DNS oops

I may have for­got­ten to setup joahua.com to point to the new web server when I moved josh.st across. My bad. I changed it over a day or two ago (I for­get when actu­ally) and now the old addresses work. I will prob­a­bly get lots more search engine love accord­ingly as all those old links that stopped work­ing start func­tion­ing again. Some­thing else that would prob­a­bly get search engine love is post­ing new con­tent, but it’s so easy to get lazy and not bother. Sigh. At any rate, after both­er­ing to post some stuff my Adsense rev­enue actu­ally did some­thing this week for the first time in months. And I’m pretty sure none of the reg­u­lars even click the ads, so there we go! Don’t quite know how that hap­pened, but… cool.

The magic 1st-cheque mark is approach­ing kind of like a curve approaches a line it never touches. I seem to recall this is some­thing to do with Lim­its, but actu­ally never even stud­ied Cal­cu­lus at all and know that has some­thing to do with it… I seem to recall func­tions made sense only because I already under­stood them in the con­text of pro­gram­ming ran­dom stuff… maybe Adsense can teach me maths!

# by Josh on September 12th, 2007 Tags: , , ,
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whisper power consumption & emissions

Now, I’m not sold on this whole green­house thing just yet (The Great Global Warm­ing Swin­dle had at least as much sway over my opin­ion as that Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion to which it was, per­haps, a coun­ter­point), but as a mat­ter of mere con­sump­tion (and intel­lec­tual curios­ity) I was keen to learn just how much power one of my com­put­ers, in par­tic­u­lar, was using annually.

This one sits in a cup­board, answers to the name of ‘whis­per’, reaches obscene tem­per­a­tures in sum­mer (yet does not crash), and, at its heart, fea­tures a low-power-consumption proces­sor and moth­er­board by VIA. It also has two hard dri­ves and a sin­gle 512MB (8-chip double-sided (16 total)) DDR-400 DIMM.

And that is all.

Most of the time, it’s rel­a­tively untaxed… it acts as file stor­age, a web server for mis­cel­la­neous stuff I want to share quickly, and a devel­op­ment box for more adven­tur­ous things. At one stage it was host­ing stream­ing media (and, very very briefly, a Counter-Strike server… it is hor­ri­bly under-specc’d for such duties). It’s also use­ful for SSH’ing into and bypass­ing prox­ies when you really need to get to some­thing (entirely legit­i­mate, mind), but increas­ingly less so as a cer­tain work­place of mine blocked SSH out access when we moved floors. No mat­ter — I’ve iden­ti­fied a HTTPS-SSH solu­tion to that par­tic­u­lar prob­lem, but haven’t been moti­vated to imple­ment it just yet!

So, here’s the run-down:

			Load	Idle
VIA EPIA PD10000	23W	15W
Generic 512MB		2W	1.5W
ST380011A		12W	8W
ST380011A		12W	8W
			49W	32.5W

Most of those have been rounded a lit­tle bit, but… let’s just say it only uses 49W at the most.

Then, there’s the 65%-efficiency-at-full-load (230W) power sup­ply to con­sider. We’re no-where near full load, but let’s just say it’s con­sis­tently effi­cient (or, in-efficient) regard­less of load. In prac­tice, it’d prob­a­bly be slightly bet­ter for lower loads due to reduced heat production.

So, our 49W sud­denly becomes (49x1.35) 66.15W

That’s 579.47kWh/year, which (appar­ently) equates to about 400KG of emis­sions. This, friends, is absolute worst-case sce­nario. More real­is­ti­cally, the sys­tem will be idle most of the time, using 384.3kWh/year, and pump­ing out around 260KG of carbon.

I’d be inter­ested to see how this would com­pare to a typ­i­cal lap­top computer.

For this par­tic­u­lar com­puter, there’s only a lit­tle that can be done to improve effi­ciency. The obvi­ous tar­get is the two hard dri­ves, which, com­bined, draw nearly as much power as the rest of the sys­tem! Con­sid­er­ing there’s not a dra­matic amount of stor­age presently in use, I could almost jus­tify replac­ing these with a solid-state device (in the form of an IDE-card reader bridge, because real SSD dri­ves remain pro­hib­i­tively expen­sive and dif­fi­cult to obtain in this coun­try) if the need were really there.

