Mostly about my amusement
I downloaded the Opensuse 10.1 remastered DVD iso. Rather than use bittorrent I located a fast mirror and downloaded the whole thing.
Click on the thumbnail for the graph, it was down a max speed of 17.16 Mbits/sec. That’s insane and I had no idea that Optimum could go that fast.
I’m planning on replacing the basement PII 450 MHz with a 3.2 GHz P4.
I had to move my WordPress installation from the VPS to the machine in my basement. The VPS web server was sending the headers and then closing the connection before sending the web page. Still trying to sort it out.
I upgraded from XP to Vista. Since I purchased my XPS 700 as soon as it came out I did not qualify for Dell’s free Vista upgrade.
My XP install had a ton of junk left on from installing apps, removing them, games I did not play etc. So I figured that I’d just boot off of the Vista upgrade DVD and do a clean install.
The idea was to
Sigh. Well I did backup my data and using the Vista clean install to wipe the hard drive worked perfectly.
Vista would not accept that my hard drive as a valid place to install on. Even putting the drivers from Dell and nvidia on a CD would not work.
I ended up having my two drives separated, installing an unactivated Vista, and downloading and installing vLite.
The vLite application lets you create an install DVD image with the update drivers. It even lets you burn the DVD directly from the application. Until I got the image booted I was in a pretty foul mood since the update XPS BIOS on my machine would no longer install XP Media Center 2005 that came with my XPS 700.
Once that was done I went into the BIOS and re-established the joined drives and started from scratch.
Now steps 3 and 4 worked and I’m keeping the DVD I burned. Using vLite saved me from making a Dell support call that would have ended really badly.
Updated: I bumped the version from 0.9.5 to 0.9.5.1.
The source RPM for 0.9.5.1 can be found here.
The 32 bit compiled version can be found here.
I no longer have access to a x86_64 opensuse installation but running this command:
rpmbuild -bb php5-eaccelerator-0.9.5.1-1.src.rpm
should create them on your system.
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I wanted to add APC or even XCache but found that my PHP version 5.0.4 was not supported. Changing to 5.2.1 did not really seem to work well for me and some plugins did not work. So I went back to the default updated opensuse 10.0 packages.
The PHP cache software eaccelerator 0.9.5 does work with php 5.0.4. In fact sometimes it speeds up php by almost half.
The opensuse 10.0 source rpm I put together can be found here. I built the .x86_64.rpm and put a copy here. The src.rpm will figure out where to put the extension so if you do a rpmbuild on the src.rpm on another opensuse which has php5 installed it should work.
The spec file has some build requirements, most of which can be commented out I am sure. I built it with
configure –enable-eaccelerator=shared –with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config
I put the eaccelerator.cache_dir in /var/spool/eaccelerator and made that directory part of the package.
Inside the footer of my theme I put
<!– <?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries. <?php timer_stop(1); ?> seconds. –>
The timer shows that pages were taking 1.3 seconds or more to generate, sometimes longer.
With eaccelerator I get 0.628 seconds or so.
I also keep
define( ‘ENABLE_CACHE’, true );
in my wp-config.php right below the line that reads define (‘WPLANG’, ”);.
This caches database information such as categories etc. I turned it off and the frequent hitting of my mysql tables introduced a big delay in response time.
Next up will be to tune my mysql settings.
I have been having some weird response times from my WordPress installation. I’m running Opensuse 10.0 which comes with PHP 5.0.4.
PHP caches like APC and XCache don’t work with 5.0.4. I can’t just upgrade the distribution since a) this is a VPS and only 10.0 is offered and b) that would be over the top.
First thing I tried was add the software repo at http://software.opensuse.org/download/server:/php/SUSE_Linux_10.0/. I ran yast, checked php5 and poof it installed. Now I was at php 5.2.1. I kept track of the RPM’s and kept the replaced ones in case the bad thing happened.
Both cache apps are built and installed the same way
Extract the tar.gz file
phpize
./configure –some-options
make && make install
And that’s it. Some php5.ini modification and I’m in business.
