nuxx.net
January 12, 2007
Ah, I’ve now done a write-up on nuxx.net. So, feel free to give it a read if you are curious what sort of things are running behind the scenes on the box which hosts my (and others) sites to… well… host things.
Category computers
Arraugh, MAME!
January 6, 2007
I cannot figure out what is wrong here. Either the MAME devs seriously broke some things between 0.69 and 0.100, or something I can’t figure out is wrong.
See, I’m trying to run a nice, simple copy of DOS on my MAME cabinet. It should work fine, but… it doesn’t. In some cases. :D
Using MAME 0.69 I have no problems, and everything seems to run rather well. Bump the version up to 0.100 for DOS and everything gets really slow. From, say, 60fps in Bad Dudes down to 17fps.
I thought that maybe the increased size of the binary was being weird with SMARTDRV, or maybe it needed to write back to disk more, and the CF card I’m using is slow, so I copied everything over to a hard disk. Same problem. :\
I’m sort of at a loss for what to do.
Gallery Sitemap Problem
December 25, 2006
For some reason (probably because of the size of my gallery and the number of sites hosted on the box) I’ve been having problems with Google being able to pull an XML sitemap for the gallery. Google was apparantly timing out while attempting to download it. I’m not sure if some change was made on their end recently regarding the length of time which could be spend during sitemap downloads or what, but I think I found a solution:
#!/bin/sh
newfile=~/www/nuxx.net/gallery/sitemap.xml.new
oldfile=~/www/nuxx.net/gallery/sitemap.xml/usr/local/bin/curl -Sso $newfile http://nuxx.net/gallery/main.php?g2_view=sitemap.Sitemap
if [ -d ~/www/nuxx.net/gallery/sitemap.xml.new ]; then
mv $newfile $oldfile
fi
Yes, I know it’s a hack, but running it every six hours should work around the problem.
UPDATE: Yep, I just realized this won’t work. The test argument needs to be changed to -f (or -e) because it’s not a directory. Doh!
Honda Music Link
December 10, 2006
The Honda Music Link communicates with an iPod at 9600 / N-8-1, and I can successfully sniff it.
Eg: 000043 17:16:12.750 FF 55 04 04 00 29 04 CB FF 55 04 04 00 29 01 CE
This can be looked up here: http://ipodlinux.org/Apple_Accessory_Protocol
UPDATE: As an exercise to myself, this is as follows:
FF 55 – Header
04 – Length of Command
04 – Mode 4 / AiR Mode
00 29 – AiR Playback Control
04 – Skip– Command
CB – Checksum calculated as: 0x100 – (FF + 04 + 04 + 00 + 29 + 04)
FF 55 – Header
04 – Length of Command
04 – Mode 4 / AiR Mode
00 29 – AiR Playback Control
01 – Toggle Play / Pause
CE – Checksum
rowla.nuxx.net
December 1, 2006
Server is back up. In short, I was using so much bandwidth that Waveform flipped my link back to 10Mb in an effort to cap bandwidth, then when that remained wholly saturated (nice to know that the to-internet link can saturate that, eh?) they turned off the port.
See here for a graph of it all: https://secure.nuxx.net/bandwidthd
Digital ICE
November 25, 2006
Digital ICE on the Nikon Coolscan V ED works rather well.
For example, here is a single frame scanned both without and with Digital ICE, set to remove dust and scratches. The negative wasn’t removed from the scanner between scans, the option was simply turned on and the frame re-scanned:
· Without ICE. Note the dust on the mountain, and small scratches on the house at the right side of the frame.
· With ICE. Aforementioned dust and scratches (and other bits) are just simply gone.
3.5GB Yay!
November 22, 2006
Two hours, twenty six minutes, and sixteen seconds (2:26:16) after starting the Apple Hardware Tests, my machine can finally be said to have received a RAM upgrade. For the last three years I’ve been running it with 1.5GB of RAM, and that had been enough. Until I tried to work with 4000dpi scans of 35mm slides.
I must say, things run much better now. Especially with my compliment of other apps running, including Safari, Mail.app, Adium, SSH Agent, iTunes, Xjournal, Obsession (LJ Checker), Terminal, Gallery Remote, Vienna, and a few others.
Tea and Biscuits
November 22, 2006
PG Tips, McVitie’s Digestives, and Organic Milk
What an excellent afternoon snack on a day when I returned from a rather lengthy lunch, only to be told that I can leave if I want.
Now I’m sitting here waiting for 2GB of RAM to show up for the G5 so that I can scan negatives. I was able to scan the 110 slides with the 1.5GB in here now, but it was pushing things. Opening the 45MB TIFFs in Lightroom with the current amount of RAM causes the machine to chew on the disk for 2-3 minutes per image. This needs to change before I tackle ~1000 full-frame 35mm negatives.
nuxx.net
November 22, 2006
Also, my site, any I host, and email is down right now. I’m upgrading MySQL, so it’s not currently running, making things which are backed by it not work.
Email is still coming in, it’s just being queued up. Once MySQL is back up things should be back to normal.
UPDATE @ 09:43 EST: MySQL upgrade done. Email and sites working again. Time to do the PHP upgrade, which will break all websites for a while. Sorry.
UPDATE @ 11:16 EST: All updates complete. Everything should be back to normal. Let me know if it isn’t.
Win32 RSS / Atom Feed Reader
November 14, 2006
Can any of you recommend a Win32 RSS / Atom feed reader? I’m liking Vienna on OS X, and Google Reader, but Google Reader just suddenly breaks all too often. And by breaks I mean fails to update feeds for long periods of time, if ever.
And Firefox sucks for feeds, because if I nest a bunch under one bookmark toolbar entry I have to drill down to each to check if there is anything new there.