Tomicles' Blog » Computers

Cross Country Trip 2009

tomicles — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 04:34:15 +0000

I am writing this as I sit waiting for my delayed flight to Boston from San Francisco. My younger sister decided to move from Boston to Portland and I am helping her move her car across the country. I’ve brought some toys to keep me connected and report my position along the way. Tomorrow there will be more photos of my setup as I get it installed in her car. My tracking site is located at the following URL: http://whereami.tomicles.com/ and if everything goes as planned it will update my position every 10 seconds or so while on the trip.

slut-o-meter

Tomicles — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 12:26:33 +0000

The slut-o-meter has finally been moved to its new home, just a few ip addresses away and 2 computers higher in the rack at he.net, provided by Community Colo. Its not got a lot more ram, a much faster processor and it is actually a Dell PowerEdge server, instead of the ghetto piece of crap that it was running on before.

Specs:
2.8ghz HT P4
2gb DDR2 RAM
6gb SWAP <– site died on old server when swap ran out
250gb of sata disk space
10mbps

Digg.com –>Slut-o-meter.com –> Server==Dead

Tomicles — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 12:13:15 +0000

Today slut-o-meter.com got posted on Digg.com. It took a couple of hours to get upgraded to the front page, but once it did, mysql on my server couldn’t handle it. Adam Smith quickly jumped in and limited the type of statistics that were being reported and offloaded a few static parts of the site to another server but it was not enough. Eventually all of the system’s RAM as well as its SWAP were completely full and after traveling to HE.net to check it out, I found the server’s console with the image seen at the bottom of this post. It was not possible to login via SSH or from the console itself so my server lost its 319 days of uptime. Because I had to reboot the server to fix these memory issues, I also upgraded to the current legacy kernel once it rebooted to take care of any potential security flaws. It now appears to be working just fine, but the load has also gone down quite a bit. In the morning when I get up, I’ll be installing some Linux OS on my Dell SC420 to place at the colo as a backup system. I’ll also configure this box to do secondary DNS, and be a box usable for offloading sites in the event of a flash flood like today.

EVDO Speed

Tomicles — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 22:45:02 +0000

Im working on my homework and studying at Coffee Society at the pruneyard right now, and I’m using my EVDO wireless because the wireless here is free, but its quite slow. I decided to do a speed test of the EVDO and got the best results I’ve seen thus far.

I saw it go as high as 1745 on the down and then it settled out to 1627/124

my previous fastest test was just about 1000/118

I love my Mac

Tomicles — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 06:19:05 +0000

So today I backed up all my crap on my laptop so I can reinstall the OS. Its just gotten a little cluttered since I got it and its just that time again. I booted off the DVD to start the format/reinstall, and had an “oh crap” moment. Luckily, from the installer it lets you load up the terminal app. I plugged in my iPod, and copied the files i forgot to backup to my ipod from the installer. <3

Week of 8/15/2005

tomicles — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 06:47:28 +0000

This week I had a lot going on. For starters, I took the boat trailer to get painted and sandblasted in santa clara and went on a nice bikeride to the top of St. Joseph’s Hill where I saw a very nice sunset. I went up to Sausalito again to help out my friend Alfonso with some computer stuff, as well as worked a bit for Cybermanor. Later in the week I went to the Control4 Real Tour off highway 92 with Gordon from Cybermanor. This was a small demonstration of the Control4 system and how they will integrate into homes of the future for home control and automation. They presented some cool aspects of home automation that I just never thought of before, including some major safety features. Some of these safety features include shutting off central air if there is a fire to stop the spread of smoke, and the flashing of exterior lights in the event of a fire to help firefighters find the location, if for example the flames and/or smoke are not visible. The whole control4 system communicates via 3 methods. It will use Ethernet, 802.11, or Zigbee. Zigbee is the slowest but also the coolest of the three, and is only used for sending control commands, like switching a light on or off because it is quite slow on the throughput, but it is a meshed network, and with a range that isn’t that great, you just need to add more zigbee devices, such as dimmers or switches, to extend the network further in the home. they relay signals off of each other, know how to figure out the quickest path, and will correct the path if a part of the home looses power.

I joined the Dark Side, and have not looked back.

tomicles — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 01:15:15 +0000

On August 8th, I finally decided to bite the bullet and actually buy myself a PowerBook. I got myself a 1.5ghz 15” with the standard 80gb and 512mb with the addition of the superdrive. Two days later I got a PCMCIA EV-DO Verizon Card for mobile broadband internet, and discovered that the PCMCIA jack was busted on the PowerBook, so I took it back, and they gave me another one. I think by this point between the Mac Mini and having two PowerBooks, I’ve installed OSX about a dozen times. Two days later I ran into an issue for work where I planned on going to Huntington, yet one of my clients needed me to have internet access over the weekend. I went to Valley Fair and got myself a EV-DO access card. This card provides both 1X (144kbps) and EV-DO (384-1800kbps) access in areas where the specific type of service is available. Currently in the bay area EV-DO service is only available at the San Jose Airport, but it should have greater coverage hopefully by the end of the 3rd quarter, if not then it will be available by the end of the year. It will be like getting my Ricochet wireless back, the broadband mobile service from several years ago that I really miss a lot. With this new card I plan on making myself a StompBox (http://www.stompbox.com). This is basically a small embedded computer with the Verizon EV-DO Wireless WAN Card in it. The box also has a wireless network card to share access from the verizon service to any laptop that is within wireless range. People are building these boxes into their car, and adding cool internet related services such as GPS tracking with webcam snapshots. I plan on building at least one of these boxes. Build it into my car with webcam, gps and all. During the summer however it belongs on my boat. The webcam will provide me with remote pictures of Huntington lake while I’m in the bay area. The 144kbps service that i can get through this card is much faster than any dial-up connection that people up there are accustomed to.

Super Happy Dev House 3

tomicles — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 01:08:09 +0000

Super Happy Dev House III was a blast. I cant say that I really accomplished anything, but I did learn a few cool tricks on my new Mac Mini. I learned that if you hold down the shift key while minimizing a program it will minimize in slow motion down to the dock, and if you kill the dock’s process id while its in motion, it will freeze in its current shape and you can use the window as if it was a normal shape, the window itself has no idea that its size has been altered. For example, you can do this with Firefox, and the browser continues to work properly in the genie shape. Kinda cool if you ask me. I brought my own car this time because I knew that I wouldn’t make it past about 2:30am.

Super Happy Dev House 2

tomicles — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 06:35:43 +0000

On July 9th I went to Super Happy Dev House II (SHDH). This was my first SHDH and I had myself a great time. I took my Dell laptop with me, and just to give you an idea of the type of crowd that was there, one of the first questions someone asked me was “What distro are you running” and sadly I had to say XP Pro. I drank lots of Redbull, and stayed and worked on blogs among other things, and Jenn came to pick me up around 3am and that was that.

Slashdot.org 500 Internal Server Error

Tomicles — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 03:47:12 +0000

Looks like slashdot is down for the first time since I can remember.