APC compiled but blew up php in strange ways. Xcache installed and worked well. Even came with an admin page for checking the stats.
WordPress and some of my plugins don’t seem to like 5.2.1 and even with Xcache I was not seeing an improvement. The problem is that the initial response from the web server is 3-10 seconds to get data. I’ve got WP-Cache installed to see if subsequent page loads are faster (they are) but I think the problem is either my VPS or the network.
I rolled php back to 5.0.4 and removed Xcache. Hopefully the problem will sort itself out.
I have been kicking around the Vista upgrade to Home Premium and it reminds me of the PS3; for now get an Xbox 360 instead.
Vista is like that. If it comes with your new PC great. But there is no need to upgrade.
Overall I like it, but I also like working with broken things.
The upgrade
When I first tried to run the upgrade it told me that I had to remove my Symantec System Works 2006, upgrade my driver for SCSI/RAID, and the firmware on one of my DVD writers.
Dell’s support web site did not have the updated nvidia drivers so I had to get the nforce one’s from Nvidia’s web site. They did have the firmware update for the DVD hardware.
I ran the upgrade and it rebooted. I left the DVD in the drive and naturally it booted up. I thought that it would continue the upgrade from there.
No such luck. After removing the DVD and rebooting the upgrade failed.
SCARY! I ended up turning of booting from the DVD drive in the BIOS but that was not good. I was afraid that the PC would be left unstable but it recovered well. Re-ran, waited, upgrade was successful.
Driver support is goofy. After all was done I went to Nvidia and Creative’s web sites for driver updates. The Nvidia one’s are good but the Creative drivers for the X-Fi sound card are beta and act like it.
Security
The User Account Control is annoy-ware and I suspect that anti-virus vendors will opt to have their users turn it off and let the anti-virus app do it’s work.
The increased security from UAC is IMHO not really increased security at all. It’s just “Well YOU selected to install that code, so WE’RE off the hook”.
If Vista had something such as sudo to escalate privileges then I might be inclined to like it. But that assumes an informed user who knows what privilege escalation is. That’s not Microsoft’s fault exactly but click through security is not really useful.
I’m not turning it off (yet) but comparisons to the TSA’s war on liquids comes to mind.
User interface
Well it sure is pretty and I’ll admit easier to use. It’s also a pretty blatant rip of OSX 🙂
The Start Menu has been revamped and takes some getting used to. The Start Search field is good, you type part of the name of the app and it locates it. The old Start -> All Programs always dissolves into a mess if you install lots of apps in the default location. This does not really fix a disorganized menu as much as makes it less obviously disorganized.
The Window effects are nice eye candy. If you use other video codecs then you should follow the instructions at Respect Sakura. I use the Media Player Classic all the time and this makes it work better (and look nicer) in Vista.
Built in gadgets side bar is cool. It’s naturally better integrated than Konfabulator but feels less developed.
Media Center
I have a Hauppauge PVR-350 card in my PC hooked up to my cable line. I like to watch TV in a window from time to time.
The Media Center is more responsive and does work better than the same one in MCE 2005. In MCE 2005 pausing live TV or re-winding always worked badly if at all. Now it is very responsive and works well.
Firefox, iTunes, Games oh my
No Firefox integration yet. Clicking on links runs Internet Explorer 7. Seriously annoying.
The iTunes works oddly. I ran the iTunes fix and that helped but iTunes get’s twitchy when I sync up my iPod and locks up a lot.
My games work well mostly. Every now and then the sound dies and I need to restart the PC. That will probably change once the sound drivers are no longer beta.
Conclusion
As I’ve said there is no reason to upgrade. A tuned Windows XP with good AV and utilities works better right now. I’m not going to roll back (can I?) but I think Vista is too immature to make the switch.
If I get a new PC it will have Vista but other than that Vista is a pass.
