Just read an interesting interview with this guy who invented a laser based detection device. It can identify the 3 parts of tylenol through the plastic bottle and tell you what type of plastic the bottle is made out of. NASA is planning on using it for a 2009 based Nuclear mars rover mission to be able to identify anything on the surface of mars very quickly. The device can identify the makeup spectrum of anything, but has to have seen it before to identify what it is. They are currently making a database of everything known on earth, to be able to identify it. They even said you could point it at a leaf from a tree, and it would tell you what kind of tree it came from. But you can read it yourself linked below. Its this sort of stuff that makes me want to get a degree in Astronomy or some other non engineering field that will in someway be linked to the space industry.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1581469.htm

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

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.

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