October 27, 2006

Geek

I Didn't Order That!

Currently receiving 2000+ trackback spams per minute.

Yay.

Had to reconfigure Apache, which was choking under the load. Bloody Apache 1.3. Bloody CPanel. Grrr.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:16 AM | Comments (114) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

October 24, 2006

Geek

Downloading Message 9511 Of 10537

It's good to be home.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:08 PM | Comments (118) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

October 12, 2006

Geek

And Another Thing!

When I look at a Linux server, I don't want to see hundreds of megabytes of memory free. At least, not on a busy web/database server with several gigabytes of actively used files.

All that memory should either be used by programs or for caching files. If there's 500 megabytes free, that means that 500 megabyes of memory was being used by programs that have now exited. The only thing that should be using 500 megabytes of memory is the MySQL server, and that (for obvious reasons) should not exit.

One big culprit is Movable Type. On our database, the MT comment script can use 60MB of memory; the search script used 300MB until I replaced it. A spamming run can easily fire up ten comments simultaneously (since they are not only extraordinarily inefficient in terms of memory use, but also in terms of speed). Then Fluffy kills them, and I'm left with a 600MB hole unaccounted for.

Another one is the Analog web stats package. I've just disabled it system-wide because it was using 300MB of memory to produce the stats for a single web site. (I've forgotten which one, but not one of the big ones like Ace or the Jawas.)

And then there's Apache. Leave it alone on a server with PHP and CGI and all kinds of other crap running, and you'll soon find individual Apache worker processes using 40 to 60MB each. If you have a hundred of those, that's 4 to 6GB of memory gone, which is probably more than you actually have.

Of course, if you're not running CPanel, you're probably running something reasonable like Apache 2.2 or lighttpd or, well, anything other than Apache 1.3.

Anyway, something is flushing useful data out of memory, and something is slowing down my blog, and I think it's the same something.

So until morale improves I'll be lining the suspects up against the wall and shooting them one by one.

(Minx itself is an interesting case. It's using 152MB of virtual memory for 10 threads, but only 15MB of that is resident. Why it does this I don't know, but unless I enable Psyco, the resident size never increases.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:12 PM | Comments (553) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Leech-o-Rama

What is it with these guys?

They show up, download 5GB from a website that only has 300MB worth of files, and disappear.

Sure, I now have 4TB of bandwidth to play with, but that doesn't mean I'm happy for these idiots to just burn through it like that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:29 PM | Comments (358) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

October 10, 2006

Anime

Punctuation Matters

One of the new shows for the Fall anime season is Negima!? This is not the same as Negima!, which aired in 2005.

It's a remake.

Of a show that aired last year.

Anyway. We also have season two of Sasami Mahou Shoujo Club* which doesn't quite have Pixy Misa in it. The first season of that aired this year, just to confuse you further. However, the fansubs of the first season are only just appearing now, so season two might have to wait a little while.

And we have Galaxy Angel 2, not to be confused with Galaxy Angel Z, which was the second season of Galaxy Angel.

It appears to be an entirely new cast, which is a shame. No more Mint? I'll still give it a try. Apricot Sakuraba? Milfeulle's sister maybe? Hmm.

* What's up with the stupid page that says ENTER? That's so 1997.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:17 PM | Comments (129) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

October 09, 2006

Geek

ZOMG

200GB/2TB $9.95.

I'm assuming that they're banking on a 100:1 oversell - which is probably reasonable. I wonder what they would do if I actually started using that 2TB every month...

Update: Seek and ye shall find. Dreamhost blog: The Truth About Overselling.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:55 PM | Comments (28) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

October 08, 2006

Blog

Relatively Painless

Moved everything across from the old servers to the new ones. And it all seems to be working, except for The Jawa Report, which I'll fix now.

50 gigabytes of assorted crep, dozens of applications, over a hundred databases. And, apart from MT Blacklist buggering itself, not all that much went wrong.

Funny thing was that this blog wouldn't work. I thought that a security option in PHP was tripping me up, since accessing minx.cc directly worked fine.

Then it started to work all by itself. Huh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:12 PM | Comments (1278) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Cool Computer Facts

Number 87:

Disk drives are not supposed to go "beep".

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:18 AM | Comments (77) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

October 06, 2006

Geek

Bah2

The failure stopped being intermittent.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:50 PM | Comments (748) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

October 04, 2006

Rant

Bah

Intermittent thermal-related failure of your southbridge sucks.

Mostly it looks like a drive failure, but not always. The neatest one was when the drive was working but the keyboard locked up.

So I can either move to Antarctica, or start looking for a new notebook.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:32 PM | Comments (69) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Anime

Easy Fighter!

