I picked up the plans from plan check today (this is from 2nd submittal), and there were 8 changes needed. This is tiny compared to the 1st submittal.
At least the 3rd (and hopefully final) submittal can be done “over the counter” right there since there are so few changes.
Dude, this issue has been bugging me for months on my Mac… A couple apps would never play any sound (most notably Macromedia Flash). Anyway, I finally was able to find the solution, so hopefully someone searching Google will find this post useful.
Go to Applications -> Utilities -> Apple MIDI Setup
Check the Audio Output Format (somehow mine was set to 96000.0 Hz) and set it to 48000.0 Hz (or lower).
So to celebrate that I have Flash audio again, I’m glad to present you with a newly released Denny “Blazen” Hazen video (the funny thing about this video is it’s actually 100x better than his previous ones)…
I did an interview with Zeropaid.com a week or two ago, and it was just posted in case anyone wants to read more about the MPAA stuff going on…
//www.zeropaid.com/news/6466/MPAA+v+Shawn+Hogan%3A+The+Zeropaid+Interview
Finally got the last (physical) piece for the blade servers (120GB RAM [60 x 2GB DIMMs]). I’m a swell counter because I counted them 5 or 6 times, and each time I counted them, I came up with 40, so I thought they shorted me 20 DIMMs for a 10 minutes or so. 🙂
So I was messing around with init.d, and wrote a script for it to automatically start the memcached daemon on boot. No biggie there, but this is a newer init.d than I had worked with in the past, and you can put comments in your script to easily enable/disable it for various run-levels. For example insserv -d memcached will configure init.d for the default run-levels defined within the script. Sweet, that’s pretty handy. I also got rsyncd (along with it’s init.d setup) up and running, so keeping the servers in sync should be cake.
Oh yeah… I had an interesting idea last night when doing all this stuff… why not configure all 10 blade servers identically (for example database servers have Apache and web content locally and web servers have database server processes installed). Then set an environment variable within /etc/profile.local along the lines of SYSTEM_TYPE = "database" (for database server). Then when the server boots, have it automatically configure itself as needed based on the SYSTEM_TYPE. That would make it super easy to change the job of a server on the fly. Just change the SYSTEM_TYPE variable and viola!, a database server could become a web server and added to the web cluster instantly. It would be even more interesting if the servers all monitored themselves, and if they were under heavy web load (but light on database), have one of the database servers automatically reset it’s SYSTEM_TYPE variable. Basically it would be automatic reallocation of servers/resources to whatever was needed at the time. Could be cool…
I’m an f’ing dork BTW. 🙂
I spent most of the day getting crap installed on the first blade as well as learning about little quirks with SuSE Linux Enterprise 9.3.
MySQL 5.0.21 was an easy install (a nice little RPM for SuSE Linux comes from MySQL).
Memcached was a pretty easy compile/install… just needed to compile/install eventlib first.
The big bitch was getting PHP 5.1.4 compiled and working properly with all the options I wanted (had to install all sorts of secondary stuff that PHP had dependencies on [and then a lot of those things had their own dependencies that needed to be resolved]) and compiled a couple dynamic extensions for it (eAccelerator and Memcache). Most of the problems with the configure script not being able to find libraries it needed was solved with the –with-libdir=lib64 parameter.
I really hope that once the first blade is setup exactly how I want it, I can use the hardware RAID mirroring to just swap out one of the drives into another blade and rebuild the mirrors (and repeat for each blade)… then just set a unique IP address and hostname for each blade/server.
I still need to code some stuff to keep some of the files in sync properly (for example each web server should mirror content on each blade), but I’ll do that next week I guess.
Once the blades are all configured and ready to go, I can do some of the more fun stuff… like setting up the load balancers. I think I’m going to use the load balancers for both web and database connections for both load balancing and fault tolerance. So much good dorky fun!
Well awesome… came home from playing poker last night at around 12:30 am, parked in my “secure” gated parking structure, and went to run some errands at 11:00 am this morning, and my car is gone.
That’s rad.
My company, Digital Point Solutions (formerly known as Data Point Solutions) has been on the web for 10 years now. It sure seems like a lot longer though considering how much different stuff I’ve done in that timeframe (for example, I’ve dominated [hehe… no really] 3 different industries).
