I’m such a geek…
I added an extra gig of RAM to my server… bringing the total to 2GB. That should allow for slightly quicker response times for you… and for me… more virtual machines at once! And other advantages.
No… it wasn’t REALLY needed, but it was cheap (as far as DDR goes anyway)… so I got it.
I recently read an interesting article (found on digg.com) that showed how someone that is not tech savvy can use ubuntu. Overall, I was impressed by how usable it really was for her. However, I think that the article also points out some minor usability flaws with Ubuntu as seen by the average Joe users. That is probably the best way to find these kind of issues and improve upon them. Very cool!
I think Ubuntu has really earned its title over the years. It has become my distribution of choice both for its ease of use and manageability. I use it on my server…. and when I get a gaming console and give up PC gaming (for the most part)… I will probably use Ubuntu on my desktop… making my life completely Unix based… with Windows on the side in a virtual machine.
There has been some talk about several cable companies thinking about switching to a system where they charge by the byte of data that goes through your connection. I need to say something about this…
NO! That is a terrible idea, period. One article I’ve read is saying they are talking about caps from 5 to 40 GBs. Are they fucking serious?? The web browsing that my mom does in a given month can _easily_ hit 5GB. And she is not downloading big stuff.
In total each month… I estimate usage upwards of 500GB at least. This is spread amongst many computers… somewhere around 7 computers. Additionally, we have VoIP… each month that has a fair amount of traffic as well… I’ve never metered it but I estimate probably around 5GB in a month.
And these numbers are 12 to 100 times higher than their caps of just 5 to 40GB. While details of how they are going to charge are still unknown…. but guestimating from these numbers… I can probably predict that our bills would be pretty high… for the SAME crappy internet connection.
And if they try to make it seem like a better deal by boosting their speeds, then that’ll make it that much easier for us to increase that 500GB/mon usage… And they still can’t guarantee that high speed all of the time.
Charging by the byte is a HUGE step backwards. That is the same as dial-up services charging by the hour which is mostly gone now. It’s like your POTS phone company charging by the call.
If I ever find myself having to limit the internet usage (“Maybe I shouldn’t download the DVD ISO for [linux distribution of choice]“) then I will throw up… on the front lawn of the appropriate ISP.
I urge everyone to make their opinion on this issue known. The only people that can possibly benefit from this are old people just check their e-mail once a week, which isn’t the majority.
Tonight, I was using my server for a lot of various tasks when… suddenly it left the network. I did all I could to restart the networking system to no avail. I ended up having to reboot the server (safely, not forcibly). There is no reason anything that you see should be affected… but certainly let me know if there are any problems.
To my defense, I was using the machine very heavily at the time… but that is still no excuse. Plus, it’s never happened before, so needless to say, I will be investigating. Perhaps I will add a second NIC to help prevent problems like this in the future because… this server is headless (no graphics card even– I basically hooked up a keyboard and blindly typed commands). Maybe even setting up a serial console could be nice to help me to fix these issues without a reboot.
On my end… no hard drive corruption occurred– all data is fine. The only real issue I’m going to be having is figuring out everything that was running and not anticipating a reboot. This is the first major reboot since the server has been set up, so there are most likely some things I’ve forgotten to have happen on a reboot. I just have to find those things.
And for the record… the uptime was somewhere around 47 days, 5 hours.
I have noticed the weirdest thing happening to me lately. I have started to realize that I have my best ideas in the middle of the night… in the time between when I say I need to get to bed and the time when I actually get to bed.
So, right now I’m in that period of time. I told myself it’s time to get to bed around 1:30am, which was about an hour ago. At that point, I start putting things away and preparing to go to bed. Often times in that process, I will get distracted by something, often times something that I have told myself I’ll worry about some other time. Then I’ll go from there until I feel satisfied with the result.
What the hell am I saying? Ok… I think the best way is to just tell what I did tonight. I told myself it’s time for bed and started heading that way. Then, I suddenly saw my calculus homework that I didn’t feel like doing earlier because I had no idea what I was doing. I picked it up telling myself that I’ll just write down the problems and worry about it tomorrow (I had intended to actually copy it from someone else, actually). But as I was copying down the problems, I found myself curious about the solutions. And before I knew it, I was working through it and figuring it out. I was making obvious mistakes along the way and instead of saying “screw it,” I kept going. Before I knew it, I was done with it and I’m fairly confident I ended up with the correct answers– confident enough to bet money on it.
This is not a unique occurrence. This has happened to me many times before. I made a blog post last semester about a similar situation in which it was the middle of the night when I finally felt like working on a paper. That is really odd because papers are not minor things… and I did end up staying up very late that night working on the paper. I finally told myself I NEED to stop… but I did get really far on it.
Another example is just the other night, too. Sometimes it isn’t just homework or something I haven’t felt like doing. Sometimes it’s just thinking about stuff, and talking to myself (you may not know that about me, but I do talk to myself… a lot actually). There was a computer problem that I had been trying to figure out for several weeks now. I’m not going to bore you with the details, but just last night, I was thinking about it very systematically, when I suddenly came up with the ultimate solution to the problem. Once I get some parts, I will be implementing the solution… and it will work, I know it.
So… I guess you could say my brain is most active in the middle of the night… which definitely explains why I have a hard time getting to be before 3 or 4 am every night.
And then I found $20.
Happy Earth Day! I hope everyone is conserving energy! I am. Every little bit helps, remember.
I’m rather disappointed in USA… We gotta help move them up the rankings here!
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