Edit0r’s Bloog

Server outage

So, all my sites went down last night. I found out this morning when Sarah received an e-mail from her forum app (SMF, a brilliant wee app I highly recommend). Upon investigating further, I found that MySQL had decided to die. Attempts to resuscitate it were unsuccessful, and a quick dmesg informed me that the server had 2.7MB of physical memory free, and no swap.

Oh dear…

Glancing at top, I saw that there were many many Apache, MySQL and PHP processes open and consuming tons of memory. After some daemon genocide, my coup of memory (physical and virtual) was successful, and I was able to start serving sites again. Just how Apache et al. managed to gobble up about 700MB of memory is something of a mystery at the moment. Investigation continues…

A trip to Fife

I went to my parents house on Friday night and stayed over till Saturday morning. This really sucked, as I wanted to stay longer, but work prohibited me from doing so. Quite an uneventful visit this time, but I was introduced to a few new things. Firstly, SmartWater. This amazing little liquid was supplied by Allianz, the company who insure my cello. Basically, it’s a UV fluorescent liquid with a unique “fingerprint” marker, and is used to track stolen goods and deter thieves (with the appropriate “touch this and die!” stickers).

The second introduction was to the lovely Ravi, a fur from somewhere (New York? She’s gonna chew me out over this, I swear…) in America. My brother talks to her on Skype a lot, and they seem to be into each other quite well (no, not like that! Honestly, you and your dirty minds). I suppose it’s kinda like things between me and Rosy, they’re good friends and make each other happy. If either had the money, they’d be over visiting the other in a snap, I bet. In case you were wondering, her character is a vixen.

So, now we come onto the third item on my 3-wide list. Elfen Lied. This is an excellent anime I like almost as much as Full Metal Alchemist. It has the most amazing song on the opening titles, sort of a gregorian chant style thingme, which I’ve been playing on the piano. So yes, go and watch it. Yes, you. Go on. Or I’ll set Ravi on you. You do not want that.

I’ve got more to say, but right now my brain be fried from labs. Remind me to talk about lighters next time.

I used to use a program called UltraFractal to make fractal images. I had a look on the site and there’s a new version out. It is pretty damn amazing. I downloaded a copy and spent a few hours playing with it last night. After making a nice blue fractal, I took a screenshot, because the demo won’t let me export images without “made with the evalution version” plastered all over it, which I then fired into GIMP. A few carefully considered filter later and I came up with this:

It was originally meant to be a top down view of a series of catwalks, but I started playing with lighting and bump mapping and, well…

So, all well and good, apart from I the fact I can’t export images, and thus can’t make bigger backgrounds. This really gets at me. If a software company is going to provide a free demo of their product, for the purposes of evalution, they should either make it time limited or functionality limited but not both! My reasoning for this is that if you’re considering buying the product, then more often than not it’s hard to give it a good evaluation if you can’t do half the stuff you intend to do if and when you decide to purchase it. Also, if a software developer is going to limit the features, it seems pointless to have it time limited. Sure, the program might be of some use to someone with it’s limited features, but is the developer really going to lose money over people using the demo instead of buying the full thing? I think not, as most developers take away so many features that the program is practically unusable. To impose a time limit after that is just adding insult to injury.

Speaking of insult and injury, we had our bunnies castrated on Wednesday. Despite my extreme reservations about this, I finally concede it had to be done, as from Sunday onwards they started tearing chunks of fur out of each other (literally). I think Sunday was the precise day that the younger bun, Nybble, reached puberty. He started mounting the older bun, Pixel, and All Hell™ broke loose. They are currently recovering seperately; we’ve put them on 12 hour rotation in and out of the bunny cage for seperation. They also seem a helluva lot more scared of us now, which is very understandable, since taking them to the vets scares the absolute bejesus out of them. Especially when dogs are around. Which they were. Also, Pixel scratched Nybbles left eye and caused an ulcer on his cornea, but this is healing nicely now and we’ve got some cream to put on it.

So I think that’s it for now apart from to say I’m stressing about exams, the eBay seller I ordered the new motherboard from sent me the wrong one, the TV tuners I ordered are no longer being made and *no-one* has any in stock, I had the most amazing musical acoustics lecture EVAR yesterday, and a big shout-out to anyone who came over from the xkcd forums. You guys rock!