The RSS feed on this web site became broken and I tracked it down to the Tarski Links widget. I use the Tarski theme as one of my two themes. The regular links widget looks awful so the Tarski theme guys came up with a replacement that looks pretty good.
But it breaks my RSS feed. Enabling that plugin somehow caused a blank line to be inserted before my feed. I did not bother to report it to the Tarski or WordPress forums since I am sure that I somehow made a mistake when I copied the code.
While I was playing with the code and confirming that I am not a programmer, I realized that I wanted some of the widgets to go away when people look at a post. I came across Otto’s page and installed the Executable PHP Widget.
Before widgets became available, I would add to the sidebar.php file the functions I wanted to display, like the weather icon. Being able to run PHP code in a widget is pretty useful.
I removed the Tarski Links widget and copied the following code lifted from links.php in the Tarski theme. This was pasted into the PHP Code widget.
<?php
if (is_home()) :
echo “<div class=”bookmarks”>n”; wp_list_bookmarks(’category_before=&category_after=
&title_before=<h3>&title_after=</h3>
&show_images=0&show_description=0′);
echo “</div>n”;
endif;
?>
And poof the Blogroll links look good, my RSS feed works and I am happy. On the home page it appears, any other page it doesn’t. I repeated this a couple of times with other items on my sidebar.
The correct way would be to code this all as a widget, and include a check mark for “show on home page only” but I’m not a programmer and this works for me.
This morning Lily saw the Toy’s R Us flyer with a Nintendo Wii bundle. It came with
The store opened at 11 am. We were the sixth couple and we got two sets. We are giving one set to our niece and nephew.
So now in my living room I have an XBOX 360, a PS3, and soon a Nintendo Wii. On the Xbox I play Burnout Revenge, on the PS3 I’d love to play Call of Duty 3 (Sigh, can’t explain or play that one around the kids), and on the Wii Rayman is too cool to put down.
Can’t wait to get an additonal remote and nunchuk…
Image lifted from Kotaku.com
According to Wikipedia:
“A virtual private server (also referred to as virtual dedicated server or virtual server, and abbreviated VPS or VDS) is a server run through virtualization in tandem with other virtualized servers on one physical computer.”
Which is a pretty good description. I use TekTonic as my VPS provider and I don’t have a complaint about their service since I get a good uptime. I pay a really good fee and definitely get what I pay for.
But I think with any VPS there are things you need to check on. I notice that processes that I need (oh say, my apache web server) will inexplicably die without any reason in the log.
Lately I have not been getting my mailed database backups. I have a cron job that backs up all my blog data and files, and another one on my basement for pulling down the gpg encrypted file so no data has been lost. The mail process died (postfix, only listens on localhost) and a weeks worth of automated mail got queued up. I also need named since this host is a back DNS server for my domain.
I was thinking of doing uber script magic then I realized I should just put the following into root’s crontab.
0,15,30,45 * * * * /usr/sbin/rcapache2 start >/dev/null 2>&1
0,15,30,45 * * * * /usr/sbin/rcnamed start >/dev/null 2>&1
0,15,30,45 * * * * /sbin/rcpostfix start >/dev/null 2>&1
It’s not elegant but it works. I don’t need to know if it was successful or not and this was a quick fix.
Saw this link on Digg. Engadget had some info on this last month too.
The PayPal Security Key.
Generates a unique six-digit security code about every 30 seconds. You enter that code when you log in to your PayPal or eBay account with your regular user name and password. Then the code expires – no one else can use it.
Two factor authentication available on PayPal. They look like a bank so it’s about time.
I don’t use PayPal much. I have concerns about getting verified and dislike a company getting access to my bank account. Credit cards have an established dispute system in place for fraud; someone charges my PayPal account and gets it from my bank money and it’s good luck to me.
If I did use PayPal frequently then I’d get this immediately and make sure charges and transfers must use this. It won’t protect against the smart phisher (Phisher: “all we need is your code for 30 seconds, plenty of time!”) but it will help against sites that harvest peoples IDs and static passwords.
