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| Well, I have been geeky; I've changed over my web server from apache-mpm-prefork to apache-mpm-worker (with FCGI+PHP)! Well, I did it on my laptop first, earlier this week, as a trial run to see if it would work, and so I knew what I needed to do on my server. For those of you who are totally confused... um... I changed the way my webserver runs. Why? Because: a) mpm-worker is faster and takes up less memory (tech: because it's threaded) b) but then PHP (which is what runs part of my website) had to be reconfigured to work with mpm-worker (tech: mod_php is not thread-safe, but php can be used in CGI mode with FastCGI (mod_fcgid), and it thus runs as fast as it did before) c) A happy side-effect of PHP + FCGI is that it can be configured to... um... behave nicer with files (tech: one can enable suexec with PHP, which means I don't have to mess with file permissions and file ownership to get my wiki to behave - SQUEE!) Looking at my server, it does appear to be using less memory (it's gone down from 53% to 42%, yay!). I found the following two How-Tos very useful: Installing Apache2 and PHP5 using mod_fcgid and How to set up Apache2 with mod_fcgi and PHP5 on Ubuntu. | |
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| I'm beginning to think that it isn't worth the effort of mirroring www.katspace.org at too.katspace.org; because it is too large, and, alas, not a straightforward case of just doing an rsync, because (a) part of the site is a wiki and (b) I can't seem to get the wiki working on too.katspace.org. I have tried a few different approaches, and they all failed in various ways. Note that part of the difficulty is that www.katspace.org is running on Apache, and too.katspace.org is running on Zeus. ( cut for geeky details )All of these approaches highlight why I decided to host my website on my own system in the first place; it is just too difficult to do advanced things with the Zeus webserver. Oh, I can understand why they use it; it is very fast, and very good at serving simple sites. But utterly useless if one wishes to manipulate URLs to make them more friendly. So what should I do with too.katspace.org? I'd like to do something with it. Because it is a much faster and more reliable system than my own. I mean, I get power failures at home while I'm at work and then all of www.katspace.org is down for hours and there's nothing I can do about it. Should I mirror a subset of www.katspace.org on too.katspace.org? Such as the gallery, which would probably benefit from having a faster server. Should I make too.katspace.org a whole different site? Take some of the stuff that's on www.katspace.org off it and put it solely on too.katspace.org? (Such as the gallery, again) What do you think? | |
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| I have a Dreamwidth account!!! Please to be telling me if you are on Dreamwidth too, and who you are there. So I have now joined the ranks of those who do massive cross-posting on multiple personal journals (LJ, IJ, Inksome, and now Dreamwidth). I was using Charm at first, but while it sort of supports cross-posting, it isn't really oriented towards that. So I have just finished writing (and quick-testing) a script (perl script, which uses the LJ::Simple interface) which cross-posts to multiple journals at the same time. Yay! It's a very simple command-line interface, nothing fancy, but I think the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. I'm thinking of deleting the inksome journal, though. Dreamwidth will be better, and IJ was able to import all my past entries, while Inksome couldn't. I have imported all my past entries to Dreamwidth too. Bring on the open beta! | |
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| Here is a geeky post which will interest only two of you, or possibly three. But I'm posting it anyway. I have rediscovered an old friend, the zsh shell. I used to use zsh when the main other alternative was ksh, and Linux wasn't as common as it is now. Then I switched to bash because it was the default in Linux, and so it Just Worked. But while I was websurfing the other day (I think it was when I was looking for info on dvtm) I stumbled across a page praising zsh over bash, and since the article had been written in 2008, I knew this wasn't ancient history. So I installed zsh and tried it out again. And this time I read user guides and tips and man pages, doing a fuller immersion than just getting by. I didn't go the "copy someone else's zshrc" route, because I wanted to understand what these options and suchlike were for. To share the joy, below I go through my .zshrc (well, highlights of it) and point out the features that I am using that I feel are cool. Yes, bash probably does some of these too, but it doesn't do all of them. ( exerpts from my .zshrc, with notes ) | |
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| This is a belated post for yesterday. What made me happy yesterday was xmonad. Back when I was trying out wmi for the first time, the main tiling window managers I was aware of were ratpoison, ion, larswm and wmi. I didn't like the limitations of larswm (it only tiled things in a certain way), and ratpoison is very very limited, so the chief contenders were ion and wmi. They each had different strenths and weaknesses. Now there are two more recent entries in the pack, "awesome" and "xmonad". The "awesome" window manager (stupid name, it makes it impossible to google for it) seems to be an inheritor of ion in at least one way: it is scripted in lua. The xmonad window manager is written and scripted and configured in Haskell. Both of them have taken ideas from their predecessors. I am trying out xmonad in place of wmii. ( why is nobody interested in the geeky details? )This all makes me think again about how we approach the creation of computer interfaces. The "desktop" metaphor is all well and good, but it can only take us so far, and if one is submerged too deeply in the metaphor, it hinders us rather than helping us. ( rambling about the nature of user interfaces ) | |
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| As I have been tagged by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) tptigger I do this meme. THE HAPPINESS MEME
Rules: For eight days you have to post something that made you happy that day. Tag eight people to do the same.I tell you what makes me happy today: Conky! | |
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| It looks like my old silver ThinkPad has died. It keeps on failing with "fan error". Somehow, that doesn't surprise me, what with the heat we had today (though it was okay inside, but still warmer than usual for laptops that run hot). A quick Google tells me that the most likely remedy is to replace the fan, but I am not a hardware person; if I went under the hood I would probably break it more than it is. Wah! At least I still have my little eeePC. But there are a number of things I can't do on it, because it is so small. (sigh) Speaking of my eeePC, I have been setting up the wmii window manager on it. ( cut for the linux-related geeky details )If you want a pretty window manager with lots of eye candy and mouse-movement, then wmii is definitely not for you. But if you're interested in getting some work done, especially on laptops, then wmii might be worth checking out. But only if you're on Linux (or probably Mac). | |
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| After hearing the news, I (a) double-checked that my IJ is what I think it is(b) tried to find an easy method of backing up my LJ (c) came to the conclusion that there isn't one (at least, not for Linux users) (d) used the LJ Export interface to export my entries from 2003 onwards, one month at a time (sigh) The options for backing up one's LJ seem to be: 1) use LJ export (which gets all the entries, but is slow and manual and doesn't include the comments) 2) use wget to spider one's LJ, which would include the comments, but only includes public posts - despite NUMEROUS attempts, I could not get wget to be able to access locked posts. 3) download each and every journal entry by hand (insanely slow and not feasible) Arrrgh! ETA: I found something! ljmigrate is a python script that works on Linux and backs up your journal (and optionally migrates it) and saves comments! I'm trying it out now; I hope it works. | |
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