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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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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(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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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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They've changed a few things. Quite a few things. And I was just starting to get seriously annoyed with them when I fixed the last difference and suddenly my code worked.

A bit more banging on various bits and I have a copy of my blog running on my home network.

Now I'm building a dev environment on my new notebook. I already have CentOS 4.4 on there (under VMWare), but when I'm developing I spend a pretty significant amount of time benchmarking code, so I need a reasonably precise timer, and running CentOS under VMWare does not give you that. At all. You can, with a little effort, set it up so that the clock doesn't run at either half or double speed, but accurate sub-second timing is not on the cards.

In testing previously I've found that Fedora is substantially better behaved in this respect, so that's what I'm installing right now.

VMWare has a helpful 25-page document explaining why the clock doesn't work when you're running Linux under VMWare, but personally I'd rather they just FIXED IT.

Well, okay, granted that I'm running a free operating system under a free virtualisation system under a rather clunky desktop operating system on cheap consumer hardware and have no right to expect the damn contraption to boot much less keep accurate time.

Nevertheless.

Update: Okay, so FC5 doesn't want to play nice either. Bah.

* Note to self: Check to see if that memory leak in Psyco has been fixed under 2.5. They did say that there had been a bug fixed relating to that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:42 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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And sometimes people report blippages that I didn't notice, or that I know weren't munu's fault because I was on the servers at the time.

So to help track such things, I've enlisted HostTracker, which checks the availability of your site from 32 locations all over the US and some other parts of the world, and presents you with a nice little button, like so:

Akane

Nabiki

You can see the Akane-outage there. Nabiki kept right on going, but since Akane is the primary munu DNS server, some people couldn't get to the Nabiki-hosted sites (Ace of Spades, The Jawa Report, the skeptic sites) anyway.

I've had other reports of outages, but they seem to be localised to people on particular (crappy) ISPs, and not related to the general availability of munu. We had a big problem with this vis-a-vis Insight Broadband at the old hosting company, which I eventually managed to get Insight to fix. (Shortly before we moved again...)

So, if you can't read this - if you have trouble getting to any munu sites, sometimes or all the time - leave me a comment. I'm going to be running a lot more sites next year, and having people not able to get to them is likely to prove counterproductive.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:48 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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This doesn't seem to work with XP Home, or at least, I couldn't make it work. With XP Pro it worked first try.

Having achieved this, it was time to try out the notebook as a media center PC. At this, it gets 2/5 overall but 4/5 for me. It has neither conventional analog (S-Video, component) or digital (DVI, HDMI) outputs, but it has VGA, and so does my television.

The VGA signal quality is fine, as you'd expect, but this wasn't true of my old Compaq notebook, which had visible movement artifacts in any large white areas. I thought it was the cheap VGA cable, but it's not.

Sound output is fine - if you are running from battery! The power supply puts a lot of noise on the headphone socket, which is the only audio output. You can configure that socket to produce SPDIF, which should eliminate the problem, but my TV doesn't have SPDIF input. (I think.)

Since I can get six hours of video playback from one charge, I'm not going to worry too much.

And so, I finished watching Kamichu! over the weekend. And put up shelves. A little shelving, a little Kamichu!

Kamichu! is very very good. More on that later.

Having shelves is also very very good, particularly when you've spent 18 months without.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Acer TravelMate 4202WLMi

Screen: Very Good (4/5)

It's big enough (15.4"), bright enough, and has no dead or stuck pixels. It has an anti-glare coating, which is great if you have to deal with glare, but does make the image slightly less sharp and the colours slightly less intense. So it depends on what you want to use it for, but it's more than adequate for programming and watching videos.

Processor: Good (3/5) to Very Good (4/5)

It's a 1.66GHz Core Duo. It's reasonably quick, though coming from a 1.4GHz Celeron M I don't notice a significant speedup. What I do notice is that when VMWare is running busily in the background, it has no effect on whatever else I'm doing. Which is exactly what I was after.

So for me, it's great; but people who aren't running large-scale web applications in a Linux virtual machine at the same time they are watching Kamichu! might be better off with the cheaper but slightly higher-clocked single-processor models.

Disk: Very Good (4/5)

120GB, 5400RPM, SATA. Works exactly as you'd expect. Nice and roomy, and reasonably fast for a notebook drive.

Battery Life: Excellent (5/5)

Okay, this was the worst feature of my old notebook, at least lately, when it would use 10% of the battery just recovering from standby (which admittedly could take a couple of minutes, another fun feature of its general brokenness). So I might be inflating the score by contrast.