And what would cre­ate such a need? Well, part of the rea­son I wanted to find out was to see how many hours this thing could live off a fairly cheap UPS for. Turns out it’s prob­a­bly got at least an hour’s worth of life in it, which is mod­er­ately incred­i­ble com­pared to the typ­i­cal ten-minute-or-it’s-fsck-time expected para­chute expectancy!

The only prob­lem in adding a UPS is that they’re not the world’s most energy effi­cient devices them­selves, with an APC 500VA model chew­ing 24BTU (82.02W, since we’ve been work­ing in that thus far) per hour when “online”. BTU is a mea­sure of ther­mal energy dis­si­pa­tion, by the way, so prob­a­bly it’s also less-than-ideal for stick­ing in a cup­board in which the next-largest heat source is prob­a­bly the power sup­ply at a mea­gre 17.15W (assum­ing its inef­fi­ciency is purely ther­mal, which, of course, it won’t be — other non-thermal radi­a­tion must account for at least some of its loss).

So, there we go. A fairly use­less exer­cise that will become mar­gin­ally less use­less if ever there are rolling brownouts in Syd­ney and I need some­thing to be able to weather the power storm. The other great thing about UPS is they pro­vide fairly decent power con­di­tion­ing, too. Given you can pay about $50 for a decent 6-way surge pro­tected board, or only $140 for a 500VA (300W) APC UPS these days, it’s really not that bad a deal afterall.

Sources:

VIA EPIA-PD10000 power usage: http://www.via.com.tw/download/mainboards/3/4/OG_EPIA-PD_111804.pdf
Generic 512MB DDR-400 mem­ory power usage:
My mem­ory, from prior read­ing and specs of higher-quality mem­ory that actu­ally pub­lish such data.
Sea­gate ST380011A power usage:
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/ata/cuda7200pm.pdf

SFX-230M2 switch­ing power sup­ply (used by a lot of big OEMs like Dell and HP, it turns out) spec­i­fi­ca­tions:
http://www.sirtec.com.tw/photot2/10205/210205R11.pdf

# by Josh on August 7th, 2007 Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
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Too much nostalgia for a computer

What fol­lows is writ­ten far less well than it deserves, but — iron­i­cally — I’m drown­ing in other work at present. This needed writ­ing sooner than other things did.

Michael’s pulling the plug on the server that this web­site has run on since 2003.

The ‘server’ has changed dra­mat­i­cally in con­sti­tu­tion since it all began way back when, but… wow. An aston­ish­ingly large part of my teenage years. For the longest time, it seemed as though the Inter­net had alto­gether ceased to exist every­time Dale’s con­nec­tion went out. In the early days, we were all run­ning servers on port 1200 to cir­cum­vent ISP restric­tions on port 80. phpBB was the order of the day, run­ning Apache — on a pirated copy of Win­dows 2000 (those were the days in which “legit­mate soft­ware” con­sti­tuted an oxy­moron). Oper­at­ing on an early ADSL link with 64kbps upload, forum emoti­cons were hosted on free web space pro­vided by iiNet in order to con­serve band­width. You laugh now, but the speed boost was incred­i­ble. Every time iiNet dropped out (to future read­ers: that’s what hap­pens when the inter­net goes out for a cou­ple of hours, none of this occa­sional con­nec­tion time-out rub­bish), an irate explana­tory post from mwd­meyer would emerge and life would con­tinue as nor­mal. Until par­ents dis­cov­ered the server run­ning and turned it off again, which would spark an effort to con­ceal yet another com­puter in a room crowded full of equip­ment. About halfway through 2004, they gave up searching.

These were the days (for me) of NE2000 clones pow­er­ing Smoothwall/m0n0wall routers, recy­cling hard­ware, a sub­scrip­tion to Atomic before all the other kids (I bought more geeky mag­a­zines than any­one I know – I think it was that strange meet­ing place of compters, cre­ativ­ity, and cant that I later became com­fort­able with), when GeForce 2’s and Pen­tium 4’s (the first ones with RDRAM that every­one despised) and DDR-supporting Athlons were still zippy. When frame-based redi­rects passed for domain names — .tk, anyone?

