Say Weeeeeee!
Ahhhhhh!

Christmas Shopping

Just ordered the motherboards, cases, power supplies, and operating system for Haruhi and Yurie, my soon-to-be new Windows and Linux boxes.  Tomorrow I'll be making a little expedition to see what I can get from MSY.  They're one of the cheapest sources of computer parts in Australia, but their stock levels are terribly unreliable.

With luck I'll be picking up two CPUs, two 750GB disks, and 16GB of memory to complete the build.  But we'll see.

Both of the systems are AMD based.  Yes, Intel chips are better right now.  But low-cost Intel motherboards suck, and good low-end Intel motherboards are anything but low-cost.  I thought I'd found a solution, but it turned out that Gigabyte screwed the pooch on the GA-G33M-S2H (the PCI-E x16 slot only runs at x4), so I went for two identical machines based on the GA-MA69GM-S2H.

Updates will follow once the small goddesses arrive.

Update: I have in my hot little hands:

2x Athlon 64 X2 5200+
6x Apacer 2GB DDR2-800
2x WD 750GB SATA
2x Pioneer SATA DVD-RW (215BK)
1x Lian-Li V600A
1x Lian-Li V600B
2x Corsair VX-450 PSU

Just waiting on the motherboards and Windows (Vista Ultimate 64-bit).  And the other 4GB of memory, but that's not urgent.

I also picked up a 2GB memory module for my notebook.  I'm not sure it's going to work, but if not I'll just swap it for a 1GB module.

Update: Have motherboards and Vista.  Now need cart to cart it all home.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:09 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Meh And Anti-Meh

When I kicked off the Passmark run on Aoi, the entire install directory I had started on suddenly disappeared.  That, on what should be a journaled filesystem, is a little disquieting, and I'm tempted to do a full reinstall and run some more tests.  But I haven't made up my mind yet, so I'm watching repeats of House.

The first five minutes of episode 3-12, One Day, One Room, is classic, flawless House.  Rest of the episode is a bit of a downer though.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wabbit Season!

I've been cursing SoftLayer's flaky hardware for the past forty minutes or so.  While I was installing and updating software on Aoi, the whole system blew up, choked, died, failed to respond.

A Passmark hardware test came up clean.  I logged in again after the reboot, and ran top...  And realised as the session froze again that that was exactly what I had done just before the previous meltdown.  My habitual wrapper script for top had a slight bug in it that had turned it into a wabbit - a fork bomb.  And on a quad-core Xeon that's awaiting a shipment of memory, it doesn't take very long for a wabbit to eat you out of house and home.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Neatness!

iTunesU.  It even contains the MIT Introduction to Psychology lectures I'm constantly recommending.

Pity iTunes itself sucks so much.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:31 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Say Hello To Aoi

After collapsing mu.nu down to one big server in October (moving all the stuff running on Akane, Nabiki and Kasumi to Midori, a new quad-core 6GB server), I'm doing the same on the mee.nu side.

Over the next two weeks, the mee.nu servers, Ukyo, Shampoo and Kodachi, will be replaced by Aoi, a quad-core 8GB system.  That means a little downtime for mee.nu - probably two outages of less than half an hour each.  There'll also be a little downtime on the mu.nu side; I'll be adding an extra disk and another 2GB of memory there to give Midori the space to act as a backup server for mee.nu.

What all this means is that I no longer have a Ranma naming scheme. Instead, I now have a colours/girl's-names scheme.  And the problem with that is that I don't know of any other Japanese colour names that are used as girl's names.  And that means no more servers.

I could cheat a little.  Ai means indigo, and is the basis for aiiro, meaning dark blue.  Akane gives us the term akaneiro, for crimson, and Sakura gives us sakurairo, pale pink.  Mikan is the term for Japanese oranges (the fruit), though I haven't seen it used as a colour name; that would be daidai or simply orenji.

Any others?

