greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • Fun with RAM

    Twice in the last twelve hours I’ve called the (polite, efficient, helpful) Dedicated Hosting support techs at Infinity Internet (our new hosts!) to reboot this webserver. As near as I can tell, running six websites (no matter how low-traffic) and an email rig on 128 megabytes of RAM just isn’t going to cut it.

    I’ve tweaked some settings here and there to (hopefully) cut down on the chance of another server lock-up between now and Monday (which is the earliest I can talk to someone about upgrading the memory), but if you see my little family of websites go “poof” between now and then… well, now you’ll know why.

    Unless, of course, the server vapor-locks before you can read this. In which case you’ll be able to read all about it next week when I get this resolved…

  • Didja miss me?

    Whew. I ran into a little gotcha right at the end (“hmm, maybe double-checking PHP for MySQL support would’ve been a good idea two days ago…”) but other than that it would seem that my efforts of the past week have paid off.

    Yes, the websites are back. Not that they were ever really gone, thanks to the good efforts of my former corporate overseer, but I feel a whole helluva lot better now that I’m up and running in new digs. There will be bits and pieces of all of our sites that probably won’t be fully functional until I’ve had a chance to tinker with them individually, of course. Please be patient with me, as it’s been quite the couple of weeks.

    I’ll do a nice big “catch up on things” post later. This? I’m mostly just testing to make sure things actually work…

  • Thanks the gods for IM privacy settings.

    This, folks, is why I require authorization to be on my “buddy list.”

    The user 177254271 wants to add you to their buddy list for the following reason:
    Hello, how are you?
    im fine and you?

    Riiiiiight. On a related note, last month’s entry about “missy_kitty” is among the most popular posts I’ve written yet, at least in terms of search engine hits and comments from people I don’t know. It’s so nice to be providing a valuable service, indeed.

  • Make mine pumpkin. With whipped cream.

    Happy Pi Day!

    Actually, this concept will be even funnier in nine years, depending on your preferred date notation.

    Think about it.

  • Thank you, Mother Nature…

    Oh, goody. Because there’s nothing I want more to be doing on my birthday (and the days immediately following) than dealing with possible snow, possible hail, possible lightning & thunder, probable high winds and a definite downpour. If I was (still) the kind of guy who looked for signs in everything, I’d say the universe in general was trying to tell me something.

    Apparently, that something would include the phrase “don’t forget your inversion-resistant umbrella.”

    Geeky side note: I know some “blog” authors like to use the feature of their chosen software that turns the entry title into part of a unique URL instead of just using the index number, but it doesn’t really work out very well in most cases. The “easier to remember” idea is bunk, ’cause the entry address tends to include things like date information, and who’s going to remember that, eh? Another problem is that the URL tends to be insanely long. The most amusing failing of this technique, however, is the way that longer entry titles get truncated arbitrarily. For instance, “Storm on the Horizon” becomes “storm_on_the_ho.html”.

    Methinks it shall storm on the ho and the non-ho alike.

  • Does this qualify as “filk?” I hope not.

    I went to several minutes’ work to create this little monstrosity for a comment on a LiveJournal entry, so by golly I’m going to inflict it on… I mean, share it with my adoring fans. Sharing is caring, after all.

    To the tune of Midnight Oil’s “Blue Sky Mine.”

    So I’m caught at the website still waiting for torrent posts
    Wipe sweat off my brow, keep on clicking search engines
    Hope the crumbs in my keyboard can keep me for another night
    And if the fansub torrent posting scene won’t come to my rescue
    If the anime dubbing industry won’t save me
    Who’s gonna save me?

    But if I click all day at the torrent site
    (There’ll be files on the hard drive tonight)
    Still I scroll up and down on the torrent site
    (There’ll be high bandwidth usage tonight)

    And some have RAWs from a distant shore
    And the fansubbers take what the fanboy hordes want
    And nothing’s as anxious, as a codec not found…

    No, I didn’t “do” the whole song. Would you want me to? I didn’t think so. Hah!

    For those of you desiring context, you may find it at EK’s LJ post which started things off…

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