RIP Waffle

So I was using my laptop this week when it randomly died. Just out right shut off. It’s done this for a while, over a year. I’ve learned not to disturb it, but something must have pushed it over the edge. I tried for a long time that night to try and breathe new life back into it, but eventually I had to call it quits. Sometimes it would make it past the BIOS screen, but sometimes not. Consistently though it would shut itself off pretty quickly.

Lets be honest here, the laptop is 4 years old, and has been pretty roughly used. It’s come with me every day to class, and has travelled back and forth from Ottawa and school, as my parents said, it owes me nothing. While it’d be nice to get it working again (not hopeful), it’s likely time for it to move on. I had hoped it was going to last 5 years, but 4 years isn’t bad.

I unplugged it and took out the battery and let it sit over night, but still no dice. I started searching for a new laptop quickly that suited my needs. For a long time I’ve been forced to deal with a crappy resolution – 1280×800 – which is pretty crappy for writing code. One of the requisites for a laptop is to have a NVidia graphics card and a high resolution display. After searching I eventually found a match, the Asus G51JX-A1, packed with everything that I was looking for. I’ll let you click the link for the specs, but in short it comes packed with a 1080p display, 15.6″, Intel i7, and 6GB of ram. It also seems to run Linux and OSX very well (in fact, it had the HIGHEST score Geekbench in late June of all the OSX machines. I’m a bit dubious of this, but it’s interesting.

I must say that I was infact looking at the MacBook Pro 17″ with i7, but the price was out of my budget at $2700. It’s also a dual core (vs the Asus quad core) and comes with less memory. The Asus checked out after shipping at a cool $2100.

I ordered it today, so I’m going to assume it’s going to ship Tuesday (as monday is a holiday in Canada), and arrive Wednesday. For the meantime, I’m using my roommate’s MacBook Pro. They’re pretty solid machines and I want one, just out of my price range. I’ll write another article soon as I’m up and running.

PS: Waffle incase you’re wondering is my laptop’s hostname.

Here’s some more waffle related posts:

• Random Freezups
• Struggle for More Pixels
• Ubuntu?
• Wrapping up Vista
• Continued Vista Testing
• Vista

Edit: Wow grammar fail.

Git Based Backups, a Followup

I’ve been using git based website backups for a while now. In my previous post, I talked about how my backup system works. So far, it’s worked fairly flawlessly, but there have been lessons learned.

The first lesson I learned is that you CAN dump a MySQL database and keep it in git, however, you have to do it the right way. Turns out, by default, mysqldump puts everything on one line, including new data. This makes for extremely large database dumps, and makes it almost useless to tell what’s new and what’s old. By using “–complete-insert”, it splits each row into a separate SQL command. This makes the initial version quite a bit larger, but subsequent versions smaller. My database 41MB when the dump is complete, which is quite large.

The second lesson I’m now learning is that git stores the entire history locally inside the .git directory. This initially doesn’t take much space, as it’s compressed, but it grows. I have limited space on my host, and currently my .git directory is pushing 131MB. My entire blog directory is now 191MB, so really, the content is just 19MB. That’s a LOT of space (I blame it all on the database, the actual content doesn’t change much), although each individual diff is about 500K. I did some digging, and the kernel.org folk said:

In general, git is not a viable solution for the the case of a large repository with relatively small individual checkouts. However, if developers do not intend to clone, fetch, push into or push from their repositories, then use shallow clones

Well that certainly limits the usefulness now doesn’t it! Unless I’m missing something, it’s basically saying that if you use ‘shallow’ copies, then you can’t really do anything with them unless you create patches locally and apply them in a full copy and commit. In a large team, I would say this makes git almost useless. Back to my situation, it means that it limits the usefulness of backups to almost zero.

So is git the best way to go? Well maybe. Perhaps backing up the database in the method I chose is the best way. I probably would have been better compressing it, naming it, and shipping it to another server. But hey, I had to find this out right?

Git Based Backup

Hey Everybody, sorry about the extended absence. I’ve been very busy of late! I’ve recently decided to try out the newest thing in SCM (Source Control Management), Git. Lots of people are getting on the git bandwagon, and I’m not sure if I’m totally on board yet. One of the things that appealed to me, however, is the ease of setting everything up. I’ve decided, after years, to have an actual backup solution for my website. I’ve been left without backups before, and it’s bitten me in the arse recently. As you can probably guess where this is going, yes, I’m doing git based backups of my website – database and all.

This lets me do some interesting things. First of all, I can have nightly backups, and ‘checkpoints’, points where I could easily roll back changes if I screw something up. Another is a site that only is a snapshot of the live site, whether for testing or redundancy (via branches). And lastly, it lets me have a log of recent changes that I make, and look at changes and have the ability to revert changes that I may have done while working on a script. I typically commit and push changes to a script with a detailed message when I make changes, outside of the nightly backup cycle.

