Category Archives: Materialism

Deal of the Day

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I just saw this link on a site I frequent: a Compaq laptop, dual-core chip, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB disk, 15.4″ LCD, DVD burner, and integrated wireless… $300 after rebate ($440 before). (Of course, I had no idea that HP still makes Compaq-branded machines?)

For the same price, they’ve got a desktop system… It’s “just” an Athlon (with no apparent details?), but it comes with 2 GB RAM and a 250GB disk… Plus DVD burner. (Throw in a tuner and you might have a nice Mythbox?)

CompUSA has a 22″ LCD (Acer, 1600×1050) for $200, although it seems that the deal ends today. (I thought they went out of business?)

This is How We Do

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I finally got around to processing some of the pictures I took this past weekend. I wanted to share a few.

IMG_1184

How does that one look? I like to think it passes as a ‘normal’ shot. What’s not evident is that it was underexposed, poorly metered, had a nasty green color cast, and had everything in perfect focus. Tweaking photos in Photoshop requires striking a delicate balance. Too little touch-up and the image doesn’t look that great, and too much and the image looks pathetically artificial.

I like to think this one is a good compromise. I used Levels as well as the Shadows & Highlights tool to bring out a lot of the detail that was lost: some areas were too dark (people), and others were too bright (the court). I bumped up saturation and contrast every so slightly (that’s an easy one to take too far), and then used my new favorite Photoshop tool, a ‘smart selector,’ which let me easily select the crowd, and nothing else. It worked remarkably well at letting me not get any of the players or the court. With that, I applied a slight Gaussian blur to the crowd, to throw them a little bit out of focus. It’s what it should have looked like anyway, had it been shot with a faster lens.

Here’s the same shot straight out of the camera. You can see that it’s not really bad, and, side-by-side, it actually look a little more “natural.” But the players are a little too pale, the crowd is a little too distracting, and so forth.

No Post-Processing

Now here’s another one I took:

The Shot

At a glance, this looks like a decent photo. Your eyes should be drawn right to the player as he makes his shot (I love shooting a camera with negligible shutter lag!) (The motion blur on the ball which looks kind of cheesy to me is actually legitimate.) The players, the rim, and the backboard all look nice and sharp. But if your eyes wander the crowd, you can quickly see that my attempt at a few tiers of Gaussian blur were amateurish. Having stuff like the open doors and scaffolding in the back of the gym is distracting. Again, had I been shooting a nice 200mm f/2.0 (not yet released, much less within my budget), it would have been thrown out of focus. But I was shooting with a lens at f/5.6, leaving stuff like that remarkably in focus. I started by selecting all the background junk and applying a Gaussian blur, but to mimic real life blur gets complicated in this setup. I wanted to throw the fans near the court slightly out of focus, but let the doors and walls be further blurred. This required multiple tiers of blurring, and left some strange effects. You’ll notice a few people with bodies that are mostly in focus, but heads that are exceptionally blurry. With a little more time, I could probably improve on this, but this was one of my first attempts at working seriously to manage background blur, so I instead offer it, with its myriad flaws, as an example.

Tweaking SQL

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I was thinking last night about solid-state drives. In their current form, they’re really not that much faster in terms of throughput: a decent amount are actually even slower than ATA disks if you measure them in terms of MB/sec throughput. Where they shine (100 times faster, at least) is seek time, though. So where they’re ideally suited for in a server environment right now is something with lots of random reads, where you might find yourself jumping all over the disk. For example, a setup with lots and lots of small files scattered across the disk.

Many implementations of a database would be similar. Something like the database for this blog will have a lot of sequential reads: you’re always retrieving the most recent entries, so the reads tend to be fairly close. But there are lots of ways to slice the data that don’t result in reading neighboring rows or walking the table. (And what really matters is how it’s stored on disk, not how it’s stored in MySQL, but I’m assuming they’re one in the same.) Say I view my “Computers” category. That’s going to use reads from all over the table. Using a solid-state disk might give you a nifty boost there. So I think it’d be fun to buy a solid-state disk and use it in an SQL server. I wager you’d see a fairly notable boost in performance, especially in situations where you’re not just reading sequential rows.

But here’s the cool link of this post. I’m not sure exactly what goes on here in a technical sense, but they use solid-state drives, getting the instant seek time, but they also get incredible throughput: 1.5GB/sec is the slowest product they offer. I think there may be striping going on, but even then, with drives at 30MB/sec throughput, that’d be 50 drives. The lower-end ones look to just be machines with enormous RAM (16-128 GB), plus some provisions to make memory non-volatile. But they’ve got some bigger servers, which can handle multiple terabytes of storage on Flash, and still pull 2GB/sec of throughput, which they pretty clearly state isn’t counting stuff cached in RAM (which should be even faster).

I want one.

MySQL

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Sun bought MySQL.

Also, Sun’s CEO {has a blog, doesn’t know how to resize images other than changing the HTML attributes}.

Remember back when they were a little below $5 a share and I said I thought they were going somewhere?

Next time I’m putting my money where my mouth is. They closed at $15.92 a share on Friday.

