Chicken! I'm gonna eat you!

Bugger, It's A Sony

My Kannagi OP video on YouTube is probably about to go offline.  Sony has issued a copyright claim against it.

Which is fully within their rights (I think) but bugger them anyway.  It's the opening credits.  No, I can't even claim fair use, but it's the opening credits.

Interestingly, the claim came from Sony Music Entertainment, who presumably have the rights to the CD release.  Not the anime, but the CD.

Still seem to be plenty of other copies of the Kannagi OP online for now.  We'll see what happens there.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The Good, The Bad, And The JPop Music Video

There's a music video out of the theme song for Kannagi.

It's terrible.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:05 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Openings

Three for the price of one!

Kannagi:


Kemeko Deluxe:


Macademi Wasshoi:


Sorry about the quality, particularly with that last one.  Youtube seems determined to squeeze every last bit out of the file size these days.  When my copy of Adobe Design Studio CS4 arrives next week I'll re-encode them as Flash H.264 and put up local copies.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:16 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Update Update Update

Six rounds of updates, plus two updates to Windows Update itself, with the attendant eight reboots, and I'm ready to begin installing SP1.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:55 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Say Hello, Nagi

While I still haven't managed to get SP1 installed (tip: DO NOT INSTALL LANGUAGE PACKS UNLESS YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO), I have settled on a name.

Nagi it is.

Which raises the question: Just how many anime series are there about high-school (or middle-school) goddesses?  Given that I've now used Kamichu!, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and Kannagi.  Not that I really need more than three desktop computers...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:25 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Drowning In Buttermilk

I had two goals today: Buy some socks, and install Vista SP1.

As for how that worked out, well, I have plenty of socks now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:44 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Kemeko Deluxe

How the heck does she fit into that thing?  I mean, her legs alone are longer than its entire body.

It's a reverse Stellar Buster Mito.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:31 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Pygmalion, Eat Your Heart Out

Nagi just shot way up in the naming ranks.  Thanks for the suggestion, mparker762!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:12 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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A New Era

Lina-Shana-Tanarotte-Kemeko-Index is assembled, working (as far as I can tell) and installing Fedora Core 9 for some burn-in testing.

Assembly was completely painless.  Plugged everything in, and it all worked first time.

Will keep an eye out for meteors sharks...

Update: The Seagate 1.5TB drive delivers a transfer rate of 121MB/sec.

Whee!  I remember being happy to get 100MB/sec from a four-disk RAID-0 array - and that wasn't all that long ago, either.

Update: Everything seems to be going swimmingly.  Easily the most powerful computer I've ever built, and the smoothest assembly process.

And next - install Vista!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:46 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Pixy's DLL Hell Tip Of The Day

If you are trying to build PHP 5.2 on RedHat 5 x86_64, and it fails with

Configuring extensions
checking whether to enable LIBXML support... yes
checking libxml2 install dir... no
checking for xml2-config path... /usr/bin/xml2-config
checking whether libxml build works... no
configure: error: build test failed.  Please check the config.log for details.

even though you know full well that libxml2 is installed, what you need to do is

yum erase zlib-devel
yum install zlib-devel
yum install libxml2-devel

Erasing zlib-devel will also remove libxml2-devel due to the dependencies (and maybe a whole bunch of other stuff, so be careful!), so you need to reinstall it afterwards.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:44 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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But I Don't Have A Shirt...

A stroke of pure brilliance.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:31 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Miracle Of Miracles!

I got the MetaWeblog API to do something useful today!

God, but blogging APIs suck.  Blogger 1.0, Blogger 2.0, MetaWeblog, Movable Type, Atom.  Line them up against a wall and nuke the wall from orbit.

Part of the problem is that they all use XML.  XML is designed for self-documenting data interchange, so naturally it's bad at both documenting and at interchanging data.

Part of the problem is that several of them use XML-RPC, which takes XML and then sucks out everything good.  Field names?  Who needs 'em?

The Atom API...  Well, it's XML, which is bad, and it's Atom, which is just plain weird for an API, and it was killed by Blogger almost before it was born.

And then there's the new Blogger API.  The client library for Python is about three times the size of the Minx code, docs, templates, and SQL definitions put together.  Eek.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?

Let's see what happens...

Well, it kind of works.  (See below.)  Say bye-bye to half my CSS settings, and at the same time, half the markup in the document itself, but other than that, it's readable enough.

That's the documentation for one active tag (albeit one of the more complex ones).  And it's pretty terse and short on examples.