At first, I was curious to see how MySQL dumps would do inside backups. So far they seem to do very well, and don’t mind being in SCM. It gets dumped to text, so stuff that doesn’t change… well doesn’t change. I back up data to one spot regularly, and then semi-frequently to another. This is how it’s laid out:

The live website is denoted with a 1, and the attached database is also pictured. This is where the general traffic and changes are, aka, the critical data. Every night, the data gets replicated to computer 2, which is completely in another country. Unfortunately it’s on a slow link, and not 100% reliable, but hey, at least it’s somewhere right? Computer #3 is my laptop, which is where I may or may not make changes to some files and testing, before committing them. On the server (computer #1), changes are pulled and merged into the repository automatically (if they’re non conflicting), before the fresh changes are committed. I’ve been running this nightly for about a half a week for my low traffic sites, and recently moved it to my blog. The scripts that run will let git automatically add new files, and delete deleted files, having a perfect snapshot of the blog. I’m going to continue testing this on more of my websites, before I make it available to the websites that I host, including a control panel type feature for managing snapshots.

It’s also worth noting that the connection between my server and the main git repository is secured by key based SSH authentication. I haven’t had any issues with this so far and has been an excellent solution.

I like to give credit, where credit is due, so I’m going to give mad props to my webhost, who processed my request for a shell within 15 minutes, installed git within 15 minutes, and fixed the git installation in 15 minutes. Their level of support has been truly remarkable. A big thanks to you guys! Check them out (A Small Orange). If you like them, and decide you want to sign up, don’t forget to use the referral link on my blog .

RSS Readers

I’m not sure why, but lately Akregator has been behaving poorly. Sometimes when it updates a feed, it adds articles from other feeds into the feed and marks them as unread. This gets extremely annoying and every attempt I’ve made to fix the problem has not proved to be fruitful.

Akregator Showing the Articles in the Wrong Field

To solve this, I didn’t create a bug report with KDE nor tried to fix it myself. I’ll have to admit that sometimes I’m not a very good member in the Open Source community. I simply don’t have time to fix the problem. I looked through Gentoo’s package manager Portage for some RSS readers. The selection wasn’t very great, but I installed a few of them. The first one, Blam Newsreader boasts to be simple. Unfortunately it was TOO simple for my use. I went down the list, and found Liferea (I don’t like the name much, it sounds a bit too much like urea). I copied all my feeds from Akreagtor to Liferea and so far so good. It has all the options and features I want from an RSS reader. I’ve been using it for not very long, so I’ll update this later with more comments. Here’s the interface…

Liferea Interface Reading a Web Comic

Random Freezups

My laptop is sick. Very sick. For the past few months, sometimes when I move it or bump it, the screen goes black and the sound skips. Then sometimes, when I try to turn it back on, nothing happens. It’s a problem that until the weekend, was easily avoidable and a livable nuisance. In an attempt to fix the problem, I reseated both my harddrive and ram. Shortly after that, I began having freezups when it was sitting on my table. Getting quickly VERY frustrated, I gave my laptop a few swift hits on the side, which seems to actually fixed the problem. Since my “fix”, I’ve had one freezup. I’ve done some reading, and one other persons says they have a faulty ram slot. In a few months, I’m going to try putting in new (and more) ram, and hopefully not as cheap as the replacement ram that’s in there now. If I still have problems, my laptop is still under warranty (which is now 2 and a half years old). My only problem is if I get a replacement laptop, is if it’s as compatible with Linux as my current one is. I’m very happy with the hardware currently in my laptop, and I’d be afraid to lose that compatibility.

Update: It seems that my second stick of ram is not being recognized at all, but I haven’t tried to fix it yet. Hopefully I can, sometimes I really need the extra memory.

Oh, Hi

Wow, has it really been two months since I’ve blogged? Sorry guys!

If you’ve been talking to me lately, you probably know I’m pretty busy with school. The assignments, papers, and midterms just keep on marching at me as fast as I can do them. Unfortunately, my schedule is extremely inefficient for getting things done. So let’s do a recap!

Christmas

Christmas was pretty busy, and unfortunately the weather played havoc with a few of my plans. There was a few storms around Christmas and on New Years, which forced me to juggle things around a bit. For those that don’t know, I got a shiny new Canon EOS 450D (Rebel XSi), and you can check out pictures on my flickr page.

School

I’m taking a few interesting courses right now:

• System Analysis, Design & Project Management
• Professional Practice
• Computer Organization II
• Operating Systems I
• Anthropology – Religion and the Sacred

This keeps me busy pretty much all the time, and I haven’t had much time to do anything but school work in the past couple weeks.

