… we get a used, eBay-acquired addition to the family 
It’s being shipped from SC and the driver just called me and said he would be here in Santa Fe on Sunday.
Of course, it has to be the day that I’m busy at work for an extended period.
Now that I’ve crossed the 40-year mark, I’m feeling more comfortable in my role as an old pervert. As such it is easier to post content that I previously would have avoided.
However in this particular instance, I’m looking at things from a purely technological point of view. I like what www.knickerpicker.com did for two main reasons: 1) the “girls dressing up for you” is really well executed and 2) the domain-name just freaking rocks!
Have a look for yourself, but do keep a mild NSFW warning in mind (especially if you are in the US where women in underwear are considered NSFW - for whatever reason).
Below is a TED segment where Alisa Miller, CEO of Public Radio International, talks about national/international news coverage in the US. Scary and sad at the same time …
Over the last few days we’ve seen some pretty strong winds during the day. It usually starts around 10am in the morning, reaching it’s peak at 3pm and everything dies down when the sun sets.
My poor aspens around the house have been pounded. I can see fresh leaves all over the front yard and some fresh small branches that have been torn off. If this goes on for much longer, I think that some of them are not going to make it.
Oh and the five pound door mat at the front entrance flew through the air yesterday afternoon and landed some 20 feet away …
On a recent analysis of kahunaburger’s front page load time (using the indispensable Charles), I discovered that Clustrmaps was responsible for a large chunk of the time wasted on getting the content of the main page.
I yanked it out and looked for a replacement, because I really like to get an idea where visitors are coming from. Yes, Google Analytics provides the same information, but it’s way easier to have it right in your face on the front-page, instead of having to login Analytics.
I gave Feedjit a try and it seems to fit the bill: response time is better than Clustrmaps and on top of it, it provides a nice Google Maps based view of recent visitors.
However, the shocking news is that the Upper West does not seem to like kahunaburger at all! Need to find topics that interest the crowd up there …
Not what you think. No, it’s worse.
Last year, the Energy Watch Group released a report that claims that world-wide oil production has already crossed the peak. Where previously experts had predicted (or wished) that oil production would continue to ramp up over the next few years, reality is that since 2006 world-wide oil production has been on a steady decline. The study below goes into great detail to analyze the international production areas and provides an outlook that basically makes the world oil market look really bleak.
If you have not invested in solar power yet, I can’t think of a better time than NOW.
The new server hardware, a cheapo refurbished Acer desktop PC, arrived about a week ago. In my spare time I installed FreeBSD 7.0 on it and started to configure all the pieces I need on the server. After running into an issue with the GENERIC kernel of 7.0, I opened a trouble ticket with FreeBSD team and it was suggested to give version 8.0-CURRENT a try. I upgraded all the kernel and userland sources and rebuilt everything. Quite nice to see a “make -j6 …” rebuild everything in a few minutes.
The 8.0-CURRENT sources did not correct my problem, but at least I was able to modify the sources to avoid the “panic [y/n]?” question during startup.
Below are some specs of the system - I think we have enough head-room on this guy for some time to come:
santafe# uname -a FreeBSD santafe.kahunaburger.com 8.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT #3: Mon May 19 11:56:08 MDT 2008 thoellri@santafe.kahunaburger.com: /usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386 santafe# df -kl Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ad4s1a 147304642 23573916 111946356 17% / devfs 1 1 0 100% /dev /dev/ad8s1d 117804484 18175874 90204252 17% /disk2 /dev/ad8s1e 118701252 19324964 89880188 18% /disk3 santafe# top -b | head -5 last pid: 12922; load averages: 0.12, 0.56, 0.51 up 0+15:04:57 07:00:11 56 processes: 1 running, 55 sleeping Mem: 107M Active, 2791M Inact, 158M Wired, 36M Cache, 112M Buf, 168M Free Swap: 8192M Total, 56K Used, 8192M Free santafe# swapinfo Device 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity /dev/ad4s1b 4194304 56 4194248 0% /dev/md0 4194304 0 4194304 0% Total 8388608 56 8388552 0% santafe#
I’m on a lot of different Adobe mailing lists. Lots of them are for internal folks only and messages from the outside to those mailing lists are rejected. However there are a number of lists which accept email from “outsiders”. They are used to allow external people to submit feedback on one or the other project.
Needless to say that those external mailing lists are exposed to Spam-messages. Postini usually does a good job of filtering out the worst spam, but some messages do make it through the filter.
Every once in a while I check on the messages that arrive for those mailing lists.
And here’s something that arrived just the other day. The message seems to come from a Richard I Moore in Philly. The contents are:
Hi, I’m Richard I Moore, attorney at law located in Huntington Valley, PA. I have offered clients extensive legal expertise in domestic relations for over 40 years throughout Bucks county, Montgomery County and Philadelphia County. I specialize in divorce with emphasis on complicated custody related relocation; same sex and racially diverse matters.