Ps. I’ve noticed that uploads from my server are being hellishly  S L O W  and would like to apologise for that. I’m looking into it, and suspect it has something to do with incorrectly set up rate limiting on our router, though Other Andrew will almost certainly disagree with me…

So, my Master Plan™ is coming together now. I should tell you all about it. But not now.

Just kidding, here goes! It all started a few weeks back when I asked Sarah what she would like for Christmas. Being the TV fanatic she is, she asked for a hard disk TV recorder. Well, thunk I, this is gonna be a bit out of my price range. So I had a look on the ‘net, and lo and behold… I was right. But then, bright idea! I could just build an el-cheapo media center which would do everything she wanted! At this point, I’ll cut a long story short and say that I went massively over budget, and so decided to build the machine and sell it for a profit.

The original specs:

• Intel Celeron 2.53GHz
• MSI socket 775 motherboard
• 512MB DDR400 RAM
• 40GB hard disk drive (IDE)
• 1 digital TV card
• media card reader in floppy bay
• TV out connectivity
• Swanky desktop case

Apart from this, the thing also had to run as silent as possible, so I bought a “silent” power supply. I think at this point another list is in order, this time of things which went wrong:

• The case I wanted was for BTX motherboards, so I had to buy one which wasn’t as nice
• The case came with a funny shaped non-standard shrunken power supply
• The power supply I ordered was frickin’ noisy, so I wouldn’t have used it anyway
• The motherboard claimed to support the processor I bought, but, in fact, didn’t
• The TV tuner did not come with a half height PCI bracket, as the seller claimed, so I couldn’t fit it into the case
• The hard disk drive I bought was on its last legs, and proceeded to die in the middle of installing Linux MCE
• The motherboard did not support TV out properly
• Some funny was up with the RAM. It worked in all machines except this one, though, so I suspected it was the motherboard (and before anyone asks, no, this was not a high density/dual channel problem)
• In an attempt to get the RAM to work, I tried to flash the motherboard BIOS…

Ah yes, flashing the motherboard, something I’ve never had a problem with before. Okay kids, here’s some advice: never ever flash a BIOS from within Windows using WinFlash or similar. That’s just asking for trouble. In this case, I managed to recover the original BIOS because I told it not to overwrite the Bootblock, therefore giving me a failsafe in case things went titsup (which they did). Cutting a long story short here, MSI’s stupid little LiveUpdate tool continually supplied me with the wrong BIOSes for my board, and at one point I had to force Bootblock execution by shorting out high address pins on the EEPROM chip. Fun times. Not content with getting the machine back to its original state, however, I tried again with yet another BIOS, this time ending up with a *completely* dead board. I don’t know for sure why this happened, as I told it specifically not to overwrite the Bootblock, but my guess would be that the incorrect BIOS was tripping up the the board at an extremely early stage, and some incredibly careful timing would be required on the high address pins of the EEPROM to rectify this. So now I had two options: send the thing off to get the EEPROM desoldered and replaced (damn you MSI and your lack of PLCC sockets!) or just buy a new board (and new RAM, as the MSI board was an old one which took DDR400 RAM with a socket 775 processor). I opted for the new board and RAM, simply because I was sick of this pile-o’-turd excuse for a motherboard. To top this whole escapade off, I also received a miniPCI motherboard diagnostic card when I ordered one for normal PCI. Aaaand, the turboflame lighter I ordered was bigger than I expected and didn’t fit in my pocket. Grrr…

Okay, okay, I know some of these things I mentioned were due to my own lack of foresight/attention to detail, but most were mistakes on the part of the seller. Sure, the whole motherboard debacle was completely Edit0r induced, but it wouldn’t have happened if MSI’s website gave me a list of all their BIOSes and let me choose the right one. This has never failed in the past.

So what’s the status of all this now? Weeeell, all the faulty/mis-ordered equipment has been returned, and replacements *very carefully* bought. I’m awaiting a motherboard, RAM, and two TV tuners still, but they will probably turn up in the next few days. I can only hope the sailing is somewhat smoother from this point onwards…

In other news, I’ve been trying out Google Checkout, and from what I’ve seen it looks very much like PayPal but… not evil. I’ve added a donation thingme to the sidebar on the right, though I doubt if anyone will use it. Really, just don’t, it’ll only encourage me. And down that path lies destruction…

