Sterling Phoenix

Yes.



It's a roller-blading, accordion-playing gorilla. Wearing a wrist-watch.

I just looove Working Moth magazine. I should just subscribe.

There's a raccoon outside my window.

Yes, I hate myself for the title.

OK, I went back to the park with a camera and the wrong lens and got pics of all the messages I could find. And here they are! Behind a cut because there's a lot of them, and some may contain what some people consider profanity. I also pixelated out some names.

( Clicky )

Alright, I took this picture at the park where I walk the dog on weekends. This was written on the wooden railing of a wooden bridge. Sorry about the bird-crap:



I first noticed this yesterday, since we cross the bridge every time we walk there. Usually twice.

Now to me this is a cross between sad and sweet. And it raises a lot of questions: who is Keith? What did his wife do? Did Keith see the message, and if so what did he do about it?

Anyway, I thought it was sad/sweet. Then, today, I noticed THIS on a picnic table:



...

To the parents of that kid with cancer who would rather their own kid die than get treatment:

I just bet you guys are pro-life.

One tank of gas. Actually not even one, it's not empty yet.

(That's 5.7 liters/100km for my metric friends)

I've wanted to get golden finches at my bird feeders for ages, and yesterday one of them finally showed up!




Then it flew away.

Mmmmm

For year, I've been telling people that



Now people are finally starting to listen.

And hopefully buy a bumper sticker.

...?

(Alternate title: And You Thought Your Job Sucks)

Warning: this post contains an EXTREMELY HIGH NERD CONTENT. I'm posting it because I just have to tell SOMEone and I don't have any friends that are nerdy enough¹. I've tried telling some people but I get a very high BSF² rate. Also it's a long post.

---

I have a lot of computers³.

They're not (entirely) frivolous; they all have specific functions.

As of last week, I had a nice beefy desktop, a cute lil laptop, a media center, a small firewall/email/external DNS machine, a small webserver, and an old internal-server (it does internal DNS, proxy, DHCP and probably a couple other things).

The old internal server is what started the whole thing. It's really old⁴. I'm all for repurposing old machines, but you have to draw the line somewhere. To me, one of these lines is when the power supply starts making really horrible noises and occasionally you have to hit it to get the fan going. Which is what this machine has been doing for a while now.

Which I used as an excuse to build myself a new desktop. The previous one was three years old, and since this is my main work machine it kinda needs to be up there. I figured I'll use my old desktop to rebuild the Internal Server.

That was a month or two ago. My old desktop was just sitting there for a while, and last week I decided to get started on the new server. The only things I cannibalised out of my old desktop were the harddrives and the video card, both of which I had spares of. So I put a new video card in the machine and immediately burned it⁵.

Totally my fault - I figured since I'm only going to be in text-mode and I'm not even plugging in the PCI-E power⁶ it wouldn't overheat. Ooops. So I ordered a $25 videocard online cause, no rush.

Then the harddrive on my webserver started failing.

The problem with that is that it was an IDE drive, and I don't really have any of those lying around (well, I do, but they're even older than that one). I had a bunch of spare SATA drives but that machine is old enough that the motherboard doesn't support SATA.

So I figured I could either spend $50 on a 'new' drive, or spend $100 on a new motherboard and CPU, since I have a case and newish RAM. It won't be a super powerful beefy machine but it's just a personal webserver.

Course I ended up getting a new case anyway, and some RAM just in case⁷, but hey. Then I copied the OS and data⁸ to a SATA drive and hey, new webserver.

By then my new video card arrived so I started building that internal server again, and then I got to thinking (I know, I know).

I figured my old desktop is WAY the heck overpowered for what this server will be doing. The machine I just made a webserver out of would be perfect for that. And sure, my old desktop would be overpowered for a webserver, too, most of the time. The thing is, I have my gallery on that server, which means it occasionally has to do a lot of image processing (every picture has the original size, and then a small, medium and large version). My mom has her own version of my gallery on that server and she's always complaining that the image processing takes too long and her browser keeps timing out⁹.

So I moved the harddrive into my old desktop. That pretty much worked well enough.

But of course I couldn't leave well enough alone.

Like I mentioned before, the old webserver wasn't exactly new¹⁰. I mean, it predates SATA. It also predates 64-bit and multicore CPUs¹¹. So basically the operating system was not able to take full advantage of the hardware's computing power.

Luckily, I had a nice empty server with a virtually identical harddrive I could build the operating system on from scratch.

OK, if you're a nerd, this is the cool part of the story¹².

The old server OS was some old 32-bit debian. For the new one, I obviously wanted a 64-bit OS, but for some reason I decided to go with Ubuntu.

I've been TRYING to get Ubuntu going for ages. I like debian a lot but I'm a bit tired of how long it takes new versions of programs to get on it sometimes. I tried Ubuntu on my media server a long time ago (heh, I remember it didn't support SATA very well), heck, I even tried it on my new desktop, and there were always tiny little annoying things about it that eventually make me go AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH! and just go back to old-familiar debian.

This time I was determined to get the damn thing working.

Long story short¹³ - Ubuntu SERVER has a weird proxy issue. When you use a proxy during installation it somehow messes up the repositories and won't download new package information, so you can't install, well, just about anything. Ubuntu Desktop doesn't do this, by the way. Took a bunch of fiddling and forum-searching etc to figure THAT out.

Anyway, once THAT was fixed I had to get all the fun software back on, and since I didn't install the same OS I had to kinda poke and guess and get a bunch of Close Enoughs.

And then I had to transfer a bunch of MySQL databases over. I would like to point out for the record that I did this in an entirely WRONG way which is completely unrecommended and in fact warned against as unreliable. But it worked! So they can all shut up.

THEN I had to get it all so my mom can still use it. That involved a couple of hours of skype.



So anyway, that's my story. I rebuilt my webserver several times in a couple of days, and did the whole OS Overhaul in under 24 hours¹⁴.

Might not seem like a whole lot of fun, but on a Nerdy level it's kinda fun to pull that off and have it actually work that smoothly.


And back in the REAL world, it looks like the dog, who has been sitting on the sofa with me for the past hour, has noticed that I'm about to go to bed, so she just ran off so she can steal my spot before I get there.




My compliments and thanks to anyone who actually read this¹⁵. LATER!

---

¹ I know, I'm surprised too. I guess that's one advantage of working in an actual office.
² Blank Stare Factor.
³ Duhhhhh.
⁴ Ok, computer-old.
⁵ Seriously, smoke and everything.
⁶ And by the way, what's with video cards needing their own special power cable now? When 3DFX tried that in the mid-90s we all LAUGHED at them!
⁷ RAM was $10 for 1 gig. So I got two.
⁸ One of the nice things about UNIX is you can just copy the OS over file-by-file and it'll pretty much just work. I'm simplifying a bit but do I really need to get into partitioning and installing the boot-loader?
⁹ She doesn't actually say "timing out", she says it "disconnects" before it's done. I pointed out that it still works but she didn't really listen.
¹⁰ That sounds a bit redundant.
¹¹ Well, in the consumer/home PC market, anyway.
¹² YES I DID NEED THAT MUCH BACKGROUND.
¹³ Ok, this portion of the story.
¹⁴ Not counting the whole Mom stuff, she's in a different timezone so that's not fair.
¹⁵ And no that's not just me trying to get "Hey I read it!" comments.

At least you can tell it's an eagle this time.

My paw is SO TASTY.


If Lynx was in a band, this would be their album cover. It would make the rest of the band feel left out, but it'd SELL.


Gigi gets jealous when I have the camera out and it's not pointed at HER, so I had to include her.


And then I had to include Duncan, too.