For my love of coffee, I tried cold brewing the other day. More convenient, in my opinion.

7 (or so) table spoons of your favourite coffee in a mason jar and fill it up near the top of water. Let it sit over night, or at least 12 hours. Strain that lovely juice into another jar. You now have cold-brewed coffee. Pour into a cup, add milk, sugar and enjoy :) 

For iced cappuccinos (blended ice coffee), freeze an ice cube tray of the coffee you just made (with out milk/etc). I stuck 6-7 ice cubes in a blender, with about two cups of milk (call it 450mL), some chocolate sauce and vanilla Coffee-mate (honey would do, too). What you end up with, is a delicious, higher in caffeine drink.

Back in school, so that's just great. Thought I'd write a post, since I haven't for a couple weeks now. Was planning on working on WorkSimple the other day, but didn't. Set up a CS:S server, running pretty good too @ 1.8ghz with 512MB (Debian with XFS of course). 

I found myself having a TI-83+, but no sync cable. So, I tried to use the same type of cable that was used for a PDA but no luck. There's some pretty cool stuff you can do with the TI's. Just and update, I'll write another post in the coming days with some stuff that I've been doing.

^{Photo by psilver}
I'll skip the whole 'I haven't posted for two weeks' intro. 

It's only October and it already snowed, a couple of inches and it's still here. Mornings are sure colder.

I finally put together my new fileserver, and up  from my one harddrive server before. I was going to do a RAID1 configuration, but instead went back to a normal partitioning setup (XFS on the secondary HDD for the files). Recieved another computer the other day, so I'm at a total of 7 servers.

I was planning on installing Darwin (hehe) on one of the faster ones, but I can't get this damn DVD is fried (for whatever reason). I'm hoping that it has CPU instructions for SSE2/3.

ICT (tech) class has been upped a bit for me, I ended up telling the teacher that I'm a Linux zealot. I guess he had never got "a peer to peer network" working (as in SMB shares), so he handed me an Ubuntu 7.10 CD.  Everything was working fine until something messed up with the first computer. It was complaining about libc6 (which was installed), and it couldn't install anything via dpkg or apt-get. I'll have to find my 9.04 compact diiiiiisc.

TCP is back up on the Torrentino tracker, since it was UDP only for a while. I checked about two weeks ago, and there was approximately 2000 concurrent connections, w00t! I ended up using opentracker, which is quite light on resources. The tracker runs at an amazing 450Mhz with 128MB's of RAM and runs incredibly well.

With the faster of the three servers used for other purposes, I'm stuck with two spare servers. What to do? If I recieved a lot of hits to Torrentino, I could set up a web server load-balancing scheme but it's not needed at the moment. The old fileserver is now a database server :)

Come to think of it, I have an old Pentium I that could be used as a syslog/notifications server. Management is key.

^{I have the urge to play Fallout 3.}

Comments are appreciated ;)

Being the geek I am, I usually stay up a minimum of 24 hours when I'm really interested or concentrated on a subject. Below, I'll point out what I do, for those that want to accomplish the feat.

• Sugar

 Increase your sugar intake, not by sugary drinks though. Small candies (gummy worms, etc. )worked the best for me. Last thing you want to do is crash.

• Sleep

Get a good nights sleep the night before.

• Caffeine

If you must have caffeine, go for '5/6 hour energy' shots, or '6 hour energy' pills (which happen to be cheaper than the shots). Try to avoid sugary energy drinks (Monster especially). My energy drink of choice is the almighty Citrus BooKoo.

• Keep hydrated

If you ran out of your favourite beverage, keep hydrating yourself with water. You can't fall asleep if you're about to piss yourself.

• Take a shower, if needed

Simple, just take a shower. Don't get too relaxed though. If you're not able to take a shower every X amount of hours, change your socks and/or clothes.

• Temperature

Try to keep the room temperature somewhere between semi-comfortable and a tad chilly.

• Be active

Be active daily, work out etc. the day before staying up for extended periods. If you're sitting at a computer (which you most likely are), stand up, walk around, sit on the couch (but don't get too comfortable).

• Music

Listen to something tolerable, but not soothing. I tend to listen to [dark] psytrance, and I'd suppose the drumming beats keep me alive. Go for something loud, but consistent.

Of course, staying up for extended periods of time, is not healthy whatsoever. Sleep is very important to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

And I guess that's it. For now, that is. If you have any comments or ideas, feel free to comment.

^{Photo by pswiik}

School's been pissing me off, most predominately ICT (IT) class. Guess what we did the other day? Used Norton Ghost and re-imaged a install of XP -again. Today, we learned about the BIOS (of which the instructor pronounced 'by-oss'). Ooh, how fun! One of the kids (who was supposed to be a 'smarter one') pronounced ethernet as 'ether-net', instead of the long 'e' sound. Frustration followed.

I got a hold of a screaming fast 486 the other day, running at 166MHz with a whopping 64MB's of RAM! W00t! It also had a tape drive, whive I've never seen. Anyway, I ended up putting DeLi (console version) on the POS and well, it runs smooth. The other distros I tried (Slackware and Debian) didn't detect the PCI and ISA NIC, but apparently DeLi did. I updated the repo's and the system using: pacman -Syu

Once that was finished, I installed lynx of course with: pacman -S lynx

I'm actually surprised that it's running as good as it is.

