It was a bad day. A lot of bad stuff happened. And I'd love to forget it all. But I don't. Not ever. Because this is what I do. Every time, every day, every second, this: On five, we're bringing down the government.

Friday, October 31

Geek

And Another Thing!

One of the things I've wanted to be able to do for my larger users for some time is offer a virtual server solution, so their blog/forum/whatever can run reasonably isolated from the rest of the horde without me having to pay for dozens of small servers.

And the way I wanted to do this was with Virtuozzo and Plesk, because they work nicely together and offer a consistent and reasonably logical user interface.  (As opposed to CPanel, which, while it provides more functionality in some areas, is rather a mess.)

The only problem was that Softlayer didn't support any virtualisation product.  Then, when they finally did, it was bleedin' Microsoft Hyper-V.  And when they expanded their range a little, it was to offer Citrix Xenserver.  Neither of which really fit my needs.  They're not bad products, but they're not aimed at the webhosting market the way Virtuozzo is.

But today, Softlayer announced support for Virtuozzo too!  Yay!

And now the only problem is that with the Aussie dollar still in the toilet (albeit somewhat improved over its recent nadir) I don't know if I can afford it. sad

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:16 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, October 23

Geek

I Know What I Want For Christmas

A few months ago, I wrote a quick note about the Fusion-IO ioDrive.  I said at the time:
80GB.  $2400.  9 watts. 120,000 IOPS.  600MB/second random writes.

If this thing really delivers, it's a silver bullet for mid-scale databases.  I want a silver bullet for mid-scale databases.
Now I've got one for testing at my day job.

But can it really do 120,000 IOPS?  Well, let's start with a 40GB random-write test.  Single threaded, with no optimisations.  And the envelope please...
random-write: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=4626
  write: io=40,000MiB, bw=271MiB/s, iops=67,869, runt=150877msec
    clat (usec): min=4, max=37,767, avg=12.32, stdev=44.36
    bw (KiB/s) : min=    0, max=335749, per=99.90%, avg=277725.87, stdev=25273.96
  cpu          : usr=15.47%, sys=83.93%, ctx=5153, majf=1, minf=2152631
Whoa.

Okay, that's not 120,000.  But 67,000 without any tweaking at all is amazing.  I have the same test running on a standard SATA drive; it's sustaining a little over 300 IOPS, making the ioDrive easily 200 times faster.

I've got a lot more testing to do, but so far it looks like the ioDrive really delivers the goods.

Unfortunately, since June the Aussie dollar has drifted south by about 30% and I can no longer afford the card, at least not short of working every Sunday for two months.  But there are some cheaper, lower-end drives showing up, and I'd be very happy with a quarter of the ioDrive's performance for a quarter of the price.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:23 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, October 09

Blog

Whoops!

Back now.  Invalid entry in my.cnf.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:06 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, October 08

Rant

Crap

My server costs have risen nearly 50% in three months.

Some software and font purchases I was planning for the next version of Minx, which I'd put off because I needed the funds for moving house, have increased in price by 30%.  (Those ones are in Euros.)

Bleah. sad

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:10 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Tuesday, October 07

World

We're All Gonna Die!

The Earth is going to be hit by an asteroid.

In four minutes.

Three minutes.

RUN!

Update: Still alive.  You?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:42 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sunday, October 05

Rant

Dear Electronic Arts

Die in a fire.

Sorry, that was rude.

Please die in a fire.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:42 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Life

Aargh! Time Thieves!

It just got an hour later all of a sudden. frown

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:13 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Anime

Credits Where Credits' Due

I've chucked some anime opening and closing sequences up on Youtube.  I plan to put my whole collection up there.  And to enlarge my collection significantly, now that I can get stuff out of mkv and mp4 files.*

* It works, though not as cleanly as for avi files.  With an avi, I can snip out the video without any recompression, as long as I start with a keyframe.  With an mkv, I have to uncompress and recompress, which always loses quality.  But since I'm uploading to YouTube which is going to re-encode and screw the quality anyway, that doesn't matter all that much.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:42 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Friday, October 03

Anime

Ryoko's Case File

ffzzzzzzip!

Taptap.  IS THIS THI  -

Oops

Is this thing on?  Good.

Kind of died last month.  After running around like mad all of August (pointlessly, as it turned out) I was trying to catch up with stuff at home and in life and mu.nu and mee.nu and another project I'm juggling while at the same time the project at my day job was launching and things got a bit crazy and then I got sick and stayed in bed for a week watching Mythbusters.

Which is awesome.

Mythbusters, that is, not staying in bed sick.

But today I'm here to talk about a startling new phenomenon: Sexy adult women in anime.*

Specifically, Yakushiji Ryoko no Kaiki Jikenbo (warning - site plays background music) or Ryoko's Case File.

I like the music (opening, closing, and incidental); I like the character designs; I like the characters.  And I can't actually recall a police officer questioning a suspect quite that way in anime before.

The only problem is that the show feels a bit loose - the pacing doesn't feel quite right either in the slow moments or the dramatic scenes.  That might just be me, and I might well adjust after a couple more episodes.  It's only a 13-parter (12 of which are already fansubbed) so it's not likely to drag, in any case.

I'll grab (or steal) some screen shots for you later.  Or hey, I can just throw up a quick YouTube clip.

...

.........

If I want it to be distorted and subtitled in Spanish.

And the fansubs are all mkv, and the raws all mp4, so I can't even snip it out using VirtualDub.  Bah.

Update: Oh, hang on, apparently there's an mp4 plug-in for VirtualDub.  Nothing for mkv, though, so I'll need to grab a raw first.

Update updated: It seems there's a DirectShow plugin that will handle mkv (at least in theory).  I'll give that a whirl.

Update: I'll be frogswoggled.  That worked perfectly.  Hang on a tick...



* Sexy adult women in anime whose breasts aren't larger than their heads, even.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:15 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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