I’ve been working a bit on Gazettr lately after a fairly long period of inactivity.

One of the things I’ve changed is moving to a more Google Reader like interface with a static sidebar for the feeds and thereby also a static article area. Seems to work quite nicely and I like the changes.

I got rid of the top menu bar which took up too much reading space and moved it to the sidebar (that menu needs some work still). I’ve also for the time being removed all ads.

Absolutely fantastic. One of the most inspiring beautiful TED talks I’ve seen.

I got a CD with the new Norwegian band Cortina this Christmas. Pretty good listening. I recommend checking them out.

If you need to manually migrate mail between for instance Tiger and Leopard you simply need to copy the preferences mail file and the mail folder itself.

The preferences file which holds information on your accounts, signatures, rules, etc. is located here:

 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

Transfer that to your new installation to the same folder.

Then rsync your mail folder (or transfer it in whatever way you like). Remember to close Mail on both Macs.

Make sure no Mail folder exists on the target machine below ~/Library and then rsync:

rsync -az ~/Library/Mail your_user_name@target_machine:~/Library

After that simply start Mail and it will ask for authentication details for your accounts.

Racistpartiets valgvideo:

Yes, it does. If you do a search for ‘lyrics’ you only get a few thousand sites shoved in your face. We need one more. Lyrics Muse.

There are two twists to Lyrics Muse which makes it stand out. It’s community based so anyone who registers can edit and improve the lyrics. The most cool differentiating factor however is that if you’re a user of last.fm you will get your own personal interface to browse lyrics because Lyrics Muse tracks your listening.

In other words this makes it very easy to find the lyrics you need. It’s the primary goal of Lyrics Muse to make it as easy as possible to find lyrics. Oh, and not plaster the site with irrelevant ads and popup crap.

If you sign up please join the last.fm Lyrics Muse group here.

With the plethora of great games coming out soon it was about time to invest in a new gaming rig. My 2005 era junk can’t cut it no more.

There are at least three titles I’ll want to play. Call of Duty 4 which is Battlefield 2 infantry warfare sped up. Much fun. Unreal Tournament 3 which is mostly an update of the 2004 title. Amazing graphics and more balanced play. The multiplayer demo is lots of fun.

And then there’s Crysis.

The follow-up to Far Cry. A singleplayer demo is currently out and my god is it good. Every couple of years a new game comes along that sets new standards. Crysis is one of these games. The graphics is absolutely spectacular. It is jawdroppingly good even at small resolution with low detail. You have dense forests and bush, all dynamically rendered, even at distance. When you walk into a bush the branches move and makes sound. There are so many details in this game it’s unbelievable.

Nice graphics without good gameplay obviously don’t make much of game but Crysis excels in gameplay as well. Let me put it this way. I’ve never played a singleplayer demo more than once. The Crysis nanosuit enables you to increase your speed, strength and armor or cloak yourself for a short period of time. Cloak makes it possible to sneak in on the North Korean soldiers and put a bullet in their neck. It’s fucking priceless.

So anyway to play this beast of a game I needed new hardware and went with the following:

• Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0 Ghz CPU
• Noctua NH-U12F CPU cooler
• 2 GB Crucial DDR2 BallistiX PC8500 RAM
• Inno3D 8800 GT 512 MB graphics card

In 1680×1050 with all settings on high and 2xAA I get around 20 FPS which is actually quite playable. At 1360×768 with no AA the FPS increases to around 30.

For more than two years now I’ve had a dedicated server at EasySpeedy. They were my first encounter with the dedicated server business as a customer.

The only other company I’ve ever been in more direct phone contact with is TDC Kabel TV (now YouSee).

But they were cheap.

That’s why I chose EasySpeedy. They also had lots of bling on their homepage. 7253 operating systems were available to be installed on my shiny new server but I would only ever need one – Debian. Sure it’s a nice feature but it’s not that fucking important.

Uptime and stability is fucking important though. On the front page of EasySpeedy.com you can read:

“99.98% Proven Uptime.”

Lies! Lies! Lies!

During my first two months in 2005 with them they had already gone below 99.98%. Excuses were plentiful. Sometimes it seemed as if I had to make them aware of network problems with their carriers. Absurd. And before you think it was my line that had problems I’ve always tested on 2-3 lines on different ISPs.

Adding to downtime there were for months problems with extremely slow connectivity making it near impossible to work in a shell.

The last half year or so has improved though but both September and October saw issues that affected uptime.

So I’ve migrated to a new Hetzner server. I now have two servers there and manage four. The only issues I’ve had has been a few problems during the initial setup. Price obviously matters. Their DS5000 server is a much better offer than any of EasySpeedy’s.

Only time prevented me from moving away from EasySpeedy sooner.

I’ve been having all sorts of hardware troubles for the past many weeks. They always seem to come in batches. First a bad RAM stick caused massive corruption of my files as I installed two new SATA disks in my fileserver. Problem surfaced when I suddenly noticed audio glitches in my MP3 files which weren’t there before.

Thought the problem was fixed when I identified the RAM as the culprit and it largely was. Yesterday, however, I decided to test moving a bunch of files from one of the new SATA disks to the other to see if the problem was gone. If there are issues with the RAM the files would likely have corruption after the copy.

And they were corrupted. I wtf’d as I had tested this RAM thoroughly when I removed the bad stick. Retesting showed no errors and replacing it with a pair of extremely high quality RAM modules also produced no errors in memtest86.

Then I suspected the disks to be faulty but there were no errors being thrown around in the logs. By further testing I narrowed the problem down. There would only be corruption when copying between the SATA disks. Not if first copying to an IDE disk and then from that to the SATA disk. I.e.:

 SATA disk (1|2) <-> SATA disk (1|2)  - corruption
 SATA disk (1|2) <-> IDE disk <-> SATA disk (1|2)  - all good

The system this was happening on was Debian Etch. Kernel 2.6.18 and I tried the latest stable 2.6.22 as well. No difference.

I think I’ve finally found the solution after hours of searching and planning massive hardware upgrade (new board, CPU, etc.). Setting EXT-P2P’s Discard Time to 1 ms instead of 30 us have so far made the problem go away. God knows what that setting does.

The board in question is an Abit AN7 with an onboard SiI 3112 chip.