As of 1.2b3, the current development version, Minx supports 1651 active tags.  (I have no idea how many data tags there are - closing on a hundred thousand, I expect.)

Of course, most of those tags are variations or combinations or or specialisations or refinements of other tags, because Minx has only about 23,000 lines of code.

But if each tag needed a paragraph of explanation, that would fill a phone book.

So I need to take what I've been writing in Word, parameterise it, and build it into a Wiki.

Fortunately, two of the features added in 1.2 are Wiki support and text macros, so I can do exactly that.

So, um, I will.

Do that.

Yes.

more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:22 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Virtua Server

I've been looking into using Virtuozzo to rationalise and better control the servers that run mu.nu, mee.nu, and all the little spin-off sites.  The problem is that Virtuozzo is not only a commercial product, it's an expensive commercial product, and you can't just go and grab a copy for testing.  You can get a test copy if you ask, but it expires after 30 days, and I kind of didn't get it installed before it expired.

Oops.

But Virtuozzo is built on OpenVZ, which is open source.  Since I was setting up a new development server for work today, and our developers had been asking for their own environments, and since I had an 8-core machine with 8GB of ram to play with, I thought I'd throw OpenVZ on there and see how it ran.

It ran pretty well, in fact, at least in my brief testing.  Certainly, once you have it installed (which is pretty easy, but requires a reboot because it installs a custom kernel), and you've downloaded one of the prebuilt templates, creating a new container (OpenVZ's terminology for a virtual machine) is very fast and only takes a few arcane commands.

I'm going to reload Guchuko with CentOS 5.2 x86_64 and toss OpenVZ on there and see how it all runs.  Only problem is that I need to download CentOS 5.2 x86_64 first, and my ISP only has the CD ISOs on their mirror.

Hmm.  Since I'll need to use this as my desktop as well while I'm running on Guchuko, maybe Fedora 9 is a better bet.  I already have an ISO for that.

So, install Fedora 9, load OpenVZ, create a container, install CentOS in the container, load Minx on there, and test the performance.  That should keep me quiet for a few minutes...

Okay, while that's going on -  Oops.  Maybe I should have done a backup first.  I am installing into a different partition, of course, and nothing should go wrong, but still...

Oh well.  Worst case I lose a few days of tweaking on the Minx code and docs.  Anyway:

OpenVZ is, of course, free.  And it delivers what I need, a memory-efficient Linux virtualisation platform.

What it doesn't have is any sort of user-friendly management tools, and that's what Virtuozzo comes in.  But where OpenVZ costs nothing, Virtuozzo starts at $60 per month for 3 containers.  Mind you, 30 containers only costs $125 per month.  It's a pity that they start the pricing so high, but they are targeting the VPS hosting market here, and most VPS hosting companies would be packing as many containers onto each physical machine as possible.

Now, the flip side of this comes if I want to offer Plesk instead of CPanel.  Plesk comes from the same company as Virtuozzo, and so they work together nicely and have (I believe) integrated control panels.  And Parallels (the company) offer serious discounts for Plesk on Virtuozzo over Plesk on OpenVZ (or any other virtualisation platform).  Plesk on OpenVZ would start at $18 per month per container; on Virtuozzo it's just $6.  So if I need 10 containers running Plesk, and 20 containers running other stuff, a Virtuozzo license has paid for itself already.

The other other problem is that 30 containers, unless they're pretty specialised containers, is really pushing it for a server with 8GB of memory; 16GB would be better.  But Softlayer's cheap single-socket servers only go up to 8GB of memory.  Their two-socket servers go up to 32GB, but you're looking at an extra $100 per month for the server, plus the cost of the extra memory, plus the cost of Virtuozzo, and then since your servers are now a lot more expensive you can't have as many and need to put more people on each one, so you can't just rely on clever replication routines, so another $100+ a month for a hardware RAID controller and the additional disks, and so it goes.

I'm hoping that the next-generation Core i7 servers from Softlayer will start at the same price as the current quad-cores, because they'll be able to go to as much as 36GB of memory on a single-socket server.  As to when those machines will make their appearance, though, I'm not holding my breath.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Suggestions?

Okay, so I have another computer.

Which means I need another name.

My current Linux box is Yurie.
My current Vista box is Haruhi.
My notebook is Potemayo/Guchuko.  (It's dual-boot.)

So, logically, I need a female anime character who's the star of a 2008 series, is petite, and possesses remarkable powers.*

By pure coincidence, Lina - the name of my previous Windows box - would fit perfectly.  But I'm willing to go further afield.

