Well I thought I should post something. So I thought I'd talk about the load that the dalegroup server experiences. Over the last few months almost all hosted websites have moved over to dynamic driven sites (powered by Mysql + PHP) and have been receiving more hits. The load on the server has slowly increased and is now at a level that is measurable :p
This month the server has transfer approximately 1.5GB of traffic just on web site stuff. So it is finally at a stage where I could call it somewhat significant.
The server is a Pentium 4 2.4GHz with 512mb of DDR333 ram running Windows 2003, Apache 2.0.50, PHP 4.3.8 and Mysql 4.0.20
The following is a run down on CPU time/usage of certain programs (logged over the last 10 days):
Apache: 1 hour of CPU time. Peak memory usage of 160mb, while currently at 143mb.
Mail Server: 13 minutes of CPU time. Peak memory usage of 60mb, while currently at 30mb.
Mysql: 7 minutes of CPU time. Peak memory usage of 15mb, while currently at 8mb
The server has been up for approx 240 hours. So apache has used about 0.5% of the CPU for this time. So it can be said that the CPU is far from overloaded (or even loaded).
Out of the 512mb of ram there is only 106mb free. Some stage this shall be upgraded to 1gb, although there isn't a problem at this stage.
A wrote some more about this but it's all just crap :p BLA!
I just checked my awstats for my forums.
http://forums.dalegroup.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl
And the msn bot has gone crazy yet again. But this time it is huge!
MSNBot Hits: 7532+133 Bandwidth: 407.52 MB
Damn!
Checked my router status and my server has been uploading data ALL day. I've never seen usage like this. Here is a screen shot.
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/red-day30082004.png
(yellow is upload). Todays data usage is about 220mb of uploads. Which is much more than the norm (~50mb).
Has anyone had/have this problem? I'll been emailing ms again and blocking the ip addresses.
EDIT: Trackback *should* be working. Don't kill me over it just yet (re: other post about it) I'll explain my actions later ;)
Well I don't play games anymore so there must be something I can do with all my game CDs (the ones that I purchased) and there is! Some of the music (CDA) on them is really good! So I've ripped the music from GTA, Mechwarrior 2 and Fury 3. It is really surprising! I'm going to good through all my other games and look for some more. hehe! I'll purchase games JUST for the music. Funny stuff.
Ah I remember back when I had my Pentium 133, ripping mp3s was a painful process. I think it worked out to be 20 minutes to encode a WAV file into a 128kbit mp3. Now it is just instant.
On another topic. My new office is proving to be very good, since I move the servers and the adsl modem my internet "seems" to be much better. Before the modem was running through a 15 meter extension cord, well that is gone. So I think that has helped a bit. The connection has been up since the move, no drop outs etc. *touch wood* although I think the dropouts (when there was problems) were more the fault of telstra/iinet. But anything to make my connection more stable.
There are a few more things I'd like to talk about. I should work on my image thing a bit more but really don't have time this weekend. Josh has finally turned to the darkside and is now using wordpress (although unsure when that is going to be "live" or maybe it is), I still think his old design looks better ;) Unsure if he wants people viewing yet, but if you do post a link in the comments ;) Doh. Now I'm going to HAVE to code stuff to try and keep up with the features of wordpress. hehe.
What else. n00bies running mail servers?! No, I wont talk about that :p
*goes back to listening to fury3 music*
:)
From the start of creating this site, I've said to myself that I wouldn't put images on this site. I want quick loading times. But this won't stop me from linking to them and well there is this one image that I wanted to show people. A very cute dog.
Now I wanted it so that style was the same as the site. So with a bit of help from mod_rewrite and some php code it can be done! Nice 8)
The first link:
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/maxdog.jpg
I like the urls :)
Well today was a very interesting day. I decided to go to the Sydney and UTS UNI open days. First place was Sydney. I rocked up there at about 10am and went to listen to the talk about Information Technology; well it was very bad/uninformative and boring. But I saw a friend from primary school (some of you may remember the house at Scotland island that I had the news years eve party. That was his house). Any who so it was nice seeing him there. Didn't expect to see him, although it would be cool to go to the same UNI. But I don't think I'll be going to Sydney (more in a sec). So anyway I went to the quadrangle and talked to some of the lecturers and uni students, which was far more interesting than the talk. So that was nice. I so met up with Kylie there (max was with us too). I saw quite a few kids from school too.