But still, on my way to work today I installed the Express editions of Visual C#, C, JScript, and Web Developer, the trial versions of Flash and Dreamweaver, and VMWare Server. At the end of that, it was reporting over 5 hours left. That's not bad.

The big power drain is the screen. Run it at full brightness constantly and you'll only get 3½ hours or so. On the other hand, if you have it processing something and have the screen blanked most of the time, you'll get six hours easily.

Keyboard: Sucky (1/5)

This is the fly in the ointment, the wasp in the jam jar. The keyboard is crap. The feel is average; not great, not terrible. The layout, though, is terrible. The keyboard curves, "ergonomically", so none of the keys are quite where they should be. There is no space at all between the main part of the keyboard and the page up/down keys on the right; the inverted-T cursor keys have two useless keys attached to them [$ and €] so you can't easily use them by feel.

And due to the size of the notebook itself, the whole thing is positioned annoyingly far in, making it hard to type when I'm lying in bed. Which may not be a problem for most people, admittedly.

Bundled Utilities: Crap (0/5)

Not merely worthless, the bundled software actually detracts from the value of the machine. However, it is easily removed by installing a standard copy of Windows, something that's not exactly in short supply at Pixy Central.

Game Performance: Not tested, probably Sucky (1/5):

It's Intel Integrated Graphics, folks, and that means quality lousy gaming. I did manage to play Neverwinter Nights on my old notebook (also with the Intel 950 chipset), but when things got busy it ran like a slug.

Overall: Good (3/5)

Overall, it's a bit meh. It is a budget notebook, and it's fast and has a big disk drive, so it's not a bad meh, but it's not exciting. On the other hand, it does what I need (with the exception of that bloody keyboard), and it is a hell of a lot better than no notebook. It won't stop me buying another Acer notebook in the future, but I sure as hell won't buy it online.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:12 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Before I even got it home.

Okay, I knew it was an older model being sold off cheap, but even so the degree of haste is a little unseemly. There's still a $300 gap, and mine still has twice the battery life of the new models, so I can deal with this particular affront.

Good: Nice screen. Big. Anti-glare. No dead pixels.

Seems fast, but I can't actually test it, for reasons that will become clear.

Bad: It has a dumb-ass keyboard. Damn. In the photos it looked identical to all the Acers I'd seen in the stores, which all had sensible keyboards. This one, though, curves. The rows of keys aren't straight. Bleah. BLEAH!

Also, it doesn't even come with a recovery CD. You get the joy of burning your own. Yays. And while it's doing this (which takes forever) it locks the keyboard and mouse.

Ugly: The disk is divided into two partitions, so I have to reformat and reinstall before doing anything else. Well, no, I have to burn a recovery disk first, two in fact, since I don't trust DVDs that much, and then I have to reformat and reinstall before doing anything else.

And it can't play the HD opening of Sumomomo Momomo any better than my old notebook. Bah.

Uglier: The restore disk that you spent all that time creating doesn't give you the option to repartition the drive. My copy of Windows XP (original) blue-screens when I try to install off that.

MCE, on the other hand, appears to be working. But there may be a problem when it comes time to activate it...

Good: Battery life. I installed Windows MCE mostly on battery, screwed it up, reinstalled it entirely on battery, and have well over three hours left. So five hours of light use is quite plausible.

Ugly: A lot of critical components - like all the networking options, for a start - are not recognised by standard Windows XP, and the recovery disk doesn't provide the drivers in any readable form.

Good: You can download all the drivers from the Acer website. On another computer. And burn them to a CD. Because they ain't getting to the notebook any other way. This lets you avoid Acer's multitude of disutilities.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:44 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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So it's time for a new Amelia: An Acer Travelmate 4202.

Amelia Mk 1, bought a year ago, is a Celeron M 1.4, with 256MB of memory (which I upgraded out of my own pocket) and a 40GB drive (likewise).

Amelia Mk 2, bought today, is a Core Duo 1.66 (not Core 2 Duo; I'm on a budget) with 512MB of memory (I'll add another gig) and a 120GB drive. And a DVD burner, something Mk 1 lacks.

It cost just $100 more, and I could have done better if I'd ordered from a company I'd never heard of in Brisbane or Melbourne. Somehow, no-one in Sydney is selling it cheap.

Also, it has an 8-cell battery with a claimed 5-hour life. It only lasted a little over 4 hours in the review I found, but since Amelia Mk 1 is currently doing well if it lasts 30 minutes, I'll take it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:02 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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