* But not names of female anime characters starting with A or M that are also the names of colours.  Those are reserved for servers.  And yes, there's enough to keep mu.nu and mee.nu running for years.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:52 AM | Comments (13) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Making A List, Checking It Twice

CPU ✓
Motherboard ✓
Memory ✓
Disk drive ✓
DVD burner, with software ✓
DVD burner, w/o software, 2x ✓
Case ✓
Power supply ✓

The rest of the parts have shipped, and should arrive today or tomorrow.  Yay!

Only worry I have is the reports of issues with the Seagate 1.5TB drive.  I might throw Linux on there first to test things out, before I go to all the trouble of installing Vista.

Update: Politeness pays.  I held the lift for a guy coming in the door, and it turned out to be the courier with the rest of my goodies.  Yay!

Update: Boo!  The cheap DVD burners, which are the same model as the more expensive burner but are cheaper because they don't come bundled with software, came bundled with software.  The exact same software.  Mind you, if that's the worst problem I have with this round of orders I'll count myself blessed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Lies, Damn Lies, And Motherboards

I wanted to order my new PC today, because I urgently need to rebuild both my Windows and Linux boxes.* But that nice new Nvidia-based motherboard (below) isn't in stores yet, so I was going to go with a similar Intel G45 motherboard - until I noticed, just before sending the order, that the PCI-e x16 slot was really only a x4, just as it was in the previous version, based on the old Intel G33.

Well, crap.

So I went AMD instead. The 9750 will likely be a bit slower than the Q8200 would have been, but I'm still moving from a 2.6GHz dual-core to a 2.4GHz quad-core. And it means that I can swap parts between boxes.  And I was kind of thinking of upgrading my Vista box to something like this anyway, and now I kind of have.

Other than that, a 1.5TB C: drive, 3 DVD burners (so I don't have to swap disks to switch games) and 8GB of RAM. Case is a Lian-Li V600, power supply a Corsair VX-450, both the same as my current machines.

Once I have this, I can load Vista and all my software on it, then copy everything off my current Vista box and install Centos 5.2 and OpenVZ, and then copy everything off my old Linux box onto the new Linux box and then install Centos 5.2 and OpenVZ on that.

Or maybe Fedora 10 and Xen.

Won't that be nice?

* My Windows registry has got corrupted - probably due to the bad RAM I had earlier - and this is causing all sorts of horrible problems. Not least of these is that I've lost all my shell extensions, including Tortoise SVN, which I need for work. It's also somehow killed the Windows Installer service, conveniently preventing me from ever reinstalling Tortoise SVN.

Meanwhile in Linux land, I need to compile a current version of Pixman so I can compile a current version of Cairo so that I can start doing some work with CairoPlot and Matplotlib for Minx. Only problem is that things won't compile, apparently due to some conflict with the pre-installed (but out-of-date) version of either Pixman or Cairo. And I'd just remove those, only Cairo is used by GTK, which is the heart of the entire Gnome desktop environment, so deleting Cairo would delete about half the operating system.

All I want is one (1) working Vista box and infinity (∞) working Linux boxes. Since I'm unlikely to get the latter, I'll settle for the ability to easily create new virtual machines at will. Hence the OpenVZ and/or Xen.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:29 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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At Long Last!

A decent all-in-one motherboard for Intel chips.

It's from Gigabyte, of course.  The GA-E7AUM-DS2H might have an ugly name, but it looks like a sweet board.  It has built-in GeForce 9400 graphics (so about a quarter the speed of my current video card), and though it doesn't have the dedicated video ram of the GA-MA78GPM-DS2H, it still manages to pip it on 3DMark06 by 100 points.*



All the usual ports: 6 USB, 6 audio, gigabit ethernet, Firewire, DVI, VGA, HDMI and keyboard.  No mouse, but it really is time you upgraded to USB.


Only problem is that it's brand new and no-one stocks it yet.  Otherwise, that and maybe a Q8200 would make a nice new Vista box.

* The GA-MA790GP-DS4H still edges it out: 2800 to 2400 to 2300.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:22 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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LiveDrive

Put the ioDrive into production today.  That's a big load of worries off my mind.  The production server (this is at my day job, not mu.nu/mee.nu) has been constantly on the edge of flattening its RAID array, which is after all only four SATA drives.

