This blog has been very quiet recently. I am now healthy again and I have been busy catching up work. Additional I am mentoring a new FreeBSD developer again. Simon Barner is my third mentee.
Last week it had snowed a lot in Austria. And today is the coldest day this winter. I spent the weekend here:
This is the farm of my girlfriends family.
Month: February 2005
Performance limit
It looks like i have reached a performance limit of MT. Starting with the last entry commenting is incredible slow. The cause is neither the perl version, nor the Blacklist nor the nofollow plugin. Attaching to the perl process with truss(1) I see endless pread(2) calls on the Berkeley DB files.
Anyone got an idea, how to improve performance?
Now I could setup a MySQL database, but I doubt that would be faster, and there are many larger Blogs that use Berkeley DB.
Or it may be time to say good bye to MT and switch to something else.
Unfortunately there not many advanced systems that use neither PHP nor a seperate Database Server.
This sucks!
news.individual.net goes $$$$
Via isotopp: news.individual.net now costs 10 EURO/year.
I registered ca. 7 years ago and still use the account as a backup for my providers newsserver (although mostly for lurking).
Now the alternatives are: a) Pay 10 Euros b) VPN or Tunnel to my universities news server c) news.arcor.de (I have not found out where to register for free access) d) Usenet is dead.
ill–
My Operating System was infected by the latest virus circulating in Vienna. For the first time in my life i visited a doctor, but unfortunately she could not help much. Now I have been at home for nearly a week and I am still coughing, my nose is running and my headache prevents me from working.
Logo contest
The discussion about the logo contest leaked to slashdot.
This resulted in the first nominations. I like this one :-):
This one is nice too:
// BSD \ || Free | || At | || Last | \||/\/\//\|/
I think a new logo is necessary because the daemon is somehow copyrighted by Kirk McKusick, which makes it difficult to use it. For example an image was deleted from the “FreeBSD” entry in the german Wikipedia, because Kirk’s license is not compatible with the Wikipedia GNU FDL.
Another boring uptime entry.
One year ago i decided to do a “make world” on my server. Since then it is running continously.
$ uname -a FreeBSD huckfinn 4.9-STABLE FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE #0: Mon Feb 9 21:55:40 CET 2004 arved@sauna.arved.de:/usr/obj/usr/local/home2/source/RELENG_4/src/sys/HUCKFINNipf i386 $ uptime 12:00AM up 365 days, 8:31, 4 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Sun Firmware update.
I tried to install Solaris 10 on my sparc, but failed.
Unfortunately the Firmware was too old to boot, so i followed the instructions at sunsolve to update the firmware.
Boot device: /pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/disk@0,0 File and args: /flash-update-450-latest - RED State Exception TL=0000.0000.0000.0005 TT=0000.0000.0000.0010 TPC=0000.0000.f000.4200 TnPC=0000.0000.f000.4204 TSTATE=0000.0091.0000.1505 TL=0000.0000.0000.0004 TT=0000.0000.0000.0010 TPC=0000.0000.f000.4200 TnPC=0000.0000.f000.4204 TSTATE=0000.0091.0000.1505 TL=0000.0000.0000.0003 TT=0000.0000.0000.0010 TPC=0000.0000.f000.4680 TnPC=0000.0000.f000.4684 TSTATE=0000.0091.0000.1505 TL=0000.0000.0000.0002 TT=0000.0000.0000.0034 TPC=0000.0000.f000.3030 TnPC=0000.0000.f000.3034 TSTATE=0000.0091.0000.1505 TL=0000.0000.0000.0001 TT=0000.0000.0000.0034 TPC=0000.0000.f000.8084 TnPC=0000.0000.f000.8088 TSTATE=0000.0091.0000.1605
What am i doing wrong?
Mice
Today my mouse @work stopped working because of a loose contact in the cable. It was a four year old MS Intellimouse Explorer. Unfortunately this defect is not repairable, because it is not possible to open the Mouse. So I am now looking for a good replacement. Requirements: USB, 3 Buttons and a Wheel. Preferrable not from Logitech or Microsoft. And i don’t like the wireless mice that require an extra battery.
trackback spam
Today I received my first trackback spam, well more than 100 pings from several different IPs. Until today I had not even enabled MT-Blacklist for trackbacks. I had to disable trackbacks, this is depressing 🙁
Unfortunately MT-Blacklist De-Spamming seems to hit a system limit. I could only delete 5 pings at a time. Otherwise the server spits out an Internal Server error. Probably because the execution time gets too long. Maybe I should consider replacing my Webserver Epia with a Minimac (which btw boots FreeBSD) or the 1Ghz Epia.
While I was waiting for the de-spamming to process I updated the weather plugin to 1.1.9. Hopefully this fixes some oddities and does not introduce new bugs, because I don’t want to look at the code. If you want to know a reason why not to use php, look at the code
Last weekend i hacked on the rssfetch code. It is now object-orientated, because I started to write unittests after reading the Unit-testing chapter of “Dive into Python”.