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I decided to go to Fry’s today and pick up parts for a new computer, mainly because of the RAM upgrade problems I’ve been having with the old one (I couldn’t put more than 512MB in it, any more would crash the system for some unknown reason).

I went all out, but didn’t break the bank too badly. Here are the specs:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ (2.6 GHz) Dual-Core processor
• Gigabyte M55 NForce4 Socket AM2 motherboard
• 2 GB OCZ 800MHz DDR2 RAM
• Nvidia GeForce 7300GS 256MB Video card (so I’m not a hardcore gamer…)
• Thermaltake Matrix case, Thermaltake 400W Power supply
• And to top it off, a new wireless mouse, because it was on sale.
• (Plus existing hardware: Ethernet card, SB Live sound card (for MIDI keyboard support), 250GB/40GB hard drives, DVD±RW/DVD drives, etc.)

Basically the only reason this is a “new computer” and not a “CPU upgrade” is because I got a new case, in hopes that it would be quieter than the old vacuum cleaner. It is, so I’m happy. That and the RAM and CPU upgrade make it a workstation worth developing on, and the upgrade process (moving the drives) was fairly painless, with ye olde “move hard drive during XP upgrade install” method.

I have to say, the speed improvement going from the old system to this is very noticeable. It’s probably the RAM mostly, followed by the extra multitasking ability afforded by the dual-core processor. That boggles my mind, to have an actual dual-core in my own computer… my dream systems always had dual processors, and now here it is, nicely consolidated. Blows me away.

Okay, now to clean up all the packaging that’s strewn across my room… Whew!

Update: This is old info, and not correct anymore. The problem was a result of a bug in Apache2 (or Ubuntu’s version of it) in which apache processes swapped out to disk would not release, and would consume all memory and crash the server. After an ‘apt-get upgrade’ on 8/30/07, apache2 was upgraded to ‘2.0.55-4ubuntu2’ and the problem has disappeared. For users experiencing this issue, I recommend upgrading your version of apache to the latest.

I have just discovered the reason for the sporadic server crashes I’ve been seeing over the past month or so. The symptoms include: Server slowing to a crawl, Apache reaching max_clients and never releasing its connections, Apache processes getting “stuck” and never going away, and finally, all open requests are for wp-cron.php?check=[somelongnumber] (which you may find out through apache-status, which looks like this).

Read the rest of this entry »

Seriously, is anyone going to upgrade to Vista? I’m definitely not anytime soon. I see no added benefit from XP and just a bunch of hassle with the install, new computer, and worst of all, living with what Microsoft thinks usability is. I don’t think I’d be able to.

My options now are to get a Mac, and run XP and Ubuntu alongside OSX. Oh, wait, that’s only one option. Heh.

Just in case you’re into stocks, every technically-minded person I know is thinking the same thing. The losses from the iPhone (eh, it could still take off I suppose) will be a drop in the bucket compared to the new Apple computers purchased because Vista isn’t worth the box it’s in. I love to laugh at all the advertising dollars Microsoft’s spending that aren’t even affecting me… it’s so sad.

Are you upgrading to Vista? Have you already?

Update: Dean was so nice and modest about leaving links in comments that he gets two links to his site in the main article! Also because I agree with him wholeheartedly, of course. First, why his next laptop will be a Mac, and second, why he’s not impressed with Vista either. I too am waiting for the next OSX update (and hopefully MacBook update as well—here’s hoping they support more than 2GB of RAM) before jumping all over it.

Zenphoto 1.0.8.2 was released quietly yesterday. Yep, there’s a .2 after that! Like you’d expect from software released without unit testing, we encountered several little bugs in the 1.0.8 version, followed by another bug in 1.0.8.1, hence, 1.0.8.2, which is now looking good.

Download Zenphoto 1.0.8.2 Here!

This is a larger release than the minor point makes it seem, with many changes to the core code and how things work under the hood. Read the changelog for more juicy info, or check Trac for constant updates. Read below for sweet details about this big point release…

I ran across this gigantic post on what Steve Yegge calls the “Next Big Language” and I’m saving it here partly for my own reference, partly to comment on what it is exactly.

He tries to keep it a secret, but it’s obviously JavaScript 2, or ECMAScript 4, whatever you want to call it. “JS2” will stick better. I’ve always thought JavaScript was quite an elegant language, if only because functions are first-class. Add optional static typing, and all the other features he lists, and it looks like it won’t suck. I can only hope it keeps some of the simplicity and flexibility of JavaScript in its current state…

If you’re interested, click through this slideshow on JavaScript 2 and the Future of the Web, or look at Mozilla’s Tamarin Project. It really looks like a complete and useful language, and it makes sense that if the web is the “next big thing” then the next big language will be the one and only language that runs on it.

Until it gets there, I’ll keep up with my JS1 skillz and get some Ajax going in the zenphoto backend…

1.0.8 in a few minutes.

I was setting up AWStats for my server a while ago and realized my Apache server log format was wrong for all my sites. It was in the “Common” format, which doesn’t include referrer or user-agent information. As soon as I caught that, I immediately switched the “Combined” log format, which gives all that information.

However, after switching formats, I didn’t want to lose all the old stats I had gathered. I had to find some way to convert the old Common-format Apache logs so that I could run my new log through AWStats without losing anything. Read on for how I did it…

I just discovered another wonderful Internet Explorer bug—it didn’t understand how to download mod_deflate compressed zip files (Firefox, Opera, Safari all handle that case correctly) and was resulting in complaints about corrupt downloads. Well, okay, no, they’re not corrupt, your browser is corrupt!

Seriously, I thought everyone knew better than to use Internet Explorer these days. Get Firefox, Opera, Safari, anything else!

On the forums, Craig said “Wow. You really feel quite strongly about IE don’t you?” and this is my explanation why:

I do feel quite strongly about it, yes; as a programmer I’m appalled that other programmers made such a low quality product. It’s like people driving around a 10-year-old beat-up car that can only go 40 miles per hour, breaks down every ten minutes, doesn’t have a radio, and is put together with duct tape (coughCSS hackscough) when you could get a souped-up fire-orange Ferarri (FIREFOX) for FREE. Or a nice Honda Accord (Safari) or maybe a Toyota Camry (Opera), all for free, but no, people just keep on drivin the junker. I just don’t understand it, and it’s such a pain in the rear for web developers that I feel like speaking my mind about it sometimes, especially when I find another “new” bug. It’s just an unacceptable quality level. Even IE 7 doesn’t make it much better, so don’t bother, just use Firefox, Safari, Opera, whatever, anything but Internet Explorer.

So please, folks, if you’re using Internet Explorer, you are part of the problem. Go get a better browser right now.

During my server setup I discovered an interesting new way to solve the age-old http://domain.com http://<em>www.</em>domain.com problem, one that I think is less resource intensive and more logical.

The problem, for those unfamiliar, is that Google sees those two sites as separate, assigns two PageRanks, and can even duplicate content. That’s not good! To try to combat this, in their webmaster tools page, you can select which address you prefer, but that’s been unreliable for me. Zenphoto.org still has split PageRanks even though I told Google to always use the www subdomain. For that reason (and others, like consistency of the URL users see) I think it’s best taken care of server-side.