Windows is not old. UNIX is old, and behaves as many older people do, working calmly and quietly in the background, running everything.
Windows is 20 years of age, and like most 20-year olds, is annoying, unable to multi-task well, and thinks the world revolves around it.
Yep, I changed my Powerbook’s wallpaper again. This was just posted on the Midway Boards, and I felt it made for the best MKSM wallpaper yet.
As far as my main PC goes, though… the parts arrived this morning. So, hardware-wise, I’m good to go. Unfortunately, my copy of Windows XP Professional 64-bit hasn’t arrived yet. So, do I wait for the 64-bit version, or just go ahead and work with the 32-bit version? Decisions, decisions…
Fortunately, I can wait a day or so, as I’ll be working late doing a hardware upgrade on a server at the colocation. Either way, I’m pretty sure I can spend this weekend upgrading the main server with the main PC’s old components. Fun fun…
Anyway, speaking of the colocation, time for me to head that way…
Well, I did some serious thinking about it today, and realized that if I was going to get a new video card, it’d have to be something I could put in future PCs. Unfortunately, the old card was an AGP card, and recent motherboards et al support PCI Express and not AGP. So, I decided now was the time to upgrade the main PC. So, I ordered a new CPU, motherboard, and RAM for the main PC off of Newegg.
The new system will have an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ CPU, an Asus A8N-SLI motherboard with an nForce 4 chipset, 1 GB of PC3200 RAM, and an ATI Radeon X800GT video card w/ 256 MB of RAM. The old parts will be used to upgrade my main server, which I had been planning on upgrading anyway. I’ll also go ahead and dual-boot the new system with Windows XP Professional 64-bit edition and Fedora Core 4 x86_64.
Ah, well. The parts should be in early next week. In the meantime, I’ll go ahead and keep using the Powerbook. There’s very little on the main PC I can do without until the new machine is ready, anyway. :-)
Looks like the video card is fried after all. I still got garbage characters with the new heatsink and fan.
Guess I’m going to be buying a new video card off Newegg tomorrow.
Well, yesterday was a bit of a bummer when I got home. I had to deal with the Fight Night chat on MK Online last night, and had planned on using my Powerbook and my main PC at the same time to keep an eye on the channel, the IRC bot, and any problems that might arise. Well, I switched on the main PC, and the screen was filled with garbage characters. I ended up going through the event solely on the Powerbook until such time as I could investigate the problem with the main PC.
I ended up checking the machine, and found that the fan on my video card had stopped working. I can get a new heatsink and fan for the card, but the fact that it’s throwing out garbage characters at boot worries me. It’s very likely the card’s FUBARed now. *sigh* So, what I’m going to do is buy a heatsink/fan for a video card and a new video card for the main PC. If the old card starts working with the new heatsink/fan, then I can just return the video card. If not, I can just put the heatsink/fan on the new card. I’ll probably go to Fry’s tomorrow after work and pick them up. Besides, I don’t need anything fancy; I don’t play that many games on my PC anymore.
Oh, well… in the meantime I can still use my Powerbook. Fun fun…
Not sure if anyone really cares, but I decided to try a little something different for my desktop this time around…
For those who don’t know, the characters are Ping and Miho from the online webcomic Megatokyo. I got this off Piro’s FredArt site; it’s the cover to volume 3.
At the very least it makes a change from the Starcraft and Mortal Kombat desktops I WAS using… heh.
Well, if you have absolutely no interest in listening to me prattle on about servers, you can go right ahead and skip this post. :-)
I had planned on doing some upgrades to my servers this past weekend. Obviously, with the storm coming through, that didn’t happen… which is a bit irritating. A couple of weeks ago, Slackware Linux 10.2 was released, and I was planning on upgrading my two main servers up to it. I can’t do it this weekend, though… Fight Night is on Monday, and I can’t risk a botched upgrade keeping me offline until then. I’ll probably do the upgrade a week from Saturday; fortunately all of the user data (including mailboxes) is kept on a separate hard drive from the operating system itself. It’ll just be a bit of a pain to get all of my server software recompiled and operational.
On the other hand, we did manage to make the “datacenter” area of the house look a lot nicer a week ago last Sunday. While I was at Fry’s the previous day, I managed to get my hands on a four-port KVM switch with cables that was on sale for $35. So, we ended up moving my test server out of another room, and putting it with the two main servers. We also cleaned up all the cables, got them organized and tied down, and now the setup looks a lot neater. The only disadvantage that we found was that having three servers on that APC BackUPS Pro 350 doesn’t exactly work. I had managed to trip a breaker while reheating pizza in my room’s microwave, and the UPS didn’t even last a minute before giving out. I’ll probably have to pick up a BackUPS Pro 1000 or something over the next week or two. For now, though, the test server is just plugged into a surge suppressor; it doesn’t need to be on 24/7. Oh, well.
I had a bit of fun with servers last night, too. With the release of Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, the Mortal Kombat Online server was seriously dragging under the weight of the extra traffic. I ended up doing some research on fine-tuning the Apache (webserver) and MySQL (database) installs, and after taking a look at the configuration settings on both, I came to a rather nasty revelation. Apparently, as part of my desperate and frantic efforts to get the server working during the first days of the botched V.7 upgrade, I had made some serious screwups with the Apache installs. For example, the system was generating more spare processes than maximum allowed client connections. In other words, the system had a LOT of spare Apache processes running that would never be used. I ended up scaling that back and making it a lot more sane. I also tweaked some of the cache settings for MySQL. The end result was that the MK Online site started being a LOT more responsive. We’ll see if this keeps up, but if it does, it’s certainly a weight off our own shoulders. One of the problems with running site software developed in-house is that if stuff goes wrong, it’s up to you to figure out how to fix it.
Anyway, enough of this… I need to go check on a few things here at the office. Fun…
http://zone-mr.net/?act=entry&id=36
I just saw this over on Slashdot, and thought it was a damn good example of dumb criminals picking the wrong people to fuck with. Apparently what happened was at a get-together thrown by an online smartphone community, some assclown decided to steal a Motorola(?) C550 cell phone. The community, however, was able to track him down… :-)
It appears that Gmail is finally out of beta and open to anyone. Well… anyone in the United States and with a cell phone. So, I went ahead and got Google Talk set up as well.
If you want to go ahead and add me, my username is drkbish (at) gmail dot com. (Sorry, looks lame to avoid spam.)