Kenplaysviola

I have an old film reel of some documentary by IBM titled, “Making Electrons Count”. It was left by a former co-worker who retired. He had received it from a friend. Not sure what I can do with this, but it would be really cool to get this onto digital format.

I recently upgraded my Dell Precision 690 at work from 2GB of memory to 8GB of memory. After installing the memory, my Red Hat 5 would not boot up the X server and present me with the typical login screen. I noticed that my mouse cursor was moving against a solid black background, and it was moving very slow and choppy. I was able to SSH into the machine from another machine and noticed that the xorg was running about 90% CPU! Doing an strace on the processor ID, I found that there was a SIGALRM loop! It turns out it is exactly this
Red Hat Bug.

There isn’t an official fix for this problem, but what worked for me was to download the most recent ATI drivers and install it. With the new ATI video drivers, all was well again. I figure that the same solution would be true for Nvidia users. I’m not sure why upgrading my system memory from 2GB to 8GB would affect the video performance, but somehow it did.

Drupal provides a nice framework to building a website. People always mention that “there’s a module for that!” when you need to implement some kind of feature for your website. For example, a photo gallery or forum. This is nice and dandy, but the problem becomes that a lot of these modules lack customization and options. They are designed by the module designer in mind and NOT for you, specifically. I constantly end up finding myself saying, “That’s almost what I want, but I would like to add this and this in this module.” Good luck! Hacking the custom module and figuring out how everything is put together takes more time than to simply just write my own PHP code to get the functionality that I want. Drupal also isn’t very smart about creating its own custom VIEWS (SQL queries). It’s a give and take situation, but so far Drupal has been a crappy experience. I find myself banging my head and thinking, “I should have just written this in PHP myself and ditch Drupal!”

Out of the box, Mozilla blew it with Thunderbird 3. Here are the new changes which really suck and how to sort of fix them:

1) “Better” search. Do you really want to sit and wait for Mozilla to index all of your emails? The search is damn slow and opens up a new tab and is hard to sort. No thank you. To get the same quick search results as in Mozilla Thunderbird 2, I changed the search bar options in the upper right hand corner to do SUBJECT, TO, OR CC FILTER.

2) Indexing. The indexing just slow! Even when you go to Tools->Options->Advanced and uncheck the Global Search and Indexer, it’s still doing something in the background. I see that Thunderbird still wants to download my 200,000+ emails in the “All Mail” box. WHY!??!?

3) global-messages-db.sqlite. This file can get INFINITELY big as it is used for the indexing and searching, I believe. It is located in your Thunderbird profile folder. For Windows Vista/7 users, it should be under the folder C:\users\YourUserName\AppData\Thunderbird\Profiles\SomeUniqueRandomCharacters. As an individual user, you might not care about this file growing insanely large, but in an enterprise level these files will consume so much disk space. Mine was reaching over 200MB+ and growing. I just have to shut Thunderbird down and delete it. Disabling the Global Search and Indexer will stop this file from growing big after you shut down Thunderbird 3 and restart it, however, this is a PER USER option. Any other users logging in the same machine will have to do this themselves. What a pain!

4) So you’ve turned off the indexing and search, but your IMAP accounts are still going berzerk and downloading mail. What’s going on? Go to TOOLS -> ACCOUNT SETTINGS. Expand your mail account(s) and go to SYNCHRONIZATION AND STORAGE. You need to tell Thunderbird 3 to download messages from your IMAP server from the past X days. By default, it’s set to download all your IMAP emails locally to your computer. HORRIBLE IDEA! I changed mine to just 1 day(s). I don’t need my emails from 2001 locally on my computer. If I did, I would have chosen POP instead of IMAP!

In conclusion, once I realized the problems with Thunderbird 3, Thunderbird 3 became bearable to use. It’s just very annoying!!! I wish there were more mail clients around. I also don’t like Outlook, so what mail clients are left to use?

I had been a slicehost.com customer for over 1-year. I was paying the $40 plan for 20GB of disk space, 200GB transfer, and 512MB of RAM. I recently switched to linode.com after investigating other Virtual Private Servers. For the same amount ($40), I am getting 32GB of disk space, 400GB transfer, and 720MB of RAM. Also, I get to choose an x86 or x64 of my OS choice!

Slicehost uses an AMD Opteron (4 processors) on their servers. Linode uses Intel Xeon 5520’s @ 2.27GHz (4 processors). I don’t have any objective benchmarks, but I am finding that my performance is much better on the Linode server. I host a Left4Dead game server on it and it runs well with up to 8-players. Perhaps it’s because I get more memory, or that the CPU is better, or that I am running a 32-bit OS instead of 64-bit. Maybe it’s all three! Whatever the primary reasons, I am getting more bang for my buck!

Slicehost’s data center is out in Missouri. Linode has 4 data centers up across the US (California, Texas, Georgia and New Jersey). Since I’m in California, my latency and response time has been very low! When I play on my Left4Dead server, I get around 13ms latency. When I was with Slicehost, I was getting about ~100ms.

Slicehost had really good uptime. It’s too early to tell with Linode, but so far the past month has had no problems.

Slicehost did have nice tutorials and a good community forum, however, if you are a competent Linux systems administrator then you should have no problems setting up your virtual private server. Linode does have a help section and a community forum area, but I did not explore it thoroughly as I was able to get myself up and running without the helps and FAQ’s.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have chosen Linode. I hope that Slicehost will be able to competitively compete with Linode in the near future.

Just to be absolutely clear, I am in no way represented by Slicehost or Linode. This is all from my own personal experience and opinions.

Great Thai food! Two people for lunch with two lemongrass iced tea drinks = ~$24. Definitely will eat here again.

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Pineapple and duck curry - $10.50

Pineapple and prawns fried rice - $8.50

A couple of weeks ago, I got presented with the message that NTLDR IS MISSING when booting up the operating system on one of our Windows Server 2003 machine. First, I suggest you check out http://tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm. Did all those methods fail? Then read on …

For me, none of the “obvious” solutions for NTLDR IS MISSING worked, despite all the Googling I did. It turns out that I had inadvertently marked the wrong drive letter as the active partition, which Windows will now make as the bootable drive letter. When I popped in my Windows recovery CD, the drive letters were reversed. C: => D:, and D: => C:. That’s why my OS wouldn’t boot. The only way to flip the drive letters back while preserving data was to do a parallel install of Windows WITHOUT formatting or overwriting the old Windows. After you boot into your 2nd Windows OS, just go to the disk manager and right-click the REAL C: drive with the c:\windows on it, and mark that as the ACTIVE partition. Go ahead and reboot and all should be back to normal. C: => C:, and D: => D:.

Upon walking to work, I see another one of the giant inflatable rat! This time it’s some construction workers protesting about unfair pay, or something like that. This was on Center St and Shattuck Ave in Berkeley, CA.

rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /in /n\\printservername\printersharename

The above command in Windows Server 2008 will allow you to add a shared printer. Pop this command in a batch file and put this on your machine’s local start up folder (c:\program data\microsoft\windows\start menu\programs\startup). Anyone who logs in with the appropriate printer share permissions will get the printer automatically mapped with their account. You could also put this in your start up scripts in group policy for your domain.