Of course, some are wondering whether this was a good buy. Not necessarily whether MySQL is good (it’s perhaps the most widely-used database in the world), but whether it makes sense to pay a billion dollars for it, when it’s (1) primarily an OpenSource product, and (2) going to take something like 20 years of revenues to break even. While I don’t quite buy the bit about it being a conspiracy with Oracle to kill the project, you should check out the page they link to, Sun’s list of acquisitions. It’s so bad that Sun appears to have a photograph of a dumpster with the Sun logo on it. (Okay, it’s a shipping crate. But it doesn’t make a ton of sense, and you have to grant that it looks a little bit like a dumpster.) It reminds me of when Sun bought Cobalt for $2 billion, and Cobalt went belly-up shortly thereafter. (I still think RaQs could be hot sellers today, by the way, if they were still being made. To take a company doing incredibly well and have it go belly-up in under a year takes some incredible mis-management.)

Beat the Rush

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In case anyone here is interested, I’m hosting a VMware Player image for BlueQuartz, the ‘modern’ GPL version of the old Cobalt RaQ software. A lot of people seem to want a VMware image. I was one of them, until I ended up just creating one on my own.

So grab it while it’s hot! (Read: grab it before I take the time to better throttle download speed.)

Get a (Virtual) Life

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Amid wrestling with getting Xen working (its kernel doesn’t play nicely with my video drivers… oh how I hate closed-source drivers), I downloaded VMware player. It’s free.

I first downloaded a VMware image of Mailserver by Allard Consulting. Quick review: I’ve never used it in a ‘real’ environment to send or receive e-mail (and I screwed up VMware’s networking, making things worse), but it seems extremely impressive. The one thing I have realized is that my much-raved-about spamd is very irritating if you try to telnet to port 25 to ‘test’ the mailserver. If I had a colocated server hosting multiple VPSs *cough* I think I’d buy the ‘real deal’ from them and use this as my mailserver.

But I think I’m going to get entirely distracted with virtual machines tonight. I’m running the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu, 7.10, codenamed “Gusty Gibbon.” But 8.04, code-named “Hardy Heron” is in early testing, and you can grab an image of it. (You can also run it on your desktop, it’s in no way ‘proprietary,’ but a lot of us aren’t hardcore enough to want to run bleeding-edge alpha code as our main OS.)

I’ve mentioned before that I was somewhat interested in the $300 PCs that Walmart was selling. They came with Linux, apparently something Google partnered with them on, dubbing the desktop environment “gOS.” (The machine also draws insanely low power.) Lo an behold, it’s out there as a VMware image. (I was also able to play around with the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) image in VMware.)

Oh, and Solaris anyone?

Fanboy

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I’d gone  a while without ogling Apple products. So they came out today with some new products.

This is a neat idea. It’s their “Airport Extreme” wireless AP (with N-capability), but with a neat addition–a 500 or 1TB disk for wireless backups. Sure, the real geeks already have their Linux server in the basement with a RAID array of 500GB disks accessible over NFS and rsync, but Apple brings something cool into a nice little box, makes it work pretty seamlessly, and, get this–sells it at a fairly cheap price.  $500 for an 802.11N AP with an integrated 1TB backup fileserver?

Of course, I’d need a Mac machine to sync to it. But I’m already carrying so much stuff to class, I want something light! I guess I’d need the world’s thinnest laptop, the Apple MacBook Air.  Not only is it ridiculously small, but it takes the awesome MultiTouch technology from their iPod Touch / iPhone and applies it to the trackpad. 2GB standard, and if you don’t like the sound of your hard drive spinning, you could always opt for the 64GB solid state one. (Apparently at a cost of $1,000, though… But that’s what you pay for 64GB SSD drives right now.)

And they relaunched the AppleTV, without the suck this time. You can also do the much-rumoured movie rentals through iTunes.

Darn you, Apple! Today was supposed to be the day that I caught up on all the work I need to do!