If you have had a child with a person of African American descent, I will capitalize on the racism inherent in our society and family court system to keep your racially-mixed child away from their African American parent.
I take advantage of my long-standing personal relationships with family court judges to “bend the system” to your ends. My specialties are, ex-parte communication with the judge, convincing/bribing the judge to “forget” scheduled hearings to intentionally delay the process of justice, abetting the implementation of “Parental Alienation Syndrome” to make your child hate their African American parent, and black people in general. I pull no stops to win my cases, and I have many more tricks up my sleeve.Contact me today:
Phone: (215) 947-5300
Fax: (215) 947-5309
Email: rich@rimoorelaw.com
2617 Huntington Pike (corner of Huntington Pike and Red Lion Road)
Huntington Valley, PA 19006
I checked the headers of the message over and over again, and all I can tell is that the message was sent via hotmail. I also checked on Snopes and did not see an entry that would signal that this is a fake message. I have to believe that this was really sent intentionally.
I sure hope that Obama wins the election and that we are finally getting rid of that nonsense …
A bunch of recent photos have piled up in Lightroom and I need to dump some of them here.
First up, another entry from the popsicle-in-the-bathtub department. While it’s entertaining for the little ones, it kind of defeats the purpose when half of the popsicles end up in the bath water and the kids leave the tub stickier than when they entered it. Oh well …
Next up, Pia the rock-lady. This is most likely related to some disproportionate distribution of parental genes: just like me, Pia seems to be a bit of a rock-hound. Quite often when we walk the dogs in the neighborhood, her eyes are fixed on the ground and she finds special rocks with magical powers and princesses trapped inside them (I kid you not). On a warm day (like this May 4th) the rocks need to cleaned and polished in the setting sun. All by herself she’ll get the metal bowl and the brush, place herself in the warmest spot in front of the house and clean those special rocks:
And about 15 mins later she’s re-purposing the bowl:
I’m beginning to believe that this was the intention all along …
Fast forward to Sunday morning. After a generous helping of eggs (that kid can eat eggs all the time) and some 2-on-1 time with Lara Croft, we end up outside on the sunny side of the house. “Daddy, I’m hungry!” is the next thing I hear. “How ’bout some strawberries with whipped cream?” - silence:
Walking around the house here is dangerous! Spiders! Snakes! Coyotes! And those little “pokers” (how Pia calls them) that manage to get inside your shoes and bug you for the next few hours. Time to engage the tweezers and get them out:
Oh, and before I forget it: the cast came off on Monday morning. Everything looked fine in the x-rays and the arm should be completely healed within a few more weeks. Pia has some “phantom pain”, which, according to the doctor, is normal and should go away in a few days. We found half a pound of sand inside the cast …
I wrote about all the little issues that the server behind kahunaburger.com had in the last few weeks. I finally found the real reason for the problems: one of the RAM modules in the system is dying and the memory on the module is corrupted randomly. This makes FreeBSD really upset (no wonder) and leads to sporadic reboots followed by lengthy filesystem checks (fsck), because the disks were not unmounted cleanly. Wash, rinse and repeat …
Let’s just order a replacement memory module then. I checked the RAM specs for the system on dell.com, then headed over to newegg.com to find a replacement. The system is a bit on the old side and happens to be one of the few computers that used Rambus RDRAMs. Searching on newegg for a replacement module yields zero results. Not being sold any more. Not available. I found a few places which still sell RDRAMs, but they are either out of stock or charge ridiculous prices.
The next option was to just yank out the faulty module (at least the BIOS tells me, which one it is) and restart without it. Well, easier said than done: the Dell’s configuration requires that all four memory banks are occupied and does not even attempt to boot, if one or more of them are missing.
Great, just great! No replacement module and I can’t boot without the faulty one. I looked over all BIOS settings to see if there was a way to disable one or the other one, but that was also not available.
I finally remembered that you could tell FreeBSD during the boot process to limit the amount of physical memory to use. After some searching I found the correct option and started to experiment with it. The loader-configuration “hw.physmem=xxx” allows you to tell the operating system, how much physical memory you want to use. There’s 1GB of memory in the system and each module is 256MB. So I started reducing the memory in chunks of 256MB until I did not see any more random reboots. Per Murphy’s law, if there are four possible configurations that could work, only the last one you test will be the one that works. I had to reduce the memory to 256MB before the system was stable again. Hmmm - I think my wrist-watch has more memory …
A replacement system has been ordered already, but it is taking it’s good old time to make it here to Santa Fe.
That’s just another lesson showing you how hardware which is just a few years old becomes obsolete …
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