Four 7200 rpm SATA drives can only do 480 iops, best case, and the ioDrive can do about 6000 iops, worst case, so it's making things run a lot more smoothly.

Now if I can just get the query builder to stop selecting the wrong index and sorting 15 million records every time a user does a search, everything will be peachy!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:46 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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It's How F'ing Much?!

So, if I'm going to be building a new PC, I'm going to be looking at the latest bits and pieces, right?

What I was thinking for the CPU was a low-power AMD chip, like the 9350e 2.0 GHz quad-core ($220) or the new model of the 5600+ 2.9GHz dual-core ($150).  Both are 65W chips - and 65W for a quad core is pretty nice.  The higher-clocked dual-core would be better for desktop stuff; the quad better for server stuff.  Shame they don't make a chip that lets you turn off two cores when you don't need them...

For the motherboard, either a Gigabyte GA-MA78GPM-DS2H ($160), a nice little all-in-one mATX board that's the successor to the successor to my current motherboards, or the GA-MA790GP-DS4H ($200), a full ATX board that has all the same features plus SLI support.  Both have built-in video, and include 128MB of dedicated DDR3 video ram.  Which is not critical now that I have a working video card, but is nice to have when I come to repurpose them in a year or two.

Throw in 8GB of memory ($160) and either a cheap 750GB drive ($125) or a shiny new 1.5TB drive ($290) and a case (which I have) and a power supply (which I also have, though I might buy a new one), and voila.

But hey, what about Intel's new Core i7?  Initial reports are that it's fast fast fast - about twice the speed of that AMD quad-core - and not too expensive, reportedly starting at US$284 in quantity.  It's only just been pre-announced, and I doubt anyone has it yet, but maybe they have pricing and an ETA...

Oh look!  It's in stock!  And it's only...  Uh, nearly $700?!  For the cheapest model, and $2400 for the high-end version.

Holy channel markup, batman.  I thought we'd left crap like that behind.

Motherboard?  One model in stock: The Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME, a snip at just $600.

It takes 12GB of DDR3 memory, and to fill it up will cost, let's see, another $700.

So, $2000 for Intel CPU, motherboard and memory, vs. $470 to $580 for the AMD stuff.  The Core i7 is a lot faster, but it's not $1500 worth of faster, at least, not in my current financial situation.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:26 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I Hate It When That Happens, Part 46

So I was writing a chapter on using the CDN for The Minx Book, and I thought I'd get some accurate stats for my examples.

And I find that my ping time to the Sydney node has jumped from 14ms to 175ms, which is not materially better than the 215ms for the mee.nu server itself.

It's a good thing I'm not paying for this.  Oh wait, I am paying for this.

Grr!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:11 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Boot To The Head!

I know I often rag on Microsoft for their knowledgebase articles, but frankly, they deserve every bit of it.  And a boot to the head:

1. Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click Access Options, Excel Options, PowerPoint Options, or Word Options.
2. Click Trust Center, click Advanced Trust Center Settings, and then click Privacy Options.
3. Select the Download a file periodically that helps determine system problems check box.
4. Wait about a week to allow the file to be downloaded, and then run Microsoft Office Diagnostics again.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:38 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Gonna Buy Me A Cuisinart

Well, no.  But I'm going to buy a new PC.

Install Vista, install everything else, copy all my data across, make sure it works, and then blow away the old one and put CentOS and OpenVZ on it.

Pity I didn't do it two months ago, before the prices all went up.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:12 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Anyone Want An Elf?

I seem to have one spare.

Update: Oops.  No, I have one elf and two collections of elf costumes.  Much less useful.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:04 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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ioDrive - Disappointment

Can't seem to break 65,000 iops for 4k random reads.

That's only the equivalent of 260 15,000rpm SCSI drives...

Heh.

4 threads (or aysnchronous I/O with a queue depth of 4) is enough to push the card pretty much flat out, which is great, because that means it's actually possible to get those benchmark results in real-world applications (if you don't simply end up CPU bound).

Too many threads, or too small or large a block size, tend to make it choke a bit, and it performs better on pure reads or writes than on a mixture, but the worst-case results still deliver in excess of 5000 iops.

It might not quite deliver on the marketing gloss on all points, at least not without more tweaking than I've had time to do so far.  I have been able to hit 700MB/sec on random reads (with a 16k block size), which is phenomenal.

Once I've collated the benchmark data, I'll produce some pretty graphs and a more detailed (and structured) review.  But right now, if you have a moderately large database and need better disk performance, the ioDrive is the way to go.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:18 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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