The Harris Report
SFX: cue teletype
I went to Harris Cyclery yesterday to see what they had for fixed gear bikes. Not a lot. Four, actually. But that’s nearly twice as many as anywhere else. None of them fit me, although one came close. They had a 49cm Bianchi Pista (too small); a 53 cm Fuji track bike (too big); a 53 cm IRO Jamie Roy (too big); and something else I don’t remember. Oh yeah, the 55 cm Raleigh (way too big). We decided that a 50 or 51 cm would probably be best. I hopped on teh Jaime Roy to try it for size and it wasn’t all that big, but the seat would have to be lowered all the way down and that would make it tough to fit in any sort of saddle bag.
I didn’t know it before, but the Jamie Roy is alumin[i]um. I definitely want steel. Plus I like the looks of the Mark V better.
OTOH, I got a good barbecue lunch while there.
In other news, the new server is here (model G5 8300B). It’s way cool and I’ve been filling it up with stuff all night. It is, indeed, very quiet. My only criticism so far is that it’s far too easy to hit the power cycle button by accident.
This will make my development efforts much easier as my current system is just about maxed out. Already, by shutting down the variousl ColdFusion and Apache servers, my desktop machine is now back to 50% of capacity instead of about 110%. I’ll not need another machine* for a long, long time.
So, try it out. Not that you’ll notice the awesome speed as you’re on the other end of my 384K upload DSL line. But anyway, here are the maps for last year’s TdC as served from my new machine:
(These are all Flashpaper documents of about 1mb each):
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
I also discovered today that Dotster provides DNS management for $10 per year. That’s good news too.
* computer, I mean. Not bike. You can never have too many bikes.
October 20th, 2005 at 4:02 pm
Nice system.
I’ll have you know that I ordered new RAM for my current machine, and thereby have no need for such glitzy machinery. I happen to LIKE the way my PC sounds like a vacuum cleaner when I turn it on, thankyouverymuch.
(Goddamnit!)
October 20th, 2005 at 9:58 pm
The thing is I bought it as a server and now I’m finding it’s really super fast and with lots of graphics and sound power that would make it a really good desktop machine. No. No. It stays where it is.
Maybe a media server. Hmmm…
I’ve still got lots of things to load on it though. ColdFusion and Apache are loaded, but I’ve still to install PHP and MySQL and ImageMagik and … … …
October 21st, 2005 at 9:10 am
What OS is on there?
October 21st, 2005 at 9:23 am
It comes with XP Pro. My only real gripe is that it comes iwth one of those “restore” disks instead of an actual XP Pro disk, but that’s what pretty much everyone does.
October 21st, 2005 at 10:44 am
Ahh. I was half expecting you to call out the name of your favorite Linux distro.
Restore Disk Upside: It’s a lot faster to “reinstall windows”, as it’s a speedy ghost image.
Downside: Everything else.
October 21st, 2005 at 10:54 am
Heh. I’ve never done Linux. I’ve tried, but I’ve always failed. I use linux only on hosted accounts that give me nice interfaces to the important tools. The last time I tried it, It wouldn’t install becuase it was a CD drive that wasn’t bootable. That meant I needed the install boot floppy. I got the thing to partially install and run in text mode, but the graphics card wouldn’t init in graphics mode (it was unsupported or too old or something). So I got a new card, and it was too new and the bios woudn’t support it. By that time, it wasn’t worth the effort any more. I’ve had good luck with XP w/r/t reliability (I don’t recall ever getting a BSOD) and as long as you add enough intruder prevention stuff like AVG, you’re fine. Beside, my router has a firewall, too, so I haven’t had any trouble so far.
knock wood.
I’ve been using Windows since 2.1 or something, so I’m used to it and can bend it to my will. Although I have to say these latest versions are getting pretty difficult to find your way around to do simple things like change environment variables and computer host names and IP addresses.
When I installed this machine, I just let it go DHCP, but then I wanted to change it to fixed since it will be the server and I have to tell the router where to redirect port 80 requests. I hunted for like 10 minutes to find where to do that. It’s the most non-obvious thing.
Loading a restore disk also wipes out any applications you have installed. V. bad. esp. when you’ve got applications (like Dreamweaver) that have to phone home to activate. If you don’t deactivate before your re-install, you have to go through MM’s maze to try to get it turned on again. Bleah. But I think they got enough grief about it that they changed it back to a “honor system” in ver. 8.
October 21st, 2005 at 11:42 am
I don’t have any Linux boxes in use right now either. A couple at the office, but they’re doing menial tasks, one runs a cd-tower, the other a tiny internal website.
Were I to use it, I’d use Ubuntu for a desktop, Slackware for a server. Installation is so much easier now. Meanwhile, XP is great. The only BSODs I can remember getting were either from hardware (failing RAM, etc.) or the %#@! iTunes 5 installation.
Yeah, restoring an image leaves nothing behind, which CAN actually be cool if you set everything up as you like it, install all your programs and then make your own image. Saves time like crazy, I do it on the loaner laptops here in the office. Set up one, and then clone the rest of them like sheep. Ghost isn’t that expensive, might be worth getting for disaster recovery situations.