After reading an article about OpenSolaris vs Linux on /., ZFS really appealed to me as I'm building a RAID5 array. Then again, would I even need ZFS if I'm using RAID5?  I think I'm still confused about RAID [5] in that case, anyway.

So, for conversation's sake, say I have three 40GB hard drives that I'm making into a RAID 5 array. When I install the OS, where would those files go? Or would I have to set a seperate partition for the system stuff and let the rest for the RAID array? I'll have to do some serious Googling.

School's started, which is just great. I won't go into great detail, as it'll bore the shit out of my readers (that is, if I have any).

I'm in an 'IT' course, if you can call it that. So far, it's ridiculously easy.
"Ooh, get it to boot from CD/DVD, start up Norton Ghost, and install XP using the image provided".
Yes, and people needed help doing that. People who were already in the same class last year, needed help.

What made me LOL, is when the teacher asked how many computers [and what they run] everyone had. Course, he didn't get to me. Anyway, seems like everyone uses Vista (kewl dewd) or some 1337 h4xx0r use Windows 7!

I, myself, have 9 computers (two notebooks, one workstation (this one) and 5 other servers) all running Debian (Lunix????????). Just frustrates me :@

I haven't been blogging lately due to the stuff going on everywhere. Here's a cool story:

I run the Torrentino [BitTorrent] tracker (last time I checked (months ago), it had about 250 peers and which runs OpenTracker). Lately, my network has been slow as hell, my ping has been as high as 3000ms. That's right, 3000. So, what's going on?

The tracker uses UDP and TCP, you see. So, I disallowed TCP for the tracker through the firewall, and everything was fine. But, there wasn't even that much traffic. UDP still works, which is even better than TCP, especially for BitTorrent.

Odd indeed.

I've taken up the challenge of learning Russian with RosettaStone. Russian isn't one of those languages that you can learn in a month (IMO). RosettaStone is actually pretty cool software, though, what makes me mad is it doesn't give you the direct meaning. Sure, it'll show you a picture of a man and you match it up, but some of the pictures it's up to the users judgement.

I built my own CMS/wiki framework the other day, mostly built around a wiki. It even has modules, which are easy to build and combine in a site. Theme system is there, just by changing a CSS file. Once I found how to use zlib and PHP, I incorporated it into the script. So, once you save the page, it encodes it and writes it to the file. Then, for reading or editing, it decodes it for human-readable text. Here's an example:

<?php

$content = gzcompress($content, 9);

?>

...which compresses the string.

<?php
echo gzuncompress(file_get_contents($page));
?>
...which prints the contents of the uncompressed page.

I found that it compressed it to about 50%. So a 1.5KB page would be 700~ bytes.  I'll release the script if I get around to.

Speaking about doing some crappy coding, WorkSimple's code really needs some cleaning up. It's terrible terrible code. If I get finally work on it a little bit more, I'll release it as 1.3.0, even though there's already a 1.3.0 beta.

_{Photo by Sam Takes Photos'}

It's official, I'm selling Torrentino. I've had no time to maintain it at all, it's a great site though. Hand coded from scratch, which I'm quite proud of. Anyway, selling it for $30, but I'll take anything else (use the Contact page if you have an offer).

Scary that I post less and less these days. I have been doing nothing the last couple weeks. I 'have' seasons one through 6 of The Sopranos which I've been watching non-stop. Bruno (movie) was quite disapointing, not as funny as I thought.

I've started a new PHP blogging script (ughh). Although it's supposed to be a fork of WorkSimple, it's quite the opposite. Every post is a complete new HTML page, so no PHP in the page at all making it lightweight. Other than that, I created a mock Twitter script, but instead of short messages, it's pictures.

Actually, one of my nicer looking projects is Sysode. I thought of it initially as some Dropbox like site, but it didn't turn out that way. It's more of a  project management/file archival site for uhh stuff.

As mentioned in my previous post, I made a album notification script inspired by Last.fm somehow named doobleg. Click here for an example.

So you wanna get rock hard abs eh? Follow these 5 steps, and you'll get those washboard abs in a week!

Don't you follow my blog? Since when the hell did working out come into my blog. 

Here's how it worked out in my head:

"hey lets do something funny"

"like what?"

"like snatch all the users that follow me on Twitter and Identi.ca to read this blog post"

"but how?"

"must be something completely unrelated yet related at the same time"

"abs!"

I crafted the headline. People will be like, "ohai kewl i want abz". Then when they get here "oh wtf i c wat u did thar". 

This is turning into a rant.

I think this may be my most creative blog post.

As compared to my usual computer/networking/hey-lets-build-a-nas/hey-lets-build-a-server/coding/programming type of posts.

I hope this made you laugh. 

Actually, I don't. I just said that to make it sound cutsey.

 I'm starting to freelance now, so I'm up for any work and make an attempt to build my portfolio. I'm available to do any work, small to medium sized projects. Stuff I can do:

• Code PHP
• Remote adminstration of Linux boxen
• Some MySQL stuff (though I hate it)
• Installl scripts (Wordpress, Drupal, WHMCS, etc..)
• Help with hosters (I know my way around WHM, cPanel, WHM and so forth)
• And probably a lot more useless stuff.

Portfolio here. My prices are cheap (say, min $3 CAD) so I'm available to hire. If you have any offers, deals etc, post a comment or use the contact page.