Mostly, it was about the forums… but as for per­sonal pub­lish­ing, this was no small resource. My first dynamic web­site was a blog hosted on that server — I don’t think it yet had a name — we all rolled our own web soft­ware in those days (it’s not that long ago). Some of us still do. The first domain name acquired was Dale’s, in March 2004, co-inciding (more or less) with the forums’ first birth­day. Twelve US dol­lars later (Joker.com’s prices still haven’t changed), we were all still using frame-based redi­rects — sta­tic IPs were the stuff of pipe-dreams, and Dynamic DNS, though around, was out­side of the expe­ri­ence of most of us. Steve ran a notoriously-flaky IIS server with real domains and Exchange, but paid about $150 a month for the priv­i­lege: sta­tic IPs being avail­able only on busi­ness grade inter­net connections.

These are mere details. The forums them­selves con­sti­tute an amaz­ing chron­i­cle of the lives of mwd­meyer, ucosty, Sammy, i_am_a_n00bie, Smile:), smKz, n|cktangents, angelicde­ity, baibai, Sphinx^, lud­vikas, and a hand­ful of oth­ers over a fairly tumul­tuous time. There is so much not recorded explic­itly that sur­rounds the nearly 16,000 mes­sages from these eleven users alone. Some has been sup­pressed, other parts for­got­ten, but all of it inex­tri­ca­bly linked together in the momen­tum of time. There are some things about that time which will never be shared with those who weren’t around.

The forums didn’t sur­vive post-school. This shouldn’t be sur­pris­ing, given the amount of research that says this will be the case for any given rela­tion­ships faced with that man­ner of tran­si­tion, but it was still bizarre wit­ness­ing what would have been sev­eral months of time spent on a sin­gle web­site evap­o­rate into (not much). The server moved from Bal­main to Mar­ian Street, even­tu­ally find­ing its way into a rack there. This is where things get hazy for me. I think the last time I saw Michael might’ve been New Years’ Eve 2005/2006… I feel some sense of guilt about that, but recog­nise mutual busy-ness had a role such that nei­ther of us should be blamed alone. I don’t believe that a blame­less “but things changed” is ever suf­fi­cient when talk­ing about close rela­tion­ships. I’m fairly cer­tain my clos­est friend for about two years at school is some­one that I no longer have any­thing to do with, but can’t explain why. And I know that I can’t in any way blame him, because I’m so guilty of fail­ing to keep work­ing on rela­tion­ships myself.

I sup­pose the point of all this is that the com­puter for­mally known as ‘Metro’, now ‘Loki’ (I don’t know how it got that name — Loki to me is an amaz­ing con­trib­u­tor to Linux-based gam­ing, 2000 – 2002 RIP, but it could just as eas­ily have been named after the Norse trick­ster and Odin’s wily accom­plice!) isn’t just the lat­est in a series of bits of elec­tronic gear that some markup and pix­els have been piped off for a cou­ple of years. This is just one step closer to a com­plete clo­sure of a very large chap­ter of my life… and, yeah, that’s incred­i­bly sad.

Please don’t for a minute con­sider this to be my argu­ing that Loki should stay switched on — it’s about some­thing far greater and more per­sonal than a star­tlingly reli­able FreeBSD web server that just hap­pened to host a web­site for free for a long time.

There aren’t too many peo­ple you can make sit in the back of a car on their 18th birth­day, much less who will laugh along with as it happens.

This isn’t an obit­u­ary, just a poor expres­sion of remorse at the (human) dis­con­nec­tion and ‘drifted’ rela­tion­ships of that era. Michael, once all this stu­pid uni crap gets out of the way (maybe after you move again?), I owe you a fairly large drink.

Thankyou.

# by Josh on May 28th, 2007 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| 4 Comments »

IE6 Scripting security

Well, IE is noto­ri­ously inse­cure, but today I was hit with one par­tic­u­larly stu­pid (though sup­pos­edly not undoc­u­mented — some­one on WSG had encoun­tered it before and alle­vi­ated much pain!) ‘fea­ture’ of the browser. Basi­cally, I’ve been depen­dent upon PNG alpha chan­nel work­ing. Hey, the design isn’t mine and I’m just try­ing to make the CSS work with as few images as humanly pos­si­ble — though I have realised I have one that isn’t required, but can’t be both­ered chang­ing… because once I’ve slated my markup, I only ever add things to it as required, and never work back­wards. Oth­er­wise, I wind up in a per­pet­ual cycle of markup opti­mi­sa­tion that cul­mi­nates in a loss of prob­a­bly under 2KB over about as many days. Tis bad. Must post the way I do CSS/markup work­flow here some day, coz it’s some­thing I’d be inter­ested to see other people’s processes of and how dif­fer­ent it is/isn’t from my own.

