Poked.net

Hung out in the Cave for an hour after practice. The cave is an immersive environment. Its basically a 10ft square room (missing two sides (roof and behind you) with high powered projectors on every wall. You wear special glasses so that the computer system (8 processors, silicon graphics machine) can show each eye a different image, and everything then becomes 3d (think holodeck from star trek). You can move your head around objects in the room because the location of the glasses is tracked by sensors. You can even walk around. The basic input device is a wand with some buttons on it that also has a tracker in it. Makes playing quake fun as the gun is projected as sitting around your arm. So you just hold out your arm in the direction you want and pull the trigger on the wand. Fun stuff.

Oh yeah, and FEDEX forgot to make me sign for the package when I was at the station, so now they are sending me more postcards via USPS asking for directions to my apartment (they still can't find it). I'm not going to call until they stop paying USPS for postage.

Our internet provider can't understand the concept of 3 people in 1 apartment. They did an audit, determined that 2 people in our apartment had not paid for network service and then shut our service off for a day. So we call them up, and they say we'll put in a work order and it will be fixed within 24 hours. I've heard that one before (and not just from FEDEX - from NTC) and that means within the next 24 days. So Dan somehow convinced them to put the tech on the phone who plugged the wire back in while on the phone and it was done. Friggin layers of service. Tag-Board's people get responses within 4 hours generally, from the guy who designed and created the whole system... Ok, I realize that isn't possible for all businesses, but there is sure room for improvement.

On another note, I called UPS for a Package Pick Up. The lady said that since it was so late in the afternoon, it would probably be Monday before they would come (it was ground which doesnt run on weekends). I get off the phone after giving her the info, and 5 minutes later the UPS guy is knocking at our door. Come on FEDEX, you're getting left in the dust! (Granted the guy wasn't there to do the pickup, he was dropping off another item and couldn't do the pickup until monday, but it was still cool)

Oh yeah, and FEDEX never did deliver. I eventually gave up all hope and drove to the distribution center 45 minutes away to pick up the package. The next day was supposed to be the new delivery date, but I was driving to DC (where the package originated by the way) and wouldnt have been there to sign for it.

Happy Birthday to me. I am the guy with whipped cream all over his face.

And no, FEDEX still did not deliver, but again promised to deliver tomorrow.

More on the FEDEX saga. Apparently FEDEX punishes you when they can't find your apartment by sitting the package at the distribution center 30 mins away for 1 week. Or so says their phone reps. I think by the time this whole thing is over, I will be on a first name basis with the phone reps. Who says the US Mail is slow? Thank god for UPS. Besides, UPS has the greatest phone number 1-800-PICK-UPS. Double meaning and all that within a 7 digit number. That takes skill.

Hrm. Apparently the company that sent me that package through fedex sorted things out with fedex and sent me the stuff again. It was supposed to arrive today, but the tracking system shows that the fedex driver couldn't find the place. Its not a surprise being that my address is Jackson St, and Jackson street doesnt even border the apartment complex, but apparently the guy could find it before, but not now. IE: The previous driver no longer works for fedex. I feel bad.

I noticed that for the enhanced boards, the queries for sorting the messages were not using any indexes, thus every time an enhanced board was shown, 5000 timestamps had to be qsorted on disk (not enough memory available). I'm going to move the archives to a different table, as they get accessed less. Screw normalization I guess.

New server: P4 1.7ghz, 1Gb RAM (can expand an additional 512M), and the rest is about the same. Rackshack really likes to clean out the coffers with RAM prices. $150 setup,, $30/month for every 512M RAM. Unbelievable. Assumming RAM is installed tomorrow, allow 2 days to move the site, and 2 days for DNS to propogate, we're looking at the new server handling the full load around monday next week. Things should run a bit smoother then.

Time for sleep.

Tag-Board is going under the knife to get the server running smoothly. I want it to stay up as anyone else, so here is what we are doing:

1) Backups: We've actually got an automated script doing backups at about 3am every day. It exports, gzips, and ftps the database to another machine for safekeeping. Its really nice to be able to do this automatically now - and the traffic spike on the bandwidth graph definitely looks cool.

2) Database: I've been looking at queries and trying to determine where to trim things. Some old legacy data was still in the tables that got cleaned out this afternoon, that made for a significant increase in load handling.

3) Flooders: I've got some scripts now that comb the logs for high requests rates from particular ip addresses. I've been running these and banning entire ip blocks from the server. I'm not going to put up with this anymore.

4) High Resource Users: We also have been looking for particular boards using more than their fair share of resources. Found a free board that had pulled off a refresh script and was using more resources than most enhanced boards, as well as one enhanced board that was pulling 20% of the enhanced resources alone. We've done some things to fix those problems.

5) Runaway processes: Most of the downtime we've experienced recently is the snowball effect of not having enough resources. We've choked off the snowball, so in the off chance that the server starts to get overloaded, it will start refusing or queing requests after the snowball gets to a certain size. We're experimenting with that size limitation now.

6) New machine: We are desparately in need of more ram. Looking at a few options, upgrading processors too and maybe even grabbing a couple raid SCSI drives to boot. Unfortunately, this item will probably up our monthly costs by 2-4x. Hopefully we can hold out w/ just 1 machine for a good while longer, but if not, we will probably do either a apache/mysql split on the machines or a enhanced/free split. We'll see what happens.

Yesterday, we tried to fix a speaker system, and ended up burning the fuses in both the station and the power converter. Then today, we burned Dan's computer completely. That was fun. Fortunately, between the 3 of us, we have 8 computers - 4 desktops, 3 laptops, and 1 palm, so dan is using the spare desktop with his HDD for the moment. Ok, I sound like such a nerd.

Well, being a senior here at tech and having had 3/4 of my classes in McBryde, I simply assumed that I knew where McBryde 100 was. I didn't even bother to look on the door as I entered the physics exam last friday. Confidence spilling out as I had studied for the thing for days on end, I sat down and realized that some of the material wasn't too familiar. No problem, it was multiple choice, and I had units and a mind - so I derived stuff that I had never seen before thinking I must have missed a section while studying. Not realizing that there were actually 2 physics tests, in two different rooms in McBryde, and I was taking the wrong one. Which explains why my test got lost - I never actually took it. The funny thing was, I ended up getting one of the highest grades in the other class. Top 5% i was told. Sucks to be them having me ruin their curve. Oh well. My professor allowed me to take the correct exam this afternoon. Did fairly well on that one too, although I dont know as much information.

And I found out about the lost FEDEX package too (its the day for finding things I suppose). Apparently FEDEX dude did indeed drop it off as a neighbor saw it next to my door. However, someone else decided they liked having free packages and picked it up for me. FEDEX seems to be willing to take the fall though, since it kinda was their fault for not doing something more than leaving it outside where anyone who wanted to could pick it up. So thats good news I guess. Anyway, on with my life...

Speaking of lost things, FEDEX lost a package of mine. The tracking info says that they delivered it at 4:13 am yesterday morning, then at 4:36 am, they put it on the truck (an hours drive away) to be delivered to my place. I'm not quite sure exactly how that works out, but suffice to say, it was never delivered. Fun Fun.

On another note, it seems as though my physics midterm was lost. They'd better find it or some people will get to hear some shit from me. I studied for the better part of a week for that thing, and I aced it. It was comedic relief that the class average was like a 50%.

Finally. Got through to the flight school and I should be in the air wednesday!