October 30, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I don’t know if you ever took the time to see my profile on Slashdot… for quite a long time, I had a terrible karma at there. Not that I consider myself a troll, but it seems other users with modpoints never liked my posts and always modded down to -1.
Following some recent news about the Raspberry Pi project, I decided to submit a Slashdot story on it… at first I saw the submission getting voted down, so I gave up on checking its progression and thought “nevermind, Slashot’s not a site for me”. But today, I got a message from Liz (at the foundation), thanking me for what she called “slashdottage”. I thought, “thanking for submitting a story that wasn’t even accepted?”. Then I checked Slashdot… and after a story about Portuguese schools moving to OSS (which I haven’t seen any consequence of), I saw my story submitted… oh my!
Well, this blog wasn’t Slashdotted – fortunately, since I configured the web server to only allow two PHP processes at once, or the server would get a memory outage. At this moment, it’s got about 7 clicks referred from Slashdot.
By the way, my Slashdot karma went from ‘terrible’ to ‘bad’, and I got eligible for the removal of ads on the Slashdot website (something that already happened anyways, since I have AdBlock enabled – but don’t tell them!).
I even joked with Liz that they should offer me a discount on the first Pi I buy. But, hey, they’re a non-profit, so let’s pay the full price and be nice 🙂
October 27, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I find myself to be getting more and more email addresses as I register on web services. For example, yesterday I registered on Zoho office, and it turns out to be kind of an email provider with docs integration (previously, I thought it was docs-only).
I’m posting this more for me to remember I have all those addresses than for people to know. Anyways, the first address in the list is the one you should use to contact me. You can send junk to the others, and don’t expect to find me checking those inboxes often 🙂
Obviously only the addresses that can be made public to anyone are on this list, duh.
The first column is the username, the second is the server, add a @ between the two.
| gbl08ma |
gmail.com |
| me |
gbl08ma.com |
| gbl08ma |
zoho.com |
| gbl08ma |
inbox.cat |
I’ll try to update this list often, but no promises 🙂
October 7, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I was really fed up with Apache on this server. It would use huge amounts of RAM, even after all the visitors left the website. Having done all tweaks to the memory usage of Apache and PHP, the amount of RAM used would never get below 450MB (out of the 512MB this VPS has). Hell, Apache was consuming even more memory than MySQL!
For those who don’t know, nginx is an alternative, lightweight webserver which is generally used (by many popular websites) as a load balancer. However, it can also act as the single web server on a system, like what Apache and Lighttpd do. I had worked with nginx before on some small websites on low-resource servers, and I was quite satisfied with it. As I explained with an earlier blog post, nginx is great as long as the website you want to serve with it does work with nginx – that is, doesn’t heavily depend on Apache rules or some Apache-specific thing. Sure, those rules can be converted to nginx config options, but I never succeeded on making eyeOS 1.x work fully with nginx.
WordPress is one of the scripts that works best with nginx. Since this website is mainly powered by nginx (although I have some custom scripts laying around, mainly the scripts providing alternative WiiMC internet media), I made my mind and decided I would go through the hassle of switching from Apache to nginx. It wasn’t a big hassle after all: apart from having to restart the server at some point due to a RAM outage, the website wasn’t offline much time, and there was no data loss.
After putting Apache off-use and starting nginx, the server was still using 300MB of RAM. I though nginx couldn’t be using so much RAM, and there was another problem laying around. Turns out to be a problem in MySQL config: I don’t need InnoDB functionality, so usually I add a “skip-innodb” line to my.cnf. The problem was, this line needs to be added under the [mysqld] section and in my case, it was somewhere else. So I moved skip-innodb to the right place, restarted MySQLd, and that’s it:
The server is now using 240MB of RAM, which still fits inside the dedicated RAM (256MB), so I’m not taking any of the burst RAM, which resides in the server swap space. The RAM usage is still high, because I have other things running such as dovecot for mail delivery.
It also looks faster to load pages, but probably someone with a faster connection than me will notice a bigger difference.
October 6, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
So the last times have been strange again. A lot of events which somehow hit me harder, for the good or for the bad, have happened recently. Some are more personal than others, anyway. Here are the ones I can remember and talk about in public, ordered in chronological order:
- My cat is really sick 🙁
- dmmcintyre3 got me a .com domain – I wasn’t expecting that in any way, thanks a lot! 🙂
- Steve Jobs had his last kernel panic (must I explain?). Let him rest in peace.
- It’s hot like hell in Portugal, hotter than in the Summer, and it’s already 6th October
- Last night (during the Steve Jobs thing, perhaps) I got a bunch of twitter followers. Funnier: most of these users have their following and follower counts on the hundreds, but never posted a single tweet. One word: spam bots.
- And some more things I can’t remember! (I forgot about them while I was writing this, and now I can’t remember. Seriously!)
October 5, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Following the latest changes in this website domain, it looks like it will have to edit the URL for this website in wordpress settings again, in no more than a week.
But this time, unlike last time, I’m incredibly happy. No, my birthday is only on 8th October, but the owner of http://freevps.us, dmmcintyre3 has registered for me the domain “myself on .com”, that is,http://gbl08ma.com . Yeah! That’s myself on a .com domain – in case you haven’t understood.
Goodbye malware-false-markings due to the use of crappy free domains! Now I only have to make sure my real TLD is not marked as malware itself.
Now I can freely post URLs for posts in my blog without fear for supposedly containing malware! This is an huge step!
Remember, the Bitcoin donations thing is still valid; at the end, I want to renew this domain next year 🙂
An huge thank you to dmmcintyre3! And to Namecheap for providing cheap domain names.
October 2, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
For those who may not know, ReactOS is an operating system that “aims to follow the Windows-NT® architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level right through to the application level”. By other words, the idea is to provide Windows XP-level compatibility with software and hardware.
Looks like a neat idea? Yes, indeed. An “open source Windows” system would has lots of applications, for example, in situations where demand for using open source software and common standards, instead of proprietary solutions, exists (like what happens, in theory, on some country governments).
Why it doesn’t work right? Well, nobody can say the project has been abandoned. It’s progressing, but very slow. I can’t blame the developers for the slowness: the task they’re doing is hard, and there aren’t many developers devoted to the project.
The latest version was released on March 2011, and it was just a tiny improvement over all that’s still missing. My only concern is, when they get a Windows XP compatibility that is good enough, won’t be XP as obsolete as Windows 95 is now? At the end, Windows XP is already more than 10 years old, and even some of the most recent software by its creator, Microsoft, doesn’t work on XP (e.g. IE 9 or the latest Live Messenger).
And another thing: if ReactOS gets noticed enough, won’t Microsoft try to squash them and send some juridical flames regarding e.g. stupid patents? Or even reverse engineering, although I don’t think they can be legitimately accused of doing it? Note that these questions may also apply for WINE and similar software, but up to now, it looks like they have been safe from Microsoft’s hammer.