Now? You want to do this now?
I have a right to know! I'm getting married in four hundred and thirty years!

Sae

13" is a bit on the small side* at least for my 43-year-old eyes. Apart from that, it's working very nicely. It's about two thirds the weight of Potemayo but feels more like half.

Just need to get another 2GB of RAM and a 640GB disk to replace the 320GB one it came with - and then reinstall everything.

Windows 7 is pretty much Vista SP2, but I'm fine with that. All my serious work is done on Linux, and for my desktop I want something pretty and responsive - and that supports a lot of games - and Windows 7 does that.

* Did you know that Firefox under Windows 7 zooms with multi-touch? Just be careful not to leave a finger resting on the trackpad, or you could end up shrinking the page down to nothing...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:29 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Doctor Who Is Back

While we'll have to wait and see how the new Doctor shapes up, it's defintely the genuine article.  With Stephen Moffat (creator of The Empty Child, Blink, The Girl in the Fireplace, and Silence in the Library) at the helm that was pretty much assured, but it's nice to see the result.

Amelia Pond is possibly the cutest in a long line of cute companions too.  Sorry, Sarah Jane!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:20 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Beedle Beedle Bee

Currently transferring 34 million files across to the new server.

This make take a few minutes.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:30 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Oh No!!

The second season of K-On!?

It's called K-On!!.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:29 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Button Pushed!

I've placed the order for the first of two (and eventually three) new servers.

Geek porn:

Dual Xeon 5670 - 12 x 2.93GHz cores
24GB RAM
RAID Controller (Adaptec 5805)
3 x 2TB drives (RAID-5)
3 x 32GB SSD (RAID-5)
Gigabit network
CentOS 5

That's 66% 94%* faster than our current main server; the other main change is that instead of a single SSD we have a RAID-5 array.  Normally you'd avoid RAID-5 for databases, but with 28,000 IOPS from a single device, it doesn't really matter any more (unless, like at my day job, you are doing over a thousands transactions per second).  Since I set up our current server I've seen a few of those drives spontaneously implode, so this makes me a lot happier.  Also gives us better performance and more space, of course; we've used up about half of our current SSD and some things I'm doing now will use about half the remaining space, so we'll need it.

Next up is the 100TB caching server.

Update: Bonus!  Apparently they were short of the 5650's, because when the server was built I got a pair of 5670's, which are even more faster.  So overall it's nearly twice as fast as our current system - 12 x 2.93GHz CPUs (3.33GHz turbo) vs. 8 x 2.26GHz CPUs (2.4GHz turbo).

Udapte: Bonus two: For 24GB RAM, instead of installing 12 x 2GB modules like last time, they installed 6 x 4GB.  That allows the RAM to run faster, and leaves me with 12 slots free for expansion.  This server can go as high as 144GB with 8GB modules, though that gets kind of expensive...

* The weird number is because the clock speeds run in increments of 133MHz.  The 2.26GHz chips are 17 x 133MHz, the 2.93GHz chips are 22 x 133MHz.  Add 50% for the extra two cores per chip, and the performance ratio is 33/17 - almost but not quite double.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:08 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The Plan, De Arimasu

Every mu.nu and mee.nu site will get two subdomains: cdn.mysite.mee.nu and cache.mysite.mee.nu.

cdn.mysite will point to our global Content Delivery Network* for fast loading of user-interface elements like icons, buttons, stylesheets and JavaScript.

cache.mysite will point to our high-volume cache server in Dallas, where we will be able to sustain over 300Mbit/sec of downloads.

I'll be setting things up so that specific BBCode tags will automatically use the CDN or cache networks as appropriate, so if you use the [video], [flash], or [file] tags, it will hit the cache without you having to do anything more.

I was trying to configure things so that we could deliver entire sites through the cache server, but that doesn't seem practical for now.

* 21 POPs in 8 countries: Amsterdam, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Hong Kong, Houston, London, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Jose, Sydney, Seattle, Singapore, Tokyo, Toronto, Washington.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:56 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Cute Girls Wearing Headphones Waiting For Trains

Sankaku Complex is probably the most NSFW site on the internet that anyone would ever want to visit for SFW reasons.  If the odious Senator Conroy has his way, it will likely be banned in Australia.

Which would mean I would miss out on this delightful gallery of cute girls wearing headphones waiting for trains.  (The page contents are SFW, but it may contain NSFW icons or ads and sure as hell contains NSFW links.)

Okay, they're not all pictures of cute girls wearing headphones waiting for trains, but there's definitely a theme going there.






Huh, just realised that three of those (not just two) are cute girls wearing headphones recording passing trains for sound-effects libraries.  The thing in the second image is a portable digital recorder.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:20 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Autumn In Sydney

Every day is the same temperature.  Some days it rains like it's not ever planning to stop, some days it's blowing a gale from dawn 'til dusk, and some days it's just perfect.  But every day is the same temperature.  Warm enough to wear shorts and a t-shirt if you like, cool enough to wear a suit if you have to.

It's my favourite season.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Yes, Virginia, There Is An Easter Bunny

And this year she* will be bringing us a shiny new 12-core server.

Just ran the pricing, and we can upgrade to a 12-core 2.66GHz machine for 10% more than our current 8-core 2.26GHz machine.  And that's after I factored in a second SSD to cope with our growing databases.  The base price is a lot higher, but by moving from 1TB drives to half the number of 2TB ones, I can cut costs quite a lot.

I'll probably go for three SSDs, in fact, and RAID-5 them.  The MTBF on the Intel Enterprise-series SSDs is huge, but I have seen them spontaneously drop dead - we run dozens of them at my day job, and they are decidedly not immortal.  We're doing nightly backups, but not having things fail in the first place is even better than being able to restore afterwards.

Also checking on the details of the 100TB bandwidth server I mentioned before.  We should, in theory, be able to connect the new 100TB front-end server to the new 12-core back-end server across SoftLayer's gigabit private network.  (Actually, their network is 10-gigabit and up, but we only have 1 gigabit network ports on our servers.)

If we can do that, that will let us do amazing stuffs.  Like...  I dunno, but pretty amazing.

Update: It definitely looks like we'll be getting a new server.   Now working on new server number two...

* Obviously a she.  Males don't lay eggs, let alone foil-wrapped chocolate ones.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:41 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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