Website

WordPress is a far better blogging system, regardless of whether I'm a Drupal developer or not.

So today I was having a conversation with a co-worker from our Portland office and the following emerged from my fingertips:

"Yes well you don't have to live with me so it's hard for you to see :). I have to live with me see... although I keep trying to get me to move out. I'm getting on my nerves."

I'm sure everyone's had a point in their life where they have thought something close to this.

Well I suppose it would be good to let everyone know what's going on...

Nothing! BWAHAHAHAHA!

Okay in all seriousness now, I really haven't been doing much of note lately other than work :). I'm currently finishing up a large refurb project on quite a few computers I've inherited/bought. When the machines are (finally) finished, I'll have loads of computing power and absolutely no clues what to do with it! :) Actually I have quite a few ideas, I'm just not sure which ones I have time to implement. Also from the house of Power Consumption: I just aquired three SMC 8624T TigerSwitch(es). These switches are fantastic devices and SMC's warranty on them is wonderful. They replaced a unit which had the password set to something strange and after five minutes on the phone with them, sent me a brand new RoHS model (which I dig). I'm giving one of these units to Devin who set me wise to their abilities. Thanks D!

Beyond the computers I'm working on a couple of solutions for a renewable power system. Right now my server room circuit is pushing 10A and with all the new machines coming online it will probably be near 25A of constant-load power (this is when they're _idling_). Now that works out to a ton of power consumed each hour and while power rates in Snohomish County are better than Whatcom, they're still moderately pricey. So the plan is to try and implement something solar (I have a relatively reasonable amount of roof-space) to supplement my existing power grid. Currently I'm researching the solutions others have come up with in an attempt to find one that will work easily for me and my budget.

I think it would also be nice to come up with a sort of continuous monitoring system for power and heat in the server room. My summer projects include building a rig to hold at least one air conditioner for the machine room and I want the ability to monitor the room environment and if possible, adjust it remotely. The biggest problem with closing a room to outside air is, if your cooling dies, your machines die with it, literally. I gambled on a heavy-duty Kenmore AC unit up in Bellingham (and won... that time) but I really don't want to do that again, not with so much equipment at stake. The biggest problem will be balancing the heat load with the air conditioner's capabilities. 10K BTUs will not work this time around, so I may have to put two 12K units in to handle the heat load. I have yet to do the wattage computations for the machine room so I can figure out how much heat I'm creating.

Honestly I don't have the slightest clue why I'm putting so much work into this (I'm literally creating my own mini-datacenter). But it keeps me busy and I get to play with computing hardware, which is something I'm very good at.

Finally a shout out to Ryan who just moved into his first house (well first house he owns). Grats man, hope it's a wonderful experience.

And on that note I'm going to get back to work! Have a pleasant day everyone.

So Dreamhost upgraded it's PHP version a little while back to 5.1.something. Unfortunately this little upgrade broke my Drupal site (which runs on 4.7) due to a bug in the way Drupal handles session management. So I decided to put off upgrading until I felt like it was neccessary. This is not to say that it's a diffcult process, far from it. It took me about 3 minutes to do the upgrade... I'm just lazy :).

I've attached two images below that I saw while looking through a forum this morning. The pokemon one is amusing, the tg3_1 is just... bizzare.

Enjoy! :)

I forgot to mention I got a free domain reg with my Dreamhost setup I ordered. So I ended up going with dotnetdotcom.org. Yes I know, it's completely dorky but I like it :).

My problem is I have no ideas what to do with this domain! Suggestions are welcome, even the whacky ones! Mindstorm (stormsim.com) provides all my major services and I have no intentions of going through the stress of moving anything over. In otherwords I'm free to do random stuff on my new domain.

So toss ideas at me!

So back at Gottathink I ran into a slight problem with a customer taking up 11G of our precious 30G spindle on one of the VPS accounts. My boss was (of course) freaking out and wanting to know who it was.

Well unfortunately Gottathink hadn't implemented quotas on any boxes up until that point (I didn't set them up so don't glare at me like that) so I had to whip up something that would tell me the offender quickly.

The following script came to me:

for i in *; do if [ -d $i ]; then du -hs $i; fi; done

What this does is simply find out the size of every directory that exists in the current directory.

It would be really easy to make this recursive so you could pinpoint the problem if need be.

If you need to limit the number of returned records, simply pipe the output through sed or if you're really lazy, grep.

So I've been pondering getting a Dreamhost account for a bit now and I think I just discovered a reason to do so! A Gallery system.

Admittedly I know I don't have a digital camera (oh how I want one though...) however I know plenty of friends with them and they all seem to be trying to host their galleries off their home lines, which isn't pretty. Pictures + Low Upstream = Sad Browser.

So why not get a Code Monster account and install some Gallery systems for my friends to use? Plus it would give me a nifty place to put large things I don't want being served off my home line.

I figure with a 4TB bandwidth limit that increases by 32GB a month it's not likely the account will go over limit (it had better not!) and with 400G pretty much anything can be stored there.

Anyway that's my thoughts. Any of you that would like a free (fast) place to store images or other large things? Let me know!

Those of you who want access to the friends areas will need to sign up (use a username I can recognize or use an e-mail address you know I have on file :)). I'll drop you into the friends role as soon as I see the e-mail from Drupal.

I'm currently tweaking the site and the theme to my preferences so don't be surprised if you see some changes happening in the near future. This theme is nice but I'm not quite happy about how it looks.

Recommendations are welcome! I'll probably be hacking up some modules to do stuff that Drupal doesn't do but we'll save that for later.

Anyway I must get back to my hacking. Enjoy the new site.

PS: The old blog posts are available here http://nickw.stormsim.com/site/aggregator/sources/1