You're Amelia!
You're late!
Amelia Pond! You're the little girl!
I'm Amelia, and you're late.
You're late!
Amelia Pond! You're the little girl!
I'm Amelia, and you're late.
Tuesday, November 10
Taiga
I've been meaning to buy a new Mac for so long that they've changed the naming scheme for OS X releases and the joke no longer works. (My old Macs are all PowerPC models. I have a second-gen iMac with the 15" CRT, and an even older PowerMac - a 7600, I think.)
Yeah, it's not exactly cheap.* Australian prices have jumped about 25% this year due to currency fluctuations. On the other hand, it's probably the best software developer workstation available at any cost.
That 8GB RAM isn't going to stay that way; I'm just deciding whether to go to 32GB or splash out on 48GB or 64GB. 64GB of third-party RAM costs less than Apple's 32GB upgrade.
I've been meaning to buy a new Mac for so long that they've changed the naming scheme for OS X releases and the joke no longer works. (My old Macs are all PowerPC models. I have a second-gen iMac with the 15" CRT, and an even older PowerMac - a 7600, I think.)
Anyway, ordered the following from the Apple Store today:
|
|
Yeah, it's not exactly cheap.* Australian prices have jumped about 25% this year due to currency fluctuations. On the other hand, it's probably the best software developer workstation available at any cost.
That 8GB RAM isn't going to stay that way; I'm just deciding whether to go to 32GB or splash out on 48GB or 64GB. 64GB of third-party RAM costs less than Apple's 32GB upgrade.
Anyone who has current Mac experience is welcome to chime in with recommendations for additional hardware and software. I want a USB Blu-Ray drive, some good (but not audiophile) stereo speakers (don't really need surround sound or a subwoofer), and either VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop.
I already have software subscriptions with Microsoft, Adobe, and JetBrains that will transfer straight across to Mac, so I'm covered there.
Apart from the old iMac, probably the last desktop PC I bought - rather than built - was my Sun Ultra 5 from around 1999. And even with that I replaced the disk drives and added a video card.
Update: Added 32GB of RAM, a Samsung external Blu-Ray writer, and a 5TB LaCie external drive, and I'm still $270 under Apple's 32GB upgrade price. That could pay for a nice set of AudioEngine speakers.
64GB might be nice, but (a) 32GB is enough, and I already have two computers with 32GB of RAM each, and (b) 64GB costs four times as much as 32GB because you need newer high-density memory.
Update: It's shipped! ETA Monday... When I won't be home. Of course.
* In fact, it's crazy expensive. You can get a decent computer including a small SSD and an IPS monitor for about A$1200. But I spend 60+ hours a week sitting** in front of my screen, and it's how I earn a living, so I can kinda sorta justify the expense.
** Speaking of which, I also need a new chair.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:21 PM
| Comments (2)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 439 words, total size 8 kb.
Monday, October 12
Bookses
The Cinder Spires, volume one: The Aeronaut's Windlass by Jim Butcher
The Cinder Spires, volume one: The Aeronaut's Windlass by Jim Butcher
Not-Spain invades not-England with their flying armada and a band of assassins and arsonists, not to mention lots and lots of spiders. Our heroes are little miss rich girl joined the Marines, not so little miss not rich girl also joined the Marines, cousin in the Marines, dashing privateer captain done wrong by the Navy brass, crazy old wizard, and crazy young witch. Oh, and cats.
Which sounds formulaic except that Jim Butcher is a good enough writer to make formula work, not-Spain and not-England are for some reason enormous smokestacks crammed full of people (hence the "cinder spires"), and there is an actual legitimate reason why the wizards are all crazy.*
Pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. The characters and setting were better than the plot, so bodes well for the next volume.
The Laundry Files, volume, what, six?: The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross
The previous volume, the last so far starring Bob - a computer programmer working for a faceless bureaucracy charged with protecting the Universe from things that make Cthulhu look like a beagle puppy - was dull and largely pointless, though at least everyone died at the end.**
This volume almost dies at the beginning as our heroine, Dominique - Mo, Bob's wife - spends the first third of the book complaining about, well, everything. But that settles down eventually and is at least partly a head-fake for later events so I've mostly forgiven it. Not as good as the brilliant first three, but better than the last one, so I'll give the series another go.
The Craft Sequence, volume four: Last First Snow by Max Gladstone
The Craft Sequence is a series of books about what I've called necromantic conveyancing - courtroom and boardroom thrillers set in a world of undying sorcerers and dead gods, where contracts are living and possibly sentient. The first three books are terrific.
Last First Snow is just... Meh. Not awful, but meh.
The first problem is that it's an idiot plot. There are, if we are generous, three characters in the book who don't act like idiots throughout. Just one more person not acting like an idiot - anyone, Kopil, Temoc, the Major, Tay, Tan Batac, Mina, Zoh, Temoc's scheming former associate, the parents who thought a riot would make an educational day trip for their children, anyone - and the story would be: Things were tense there for a moment, but we worked it out. The end.
The second problem is that it's supposed to be balanced, sympathetic towards both sides. But the underdogs are a cult of human sacrifice seeking to subjugate humanity in an endless reign of slavery and terror - again - and the "man", so to speak, holding them down, is the leader of the plucky rebels who freed mankind from captivity within living memory.
Gladstone can and has done a lot better; I think the decision to write a prequel was unwise. Even here, parts of the story are captivating; I've certainly read worse. Still hoping for a return to form with the next book.
