flying monkeys

^{Photo by psilver}
I'll skip the whole 'I haven't posted for two weeks' intro. 

It's only October and it already snowed, a couple of inches and it's still here. Mornings are sure colder.

I finally put together my new fileserver, and up  from my one harddrive server before. I was going to do a RAID1 configuration, but instead went back to a normal partitioning setup (XFS on the secondary HDD for the files). Recieved another computer the other day, so I'm at a total of 7 servers.

I was planning on installing Darwin (hehe) on one of the faster ones, but I can't get this damn DVD is fried (for whatever reason). I'm hoping that it has CPU instructions for SSE2/3.

Being the geek I am, I usually stay up a minimum of 24 hours when I'm really interested or concentrated on a subject. Below, I'll point out what I do, for those that want to accomplish the feat.

• Sugar

 Increase your sugar intake, not by sugary drinks though. Small candies (gummy worms, etc. )worked the best for me. Last thing you want to do is crash.

• Sleep

Get a good nights sleep the night before.

• Caffeine

If you must have caffeine, go for '5/6 hour energy' shots, or '6 hour energy' pills (which happen to be cheaper than the shots). Try to avoid sugary energy drinks (Monster especially). My energy drink of choice is the almighty Citrus BooKoo.

Less than a week 'till school starts; you'd be surprised how enthused I am. Tomorrow I get to pick out my locker, fun. So excited. Bouncing off the walls, excited. That's right.

Anyway, I finally received two more servers. One, I just turned into a SmoothWall firewall, which is working excellent I must say. Worked out of the box, cool web interface as well.

The other, I'm not too sure what to do with yet. Turns out, this is faster than my newest web server. I think I'll take the disk out of the newest one, pop it into my NFS server, add another disk from somewhere and put it in a RAID 5 array. Which would be quite intriguing, since I've never worked with RAID before.

I've recently taken up the hobby of lockpicking. I've ordered a set yesterday, so they should arrive in the next couple weeks. I'm sure these will be much easier than a paperclip and a screwdriver. Here's a mini guide who those curious one.

Anyway, I found that either two paperclips or a paperclip + flathead screwdriver work as a makeshift lockpick set. Bend the paper clip straight out, but leaving one end bend to have some kind of leverage. Bend the tip of the paperclip to a 20-35 degree angle. That's the pick.

I've also made a rake, by bending a paperclip in a mountain-valley formation.

As for a tension wrench, a flathead screw driver or another paperclip works. Simply bend the paperclip at a 90 degree angle so you have an L shape. It also depends on the size of the key hole and how much room you have to work with. There are numerous ways to bend a paperclip to work as a tool (in this fashion), so use what works for you.

Now, to pick it.

I've taken up the challenge of learning Russian with RosettaStone. Russian isn't one of those languages that you can learn in a month (IMO). RosettaStone is actually pretty cool software, though, what makes me mad is it doesn't give you the direct meaning. Sure, it'll show you a picture of a man and you match it up, but some of the pictures it's up to the users judgement.

_{Photo by Sam Takes Photos'}

It's official, I'm selling Torrentino. I've had no time to maintain it at all, it's a great site though. Hand coded from scratch, which I'm quite proud of. Anyway, selling it for $30, but I'll take anything else (use the Contact page if you have an offer).

Scary that I post less and less these days. I have been doing nothing the last couple weeks. I 'have' seasons one through 6 of The Sopranos which I've been watching non-stop. Bruno (movie) was quite disapointing, not as funny as I thought.

So you wanna get rock hard abs eh? Follow these 5 steps, and you'll get those washboard abs in a week!

 I'm starting to freelance now, so I'm up for any work and make an attempt to build my portfolio. I'm available to do any work, small to medium sized projects. Stuff I can do:

• Code PHP
• Remote adminstration of Linux boxen
• Some MySQL stuff (though I hate it)
• Installl scripts (Wordpress, Drupal, WHMCS, etc..)
• Help with hosters (I know my way around WHM, cPanel, WHM and so forth)
• And probably a lot more useless stuff.

Portfolio here. My prices are cheap (say, min $3 CAD) so I'm available to hire. If you have any offers, deals etc, post a comment or use the contact page.

Since my boredom has been growing substantially over the last couple days, I thought of building a SAN. Yes, a SAN, not a NAS. Get another web server running and put it in a round robin type config. Set up a SAN for centeralized storage (among other things), then yay!

Really, it's just an excuse to build more servers and use ports on my 24 port switch....

WorkSimple 1.2.3 was released the other day, improved on some things, 'optimized' some code.

Sysode has been going pretty well, though I'm concerned if I have the need to scale up/out. The underlying code is quite messy, I'm not a fan of neat looking code nor whitespace. I should improve on the looks of my code, it may actually be maintainable...

Having to switch between computer to computer [locally] is tiresome. Yes that's right, rotating your head 75 degrees hurts after a while, nevermind the shift in your body. 

I have a tri-monitor setup, plus two laptops. Moving my hands each time to keyboard sucks. This is where Synergy comes in. In short, it's software KVM, so to speak. That means no special hardware. Share one keyboard/mouse between multiple clients. Interesting, eh?

Here's a quick tutorial on getting it set up.