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Friday, February 15 2008, 9:35 AM

Eeek! It's been a month since I last updated here. Time flies when you're ... alive. I guess.

I haven't really been up to all that much. I had a couple of pretty hairy weeks at work where I was called upon to help clean up messes that I did not create. This occured on multiple occasions, and because of which, I was pretty stressed out during those two weeks. Its been better recently though, so I can't complain a whole lot.

I recently picked up some new pickups for the Carvin, and I'm mighty pleased with how they sound so far. I bought a pre-assembled pickguard on eBay from a guitar store in Florida, and it came loaded with three Lace Sensor pickups. I had a Lace Sensor in the Carvin before the upgrade, and I always liked the way it sounded, so I figured I couldn't go wrong. I'll be updating the guitar page with the new details sometime relatively soon (read: before 2017), and I may post some sound clips for the axe handlers out there.

It seems like I also put some more work into refining the code of the old web site here a few weeks ago. I converted some of the code to handle data objects over to an object-oriented approach using classes, and it's reminded me how easy they can make things. Instead of having to write code each time I want to say, make a form to add new content or submit new comments, I can just call methods on the class object. A few calls to something like $ContentObject->setTitle('OMG Wheee!'); and a $ContentObject->commit(); sure as hell beats a bunch of SQL statements.

guitar siteupdates work

Wednesday, January 02 2008, 2:27 AM

In yet another pointless round of code updates to my site, I've made most of the site memcache-enabled. Memcache is a client/server system that allows for caching of data that you plan on accessing repeatedly, such as relatively static information from a database. For dynamic sites, this allows you to take a large amount of load off of your database server(s), and instead place that load on memcache, which is going to be faster and less CPU-intensive in just about every case. This makes for happier servers and faster site performance all around.

Why am I doing this? Mainly for the practice. I use memcache in some applications at work, and I'm constantly looking for ways to speed up those applications and make them more efficient. Plus, if I post something really cool and my site gets slashdotted, it will be able to weather the storm much better. I think.

There's still a few things I have to do yet, but if you look at the little stats area at the bottom of the site layout, you should see that most pages only show a few database queries, and many more memcache hits. There will always be a few database queries per page, but I'm shooting for five or less on each page.

memcache siteupdates

Tuesday, September 11 2007, 11:00 PM

So I got bored and decided to move things around a bit layout-wise. I'm not sure if I'm finished yet, but I like how things look for the time being.

siteupdates

Sunday, August 05 2007, 4:08 PM

I've got a good working listing set up for the event log I was talking about in my last post. I still plan on adding some more stuff to it. like the ability to move around in the log, but that's for later. I've got chores I need to do today.

You can access the event page from the Events link up in the menu bar, or by clicking here.

siteupdates

Sunday, August 05 2007, 9:28 AM

Out of boredom-induced creativity, I decided to update the site to incorporate a Facebook/Twitter-like status readout. I can update it from my phone, so I can update the thing even when I'm not around a computer. This way, my mom can see that I actually am alive, but just not in the mindset to post something more elaborate. While I was at it, I made it so the status update process will update my Facebook status as well. I found some code here that made it downright easy.

Since the site only shows the latest status currently, I've decided to implement an event log of sorts in order to show the past status updates. This will also show when I add or edit new posts, or when someone comments on the site. I'm going to try to make it so it will update when I add something to the wiki or photo gallery as well, but I dn't know how easy that will be. There will probably be an RSS feed for it once it's done.

facebook siteupdates

Wednesday, February 14 2007, 12:38 AM

Tonight I discovered that MediaWiki has a RSS feed for the most recent changes to articles in the wiki. Knowing this, I decided to add another sidebar block for recent updates to the wiki. You may notice that there are currently duplicates. I guess that's how its designed. Instead of the last X pages that have been edited, ignoring when the edits take place, it shows the last 10 edits in order. Not a horrible thing really... and it still gets the message across.

I also added the little RSS buttons for direct links to the feeds that I use to generate the blocks, on the off chance that anybody cares to use them.

siteupdates wiki

Saturday, February 10 2007, 5:56 PM

Spurred on by my recent camera purchase, I decided to update my gallery and import all of the images I've been sitting on for the past year. I'm now running Gallery 2.1.2, which is a tad better than the 2.0beta version I was running previously. This one has a lot more nifty features, namely the RSS feed function. You'll probably notice that the "Gallery Updates" section on the sidebar has returned after its long hiatus. That's provided via RSS, and will update whenever I make updates to the gallery.

I've been taking random pictures pretty frequently with the new camera, and I'm still quite happy. I'm learning to use more of its features, which has made for a couple good pictures, and many bad ones. Here's one that I think turned out pretty well.

camera gallery photography siteupdates

Saturday, February 03 2007, 1:01 AM

As alluded to in my last post, I put up a wiki on the site. I've got a couple of articles up so far, mostly related to various scripts I've written. They're easy to cut and paste. I'll probably go back and edit a few posts to reference the wiki articles as they're written.

The link to the wiki is up in the menu bar. Wikitastic.

siteupdates wiki

Sunday, August 06 2006, 4:11 AM

I got bored with the old layout and decided to change it up a bit. More changes are probably coming... depends on how motivated I am.

siteupdates

Friday, June 16 2006, 12:29 AM

Yep, you heard me right. A keg. Earlier this week, Gregg, a buddy from work and all an around good guy, gave me a nice gift in the form of a new machine that has now become my webserver. I mostly-jokiingly bugged him for a while to give me the machine, since he had also received it at no cost, and I guess he finally bought into my bullshit. Therefore, I feel that I owe him one. He's got a kegerator in his basement, so I told him to let me know when his current keg is empty. I'll be picking up the cost on the next one.

The machine is a pretty significant upgrade from what my webserver was before. The old box was powered by dual Pentium III 500MHz processors, with 512MB of RAM, a couple of 9GB SCSI-2 drives for the system stuff, and a couple of 80GB IDE drives for user data and backups. The new box has dual Pentium III's running at 1400MHz, 2GB of RAM, and two 18GB SCSI-3 drives in a hot-swappable enclosure, and redundant power supplies. This machine is designed to be a server, not just a generic computer acting as one. It's also designed to be more massive than your average Volkswagen, apparently. It weighs 50 pounds easily, probably more. I've got the two 18GB drives set up in RAID1, which should make disk reads faster, while providing some data redundancy for the system files. I also moved one of the 9GB drives over, and both of the 80GB drives. I'm not sure what purpose the 9GB drive will have, but the 80GB drives are serving their old purpose in the new machine.

My website itself isn't noticibly faster, since I have my code optimized to a decent degree, but the gallery is a lot faster. I've lamented over the speed of Gallery2 in the past, and having more horsepower makes that a bit more bearable. The processing of uploaded images should be a good measure faster now as well.

gallery2 siteupdates webserver

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