The Hall Family

At HostingCon, Ivan was passing out the new “Freeside”:http://www.sisd.com/freeside T-shirts.

“!http://halls.lug-nut.com/gallery/jayce/Computers/.cache/320×240-Photo_071806_001.jpg!”:http://halls.lug-nut.com/gallery/jayce/Computers/Photo_071806_001.jpg

“!http://halls.lug-nut.com/gallery/jayce/Computers/.cache/320×240-Photo_071806_002.jpg!”:http://halls.lug-nut.com/gallery/jayce/Computers/Photo_071806_002.jpg

It’s fun to have a shirt to a GPL project that I’m actually a developer on, not just for a tool I use.

And if you are interested in learning about good, open source, enterprise quality billing infrastructures, drop me a line, or join us on IRC.

While I’m not much of a baseball fan (actually, I really dont’ care for the game), on Friday my family and I went to a “Orem Owlz”:http://www.oremowlz.com game. It was quite enjoyable to watch the game as a family. The stadium they have is pretty nice, and our seats were great. It’s small enough that really any seat would be good.

For the price, I’d recommend most anyone to take their families out to the local ball game sometime. It’s relatively cheap, it’s a nice place, and some great weather. This coming from a guy who really doesn’t like the game, and yet still had a fun time. I love the idea of supporting the small town, local teams. The players really seem to try harder (vs overpaid major league folks), and the game of course is right in front of you.

As you can see, the kids were ecstatic.

“!http://halls.lug-nut.com/gallery/Hall_Family/2006/July_Orem_Owlz_Game/.cache/240×320-IMG_1469.JPG!”:http://halls.lug-nut.com/gallery/Hall_Family/2006/July_Orem_Owlz_Game/IMG_1469.JPG
“!http://halls.lug-nut.com/gallery/Hall_Family/2006/July_Orem_Owlz_Game/.cache/320×240-IMG_1475.JPG!”:http://halls.lug-nut.com/gallery/Hall_Family/2006/July_Orem_Owlz_Game/IMG_1475.JPG

This week I noticed a rather interesting change in the stats on this site. Right towards the end of my vacation, where I had gone just over a week without any new posts, I began getting a large surge in traffic. A very *large* surge.

This traffic has a couple of interesting things to note about it. During the week preceding the upswing, I noted quite a few comment spam attempts mostly from Texas poker sites. Then this large swing in hits began, and most had referrer sites coming from a long list of texas poker sites

It was interesting to watch this heavy increase in traffic after almost exactly one week from my last post, all now including a referrer from sites that had been attempting comment spam. After I began posting again, the traffic quickly began to slow down to normal levels.

My biggest peeve, is I now have windows/IE as my top os/browser hitting my site what a lame stat.

My best guesses at what they are doing:

* They noticed that the comment spam wasn’t arriving, and changed what they sent thinking they could bypass security
* They thought the spam was in and were following up with hits causing google/alexa/etc to then reindex the page (especially on popularity as part of their SEO.

The interesting part I find is in their waiting for a week of inactivity to follow up with their very noticeable barrage. Is that the standard preying on abandoned blogs?

I saw some code for a “very clean tab library”:http://www.barelyfitz.com/projects/tabber/ that I thought I’d share out. Looks like a nice clean implementation, MIT license. Works great in safari

Hrm, since updating my site, I don’t seem to be picked up by the “planet”:http://www.openclue.org/ut . At first, I had a problem where my personal rss feed wasn’t displaying, and then it was in reverse order (whoops). I’m hoping with a new post, and everything squared away, it’ll redo the feed correctly.

Well, I’m finally running on a slightly newer version of “catalyst”:http://www.catalystframework.org today. After some recent refactoring of the Catalyst Framework, I needed to update this blog code a bit.

As of now, things are working again, but only about 90% of the way (encouraging aint it?). I hope to have the rest up soon, but this has definitely been changes for the better. Lots nicer code, stabilized api.

My biggest problem though, is that the makefile wasn’t getting rid of some old code, like it was supposed to. Things were breaking because I had a stray .pm sitting around that wasn’t working. Finally debugged that, and a lot of things are working again. I bet I have a few more breaking other little features. I’ll get those cleaned up soon.

Wednesday at 7:30 is the monthly “Plug”:http://www.plug.org meeting. As “Stuart”:http://blogs.gurulabs.com/stuart/ posted, he is presenting on “ConTeXt”:http://blogs.gurulabs.com/stuart/archives/2006/04/context_an_alte_1.html .

The big change for this month, that everybody needs to note, is our NEW LOCATION. My company has offered us usage of a nice, much larger, conference room. We’re location in “Canyon Park”:http://www.canyonparkutah.com/ “(*MAP*)”:http://www.canyonparkutah.com/location4.htm , Building Q.

The entrance will be the NE door of building Q, which is just off of 1200 N in Orem, I will have a sign on the door for information. We are on the second floor.

For those that don’t want to click for the map, just take 1200 N in orem East until 600 East, take a left, then your next left. Find a parking spot and head in the NE door (not the SE one!), and head up the stairs to your left, we’ll just to the left on the second floor.

After the upgrades today, I was quite disappointed with disk speed. It seemed no matter what I did, the generic-ide module was taking over my drives before the specific (piix) module could load them. While it did allow me to access my data, it was extremely slow, and I couldn’t turn on DMA, no matter what. After much headbanging, several reboots testing different options and attempting every known way to load the module, I finally went back to my last kernel which worked perfectly.

It appears the 2.6.15-1 and associated udev scripts have a problem where ide-generic is loading first, no matter what. I found some debian threads where they want to get this fixed (they are in the -5 range) by .16. Hope they do.

System is back up and running with a new drive. (Hey, did you know you can fit 5 3.5″ drives in a 3u that wasn’t designed for it?) Definately can’t handle any more in terms of power needs. Next time I need to grow, It’ll be time for a new case and everything.

Debian came back perfectly, only issues I had (besides *very* cramped spaces) was my idiocy of always forgetting which end is master and slave on an IDE cable (now that I have to put two disks on one ide channel).

I definitely remember why I didn’t want to be an ‘IT’ specialist

So, I’m about to have some planned downtime. Hopefully it will be kept to a minimum. If things work right, I’ll be wedging in another drive in this box and be up again in a few minutes.

Problem is, it’s a rack box, and pretty tight. There is a chance that I might have to take one of my old scsi drives out, breaking the raid it’s in Hopefully we can avoid that.

Worst case, things don’t come back up right… bleh..