nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Magnesium!

September 30, 2006


75′ of Magnesium Ribbon, purchased via eBay
(Click for more Magnesium photos…)

The coil of magnesium I mentioned a little while back showed up today. It’s just as I expected. And yes, I’ve already burned a small piece of it. I’d forgotten just how brightly that stuff burns.

Today has been pretty busy thus far, too. First I mostly finished up the blueberry cider (photo gallery retired), transferring it from the fermenter to the carboy for aging. Before making this transfer I pressed the remaining juice from the berries using a Italian fruit press a friend loaned to me. It worked very well, leaving a bowl of pressed, almost-tasteless, raisin-looking blueberries in its wake.

I’ve got pretty high hopes for this cider. Compared to the plain cider + honey I made a few weeks earlier it has an amazingly deep purpleish color, and its taste is just great. Sort of a tart apple/berry mixture with a hint of alcohol taste. With another month of aging and carbonation I think it could end up being a really nice beverage.

When I pulled the lid on the fermenter I got to see something which looks more like dirty socks floating in the brew. Those are actually natural cotton sacks which I put the berries into (well, most, I accidently dropped a few) to make collecting them for later pressing easier. It seems that most of the yeast grew while attached to them as well, as there wasn’t really much left in the bottom of the fermenter.

Also, here is a picture of Danielle, taken by looking in the wrong end of a pair of binoculars while she stood at the other side.

Now, I think I’ll go acquire some Thai food, or something of a similar nature. Tomorrow will be spent troubleshooting the Casio SK-1 MIDI Mod I assembled today and am having issues with. And doing laundry. And maybe finishing up some things with the webserver. I’m not sure where the problems with the SK-1 thing lies yet, but I haven’t tried much troubleshooting either. Anyway, yes. Food.

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DreamHost

September 28, 2006


DreamHost Cancelation
(Click for full res image…)

In case any of you are interested, the process for canceling an account with DreamHost is completely automated. In fact, it’s easier than signing up for the account in the first place. When canceling the site simply calculates whether or not it has been more than 97 days since signing up for the account and if not, automatically supplies a refund.

Maybe they get quite a few of these or something.

Anyway, I’m (obviously) going to wait a few days to be sure things go through as expected with the credit card company, but this is definitely a bright spot in this whole ordeal with DreamHost.

Oh, and yes, all sites are now on rowla.nuxx.net at the wonderful host which is Waveform Technology Inc, LLC. As long as I can provide a stable, unhacked box for another more than two years I’ll be content.

computersmoved from livejournal

lighttpd? Nokia Image Upload API?

September 26, 2006

So it seems that my choice of webserver for rowla.nuxx.net, lighttpd, isn’t working out so well. It seems that the Nokia 6600 (and I’d imagine others), as part of implementing the Nokia Image Upload Server API v1.1 sends an Expect: 100-continue, but lighttpd always returns 417 Expectation Failed. As can be seen here, the ‘100 – Continue’ part of HTTP/1.1 simply hasn’t been implemented.

A bug report (#377 – Incorrect handling of the 100 (Continue) Status) has been submitted, but it looks like there hasn’t been any work done on it in quite a while.

I presume that Nokia uses that because then the client will only send another chunk of image after the server has received the last, helping ensure data doesn’t get lost somewhere in the high latency / flaky world of GPRS. Or maybe because they anticipate the Image Upload feature of the phones to be used on potentially overloaded ISP / telco servers and they don’t want the phones sending data faster than the server can handle it.

As is stated in RFC2068, 10.1.1 – 100 Continue:

The client may continue with its request. This interim response is used to inform the client that the initial part of the request has been received and has not yet been rejected by the server. The client SHOULD continue by sending the remainder of the request or, if the request has already been completed, ignore this response. The server MUST send a final response after the request has been completed.

I don’t think I can use some sort of proxy for it either, because it seems that Expect headers need to be forwarded by proxies. (RFC2616, 14.20)

So, back to Apache, or I can try to find another way around this… At least I know what’s causing it. Until then, no from-phone updating of my moblog can occur.

computersmoved from livejournal

Beer Purchases

September 24, 2006

I meant to post this the other day, but I forgot to. Anyway, here’s Friday’s beer purchases. Three more bottles of St. Bernardus Abt. 12 Special Edition, Coniston Brewing Co.’s Old Man ale, Founders’ Bad Habit Quad, and Dogfish Head’s Chateau Jiahu. Yes, that makes for a total of four bottles of the St. Bernardus Abt. 12 Special Edition, and no, I haven’t tried it yet. (I will soon, but I’m still moving nuxx.net to a new physical server and one of these beers is to celebrate that move.

beermoved from livejournal

Molly

September 23, 2006


Molly laying on the carpet.

Just a quick photo of my sister and brother-in-law’s new(-ish) puppy named Molly.

More photos of her from last night here (photo gallery retired).

And of course, pictures of Afie here.

Also, this is (hopefully) the last photo I’ll post hosted from DreamHost. It’s taken be an extra five minutes to make this post because I kept getting 500 – Internal Server Error errors from my site at DreamHost. A few reloads later and it works. I’ll be moving my web hosting tonight or tomorrow.

familymoved from livejournal

rowla.nuxx.net

September 20, 2006

rowla.nuxx.net lives!

PING 204.11.33.41 (204.11.33.41): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 204.11.33.41: icmp_seq=0 ttl=42 time=44.605 ms
64 bytes from 204.11.33.41: icmp_seq=1 ttl=42 time=34.532 ms
64 bytes from 204.11.33.41: icmp_seq=2 ttl=42 time=31.647 ms
64 bytes from 204.11.33.41: icmp_seq=3 ttl=42 time=37.469 ms
--- 204.11.33.41 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 31.647/37.063/44.605/4.818 ms

computersmoved from livejournal

Postfix

September 19, 2006

I don’t completely understand how / why yet, nor how I’ll manage it, but I’ve got Postfix authenticating against mysql and pulling the virtual user / domain from there. I think that’s enough work for tonight.

Tomorrow the server goes into colocation.

computersmoved from livejournal

Some Photos…

September 18, 2006


Broasted Mushrooms from Chicken Shack

Nothing much to say besides that rowla.nuxx.net is coming along nicely. Here’s some photos I took over the past few days:

· Broasted Mushrooms from Chicken Shack
· Danielle holding a garter snake which she caught as we were walking around a trail in the thumb area.
· A large, and I believe edible, mushroom found not far from where Danielle caught the snake.
· Standing on a crappy beach just north of the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron
· Inside of rowla.nuxx.net showing the new disk controller, SATA cabling, and 2x 320GB disks.
· A little bit of metal work which I did to patch unneeded ‘vent’ holes in the side of the case.
· Side of rowla.nuxx.net’s case, closed, showing how the patched parts look.

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