Any­way! Digres­sion aside, I was using IE5.5+‘s filter thing (pretty well doc­u­mented PNG fix with some caveats… it’s the best we can do until IE7 in all its splen­dif­er­ous glory drib­bles from Microsoft’s front door. Don’t ask me where that came from.) with great suc­cess, but for the inces­sant secu­rity warn­ings every time I loaded the page. Yeah, great, this really looks usable. Not. Every twit using XPSP2 is going to be pretty happy to stay on a page when their browser is blurt­ing secu­rity warn­ings at them… and don’t get me started on IE7’s pro­posed phish­ing alert thing that lets users report false pos­i­tives. Dumb users (i.e. 97% of the pop­u­la­tion) are going to be scared away regard­less, and mali­cious users (i.e. 2% of the pop­u­la­tion) are going to write viruses that exploit the report­ing mech­a­nism to let sites through.

Wow. This is a really windy post.

Okay. On topic (hah!). The moral of the story is, don’t exe­cute web pages locally. IE won’t trust you. How­ever, if it’s on any ran­dom web server (I ended up installing Apache on loop­back), IE is per­fectly happy to let it exe­cute what­ever the hell weird kinda code it wants. And that, kid­dies, is why we all love Microsoft.

# by Josh on December 29th, 2005 Tags: , , ,
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Lens cap on?

This mes­sage was orig­i­nally posted on a tem­po­rary “out­age” page, hosted at an alter­nate loca­tion. It is retained here for archival pur­poses. The time­stamp has been altered to reflect this fact.

Tech­ni­cal Difficulties

Due to a hard drive fail­ure at approx­i­mately 5AM EST today, this web­site will be offline for a period of at least two days.

The web server is main­tained by Michael Dale, and the host­ing of this web­site is pro­vided free of charge using his own resources. My per­sonal web­site has been hosted there since the end of Feb­ru­ary 2004, and for nearly a year and a half uptime has rivalled that of servers sit­ting in dat­a­cen­ters.
This, in and of itself, is hardly unim­pres­sive. How­ever, when you con­sider this has been achieved with only a “consumer-grade” ADSL con­nec­tion and open source soft­ware, the qual­ity of ser­vice — espe­cially a ser­vice pro­vided pro bono — is brilliant.

Street­Com­put­ing will return shortly, with the same host, run­ning the same software.

In the interim, this holder page is tem­porar­ily being hosted by base10solutions, a web-development and mul­ti­me­dia com­pany for which I work.

What does this mean for this website?

As stated already, this web­site will remain hosted by Michael for as long as he is will­ing. How­ever, as a result of the fail­ure of a hard drive, a small amount of infor­ma­tion has been lost.

Whilst data­base back­ups are auto­mat­i­cally made by the server daily, I have been a lit­tle lax with back­ing up files. Con­se­quently, a small num­ber of images assoicated with posts have been lost. This only affects some posts, iden­ti­fied as the following:

  • Why not to use pre­built templates;
  • H.264 scares me;
  • If I swam, and;
  • On rails

I hope to have replace­ment con­tent for these posts in the near future. Until this con­tent is pre­pared, the posts will con­tinue to be avail­able (when the server is again live), albeit with­out visual content.

Michael’s announce­ment

The fol­low­ing was sent via email to web host­ing users.

Sub­ject: [dg-support] Hard Drive Fail­ure
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 06:56:54 +1000
The hard drive in the web server (metro) died this morn­ing at about 5am. Unfor­tu­nately I am leav­ing to the Hunter Val­ley in 10 min­utes and do not have time to look at it. I will be back on sat­ur­day and will start look­ing into the prob­lem then.

I do not know what the state of the drive is. I’ve never had a Sea­gate drive die on me.

The last backup of mysql data­bases was today at 3am and home direc­to­ries on the 8th of this month. I do not know if I can recover any data from the hard drive.

Please expect the web­server to be offline for at least 2 days, although a full rebuild may take much longer.

Very very sorry about this.

Dur­ing this time email will con­tinue to work as it is han­dled on a dif­fer­ent server.

Please email me if you have any concerns.

Thank you,
Michael Dale

# by Josh on July 15th, 2005 Tags: , , , , ,
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