Will be interesting to see what happens in the next 10 years…
Just got back from the Early Neutral Evaluation Conference with Judge William McCurine, Jr. (who was a remarkably nice and likable guy). Overall it was a waste of time (as expected) though because they really just want the two opposing sides to figure out a way they can settle without going to a full trial. Judge McCurine asked ██ â–ˆ █████ ██ ██████████ ██ ████████ ███ ████ (not that the MPAA/Universal offered that)… which of course â–ˆ ████ ██ █████ â–ˆ ████ ██ ████████ ██ ███ ██ ███ ███████████ ███ â–ˆ ███ ███████ ██ █████ ███ ██████ ██ ████ ██ █████ █████ ██████ ████ ████ ████ ████████ ██████ ███████ they asked for it. I guess he isn’t a regular reader of my blog, because if he was, he would have known that already (heh.. that’s a joke BTW).
I almost was late for the whole thing because I forgot how to tie a tie. hahaha!
Their lawyers were blabbing about ███ ██ ███ █████ ██ ████ â–ˆ ████ ████ █████████ ██ ███████ ████ ████████████. Hahaha… that’s a weird argument for a court, eh? Thanks for the compliment… I would pay to hear that argument in court. 🙂
Since I have no interest whatsoever in their extortion settlement offer, we will be going for a trial. Judge McCurine did say ██ ███ █████ ██ ███ ██ ████ ██ ██ █████ ████ ████ (█████ â–ˆ █████ ██ â–ˆ █████ ██████), so that’s cool.
I guess next up is a mutual discovery plan which is due in 3 weeks.
Also… in the last week, I’ve done a couple different interviews regarding this case, so I’ll post links to them when they are published. 🙂
I was getting a map to the courthouse for my Early Neutral Evaluation Conference this afternoon, and I noticed something… Broadway Avenue in downtown San Diego seems to have some sort of quantum warping going on. The buildings on the north side of the street appear to be leaning on the buildings on the south side of the street.
I’ve been down there myself, and that certainly doesn’t appear to be the case when you are up close, but obviously it *is* happening, as you can see when viewed from outer space…
//maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&ll=32.715373,-117.162926&spn=0.002866,0.002765&t=h&om=1
It’s actually pretty interesting how Google splices the images together, because obviously it’s not done in a straight line…
Paralells has their Intel Virtualization solution for Intel based Macs, but someone combined it with VirtueDesktops for a “fast OS switching” system (basically like the fast user switching that is built into OS X).
So you can run OS X, Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc. all at the same time without needing an emulation layer.
Yesterday I spent about 2 hours configuring all sorts of crap in the new network switch… port assignments/names, QoS, SNMP crap, etc.
I forgot that even though changes you make are applied right away, they are lost if you power cycle the equipment. Hahaha… whoops!
Don’t forget this, I know I won’t ever forget it again. 🙂
There are some pretty cool architectural designs from the old Soviet Union that never came to fruition…
//www.muar.ru/ve/2003/moscow/index_e.htm
(via digg)
FIFA’s new rule about racist soccer fans will go into affect next month for the 2006 World Cup. Basically if fans are judged to be racist against an opposing team, the fan’s team will lose 3 points.
Should be interesting to see how they control that. Soccer fans are crazy enough that they would probably just be racist against their own team to make the opposing team loose 3 points. 🙂
The blade chassis arrived on a palette today (and boy, was that an awesome time getting it upstairs), so that means all the new server equipment is here (except for additional RAM).
We got 1 blade chassis, 10 loaded blades (except for RAM right now), 2 load balancers (1 is a hot spare) and a managed 48-port gigabit switch (along with redundant power supply).
Now I need to go to Home Depot and get an extension cord and plug adapter so I can plug the chassis into a 220V outlet.
Until the equipment is ready to be installed in the data center, we have Yashi (and his camera shy brother, Wiggly) standing guard over it all.
I know this is old news for people that have been following the RIAA and MPAA lawsuits, but it’s new to me (now that I’ve been dragged into it, I’ve been reading all I can find). This entry is more of a bookmark entry for myself.
Some interesting stuff that I may find useful for my suit.
I’m sure they are going to want to go diving into my computers, which is fine with me as long as I have assurances they destroy everything afterwards. I’m certainly not going to let them take clones of every computer I own if I can help it. I have enough source code and trade secrets on my computers that I’m sure millions of people would love to get at it.
And the RIAA will have to pay his or her bill.
