Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:26 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:37 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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More buzz.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:13 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Got a call on Saturday that one of the systems was down. Said I'd look at it on Monday.

Monday arrives, and I look at it. Seems that both sides of a mirror had spontaneously converted themselves to unrecognised volumes. The system had become somewhat disconcerted, and crashed.

Yes, I had a backup. A complete, up-to-date backup.

Because I'm paranoid.

Fortunately, very soon all of this will become Not My Problem.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:35 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The worst cold I've ever had.

For four days my throat felt like I'd been gargling RFNA. The only thing that made any difference was tea. A nice mug of English Breakfast with honey would make the pain go away for half an hour, and keep it bearable for an hour more. After that, it became so uncomfortable that I was unable to sleep.

So a full night's sleep required five or six large mugs of tea... which comes with its own problems. Needless to say, I have not been sleeping well. (This morning I got four hours uninterrupted - starting at 6AM. That's the best I've done in the past week.)

But at least in the agonizing pain stage I wasn't much trouble to others. After four days of that, I returned home from my trip, and by the next day the pain had largely faded.

But I wasn't better.

I had moved on to stage two, which combined heavy (and pretty yucky) congestion with an incessant cough. The part where I bark like a seal is particularly amusing. So I need to take a decongestant and a cough suppressant, and use the manual override when I really do need to cough.

And an antihistamine, because just because I'm in bed with a horrible cold doesn't mean I don't get hay fever as well.

As of this afternoon, the cough seems to be under control. Either the codeine worked or it's just run its course; the last bad session was at 4AM. Now I just have to see if that's it, or if there's a stage three, where I presumably implode or break out in hives or something.

I'm not complaining - okay, I am complaining - just letting you know that I am back but not exactly running at full efficiency just yet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:53 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Yay.

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

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:16 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:08 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 01:12 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 12:29 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 03:17 AM | Comments (15) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 01:55 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 03:12 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Disk drives are not supposed to go "beep".

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:18 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:50 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 09:32 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 06:11 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 12:54 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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.

These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:49 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 02:15 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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