Jay’s Not Here

Today is the last day of Energy Saving Week 2009. It’ll also be the last day I’ll be running my 108-watt-when-idle development server. I decided to replace it with the new Mac Mini Server and see if that really lives up to all the marketing hype. Here’s a quick summary:

Pros:

• Sips a measly 13 watts when idle. That’s a whopping 87% energy savings over my old server.
• Hourly back ups to a dedicated hard drive, out of the box. It’s configured as a twin 500 GB set up; one for the OS and the other for Time Machine.
• It’s great as a collaboration server: VPN, VNC, SSH, CalDAV, http/https, Open Directory, per-user/group wikis and blogs right out of the box—but if your DNS server isn’t configured properly (or you have no authority to make changes on it) you’re hosed. Good luck finding help.
• Open Directory + SVN = pure awesomeness; no more mucking around with htpasswd files—users can change their password themselves using a built in web interface.
• Makes a great media server—plays 1080p video full screen very smoothly; even across a (wired gigabit) network share (hosted by a dedicated hardware RAID5 unit).
• It was a hell of a lot faster to set up all those services compared to my old Linux server (I still have nightmares about IPsec and ypserv configuration); and I didn’t have to download/compile anything either. I only had to edit config files to get Apache/SVN working.

Cons:

• You need to administer your own DNS server for everything to work. DNS is painful and very tricky to get right if you haven’t set it up before. Luckily the Tomato router firmware, which includes dnsmasq, is good enough to get everything working. It doesn’t run on all routers, and the ones that it does support only transmit at 802.11g speeds (i.e. 54 Mbits max).
• Kerberos and iCal Server are a huge pain to set up unless you’ve got a fully functional DNS server with fully-qualified forward and reverse mappings for your machines.
• Prone to stealthy name collision problems: if you’ve got a nasty habit (like I do) of creating a local admin account with the same username as your Open Directory user account, you’re in for a whole lot of set-up pain.
• Server Admin keeps overwriting my Apache settings You can prevent that by putting your stuff in a separate .conf file and Include it from the main config.

The newly released Mac Mini Server caught my eye. It boasts 16 watts of power usage when idle—that’s just 2 watts more than the base Mac Mini. So I busted out my handy Kill-A-Watt meter to see how my existing boxen farm measures up:

Note to self—don’t forget to turn off the TV.

[1] Assuming a constant rate of $0.093 per kWh (which is currently the peak usage rate in Ontario) and 24/7 idle time. Costs will be higher when the devices are under heavier load.

Last week was extremely productive on many fronts. The hobbyist in me is all smiles:

• Finished acceptance test suite for my study.
• Fixed a major concurrency bug involving modal dialogs in one of my Java projects.
• Wrote a little PHP script that feeds a Flash/AS2 gallery with pictures from my Flickr account.
• Put in an order for The Pragmatic Programmer and Software Craftsmanship.
• Climbed a bunch of 5.9 walls at the gym. 5.8s are now my cooldown climbs.
• Climbed about 80% through a V1 bouldering route—it’s hard to get over the lip after ten or so 30-50′ climbs.
• Learned how to jack up and chock a car, remove the front bumper, air box and resonator, swap in a cold air intake and put it all back together again. Once the parts come in, I’ll get to apply this theoretical stuff. In the meantime, I’ve learned how to take public transit to get all the way to school—you know, just in case.
• Found a 25% off deal on a 200W bass amp head and 4×10″ cabinet. My 30W combo unit just isn’t doing it for me anymore—actually, it never did.
• Started packing my stuff for the move in February.
• Booked cottage for autumn getaway.
• Caught up on sleep.

Someone asked me how to convert a string to a date. This was my answer:

"Your place or mine?"

It works over email, IM, Facebook, SMS and even blog comments! Of course, it’s most effective AFK.

I’ve spent the past little while evaluating a number of content/document management systems for keeping my research and course work organized. I need something nimble (i.e. no Apache/MySQL-based solutions), searchable, usable, and pretty. It has to play well with version control systems and not consume oodles of disk space (i.e. 50 megs of PDFs should still be ~50 megs of PDFs when imported into such a system).

Oh, and it has to run on OS X. Web-based is ok, too, but shouldn’t always need a ‘net connection. Subscription-based is a big no-no, so that rules out EverNote.

After evaluating Notebook, VoodooPad, SOHO Notes, Curio, and MoinMoin, I decided to use MoinMoin.

The others didn’t play nicely with Subversion; SOHO Notes actually nuked some of my .svn folders. Yikes!

Curio liked to change some files to directories; Subversion apparently gets very confused with that.

Notebook preindexed a ton of stuff in binary format. I wouldn’t want to have to commit those indices each time I make a change.

I didn’t get to check whether VoodooPad worked well with version control, actually. I didn’t spend too much time evaluating it. It felt too restrictive in terms of formatting and layout.

What I liked about MoinMoin is that it already had extensions for LaTeX and BibTeX content. It’s easy¹ to extend in many ways via Python and runs in standalone mode (i.e. DesktopEdition–still needs a browser but not a full-fledged web or database server). And it stores all its pages and attachments in a straightforward hierarchical manner on the filesystem–ditto for the extensions. So I can commit my whole wiki system to version control, check it out on some other (not necessarily Mac) system, start it up and keep growing it. There are plugins for merging two MoinMoin wikis in case I make changes on different working copies, but I haven’t tried those out yet.

Oh, well, it looks promising. We’ll see how it goes.

Next up: collecting up all my notes, clippings and papers and stuffing them in.

¹ Assuming Python comes easy to you

As I talked to a friend tonight about deep sea creatures, I realized I’d be a very bad marine biologist.

The first thing I’d want to know about a new sea creature is how it’d taste as sashimi.

I didn’t make it into work earlier this week because my front left tire decided to relieve some pressure.

Enough that I had to swap in my trusty spare. It’s the second time I’ve had to use it this year. Second time, ever actually.

Doesn’t it look lonely in such a large wheel well?

I took my car into the shop to get the flat fixed. After they took put it on the lift, they told me the front left wasn’t damaged. It just spontaneously became unsealed.

Spontaneously!

Oh, and my rear right tire had a nail in it. But that didn’t lose pressure.

Somehow. Luckily, it didn’t. I only have one donut. And I was already worn out from installing it. You know, power tools are really good at tightening wheel nuts. Too bad I don’t have any. I had a hell of a time undoing them so I could get my unsealed rim off my ride.

Seeing my RMT tomorrow. Mmmm…

I gave up a media pass for the crowning of the 2008 Playmate of the Year over the past weekend so I could spend some time with my nephew. Yes, that Jayde Nicole; and a handful of her playmate friends.

Does this mean I’m slowing down?

No, I just really like my nephew

Yes, it’s coming soon!