But the most interesting part to me is that she brought forth RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization) allegations against the RIAA about 6 months ago. Since they haven’t been thrown out of of court yet, I’m assuming the counterclaim has enough merit that it will be forced to go to a full trial. I’m thinking I may be able to do the same thing, considering they “offered” a settlement of $2,500 based on no valid information (a random IP address they could have pulled out of thin air). Then when I refused, they flat out threatened me saying that if I didn’t pay, they would take me to court, and my costs incurred would be much more than $2,500 even if I beat their charges.
If they really believe they have a case against me, why are they “letting me off” for $2,500? They have much more to gain by going the court route. Oh wait… maybe because they are extorting money from people.
I’m not a lawyer (so someone please correct me if I’m wrong), but if I’m able to file a counterclaim that doesn’t get thrown out in court, would this prevent them from dropping their original suit against me (forcing it to go to trial and final judgement)?
At the beginning of last November, I had the idea to do an automatic geolocation system for blog/website owners called Geo Visitors.
This blog got quite a bit of traffic in the last 24 hours (because of a front-page digg). Anyway, check out what the maps look like for visitors to this blog in the last 24 hours… It’s crazy how much traffic digg can bring you in a short amount of time. Thankfully my quick little caching mechanism I did for WordPress last time I had something in digg, held up (last time WordPress was thrashing my servers because of the traffic).
Europe
United States
New York area
If you want to check out the map in realtime (or use it for your own blog/site), click here.
Here’s one I got (in it’s entirety like always)…
Okay… I can understand someone hating my site… I’m sure he/she isn’t the only one. But This dude hates my site so much that he’s going to go milk his cow. Huh? That really will show me I guess. {shrug}
It’s amazing how no matter how many times you tell someone something, they don’t seem to “get it”. Someone called me letting me know they are preparing whatever paperwork they have to file for next weeks Early Neutral Evaluation Conference. They keep letting me know they are working on getting the issue settled.
But here’s the problem… It’s not about the money for me, it never was. I’ve already spent more in legal fees than what I could have settled for.
I will never sign any sort of admission that I did anything (since I didn’t) in exchange for them to drop it. There is nothing the MPAA/Universal Studios could say or do that will make me settle (I wouldn’t settle for $1). I know technically I can’t prevent them from dropping the case, but if I could, I would force it to go to a full trial with final judgement. As far as I’ve been able to research, out of the tens of thousands of RIAA and MPAA lawsuits, not a single one has gone to a final judgement. Does that seem odd to anyone else? (If anyone knows differently, please let me know.)
The bottom line is I would gladly prefer to spend whatever it takes out of my own pocket, rather than just hand over the $2,500 in extortion money they wanted. Regardless of the money spent, there is always a way to indirectly recoup the costs. For example paid advertising displayed to people reading about my case (which at this point is well over 100,000 people, and we haven’t even really begun). Another idea I had was why not put together a website where people could use it to defend themselves from the RIAA and MPAA lawsuits. The only reason people settle with them is because they can’t afford the cost of going to court. Maybe put together a site that generates all the filings/forms they need to defend themselves for a couple hundred bucks or something. BTW, if any lawyer(s) want to do a joint venture on something like that, please let me know.
More info on this whole case can be found over here.
The new blade servers were delivered this morning (10 of them). Hopefully should get the chassis tomorrow (it shipped separately), and the new switch and load balancers later in the week.
Wiggly (one of my cats) is terrified of change, and now he won’t leave my office because there are big boxes in the hallway. heh
My primary MySQL server has been VERY overloaded lately (which is the main reason new blades are on the way), but today I decided to see what I can do about it in the meantime (the parameters have already been tuned as much as possible).
First I toyed around with a single node MySQL Cluster… it didn’t work terribly well. I think you really need 2 or 4 nodes for it to be effective.
Then I decided to run two different copies of mysqld on the same machine. Dude, this works *so* well under a high load that it’s almost unbelievable. While the memory fragmentation issues are still there, it’s 20x better (really). I should have done this a long time ago… 🙂
The BBC was doing a news piece on the Apple music vs. Apple Computer case and they were trying to do an interview with Guy Kewney, but instead they accidentally pulled his cab driver into the interview. 🙂
Hmmm… John Quincy St. Clair has filed an interesting patent with the US patent office back in 2004. A “Full body teleportation system”. He must have also invented a time machine and traveled back from the future to file the patent. 🙂
(via digg)
As far as being a good skateboarder, on a scale of 1-10, I would say this guy is at least a 6…
“Ask A Ninja” tackles the topic of Internet Neutrality. For those of you that don’t know what it is, telecoms are trying to make it legal to prioritize Internet traffic based on the who’s the highest bidder.
