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.

Sunday, December 31

World

So Let All Tyrants Perish!

From The Age:
Saddam Hussein is dead, hanged at dawn in Baghdad for crimes against humanity.
And there was much rejoicing.

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Friday, December 29

Anime

Meeeee!

Download ElectricSistaHood episode 31. Listen starting at 8m30 through to about 10m00.*

That's me they're talking about. smile

And then they segue into a discussion on Ghostbusters. These girls rock!

* And the rest of it too. Uguu!!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:49 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, December 28

Geek

Who's A Pretty Bot?

With new servers coming soon, and lots of new users with them, I've been looking for a good monitoring system.

Simple Server Monitor is what it says. It monitors your servers - on ping, HTTP, SMTP and/or POP - and screams like a stuck parrot if anything goes down.* It also plots little graphs of response times. Not fancy, but it fills the immediate need.

I also tried out Spiceworks, which is kind of neat, but really designed for monitoring small office networks. It's written in Ruby (using Rails), and runs in the background, accessed through your browser. For a Web app, it's pretty neat, though for a monitoring system it gives me a great deal of information I don't want. Doesn't seem to like monitoring the web servers, either.

Zenoss is probably quite good if you work with SNMP 7 days a week. Otherwise, avoid. The simplest way to set it up involves downloading a pre-packaged virtual machine and running it under VMWare.

PortSensor is another simple monitoring tool, but a very flexible one since you can have it execute custom shell scripts remotely via SSH and process the results using regular expressions. Naturally I'd rather not do any of that, and it doesn't have any particularly significant functionality built in. It's more a sort of monitoring toolkit.

Simple Server Monitor I'm keeping until I find something better; the others have hit the bit bucket.

* Well, that last is due to the alert sound I chose.

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Tuesday, December 26

Geek

Bum!

MySQL supports large files if your operating system does. So there's no need to worry about your application dropping dead if a particular MyISAM table exceeds 4GB.

Except that the default table pointer size is 32 bits.

And it seems that changing it from 32 to 40 bits slows database writes by about 10%.

Not that I will necessarily be using MyISAM. What I was doing when my table hit 4GB was finding out whether to use MyISAM or InnoDB.

Well, off we go again. About 4500 inserts per second right now (at one record per query, which is far from the fastest method, but is after all what the application will be doing).

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Geek

Blah

Apache and Exim ganged up on me again. I caught it early this time, when it was only 1GB into swap. Load average peaked at over 1000.

Crap.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:20 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Life

Dear Santa

Please could I have for Christmas:

  • A laser printer.
  • A rubber ducky.
  • And a winning lottery ticket.

...

Ooh, thanks Santa!*

* Okay, so it was not a very winning lottery ticket...

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Monday, December 25

Geek

Irony

IronPython is a version of Python written in C# for the .Net platform. It's intended as an embedded scripting language for .Net applications, but can also be used to quickly assemble applications from components written in other .Net languages. Since I'm currently working in both Python and .Net, this is of interest to me, so I downloaded IronPython* and ran my little benchmark.

And then I went and had dinner, and read a book, and read some blogs, and had some ice cream, and then came and posted this. Because IronPython has a leetle performance problem relative to CPython**; or rather, it lacks at least one very important optimisation from CPython. See if you can spot what it is:

SystemCPUClockPythonLoopStringScanTotal
AmeliaCore Duo1.66GHz2.5 (Win)1.2433.1581.0335.434
AmeliaCore Duo1.66GHz2.5 (Win)+Psyco0.0370.4831.1901.710
AmeliaCore Duo1.66GHzIronPython 1.010.6982236.3192.0452239.062

Source code for the benchmark can be found in my earlier post.

* Again; I had it on my old notebook, but that got reformatted and reinstalled at least four times, and in any case I no longer have it.

** The standard version of Python, which is written in C. more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:57 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Geek

Windows Vista: The Paranoid Schizophrenic Operating System That's Coming Soon To A PC Near You If You're Not Careful

Analysis by Peter Gutmann.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:12 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Life

Merry Christmas Eveyone!

And stuff.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:11 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sunday, December 24

Geek

Fate Worse Than Death

Just rescued Akane from a load average of over 800, without rebooting.

Spam flood. Double spam flood, in fact - blog comments and incoming email.

Fluffy wasn't running, and Apache took over the machine, and then exim took it the rest of the way. By the time I logged in it was using nearly 100% of swap.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:07 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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