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Posted on

Planning for a fourth machine

I’m sick of my webserver machine. The problems I mentioned previously did not
go away and I’m far too lazy to diagnose it. So fuck it, might as
well build a new one to end all problems.


Planning stage. I want a small and quiet one. So I guess I’m going SFF (Small
Form Factor). The Shuttle-brand SFFs have an appealing look. But I have not
decided on a specific model/make. This will have to wait till I next visit Sim
Lim Square.


CPU, definitely Athlon64. Something that operates with low power yet high
performance. Users report having it running at 36 degrees celcius but they are
using stock HSFs. If I’m not wrong, I have to use the built in HSF in a SFF
chasis. Speed? Anything above 2000+ just to keep it cheap. Cool n Quiet feature
of Athlon64 CPUs is another good reason to get it. During idle, it downclocks to
about 1GHz and reduces power consumption. Less heat as a result. And if your
fans dynamically adjust their speeds according to CPU temperatures, they will
also spin slower and thus, run more quietly.


Rams, don’t think I need to look for any specific brand. And considering
they’re very cheap nowadays, I’ll be going for 2 sticks of 512MB.


Harddisks, prefereably 3, but I’m ok with 2. Since this will be a webserver,
I’m looking to having mirror raid for redundancy. If 1 dies, my data
is still safe on the other. Perhaps 2 80GB bricks. 8MB cache, 7200RPM, SATA! I
just love the small, easy to unplug, SATA cables. And yes, a quiet one. Still
need research to find out which brand/model. If there’s space for a third one,
it will be used for storing my anime videos.


Graphics, a cheap ATI 9600PRO will do. Or even cheaper acceptable ones.
I may want to watch DVDs and animes on this. I’m still against onboard graphics
because of a horrible experience I once had with Intel’s onboard graphics.


Sound, onboard sound will be fine. I’m sure most SFFs have onboard LAN and
sound device.


DVD writers are cheap now. But I don’t know if I should get one or just wait
till Blu-Ray and HD-DVD ends their battle.


And I want to get rid of the 17″ CRT monitor. Mentioned before, it has blur
text. Renders images too dark. Coding on a 17″ LCD with 1280*1024 resolution is
my reason for getting one. Not to mention saving SGD$10 on my monthly
electricity bill is also a plus. Budgetting SGD$300 for one.


Now all I need is a little more determination to do some research. Damn my
lazy ass…

Posted on

Haubergeon!

After spending almost a whole day of mining last Saturday, I was
able to meet my target of earning 500K a week and now I have 2 million gil!
[X)]


Second million!


Now that I’ve hit 2 million gil of savings, why not level my black
mage job a little? Something to get my mind off the tunnels of Zeruhn. Putting
my winamp in an endless loop of Kotoko’s Hane album, Kokia’s Utaga Chikara and
Origa’s <album name forgotten>, I transferred over my black mage equipment
from my mule and began looking for a party. As I expected, I got an invite
within 5 minutes. [:|]


Halfway through Evasama dropped by to give my party a bit of
powerlevelling. Ladyrikku, who just reached level 69 not long, came to sell me
her Haubergeon. The price of Haubergeon on the Auction House fluctuates between
1,850,000~1,950,000. With a bit of bargain, we agreed on 1,800,000gil~ [XD]


Rest of Sunday involved visiting Stone Monuments with Evasama for
that Selbina quest, camping Stary Mary which we gave up in the end, attempted to
pop Goblin Archaeologist twice. At the first try, as we were waiting for the
next vanaday to come, 2 Japanese players came along and popped it despite the 4
of us (Joachim and Ladyrikku), standing near the spawn point. I guess because we
had quite a few high levels trade items to the spawn point, the Goblin NM turned
out to be too difficult for those 2 Japanese players. They teleported away in
the midst of the fight, almost dying.


On the second try, we traded the items and went away to camp Stray
Mary while waiting for the next vanaday. When the next day came, we went back to
the teleport crag to find the spawn point gone. Oh well… [:(]


And finally, here’s a few screenshots of me in my new armor! I
swear this thing gives ass-shaking skill +10. My ass shaking when
running looks so much more obvious when wearing it! [X|]


Haubergeon Front View
Front View



Back View


And according to the prices on IGE, an infamous evil gilselling
company, this Haubergeon would have a value of 80 US dollars. [8|]

Posted on

Crapweaver

I’m in favour of creating websites from writing raw html codes. Which is to say, type out every single HTML tag in a simple text editor. With this mentioned, I will proceed to rant on how much I hate Dreamweaver.


At work, I had to edit an existing webpage. Move this logo here, open up that space over there, blah blah. So I saved a copy of the site onto my harddisk. Opened up the index.htm in Firefox, used the Web Developer Toolbar plugin to render a red-dotted outline on the invisible tables so I could get an idea on how everything is laid out. Turned out to be a mess of columns and rows only a computer can comprehend.


This mess of rows and columns could be greatly simplified just by adding 1 or 2 more tables. It could even make the code more readable.


Next worse thing, since this is a computer program, it has completely no idea how to generate user-friendly filenames for images. So it automatically generates filenames like craptastic_1-1×1, craptastic_2-1×3, craptastic_9-2×4.


And I have no clue why there’s fragmented images of a single-color bar, whose color is the same as it’s background. Not to mention those images come in both jpg and gif formats!


Oh, and there’s one more important factor for a fucked up dreamweaver-made website, a noob Dreamweaver user.

Posted on

I love logs

For this blog of mine, I threw in a quick INSERT sql statement at the end of
every page request to log down the IP, referrer, date and time so I can get a
rough idea of where my visitors come from, how did they come here and when. Rest
assured I can’t tell exactly who is viewing my pages.


I can see visitors coming in from links from my friend’s blogs [:D]. I can
see what search string the visitor entered in google which brought him to my
blog [XD]. I can see what you manually enter into the query string
[8|].


And sooooo, the “title” query string in my PermLinks serve no purpose other
than just being there for search engines’ crawlers. Manually entering
“title=..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2F..%2Fetc%2Fpasswd”
will not reveal any of my passwords nor will
“title=http://download.microsoft.com/download/WindowsInstaller/Install/2.0/W9XMe/EN-US/Redist.txt”
make my blog read data from Microsoft.


Helloooo Florida.

Posted on

What the fuck?

I bought a few Jpop CDs to pop in on my second machine and listen to during my mining sessions in FFXI. My secondary machine, Chii, is connected to my speaker which accepts 2 inputs and plays them simultaneously.


And so out of the audio CDs I bought, 2 of them have cd copy protection. And to my great dismay and understanding, it involves tricking your computer into thinking it’s a data CD. It automatically launches an ugly looking player program from the CD and plays the tracks. What further annoys me is that program takes up 90+% of my CPU power. Very unacceptable. I guess I should have read the cd copy protection warning label closely.


Anyway, good job recording companies! Thanks to you, I now have to resort to digital alternatives downloadable via the internet.