Some interesting stuff here… light traveling at speeds other than the speed of light (slower, faster and backwards)…
But to find out if the pulse was truly traveling backward within the fiber, Boyd and his students had to cut back the fiber every few inches and re-measure the pulse peaks when they exited each pared-back section of the fiber. By arranging that data and playing it back in a time sequence, Boyd was able to depict, for the first time, that the pulse of light was moving backward within the fiber.
I really would like to meet some of the people that are on the sending end of these emails. 🙂
That’s the whole email… I don’t know why this dude (maybe a girl, I dunno) feels like they need to email me telling me they are not going to “have sex with a film”. I never asked them to, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it. Would probably cause chaffing anyway, especially if it was VHS vs. DVD.
Google Trends is a neat little tool that lets you see how keyword searches compare historically over time. There seems to be more people searching for myspace than porn these days. 🙂
myspace 
porn The more I watch this guy, the more I realize what a lyrical genius he is… He’s good. Real good.
First, I go to the game and the Padres winning streak starts… then as soon as I mention the 9 game winning streak (starting with that game), it ends.
I’m a prophet of some sort. 🙂
On one of my ultra-high traffic web servers, I switched from eAccelerator to APC today (an opcode/caching system for PHP). So far it seems pretty nice… Especially the ability to disable stat for each PHP request.
I ended up making a datastore class for vBulletin also so I could use it for the forum, so if anyone else is using vBulletin on a server with APC, here you go (if you know what this is for, you will know where it goes :)).
[code=php]// #############################################################################
// APC
/**
* Class for fetching and initializing the vBulletin datastore from APC
*
* @package vBulletin
* @version $Revision: 0.0.0.1 $
* @date $Date: 2006/05/08 16:51:06 $
*/
class vB_Datastore_APC extends vB_Datastore
{
/**
* Fetches the contents of the datastore from APC
*
* @param array Array of items to fetch from the datastore
*
* @return void
*/
function fetch($itemarray)
{
if (!function_exists(‘apc_fetch’))
{
trigger_error(‘APC not installed’, E_USER_ERROR);
}
foreach ($this->defaultitems AS $item)
{
$this->do_fetch($item);
}
if (is_array($itemarray))
{
foreach ($itemarray AS $item)
{
$this->do_fetch($item);
}
}
$this->check_options();
// set the version number variable
$this->registry->versionnumber =& $this->registry->options[‘templateversion’];
}
/**
* Fetches the data from shared memory and detects errors
*
* @param string title of the datastore item
*
* @return void
*/
function do_fetch($title)
{
$ptitle = $this->prefix . $title;
if (($data = apc_fetch($ptitle)) === false)
{ // appears its not there, lets grab the data and put it in memory
$data = ”;
if ($dataitem = $this->dbobject->query_first(”
SELECT title, data FROM ” . TABLE_PREFIX . “datastore
WHERE title = ‘” . $this->dbobject->escape_string($title) .”‘
“))
{
$data =& $dataitem[‘data’];
}
$this->build($title, $data);
}
$this->register($title, $data);
}
/**
* Updates the appropriate cache file
*
* @param string title of the datastore item
*
* @return void
*/
function build($title, $data)
{
$title = $this->prefix . $title;
if (!function_exists(‘apc_store’))
{
trigger_error(‘APC not installed’, E_USER_ERROR);
}
$check = apc_store($title, $data);
}
}[/code]
Starting with the great game I went to last Sunday, the San Diego Padres have not lost. That’s 9 games in a row (and counting).
Maybe if the Padres would just give me dugout seats for every home game, my presence would cause them to go undefeated the entire season. 🙂 Or not…
I’m thinking this would knock the wind out of you, and you are going to be sore for a few days. 🙂
I think this guy might actually be serious…
You can thank Julien for bringing this glorious video to my attention. 🙂
This aired a week ago, but it’s still funny and it just recently showed up on Google Video (they aren’t letting you embed the video unfortunately, so you need to click the link). 🙂
//video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-869183917758574879
President Bush didn’t look like he was having a terribly fun time during it. heh
Here’s another random one…
Say what dude??