So the new parts for Gibson, my colocated server, showed up today. A 70 lbs. 3u server case, 2 hard drives, some cpu coolers, and a wicked awesome raid card (Areca 1230, google it.)

So, I had to transfer all the old parts that I was keeping into the new case and install the new parts as well. Here’s the after math photos:

Previous Server carcass

An overview of the “workspace” table

The front of the server. 8 hotswap sata drive bays drool

currently occupied by 2 150gb raptors and 2 WD RE2 400gb’ers — both sets will be in Raid 1

Taller heat sinks of the dual 285 opterons

These fans have a spot in the fan cage where the power sits so you can just swap the fan in and out without fussing with in-case wires. A joyous thing.

The current four drives all plugged in — the card has spots for up to 12 drives.

The SATA hotswap backplate interface

An overview of Gibson 2.0

I’m excited. Now Fedora just needs to finish downloading faster…

Here I am, getting all excited to build a neat little javascript managed, persistently stored¹, local bookmarking fun toy, and Mozilla goes and ruins my fun by not allowing me² to store bookmarks globally.

Guess I'll go sign up at del.icio.us. :/

My pet cockatiel, Pete, died today.

We believe he died from something toxic in a computer cable he chewed up while sneaking about. He may have been a jerk at times (well, most the time :D), but he was definitely part of the household and I'll miss him a lot.

While gawking at some of the really cools toys by Moritz Stefaner , I got particularly interested in his post about visualizing time gaps in data and had a moment of inspiration.

Instead of vertically gaping the data, you could "timeline" the data like we used to do in gradeschool. (I was also looking at some sparklines today too...).

So, I implemented the idea on the blog here. Now, this post won't serve well to illustrate the effect, but if you fly back to a post that had some activity, you'll find that as you read the comments, the yellow tick above each comment shows you the relative position in the discussion when the comment took place. Neat, out of the way, and very easy to grep. I like it.

For those who care, the code is really, really simple. For Wordpressers, in you comments.php add these lines right after <ol class="commentlist">

<?php 
$last_comment = $comments[count($comments)-1]->comment_date;	
$bar_length = strtotime($last_comment) - strtotime($post->post_date);
$bar_length = $bar_length + ($bar_length*.04); // 4% slack, width of each 'tick mark'
?>

Then, inside the foreach ($comments as $comment) loop and right after the <li>, add this:

<div class="commenttimeline"><div style="left: <?php 		
echo floor( ((strtotime($comment->comment_date) - strtotime($post->post_date)) / $bar_length ) * 100 );
?>%"></div></div>

Then you set up some basic styles for the bar (these will vary a LOT depending on your theme/style/etc):

.commentlist li {
position: relative;
_height: 1px;
}
.commenttimeline {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
right: 0;
height: 2px;
background: #666;
_width: 102.5%; 
}
.commenttimeline div {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
background: #cc0;
height: 2px;
width: 4%;
_line-height: 1px;
_font-size: 1px;
}

Yes, a few IE hacks were needed. :/

And ta da, instant comment timeline above each comment. Pretty cool.

I've always loved these types of photos. I took a spontaneous trip to, well, outside the other day. On my way around, I see a park on the GPS that looks interesting, so I veered over and headed up. I ran out of road and hiked the rest of the way up, what I believe is, Mr. Davidson. At the top I was confronted with a gigantic gross, and a nice sweeping view of the city. While sunrise would be a much nicer time to do a pano here, this one isn't half bad.

Warning: Large image ahead! If you'd like to see the whole, full size pano, be warned, it's a HUGE download. The image measures 15,945×2,613 pixels and weights in at 3mb! Nearly twice as tall as most monitors and easily wider by days :D BE CAREFUL: If you don't have a beefy machine and you click that, your poor browser is going to try and load that -- it won't be pretty.

Well, I'm glad I now know that one of the most popular business attires on the planet should only associate you with an "Axis of evil" leader.

Oh... Wait...

source

I was very surprised when I came home to a brown shipping box sitting at my desk. I was more surprised when I turned it over to see Google had sent me something.

I was giddy when it turns out they sent me a multi-functional digital photo frame! MP3's, JPG's, Record/Play, and even video can run through this sucker via internal memory or a SD Expansion card! How crazy awesome is this thing.

As I read in a few other places, this in an annual event for people who do well with the Adsense program. Well, thank you Google!

A picture sniped from elsewhere:

So far, however, I can't quite seem to figure out what format they mean when the manual says this thing displays JPEG's, because I'll tell you right now, not a single JPEG I export from photoshop is doing the trick -- and I'll be damned if i'm going to convert a nice little library of these photos using their one and a time "SunPlus PMP Transcoding" utility >:|

Any ideas?

( another lucky winner :D )

Run a deceptive, lie-based, destructive, and ultimately inflammatory war for the last 6 years while your buddy-buddy government friends hold control: Well and fine.

Once the House is against you and the congress may well be too: well, you best make for the hills.