Also, the first two books involve magic that eats holes in your brain, and the latter two books are about the King in Yellow and the King in Red, respectively.
* Magic eats holes in your brain. Literally.
** Not actually true.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:38 PM
| Comments (3)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 568 words, total size 4 kb.
Tuesday, October 06
Still Alive
Posting should return to abnormal soon.
Posting should return to abnormal soon.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:10 PM
| Comments (3)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 8 words, total size 1 kb.
Monday, October 05
This Is Going To Be Interesting...
Construction has started in Sydney on putting back the tram lines we ripped up fifty years ago. Well, they ripped up, I wasn't around, much less involved.
Straight up George Street, the busiest street in the CBD. I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad idea - at peak hour George Street isn't a thoroughfare so much as a bus depot lined with shops, and trams will be a nice change even if they make traffic worse - but it will certainly be interesting.
Construction has started in Sydney on putting back the tram lines we ripped up fifty years ago. Well, they ripped up, I wasn't around, much less involved.
Straight up George Street, the busiest street in the CBD. I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad idea - at peak hour George Street isn't a thoroughfare so much as a bus depot lined with shops, and trams will be a nice change even if they make traffic worse - but it will certainly be interesting.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:31 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 90 words, total size 1 kb.
Sunday, October 04
Mostly Dead Is Still Partly Alive
Also, Doctor Who series 9 episode 3 was pretty good. Doctor Who has always been good at "base under siege" stories, and this one killed the token idiot pretty quickly.
Also, Doctor Who series 9 episode 3 was pretty good. Doctor Who has always been good at "base under siege" stories, and this one killed the token idiot pretty quickly.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:36 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 36 words, total size 1 kb.
Wednesday, September 16
All Onions Go To Heaven
Really.
Really.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:11 AM
| Comments (2)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 6 words, total size 1 kb.
Friday, September 04
Sometime Simpler Is Better
Two virtual machines, each with 3 cores and 4GB RAM, running CentOS 7.
[Edit: Wait, Kururu is on CentOS 6. Well, near enough.]
Kururu is running under OpenVZ:
While Rere is running on KVM:
Also, Kururu didn't have 3 cores and 4GB of RAM. It had 1 core, and 1GB. I changed it to take this screenshot - but check the uptime.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
08:52 PM
| Comments (6)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 56 words, total size 1 kb.
Good News, Irritating News, Great News
A few days ago I signed up with Wable, a new VPS service run by the company that hosts most of the mee.nu servers. They were having a lifetime half-price sale on their entry-level package, just $8 per month for 2GB of RAM and 50GB of disk, which you could then split across 1-3 separate VPSes as needed.
A few days ago I signed up with Wable, a new VPS service run by the company that hosts most of the mee.nu servers. They were having a lifetime half-price sale on their entry-level package, just $8 per month for 2GB of RAM and 50GB of disk, which you could then split across 1-3 separate VPSes as needed.
Today I saw a special offer that went a step further and gave you a bonus 4GB of RAM, 30GB of SSD, and 2 VPSes if you signed up right away.
Dammit. Nothing spoils a good deal faster than a better deal you can't have.
I clicked on the promo code anyway... And it added the bonus to my existing account.
Nice.
Underlying hardware is the Intel E5-2643 v3, one of the fastest server CPUs available for single-threaded workloads. As long as your hardware node doesn't get overloaded, that should really fly. Crazy good performance for the price.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:54 PM
| Comments (2)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 162 words, total size 1 kb.
Thursday, September 03
Well, Now...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:39 AM
| Comments (11)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 2 words, total size 1 kb.
Wednesday, September 02
It's A Machine That Goes Ding
How to build a perfect website.
more...
How to build a perfect website.
DO:
- Use a replicated document database - MongoDB 3, TokuMX, or RethinkDB. Use Riak if you know you need Riak.
Caveat: If you are running a transactional operation, use a transactional database. - Use uWSGI as a server.
- Use Nginx as a proxy.
- Use Redis or LMDB as an intelligent, structured cache.
- Use Python or Ruby.
- Use HTML5 semantic elements.
- Use Mustache templates.
- Use Semantic UI, or, if you want to use pre-packaged templates, Bootstrap.
- Use Amazon EC2 for operations.
- Use Amazon EBS SSD volumes for system storage.
- Use Amazon S3 for file storage.
- Use Amazon Route 53 for DNS.
- Use Google Nearline for backups.
- Use RunAbove object storage for large downloads.
- Use SSL/TLS.
- Use Pushstate with jQuery to streamline page loads.
- Use RabbitMQ if you need a message queue.
- Use Elasticsearch if you need better search.
- Use CDNJS.
- Use PBKDF2, SCRYT, or BCRYPT for passwords.
- Ignore rare edge cases. If you worry about IE6, you'll never launch.
DON'T:
- Use PHP or Node.JS.
- Use a heavyweight Javascript client framework unless you know precisely why you need it.
- Use templates that mix code and layout.
- Ignore common edge cases. If your site looks lousy on an iPad, you have a problem.
And yes, we don't currently score very well on this list. Knowing what to do doesn't automatically grant the time in which to do it. 
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:55 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 296 words, total size 3 kb.
84kb generated in CPU 0.0416, elapsed 0.5267 seconds.
57 queries taking 0.4789 seconds, 409 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
57 queries taking 0.4789 seconds, 409 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
