CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?
Thursday, September 02
Grrrrr
Whoever designed the API for urllib2 in Python should be kicked in the nuts. Repeatedly.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:00 PM
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Friday, August 20
He Was A Visionary, You Know
Those who would give up E
ssential L
iberty to purchase a little
Internet Bandwidth, deserve a K
ick in the C
rotch.
Benjamin Franklin
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Saturday, July 24
Dear Dell, Your Pricing Makes No Sense
It is cheaper to buy an
entire server - with 8 CPUs, 24GB of RAM, 6 x GbE, and 24TB of disk - than it is to buy a 24TB direct-attach storage array.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:59 AM
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1
Probably economy of scale. I bet the DAS is a special order, which has to be sheperded all the way through the production line, whereas the server is off-the-shelf.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, July 24 2010 12:02 PM (+rSRq)
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I don't know which DAS you were looking at, but if it's the one we build which they rebadge (or heck, most any DAS)... there is quite a bit more to the thing than just a stack of drives.
Dual redundant smart power supply modules, ditto fans, redundant enclosure services modules, redundant internal loops, lots and lots of R&D. It is far more likely to choke itself on some silly internal coding error, than it is to lose your data due to hardware malfunctions... and it is very very unlikely to trip itself on coding errors. Not that they're not there... just that they exist primarily in remote boundary conditions.
Also, the drives will have special firmware, and possibly be the pick of the litter, so to speak.
Posted by: dkallen99 at Wednesday, July 28 2010 02:31 AM (1PFDl)
3
I don't think Dell do special drive versions, though enterprise-class drives certainly do have different firmware than commodity drives.
It does offer redundant controllers as an option, though I didn't configure that. Just having the option increases the complexity and price, of course.
The most expensive component, though, is the drives - Dell's drive prices on their US site are hugely inflated. They're actually about 40% cheaper if you buy them in Australia (though in Australia the rest of the server is more expensive).
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 28 2010 03:58 AM (PiXy!)
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Thursday, July 15
Moratorium
No science fiction author is to write any work involving online games until they have been dead for 28 years.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
The games or the author?
Posted by: Mob at Friday, July 16 2010 12:31 AM (8c34o)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 16 2010 04:39 AM (PiXy!)
3
Who burned you? Walter Jon Williams just did a
pretty good murder-mystery about that stupid craze from about six years back that featured large-scale email-style interactive puzzle-rollplaying. I'm not sure if it qualifies as science-fiction, since the only thing even remotely implausible is a rogue HVT widget which strikes me as more of a "five-minutes-into-the-future" than real SF. Especially since nobody's really talking about what exactly happened last May with that five-minute crash in the US markets.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Saturday, July 17 2010 01:15 AM (jwKxK)
4
I was reading the monthly newsletter from Galaxy Bookshop here in Sydney. Greg Egan, Ken MacLeod, and Walter Jon Williams all have books out this month with the same basic premise, and that's just from the authors I was actually looking for. Charlie Stross did it recently too.
So the new rule is, unless your name is Philip K. Dick, the topic is off limits.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 17 2010 03:34 AM (PiXy!)
5
How about movie adaptions ? Could we declare a moratorium on adaptions of P.K. Dick ?
Have you read Daemon by Daniel Suarez ? I've just started it. Pretty good so far.
Posted by: Andrew at Sunday, July 18 2010 12:07 AM (cB03i)
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Sunday, May 30
Into Each Season Of Doctor Who Some Suck Must Fall
Or so it would seem. And this week's episode is all that. 14 minutes in and it's so bad that I've stopped watching five times.
Update: Okay, it picked up a bit after that. But a very clumsily-written episode, which is particularly bad because it hit a couple of very important points for the season story arc.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Because I require logins to comment, I don't get a lot of spam. In fact, until today it's only happened one time. But the guy who seems to be spamming you today has also been spamming me.
I've deleted four, and I just switched one to "hidden", because of this: I want to ban him, but I can't figure out what to use. He presumably has a mee.nu account and is logged in, but he isn't using his login name, or his login page, or anything which the ban page accepts as an ID.
It's kind of like black magic where you need to know someone's true name in order to cast a death spell on him. How do I figure out this guy's true name in order to add him to the ban list?
(I assume you're probably going to use the Pixy ban hammer on him, but I'm reporting this because I think it's a bug: there's no way in the admin comments page for me to find out the true identity of a commenter.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, June 02 2010 12:04 PM (+rSRq)
2
Yep, good point - I'll get that fixed up.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 02 2010 02:26 PM (PiXy!)
3
Meanwhile, that user has been banned.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 02 2010 03:28 PM (PiXy!)
4
This new season has been a little patchy. Definitely a very different take on the Doctor.
That he isn't the only solution to the problem. Some terrific setups and ideas but very uneven.
I'll weather the ups and downs anyways.
Posted by: Andrew at Thursday, June 03 2010 11:44 PM (cB03i)
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Saturday, April 24
World Gone Mad
Why the HELL is
Peopleware out of print?!
It's the best book ever written on managing software development teams. (The Mythical Man Month is the best book ever written on managing software development
projects.)
Used copies in good condition are going for $200 and up! Get that sucker into reprint,
now.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Totally agree. This is a life changing book that should be on every software developers bookshelf
Posted by: Steve at Friday, August 31 2012 09:52 PM (l96u5)
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Sunday, April 18
Well, That's Just Ducky
From my ISP's status page right now:
Fault Notice 1018181
Areas: Australia
Do tell.
Expected time to fix is 4PM WST, i.e. 6PM EST, i.e. exactly when I'm supposed to be doing the server migration.
Bah.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Monday, April 12
Just Once
Just once I want to buy something and have it actually work properly. Just
once.
I have two servers. I have a range of portable IPs that can be assigned to whatever server I need them on and reassigned as required.