So the DVD release of Hyperdoll has nothing in the way of extras?

That's such a shame, since the old laserdisc release* has a LIVE ACTION VERSION on the flip side.

Bwahahahahaha!

* That I happen to own.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:11 PM | Comments (30) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

October 03, 2006

Anime

Nyo Is War!

16 episodes? Oh, sure, 16 episodes in the original series.

And another 104 in the second series.

And another 48 short episodes in the third series.

And then there's the Summer Special, the Christmas Special, the OAV, the Movie...

Update: 104 episodes at twelve minutes each. The first series was actually designed as advertising, but it became a hit in its own right, leading to a veritable explosion of cute.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:54 PM | Comments (41) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

October 02, 2006

World

Compare And Contrast

The First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 29, Paragraph 3:
These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Discuss.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:49 PM | Comments (43) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

October 01, 2006

Anime

Fractured Furry Tails

Yeah, I'm supposed to be doing a server migration right now, but it's a long weekend so I have plenty of time. [Had plenty of time. Wasn't expecting it to take 20 hours to do the CPanel account transfer. The migration is now set for next weekend.] Also, I'm feeling kind of lazy, and I'm waiting for the forums to finish copying.

So.

We have the Three Musketeers, only the role of Athos appears to have been taken over Little Red Riding Hood (with tame wolf in tow).* Only now she's Akazukin the Ninja Girl, with a magic card-operated cellphone (shades of Pretty Cure, though thankfully sans irritating alien blobules) that doubles as a Garden Supa Centre and photon cannon.

And she's here to fight the forces of evil, which so far consist of Cinderella, Puss in Boots, the male half of Hansel and Gretel, and their army of hideous bio-mechanical bug-monsters.

I'm sure that the second episode will make sense of all this.

Oh, and Athos-chan is supposed to be fourteen. According the the website, all the main characters are supposed to be fourteen. She looks about six. Huh?

Update: And Porthos... Snow White appears.

And the animation director should be fired. The animation is not actually bad, but it is inconsistent. In scenes where the animators have been paying attention and the characters are on-model, they look about six... maybe eight, tops. In scenes where they are slacking, they look twelve, maybe even the supposed fourteen. And their proportions vary between scenes, and even within scenes. So they are clearly too short to easily stand at the kitchen sink and wash the dishes (without standing on one of those little steps that kids use) - but that is exactly what they do. And one moment they are little kids sitting on chairs at the cafe, with their shoulders clearly below the top of the chair back, and just seconds later their shoulders are just as clearly above the top of the chair back. And then some actual little kids show up - and some adults as well - and the whole scene just looks out of kilter.

Meh.

At least for scenes involving just the main characters (both the good guys and the bad guys), everything is skewed in the same direction (kawaii-wards).

Update: And anyway, if Souta's fourteen, how come he sleeps with a blankie?

(Fairy Musketeers Akazukin)

* Before you ask, apparently the answer is Snow White and Sleeping Beauty respectively, but they haven't appeared just yet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:15 PM | Comments (90) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 29, 2006

Geek

Meet Your Maker

This is interesting: MakeVM. It's a little shareware utility that creates virtual machines - either blank ones or clones of existing disks - for VMWare.

This is great if you're running VMWare Player (which doesn't have the ability to create new virtual machines itself), or if you're running VMWare Server and want to migrate an existing Windows server to a virtual environment.

Costs $19.95 for the full version. The free download is limited to teeny-tiny VMs, so I'll need to buy it. I have a couple of Windows servers here at work that do almost nothing but which I can't actually unplug, because they only do almost nothing. Now I can finally get rid of the buggers.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:48 AM | Comments (13) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 28, 2006

Cool

Whee!

Got my 4GB memory card. Although Canon doesn't list the Ixus 800 as supporting SDHC (which is required for SD cards larger than 2GB), Sandisk does, and I found a couple of people reporting that their cameras worked just fine with 4GB cards.

And so does mine.

Over 1400 photos at maximum resolution and image quality (well, that's JPEGs, not raws).

Now I just need to find something to take a photo of...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:04 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 27, 2006

Geek

Well, That Was Fun

Had a little excitement at work today. Apparently several blocks of Sydney's CBD went dark, including, of course, our office. Our elderly UPS valiantly struggled along for nearly a minute before expiring; the blackout itself lasted about an hour and a half.

Then I had to fix pretty much everything. Crashed databases, lost routing tables, failed NFS mounts (the systems didn't neatly reboot in the required order), unending fscks (This volume has not been checked for 562 days* so I'm now going to scan every one of your seven million files and there's nothing you can do to stop me so nyah.), broken RAID sets, misconfigured network cards...