I’ve been thinking about sex lately. Not the actual deed itself, but peoples’ attitudes towards it. It started a few days ago while manning a checkout at Sainsbury’s. It was near the end of the night, about 9:30pm, and I see this guy looking obviously embarrassed walking towards my till, with apparently nothing in his hands. As soon as he reached me he pulled a packet of condoms, I swear, out of nowhere. Shifty eyes on his part. After I scanned the offending item through, it magically disappeared again before I gave him his change. What I didn’t understand was why he, or anyone for that matter, should be embarrassed about sex related items/topics. It’s a subject which goes beyond completely natural, because it’s what we as a species were designed for! Virtually everything we do is driven by sex, so why do most of us shy away from it in public? I’d very much like to hear your comments on this, so please make use of the (rather neglected at the moment) comments facility, or maybe even the shiny brand spanking new shoutbox to the right.

I often have trouble getting up in the morning, and now it’s gone beyond funny. I reckon I’ve missed almost two entire weeks of physics and maths lectures because I find it so hard to get up in the mornings. After going to the doctor to no avail, I did some research into sleep disorders on the internet, and came across the absolutely brilliant Sleepnet. I read some of the articles on the site, but didn’t really get anywhere, as none of them really described my symptoms. Then, just out of curiosity I took a look at the page about narcolepsy. Now, if any of you think as I did that narcolepsy is just a general tiredness that old people get, think again. I found it described my symptoms to a tee! Excessive daytime sleeping, sleep paralysis, sleep attacks, and hypnagogic hallucinations are the most common ailments associated with narcolepsy, and I can say with a great deal of certainty that I regularly experience all of these. So, another trip the doctor. Apparently, the normal treatment is stimulants such as amphetamines, and sticking to a sensible sleeping pattern. In lieu of that, I bought myself a proper alarm clock and have decided to force myself to bed at reasonably sensible times. So far so good, but I wonder how long I’ll be able to keep it up…

On a happier note, I’ve upgraded my WordPress installation to 2.3.1, and added a shoutbox widget to my sidebar. I was quite pleased that it saw proper a few seconds after I added it, as my brother was viewing the blog at the time! It wasn’t properly widgetified, but a few minutes of coding fixed that. So yay, use it!

Okay, I know it’s been a day since my last post, but I’ve got a few things to tell you all about. Firstly, I’ve been playing around with spectrogram software. Basically, what this does is it takes a Fourrier transform of a sound input (usually the microphone) and displays it as a bunch of frequecies against time. If you want to know more, Wikipedia is a good place to start.

So what exactly have I been doing? Well, I read this excellent page about hidden pictures in music, and decided to have a go myself. I found a nifty little Windows program called Coagula which can generate these sounds from bitmap images, and had a play around with it. I decided to see what would happen if I made a kind of feedback loop by feeding the spectrogram image from a recording of my voice into Coagula. Here are the results:

If you want to try this picture in Coagula yourself, it is 1.54 seconds long, and the frequecy range is from 20Hz to 22050Hz.

My voice before processing
My voice after processing

As you can hear, it’s pretty cool. Other interesting results can be achieved by using the same process on music. As you may know, I have a total J.S. Bach fetish, so naturally I tried this: bach.mid. This MIDI file was nicked from this website, which is also an excellent place to find out more about on this subject: http://www.seeingwithsound.com/javoice.htm. Take a look at their aural rendition of Sierpinski’s Gasket, it’s very interesting! I’ll leave it up to the interested individual to try out this technique on the Bach MIDI!

Secondly, I’d like to say something about someone I miss a lot from St. Andrews. Tom Moffat was the best friend I could have hoped for, and we shared a great many fun times together (see Regs AMV Hell). Since moving to Edinburgh, things just haven’t been the same. I have no one to talk to about old computers, to set off air raid sirens with, or with whom I can dance to Moskau. He’s like a brother to me (but without the constant annoying and beatings), and I really hope he moves to Edinburgh or somewhere close. Maybe if I tell him about Pyrosoc it might persuade him…

Pysrosoc! That’s the other thing I was meaning to say! I’m trying to start up a University society for fellow pyromaniacs, though so far I haven’t really got very far. I’ve got about 11 people signed up, but need 20 for affiliation with the Students’ Association. Hopefully these new posters I designed last night should do the trick:

Poster 1
Poster 2
Poster 3
Poster 4

Good, ja? Now all I have to do is find the money to make a few posters of each.

Ahem, if you need me I’ll be busking on Princes Street…