Update: Okay, according to this list, Akae, Akaho, Akana, Akane, Akari are all forms of aka/akai, red.  So Akari would be a good one.  (Hey, it's hailing!  Plink!  Plinkity!  Bip boop blep! Clack!  Hell, I'm glad my car's not parked outside, some of those buggers are an inch across!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:50 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Growing Old

Had to take my glasses off to thread a needle.

Goes back to working on bliki module and configurable search engine...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:48 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Houseless

Darn you, writing strikers!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:51 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Footsies

That footnoting function I mentioned yesterday?  Coming soon to a Minx near you!



How does it work?  Simple!  The [note]...[/note] tag encloses a footnote, and leaves a link in its place: [note]I'm currently employed three days a week, and spending the other four working on mee.nu and mu.nu, so having my weekend wiped out by multiple catastrophic computer failures is even less pleasant than you'd normally expect.[/note]

The [notes] tag displays all the footnotes you've accumulated.  If you have a post in multiple sections, you can have multiple groups of footnotes with consecutive numbers.

A little fine tuning is still required, and I'll add the option to use numbers or asteriskses, but it works.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:44 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Yay For Torrents

Lost my copy of Aishiteruze Baby in the great server kablooie of '07. Most of the things I've lost are either (a) also on one of my other computers, (b) backed up, (c) licensed and available on DVD, or (d) rubbish that I don't care about. Somehow I never backed up this one, or if I did, I've lost the backup. 

Fortunately, it having never been licensed (a shame, it's a lovely sereies), I have a choice of two complete fansubs with active torrents. I found the AonE torrent first and grabbed one episode; it's nicely done, but seemed a bit odd, so I think I had the Lunar sub before. That's downloading now.

I've queued about 400GB of downloads in μTorrent, everything I could think of that was still available as fansubs that I might have lost.  Turns out I rather overdid that and actually have many of them in one way or another. (And a good thing too, because I can only download 120GB a month.)  But now at least I can check them off as I restore the backups or locate them on another drive.

I also lost one episode of Nanaka 6/17 and some parts of files from Jungle Guu - the back disks got eaten by mice or something.  I was able to restore them both quickly, because the original torrents were still active.  Fetch the torrent, stop it, drop in the corrupted files, and it fills in the missing bits.  Magic!

Update: Yep, I had the Lunar subs before.  But the AonE sub looks very similar - I think they might have applied the Lunar subtitle scripts to the DVD release, since there's no Animax watermark.

Update: Heh.  I'd forgotten that scene in episode 3.  Perfect child-logic.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:48 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Coming Soon To A Minx Near You

Despite the explosions and alarums here at PixyLabs over the weekend, I did manage to get some work done.*  I've added a secure persistence model to the BBCode engine,** merged the topic query code into the post query code,*** rewrote the URL parsing system as a generic engine instead of a whole list of special cases, and started in on the new filter engine.

To see what's going on, you'll need to look at the address bar and then at the page contents:

****

Basically, you can now string together any of the filtering and formatting functions, currently search, filter, tag, keyword, title, archive, author, and feed, to create whatever you want.  If you want a feed of posts tagged "anime", no problem.  If you want to search just the post titles for last October for the phrase "Potato Cats", no problem.  It also magically fixes problems like the limitation of the current search engine, which can only produce one (albeit arbitrarily long) page of results.

Due to the blowing-uppings, it's not quite ready to go, but will get installed next weekend along with some of the other handy 1.2 features (like knowing when you have a new private message...)

* I'm currently employed three days a week, and spending the other four working on mee.nu and mu.nu, so having my weekend wiped out by multiple catastrophic computer failures is even less pleasant than you'd normally expect.

** Which addresses the problem I mentioned where if you put a [slideshow] tag in the body of your post, it forgets the settings in the extended entry.  I'm adding an automated footnote system, and that has to remember such details, so I killed two bbirds with one stone.

*** Which not only fixes some existing bugs, but means I don't have to maintain two sets of near-identical code.  So if I were to embark on a major rewrite of the post query functionality, it would automatically
 apply also to the [topics] tag.

**** Damn!  The new static server code I installed last weekend now does beautiful resizing for GIFs, but still ruins PNGs.  Back to the board of drawing.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:37 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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