Cool Stuff

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  • FDC (FDCServers.net) has come a long way since I last dealt with them. (I remember back when they had a couple Cogent lines). They’ve now got 81 Gbps of connectivity.
  • Internap has long been the Internet provider when latency/speed matters. They basically buy lines from all the big providers, and peer with lots of the smaller ones, so that, unless your hosting company has their own private peering agreements, it’s basically impossible to find a shorter route. People hosting gameservers, or really just anything “high quality,” love Internap. I’ve seen prices in the $100-200 range for 1 Mbps. (This is purely for the transit: it’s all well and good to envision $100 for a 1 Mbps line to your house as good, but that’s not what it is. This is when you’re in a data center where they have a presence and run a line to them. The cost is just for them carrying your packets.)
  • FDC now has a 10 Gbps line to Internap. “Word on the street” is that Internap had some sort of odd promotion at $15/Mbps if you bought in bulk, and FDC wisely jumped, getting a 2 Gbps commit on a 10 Gbps line.
  • I’m working on getting Xen running on my laptop. It’s interested me for a long time–it’s a GPL’ed virtualization platform. You can use it on your desktop to experiment with various OSs inside VMs, but it’s also awesome on servers to run multiple virtual machines as virtual private servers.
  • Do you remember Cobalt RaQs? I distinctly remember ogling them and thinking they were the best things ever. (Of course, now we see them as 300 MHz machines…) It turns out that, when Cobalt went belly-up, they released a lot of the code under the GPL or similar. The BlueQuartz project is an active community-developed extension of that, and, combined with CentOS, it apparently runs well on “normal” computers now. (True, you don’t get the spiffy blue rackmount server or the spiffy LCD, but you do get to run it on something ten times as powerful.)
  • I’m still itching to host a TF2 server. I’ve found that they’re all either full or empty, with few in-betweens, and that a lot of them aren’t ‘adminned’ as tightly as I’d like: games like this seem to attract irritating people, and not enough servers kick/ban them.
  • cPanel seems to have come a distance since I last used that, too, and you can now license it for use just inside a VPS at $15/month.
  • Mailservers are hard to perfect. There are lots and lots of mediocre ones, but it’s rare to come across an excellent one, something that can deflect spam seamlessly, make it easy to add lots of addresses, and provide a nice web GUI. All of the technology’s out there, but for some reason, mailservers are among the hardest things in the world to configure. (Even my thermostat is easier to use!) Especially given my affinity for spamd, it’s no wonder that I’m so impressed with the Mailserver ‘appliance’ that Allard Consulting produces. It’s essentially all of the best things about mailservers (greylisting, whitelisting, SpamAssassin, Postfix with MySQL-based virtual domains, a spiffy web interface with graphs, Roundcube…), hosted on OpenBSD, coming as a pre-assembled ISO.
  • Computer hardware’s come a long way lately. I’d imagine it’d be fairly easy to assemble a machine with a good dual-core (or quad-core!) processor, 4 GB RAM, and a few 500 GB disks for around $1,000.
  • Colocation + 1,000 GB transfer on Internap at FDC is $169. (Or $199 for 5 Mbps unmetered, but that’s probably overkill.) Are you thinking what I’m thinking? (Hint: everything on this list indirectly leads to these last two point!)

Amazon S3

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I really didn’t pay it that much attention, or think about its full potential, at the time it was released. But Amazon’s Simple Storage Servic (hence the “S3”) is really pretty neat. In a nutshell, it’s file hosting on Amazon’s proven network infrastructure. (When have you ever seen Amazon offline?) They provide HTTP and BitTorrent access to files.

Their charges do add up — it might cost a few hundred dollars a month to move a terabyte of data and store 80GB of content. But then again, the reliability (and scalability!) is probably much greater than what I can handle, and it’s apparently much cheaper than it would be to host it with a ‘real’ CDN service.

Sadly, I can’t think of a good use for this service. I suppose the average person really doesn’t need to hire a company to provide mirrors of their files for download. (It would make an awesome mirror for Linux/BSD distributions, but I think the typical mirror is someone with a lot of spare bandwidth and an extra server, not someone paying hundreds a month to mirror files for other people… I wonder if there’s a market for a ‘premium’ mirror service? I doubt it, since the existing ones seem to work fine?)

Datacenter Fiend

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No matter what I do, I keep finding myself thinking about webhosting.

Netcraft does a monthly survey of hosts with the top uptime, and mentioned that DataPipe is usually on top. I’ve found that, at least for what I do, any “real” data center has just about 100% uptime. I have never not been able to reach my server. You’re either with a notoriously bad host (for example, when Web Host “Plus” bought out Dinix, they took the servers offline for a few days with no notice… that’s noticeable downtime), or you’re with a reputable host where downtime just doesn’t really happen.

So 0.00% downtime, as opposed to 0.01%, isn’t a huge deal for me. (That doesn’t mean it’s not impressive.) But what impressed me about DataPipe is that I clicked their link and their webpage just appeared. No loading in the slightest. I browsed their site, and there was never any waiting. I might as well have had the page cached on my computer, except I know it’s not cached anywhere.

Their data center is in New Jersey, but they clearly have excellent peering. I’m getting 20ms pings. They don’t (directly, at least) offer dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, or shared hosting.

One of my big concerns is that I wonder about long-term viability. The market’s full of hosts. A lot of them are “kiddie hosts,” inexperienced people just reselling space often with poor quality. That’s room for competition. But the problem is that there are hosts selling the moon: 200 GB of disk space and 3 terabytes of bandwidth for $5 a month? That’s ludicrous: that’s more than I get with my dedicated server! They can get away with it because no one uses that much, but it concerns more “honest” hosts–you’d have to charge ten times as much if everyone actually used it! But for hosts that offer, say, 1GB of space and 10 GB of transfer–a ‘realistic’ amount–they’re left vulnerable to people thinking they’re getting a better deal.

I realized the other day that, while a lot of people offer VPS (virtual private server: several people share a server, but software ‘partitions’ give each of them their own server software-wise, with root access and separation from other users), I’m really not aware of any good ones. It’s also hard to find any that offer significant amounts of disk space, or any that are particularly cheap.