Ugh.

Knoppix was used. It would have been even more not fun without Knoppix.

* Actual number.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:13 PM | Comments (32) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 26, 2006

Anime

Shanatan

Just finished watching Shakugan no Shana.

I do recommend it, though it is a little uneven. Jonathan Tappan has an interesting review of it, but it is rather spoiler-laden, so you might not want to read beyond the opening paragraphs (avoid even the synopsis!) until you've seen at least a couple of episodes.

And now I'm going to take a nap.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:39 PM | Comments (49) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 25, 2006

Cool

Happy Pixy Day

My copies of Macromedia Studio, Eye Candy 5000 (the complete bundle), Acid Music and Sound Forge have arrived. Vegas Video and Paint Shop Pro XI are due later this week.

And I've ordered a 4GB card for my camera, a 320GB disk for my PC, and a 16X DVD burner to replace my old CD burner - which has gotten stuck with my Neverwinter Nights CD inside.

I start working from home on Secret Project M from the 5th of October.

Oh, and while I was at it, I upgraded my ADSL plan:

You have 58628.37 MB quota, and 59601.46 MB offpeak quota remaining until shaped at 64k
Now, nothing can stand in my way. Bwahahahaha!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:01 PM | Comments (88) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Cool

In Camera

I ended up getting the Ixus 800 IS, the same model as TJ at Riuva. Based on both specs and sample photos it appears to be better than my ancient Sony S85 in every way. Despite having a smaller sensor (1/2.5" vs 1/1.8") and of course a smaller lens, the sample photos from the Ixus have more detail and less noise.

More pixels, wider zoom range, much faster, much more storage (4GB vs. 128MB, same price for the respective cards), optical image stabilisation, much smaller and lighter, bigger screen (twice the screen area on a camera half the size), one-third the price. And the Sony is not a bad camera - apart from the slow auto-focus and some shutter lag, and the limitations of Memory Stick - it does take very nice photos. It's just that five years has made it completely obsolete.

One little thing: The two cameras, bought five years apart, both came with 16MB memory cards.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:09 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 24, 2006

Anime

Shakugan no Shana

Is pretty darn good.

I think it's licensed by Geneon, but doesn't seem to have been released yet. (A search of their sucky site reveals nothing.)

One thing I particularly like is that it's paced more like the first Slayers series than, say, Bleach. Dramatic rescues take one episode, not fifty. Plot points actually get resolved.

And like Slayers, you have a flame-haired flame-eyed super-powered chibi-chan.

Fear the kawaii!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:56 PM | Comments (95) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 23, 2006

Anime

AMVs

Thanks to Wonderduck for pointing me to two great new AMVs. Both are from artists previously featured here at Ambient Irony.

First up, Stop Watching Anime and Go Outside! by Doki Doki Productions. Music is There Is Life Outside Your Apartment from Avenue Q; video from Genshiken (which I haven't seen) and other shows, some of which you are sure to recognise. (More details at Doki Doki's site.)

Second, She's Just Oblivious by the very talented Silver Moon. Music is Sharada by Skye Sweetnam; video is the best anime of 2006.

Enjoy!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:05 PM | Comments (187) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Anime

Footnote

The first two munu servers were named Mica and Mew.

(Well, technically there was one before that, but since it was the only server it was just called mu.nu or something like that. It was retroactively renamed Pooky when it came time to decommission it.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:48 PM | Comments (358) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

World

Save New Scientist!

Back in the 80s, through to the mid-90s, I bought New Scientist every single week, and read it from cover to cover.

And then... Well, let's just say that I didn't leave New Scientist, New Scientist left me.

The economic illiteracy of the editors I could cope with, more or less; it's a popular science magazine, not an economics journal.

But the growing scientific illiteracy was harder to stomach. The increasing tendency to "study the controversy" and publish articles that were complete and obvious nonsense eventually drove me away.

Now it looks like I'm not alone.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:58 AM | Comments (39) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 22, 2006

Anime

So... Anything Good?

I haven't watched any anime for a while. The last major things I saw were Haruhi Suzumiya and Renkin San-kyuu Magical? Pokaan (and I still haven't finished watching either one).

Is there anything notable in the current season, now that I have time to watch stuff again? There's the second season of Honey & Clover, but I haven't finished watching the first season of that.

So preferably something that is good, but short.

I poked around in the three squigabytes of fansubs that I've accumulated and came up with Shakugan no Shana, which looks like it will keep me occupied until I can sort out what's what in the new shows. I've always liked shows where the hero gets killed in the first episode.*

* Paging Yakumo Fujii...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:03 AM | Comments (1898) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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