bad meh, but it's not exciting. On the other hand, it does what I need (with the exception of that bloody keyboard), and it is a hell of a lot better than no notebook. It won't stop me buying another Acer notebook in the future, but I sure as hell won't buy it online.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:12 PM | Comments (376) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

December 06, 2006

Geek

Not Wasting Any Time

My notebook has been discontinued and the new model reduced in price by $200.

Before I even got it home.

Okay, I knew it was an older model being sold off cheap, but even so the degree of haste is a little unseemly. There's still a $300 gap, and mine still has twice the battery life of the new models, so I can deal with this particular affront.

Good: Nice screen. Big. Anti-glare. No dead pixels.

Seems fast, but I can't actually test it, for reasons that will become clear.

Bad: It has a dumb-ass keyboard. Damn. In the photos it looked identical to all the Acers I'd seen in the stores, which all had sensible keyboards. This one, though, curves. The rows of keys aren't straight. Bleah. BLEAH!

Also, it doesn't even come with a recovery CD. You get the joy of burning your own. Yays. And while it's doing this (which takes forever) it locks the keyboard and mouse.

Ugly: The disk is divided into two partitions, so I have to reformat and reinstall before doing anything else. Well, no, I have to burn a recovery disk first, two in fact, since I don't trust DVDs that much, and then I have to reformat and reinstall before doing anything else.

And it can't play the HD opening of Sumomomo Momomo any better than my old notebook. Bah.

Uglier: The restore disk that you spent all that time creating doesn't give you the option to repartition the drive. My copy of Windows XP (original) blue-screens when I try to install off that.

MCE, on the other hand, appears to be working. But there may be a problem when it comes time to activate it...

Good: Battery life. I installed Windows MCE mostly on battery, screwed it up, reinstalled it entirely on battery, and have well over three hours left. So five hours of light use is quite plausible.

Ugly: A lot of critical components - like all the networking options, for a start - are not recognised by standard Windows XP, and the recovery disk doesn't provide the drivers in any readable form.

Good: You can download all the drivers from the Acer website. On another computer. And burn them to a CD. Because they ain't getting to the notebook any other way. This lets you avoid Acer's multitude of disutilities.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:44 PM | Comments (21) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Life

Also

Where's my notebook?!

It left the warehouse hours ago!!

Update, twenty minutes later: There it is!!!

It came in a box, inside a box, inside another box. Yay boxes!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:57 PM | Comments (47) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Life

Damn

Everyone seems to have run out of Viva Piñata.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:55 PM | Comments (24) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

December 04, 2006

None

Mister Pointy

Quad Opteron.

4GB of memory.

One 250GB SATA drive.

Who specced this thing?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:55 AM | Comments (231) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

And Next -

Since I'm leaving my job of the last four years in two weeks time, I have to return the useless pain-in-the-ass broken laptop of doom, Amelia.

So it's time for a new Amelia: An Acer Travelmate 4202.

Amelia Mk 1, bought a year ago, is a Celeron M 1.4, with 256MB of memory (which I upgraded out of my own pocket) and a 40GB drive (likewise).

Amelia Mk 2, bought today, is a Core Duo 1.66 (not Core 2 Duo; I'm on a budget) with 512MB of memory (I'll add another gig) and a 120GB drive. And a DVD burner, something Mk 1 lacks.

It cost just $100 more, and I could have done better if I'd ordered from a company I'd never heard of in Brisbane or Melbourne. Somehow, no-one in Sydney is selling it cheap.

Also, it has an 8-cell battery with a claimed 5-hour life. It only lasted a little over 4 hours in the review I found, but since Amelia Mk 1 is currently doing well if it lasts 30 minutes, I'll take it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:02 AM | Comments (54) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

December 03, 2006

Geek

Stress Test

After many a reboot, I got everything off Martina, who has now been wiped and reinstalled with CentOS 4.4.

I just configured Samba and dropped 60GB of AVIs on it. I want to see if the crashes were purely a hardware problem or a hardware+driver issue. I was never able to make the box crash except by transferring huge amounts of data over the network, so it's fundamentally sound otherwise.

Which is good, because it's about to get a lot of work to do.

And speaking of stress tests, I just downloaded Picasa and said "Index this!" I did make it easier by archiving 600,000 images during the big backup, so we'll see how it goes.

Update: Martina seems to be working fine. I copied files back and forth until I got bored, without a hiccup.

Picasa, on the other hand, locked up after a couple of hours. My boss is a huge fan of Picasa, but I don't use it. I couldn't remember why, exactly, but I seemed to recall that last time I tried it, it spent a couple of hours indexing my drives before freezing solid. Google don't seem to have fixed that bit.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:38 PM | Comments (33) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

December 02, 2006

Anime

EEEEK!

ZOMG! The external drive with all my recent fansubs has stopped working! And I only got to back up Haruhi and MagiPoka!

Dude, you just knocked the power cord out.

Doh.

Useful piece of information: With the Noontec Blue-Eye cases, the power light remains on and the USB hub still works even if you knock the power cord out. So check the power cord first, then panic.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:03 PM | Comments (47) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

The Delights Of Independent Power Control

While I was ferreting about inside my PC to replace the video card, I also pulled the old failed C drive and stuck it in one of my external drive cases.

As I thought, it's pretty much gone to the big rust farm in the sky. It comes up fine, but if you try to do anything serious with it like actually reading the data, it's not long before it stops responding and Windows freezes up.

But now, now I just reach over and turn it off, and Windows is like, oh, your USB device has gone away, and everything comes back to life.

So now I can recover critical information like my AMV.org password...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:20 AM | Comments (23) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Scrambled, Not Fried

So I took out the 6600GT, blew off the dust and a couple of unfortunate moths, cleaned the AGP connector* and re-installed it.

It works.

Which means no 7600GT for Pixy, but also means that I can wait for this nice X1950Pro card to reach Australia.

And that's if a game comes out that I actually want to play. Well, I'll probably get Neverwinter Nights 2 eventually, even if it's widely agreed that it sucks. It can't be as bad as Temple of Elemental Evil, and I bought that. Never played more than half an hour of it, but I bought it.

* On my shirt.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:34 AM | Comments (28) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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