This accidentally fell out of her pocket when I bumped into her. Took me four goes.

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 04:00 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 11:08 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 07:44 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 10:01 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 07:25 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 07:14 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 11:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 10:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 09:17 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 10:37 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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