Inert Ramblings

Month: May 2004

  • Where the heck did CafePress go?

    So CafePress has been down for the past 24 hours. Great. No idea if they just went under and disappeared, or if this is a temporary glitch. I found out this morning when I started getting e-mails from a few people asking me if Trunk Monkey gear was still available because the link to the store was dead. Anyone else have any additional info?

  • Homestar Runner RPG

    Paul Slocum is in the process of developing an RPG based on the characters of Homestar Runner! Get out your Atari 2600, burn yourself a ROM, and get stupid!

    Although the cast of characters is currently limited, I’m sure that more maps and options will be added later. Well, as many characters and maps that can be added to a miniscule Atari 2600 ROM.

  • Trading CPU for bandwidth?

    Which is more important? Massive amounts of bandwidth or lots of CPU? In my case bandwidth definitely wins since I’m passing between 5 GB and 25 GB per day. My dedicated server is an Intel Celeron 2.0 GHz box with 512 MB RAM running Fedora Core 1. My personal Web server sitting on my SDSL line is an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ with equivalent memory and the same OS.

    Although the Celeron is lightning quick when serving up static and light dynamic content, it’s extremely sluggish when rebuilding Movable Type pages. It’s perfectly adequate for a single Movable Type installation and a few authors, but I’d hate to see what would happen if I started hosting a lot of blogs for friends. Either way, the Athlon definitely blows away the Celeron, but I guess I’ll just have to live with the CPU downgrade.

  • Gmail

    If anyone has a Gmail invite, I don’t suppose you’d be so kind as to toss it my way? I’d like to see what all the fuss is about.

  • Hi-Touch 640 PS

    Hi-Touch 640 PSSince Kelly and I are going to start on-location shooting, we’re going to need a portable unit for proofs and sales. I just ordered a Hi-Touch 640 PS 4×6 photo printer along with a bunch of media refills. It’s a continuous tone 403 DPI (6400 DPI inkjet equivalent) dye sublimation printer that spits out prints in about 75 seconds.

    My Father picked one up last year, and he absolutely loves it! Although it didn’t support direct printing from Mac OS X when he let me play with it a while ago, there are supposedly beta drivers available now. Doesn’t matter anyway, since it prints directly from flash media. Also, with a $0.40/sheet consumable price, the price can’t be beat!

  • Ensim – I don’t get it.

    If you want a guaranteed way to hose your Web server, install Ensim. In a nutshell, Ensim is a control panel application that completely takes over your Web server and turns it into an appliance that any neophyte can manage themselves. The base operating system more or less gets pushed into the background, Ensim installs its own customized set of applications, and you never have to touch the command line again.

    That’s all well and good for someone who wants Web Server in a Box functionality, but no good for a geek who wants full control over their system. If you ever want Ensim to die a horrible death, simply install some vendor security patches. Everything breaks horribly.

  • A fistful of quickies…

    Many thanks go out to sabominator for pointing out toothpaste for dinner. Applegeeks makes me laugh. A lot. Gina makes a hot bride. Mac Hall inspired Applegeeks. The Inventor makes a guest appearance. We have a bunch of little pricks wandering around the house, and you should buy stuff. The Trunkmonkey is passing 6 GB to 20 GB per day (leeches). Hamor.com needs some attention from Google. And, finally, Pepper Computer just released Pepper Keeper 1.2.

  • Mac OS X – Clearing DNS Cache

    Once you go to a Web site, or do any DNS lookup, the IP gets cached for quite a while. This becomes a royal pain if you’re a systems administrator who is in the middle of migrating domains from one server to another. Executing sudo killall lookupd lookupd -flushcache clears the cache, restarts the caching daemon, and fetches fresh DNS records. And there was much rejoicing…

    Updated November 26, 2007: Thanks to Syd, the Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) command has changed to dscacheutil -flushcache and lookupd has been deprecated.

  • Cheap dedicated servers!

    Although it’s too soon to give a review or recommendation, ValueWeb has been rocking my nuts for the past few days. Expect a full review in the next few weeks once we get all of our Web sites transferred over and convert our 768 Kbps SDSL line to a 6 Mbps ADSL line.

  • Liquid ecstacy?

    If Poland Spring sparkling water is liquid crack, then Crystal Light is liquid ecstacy. Both are hopelessly addicting, but freshly-mixed Crystal Light has a warm and fuzzy tartness to it. One tub makes 2 quarts, so half a tub mixes perfectly in my 32 oz water bottle. And what do I mix it with? Ice cold Poland Spring spring water out of the office water cooler, of course! Twitch…