I looked at a few courses.
Computer Design (half arts course and half software design)
Computer Science and Technology (standard computer stuff with a major in a section in second year).
So that was good. The main grounds are nice but the library and the lecture halls weren't all that great.
I then went to the computer labs. I checked out the multimedia centre and the "High Perform Visualization centre" now the visual center was pretty wow. The guy there was showing off a program which took the openGL out puts of a program (quake3 in this case) and spilt it into three sections and rendered it across 3 different computer systems. You could move each section around within a window. Very funky!
He also showed me the UNI video conferencing link that connects many of the UNIs together. The internet connection at Sydney is a 10gigabit/sec connection. Nice huh? All UNIs are connected to this massive backbone.
I then went to UTS where the first thing that I saw was a dell stand! Yes that is right. They give large discounts to students for hardware when going to UTS. So I've got this password and thing to give me some nice discount :) Time for a nice laptop!
I then went to listen to a talk about the IT at UTS. Wow they sold themselves so much better. The talk was fantastic, I found out everything I wanted to know and more. They had DJ's playing music in every building and just the general atmosphere was so much better than Sydney. They also have an 802.11g 54mbit wireless link throughout the whole grounds. Time for some serious leaching! :)
The courses here are:
General IT
Business + IT
Maths + IT
So I think I'll do one of those. UTS has some really great stuff and the feel of the place is just much nicer than Sydney. They also have better buildings ;p They even have computer shops IN the UNI! Sweet!
There is also lots of different clubs, ranging from social things to hardcore programming and computer stuff. w00ting. So yeah, it looks sweet.
I also went to see The Bourne Supremacy which was a good movie.
Next week is the UNSW open day so I'll be going to that too. Although I think I'm set for UTS.
UNI looks kick arse!
I thought I would post my current view (and may change) on trackback. Now trackback is a way of posting comments on someone else's blog site. What happens is instead of replying to a post on the site you are visiting you go to your compatible blogging software type in the sites (the one you're wanting to add a comment to) trackback url and then your reply. What then happens is a small amount of your comment is sent to the site and posted where as the rest is stored on your website.
An example can be found here:
http://binarybonsai.com/archives/2004/08/22/kubrick-vs-wordpress/#comments
Your site now appears with your comment and users from the other site must visit your site to read the comment.
I don't like this for the following reason
1) If I am reading a website I don't wish to go to someone else's site, which I have no idea what is about just to read this one comment. Now this comment may have replies from people visiting that site, so it becomes like this massive chain. Visiting 5 different sites to read 5 comments is not my idea of fun.
2) Confusing. The trackback comments appear as a new item on your site too. For example:
http://photomatt.net/2004/08/18/blog-appeal/
3) Just lame. If someone has visited my site they should post on my site, not some crappy way of getting people to go to their site. The same if I post on someone else's site.
4) Something about if the website the trackback is going to is down I can't read the rest of the comment.
5) Effort. Instead of just typing my reply on that site I must go back to mine, log in, type the trackback url and then add my comment.
Currently at this stage I think it is not all that great. Now maybe I'm saying this because my site doesn't have trackback or something. I'm sure if I really wanted to I could code it but I just don't see the point. If you want to comment on something great just post it here, otherwise just read it.
This site isn't about drawing masses of people; it is mainly here just so you can read my feelings/ideas on certain topics. The commenting system is for feedback, nothing more.
My feelings towards trackback might change so there is no point in quoting me on this in 10 years time when everyone is using it :p
Old School Commenting!
Feel free to tell me why I should like trackback.
EDIT: It may also be called ping-back not track-back. I don't know!
I'm currently waiting for the google bot to index this site and I'm very much hoping it does as that was the main reason for adding mod_rewrite. Quite a funky little module if you ask me.