Programming

All of my current programming project are unfortunately put on hold. Thing’s I’d love to get done is qZDL, and OCam. OCam (name still under consideration), is a little program I developed during the Ottawa OCTranspo strike to look at the City of Ottawa webcams easily. The app lets me flick through all the webcams in a way that’s analogous to using a TV (including “stations”). I’m working to add more and more webcams to this, and maybe release it.

The Best iPhone Game

In my experience, Jellycar is by far the best iPhone/iPod touch game on the platform. Full of great music, hilarious sound effects, and always a great challenge, Jellycar is a must have. Best part it’s free!

Jellycar’s main screen is a bunch of little thumbnails of the maps, that slide and bounce around as you tilt your device. Tapping an icon will first pop up a dialog with the best time, and asking you to confirm your choice for the level.

When you load a level, you start as a small car, with a continuously counting timer. In the top left hand corner there’s a progress bar of sorts. The controls are simple: tap and hold the right side to go right, tap and hold the left side to go back, tilt left and right to roll the car, pinch to zoom, tap with all three fingers to pause. But that’s not it! Tap the car to convert your car into a monster truck.

You only get a limited amount of time with this car (as shown by the progress bar), but it’s usually required at some point in each level for completion.

Why is it called Jellycar after all? Well you see, your car and the level is made of a pliable jelly-like material. You bounce, deform, and squish your way through the level, usually laughing the whole time at the silly sound effects.

If you think these levels are easy, think again. Each level is challenging in its own way, and until used to the controls and the dynamics of the game, it’s actually extremely difficult.

If you don’t have Jellycar, and you have an iPhone or iPod touch, I highly suggest you give it a try. It’s probably the only App I actually use from the App Store.

Please Make it Stop!

Why am I continually assulted with an election that gets more press coverage in Canada than Canada’s own election? People complain about Canadian Politics, but that’s because everybody’s so fixated on the wrong country.

Struggle For More Pixels

Anybody that uses a computer a lot, usually would agree that there’s just never enough pixels on the screen to do what you want. This term, my old roommate left his monitor behind, and I’ve taken it into my room for use with my laptop. My laptop’s display is 15.4 inch widescreen, with a native resolution of 1280×800. The current monitor I’m using has a native resolution of 1680×1050 (just shy of 1080!), however, sometimes even that doesn’t feel like enough. Having a dual monitor setup is perfect, but I wish it worked better in Linux for a setup where both monitors might be a different size.

X seems to think that the best way to do this is to make a square screen, even if one screen is taller pixel-wise than the other, meaning I don’t get the bottom of the screen on the smaller monitor. The other side-effect here is that the KDE panel goes across the bottom all the way, even if I wanted it just to be on one screen (Windows does this, and it’s a feature I like). Dual monitors is something Windows gets right, and Linux absolutely fails at. Then again, there might be a solution I don’t know about. At work, I have a nice setup. I have a nice large square screen, and spend all day in VMWare, so switching around VMWare has become second nature.

I’m also thinking within a year I’m going to have to get my laptop replaced. Heat has became a big issue for it, and even a chillpad struggles to keep it cool. I’ve tried dusting it a couple times, but unfortunately the air circulation on it has never been that great. I have the most problems when running something that gives the GPU a pretty good workout, usually pushing the sensor temps over 100C, and making the bottom of the laptop too hot to touch. In my dual monitor setup, I must remember to keep the laptop lid open, even if the screen is in use to promote air circulation.

Who Turned Off the Pump?

Every weekend, my friends and I go to a pub called “The Lieutenants Pump” for bunch at about noon. Last week we got this letter:

Dear Valued Patron,

I regret to inform you that the Lieutenant’s Pump has been assessed a two day Liquor license suspension by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission. The Commision found us guilty of being over capacity by five people on the patio during last years Stanley Cup Finals.

On the night of the infraction, we did everything in our power to control the patio but did not foresee people jumping the fence. We had staff supervising the patio and when people hopped the fence they were immediately escorted off.

We were not aware at the time that this would be considered insufficient by the Commission. Somehow, the Commission expected us to prevent the fence jumping. Short of barbed wire and electrification I’m not sure how this could have been accomplished. None the less, in its wisdom the Commission has concluded that the suspension is warranted as a general deterrent to other operators and as a specific deterrent to us letting it happen again.

The Lieutenant’s Pump will be closed October 11, 12 and 13 which is Thanksgiving weekend including Monday.

I apologize in advance for any inconvenience this closure will cause. Any concerns about this situation should be directed to:

Ted Meekin
Minister of Government and Consumer Services
4320 – 99 Wellesely St. E.
4^th Fl. Whitney Block
Toronto M7A 1W3

416 – 327 – 6611
TmcMeekin.MPP@Liberal.OLA.ORG

“See You At the Pump”
<SIGNATURE>
John Couse
Owner