The two servers have been placed on different VLANs, so this doesn't work in any way whatsoever.
The suggestion from tech support is to get a new range of portable IPs specifically for the new server sitting alone on its own VLAN, so I can reassign them to itself when it's down... Or something.
Update: They have a solution, which is to physically move the server so that they can plug it into the same VLAN. Yes, that will certainly work, but it makes my teeth itch. But then, that's why I never went into network administration. Servers are quite bad enough, thank you!
I don't really like the idea of moving rackmount servers around after they've been set up, but it's better than the Catch 22 that I was half expecting. And unless they actually drop it, the worst that should happen is that I'll need to update the IP address in my terminal emulator.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:22 PM
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1
After years of working with people to set up vpns and ftp feeds, I can tell you now that 99% of people who work in "networking" haven't got the vaguest idea of what they are doing. No clue.
I do not consider myself a networking expert by any means, but damn - could some of these people please learn at least the rudiments of how this stuff works??? Please?
As you can see, I feel your pain.
Posted by: Teresa at Tuesday, April 13 2010 01:24 AM (ZCuP9)
2
Indeed.
I understand SoftLayer's position, though: They have a Standard Way of Doing Things. Often, that's just an excuse to avoid work, but in their case they run tens of thousands of servers for thousands of customers, and they
need a Standard Way of Doing Things. Physically moving my server from one room in the datacenter to another was less effort and less likely to cause future problems than poking even a tiny tiny hole in the SWDT.
And they did it quickly, successfully, and free of charge, so I'm not about to complain.
Much.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 13 2010 02:59 AM (PiXy!)
3
Die in a fire, spammer.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 13 2010 03:51 PM (PiXy!)
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Hmmm.... you would think it would be good practice for them to put servers owned by the same people in the same room. You know, just in case. Of course that probably would mean some extra work for them on the front end. Why do it up front when you can wait and do it later. Heh.
Posted by: Teresa at Wednesday, April 14 2010 12:51 AM (ZCuP9)
5
Teresa, on the contrary, it would make sense to separate them widely. Indeed, it would make sense to put them in different facilities.
That way, if there's some sort of physical outage (leaky roof, bomb attack, power outage) then it doesn't take out all of that client's computers.
It would only make sense to place them near each other if the client cared more about intercommunication than about reliability.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, April 14 2010 08:13 AM (+rSRq)
6
They have three datacentres - Dallas, Seattle and Washington - and are opening a fourth in San Jose next month, so if you need super-robustness you can easily request geographic distribution. They have a free 10Gbit private network between the datacentres too.
Currently we're located in Dallas; I might be getting one server in San Jose; we'll see.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 14 2010 11:18 AM (PiXy!)
7
Ah - see - I wasn't thinking about one set being a final backup of the other. Final backups should be off site entirely as you say. I was looking at it from the point of view of all being primary servers. Either all in use or one being able to immediately switch to the other.
From my reading of the process above, the idea is to have something that is instantly convertible a running duplicate if you will. It depends on how the servers are set up - possibly the service provider does have the ability to use their other sites as backup in case of emergency. The extent of that may depend on how much one is willing to pay.
Flat backups of servers being the cheapest thing to do. Cold servers available for configuration in case of emergency being the second cheapest. And hot servers ready to rumble being the fastest but also the most expensive. It all depends on how important the data availability is. I like my little blog, but hardly consider it to be worthy of a hot server set up and in all honest... not even quite worthy of a cold server set up - LOL.
Posted by: Teresa at Thursday, April 15 2010 05:49 AM (ZCuP9)
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Saturday, April 10
Glaargh
Okay, I want to swap the 320GB drive that came with Sae for a 640GB one. To do that, I need to burn a set of install disks, because no-one bothers to provide them any more.
I can't do that, because Sae is a lightweight notebook and doesn't have a DVD drive.
No problem, I have an external drive.
The recovery disk creation utility doesn't recognise it. Or rather, it does, but it doesn't believe that there's a disk in the drive.
No problem, I can install a trial copy of Virtual CD, burn to that, and then burn the ISOs.
The recovery disk creation utility doesn't recognise Virtual CD either. Or rather, it does, but it doesn't believe that there's a virtual disk in the
virtual drive.
No problem. I already downloaded all the Sony drivers just in case, so all I need to do is grab a copy of the Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit disk image from my MSDN account, burn that, install it using the existing license key, and go from there.
MSDN is down for the weekend.
Update: Hmm. Maybe if I burn a repair disk and do a full backup. Now if only I had a spare drive to back up onto...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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I understand your pain. They make it almost impossible to do an reinstall or backup of your own system these days which I think is so unfair. You often dont think about it until your pc goes bang
Posted by: Mike at Friday, August 31 2012 09:54 PM (l96u5)
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Monday, March 22
Crapple
When I plug in my iPod, iTunes crashes.
Update: The iPod lost all the music, but still had the podcasts. So I tried resetting it - whereupon it lost everything and wouldn't even start up. Which left me with an hour's commute each way, no iPod, and a notebook with a 20-minute battery life.
Update: Reset, reboot, restore, and Unagi-tan is back to life, albeit very empty. And now it thinks it's syncing. Ah, there we go. It's just worked out that it's a 160GB iPod and I have nearly 500GB of stuff in iTunes, so it's selected some unspecified subset for me...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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OMG - no iPod for commute!!! Suckage of the highest order! Hope it all gets worked out.
Posted by: Teresa at Tuesday, March 23 2010 03:32 AM (ZCuP9)
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You named your iPod "Eel"?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, March 24 2010 03:09 PM (mfPs/)
3
After the ferret/ferret-girl in
Popotan, who is indeed named "Eel".
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 24 2010 03:32 PM (PiXy!)
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