Oh something random,
I was starting my computer (as you do) and as grub (my boot loader) appeared. I thought I had pressed the up key and started Linux (fedora) by mistake. I was very pissed off as I'd HAVE to restart my computer. I can't stand Fedora in its current state (the installed version on my computer). Too much crap installed and just feels well wrong. So that is my Linux bashing for today. Now time for some Microsoft bashing...
I don't think I could ever use IIS even if for some strange reason I wanted too. The main problem is the lack of htaccess support. You cannot configure different folders with an htaccess file to set permissions and settings. So like passwords, mod_rewrite etc etc. Although the school proxy (MS proxy version 2 no less) is making my site _very_ slow. It works much faster through iis. GRR. So I COULD run IIS on another port but it wouldn't do mod_rewrite or pass worded stuff. Bah! Pain.
Oh a useful link for people who want Service Pack 2 on CD:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/sp2/cdorder/en_us/default.mspx
I'm off to cruise the UNIs tomorrow. I think I'm looking at Sydney and UTS. Should be interesting. 20 days left of school or something. 54 days until the HSC.
Certain people who wear blue shirts need to learn how to use FTP otherwise I will disconnect their site :@
Here google bot, now you can index me!
Let me try and explain what rewriting is:
mod_rewrite is *some what* like DNS in a way.
For example if you type http://www.google.com your computer will look up the ip address for google and then load the page.
Mod_rewrite looks at the url that the user entered and outputs something.
So the user enters:
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/newsid/91#comments
My website outputs:
http://blog.dalegroup.net/index.php?newsid=91#comments
Yet the user doesn't see this.
Like DNS you don't see the IP address just the "mask".
That is just a basic example. mod_rewrite is much more/different than that. But hopefully you understand.
Now why is this a good thing? Well google, yahoo and any other bots have issues with ?= and all that stuff meaning that as until now they would have only indexed the front page of this site. Now since my urls don't have ?= etc google should index them and therefore have a hard linked url to that news item. Sweet :)
For anyone who wants to try this on their site the code I use is here:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^archive/blog/newsid/([^/]+)$ /?newsid=$1
RewriteRule ^archive/blog/newsid/([^/]+)/$ /?newsid=$1
If you want me to explain it, email me :)
EDIT: If you have any problems posting comments etc because of the new setup please do let me know. *hint* post something to test it ;)
EDIT2: I also should thank wordpress for giving me the idea. Although I'm not a fan of third party blogging scripts they have some great developers and features.
Okay it really only just hit me yesterday. There is like sooo little time left of school. I was looking forward to leaving but now I'm unsure. I'm going to miss it! :'(
So many people/teachers/friends that I may not see again for a long time. And then it the whole structure of everything changes and aaHH!!! I'm sure I'll enjoy the "new life", but I am going to miss SACS. Even though they suck ;)
Wow like 4 weeks left of this term AND then the HSC. Scary. eep. It has come so quickly and like meh! Oh dear!
Anyway should be doing work or something.
Enjoy :)
It is really quite funny to watch the media deliberately beef up stories in an aim to increase emotion and sympathy just to get a better story. My crappy news reader (which I am learning to like ;)) decides to think there is a new item when ever the title of the article changes so I get all the Sydney Morning Heralds old titles a long with there "better" versions. It has happened on a number of different times. Let me find some examples:
[i]Greek sprinters unhurt[/i], changes to [i]Greek sprint champ out[/i] which then changes to [i]Greek sprinter quits Games[/i] (remember this is the same article which just a different title).
[i]Aussies heads for finals[/i] (yes that wording) changed to [i]Australia heads for finals with win over China[/i] (yes the grammar was wrong so this should have been changed)
[i]Drug test costs her gold[/i] to [i]Russian denied gold after positive test[/i]
[i]Robbins 'threatened' by teammates[/i] to [i]Robbins: I was threatened[/i] and then back to the first one.
*sigh* and the list goes on. Maybe it is just that their editor doesn't read things before they are published. I don't know, I just find it funny.
So it isn't all that interesting but hey!