^{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.

Less than a week 'till school starts; you'd be surprised how enthused I am. Tomorrow I get to pick out my locker, fun. So excited. Bouncing off the walls, excited. That's right.

Anyway, I finally received two more servers. One, I just turned into a SmoothWall firewall, which is working excellent I must say. Worked out of the box, cool web interface as well.

The other, I'm not too sure what to do with yet. Turns out, this is faster than my newest web server. I think I'll take the disk out of the newest one, pop it into my NFS server, add another disk from somewhere and put it in a RAID 5 array. Which would be quite intriguing, since I've never worked with RAID before.

I've recently taken up the hobby of lockpicking. I've ordered a set yesterday, so they should arrive in the next couple weeks. I'm sure these will be much easier than a paperclip and a screwdriver. Here's a mini guide who those curious one.

Anyway, I found that either two paperclips or a paperclip + flathead screwdriver work as a makeshift lockpick set. Bend the paper clip straight out, but leaving one end bend to have some kind of leverage. Bend the tip of the paperclip to a 20-35 degree angle. That's the pick.

I've also made a rake, by bending a paperclip in a mountain-valley formation.

As for a tension wrench, a flathead screw driver or another paperclip works. Simply bend the paperclip at a 90 degree angle so you have an L shape. It also depends on the size of the key hole and how much room you have to work with. There are numerous ways to bend a paperclip to work as a tool (in this fashion), so use what works for you.

Now, to pick it.

[pin tumbler lock]

^{via wikipedia.org}
(I'm not that experienced, so any expert locksmith opinions would be great). Insert the tension (or torsion) wrench into the lock, to the right. If the door's hinge is on the right, pull clockwise; and vice versa. Insert your pick into the lock, apply little tension and begin to push the pins up but still keeping tension on the wrench (not too much). Depending on the lock, it might have 6 or 4 seperate pins.You want to get all the pins to the shear line.

From what I understand, by applying tension on the wrench, you want the pins to bind on the shelf between the layers. Then you can go ahead and move the other pins up.

[wafer lock]

^{via ebbo.org}

Also, from what I understand, a wafer lock is just like a pin tumbler lock (most common) but has wafers instead of pins and is one piece.

Yes, it is that easy. I'd suggest buying a seperate lock to play around with though.

Check out Lock Picking 101 for more info on lockpicking, they have a lot of content.

Any comments or suggestions are greatly appreciated ;)

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.

Since my boredom has been growing substantially over the last couple days, I thought of building a SAN. Yes, a SAN, not a NAS. Get another web server running and put it in a round robin type config. Set up a SAN for centeralized storage (among other things), then yay!

Really, it's just an excuse to build more servers and use ports on my 24 port switch....

WorkSimple 1.2.3 was released the other day, improved on some things, 'optimized' some code.

Sysode has been going pretty well, though I'm concerned if I have the need to scale up/out. The underlying code is quite messy, I'm not a fan of neat looking code nor whitespace. I should improve on the looks of my code, it may actually be maintainable...

I 'got' some new music,  an album by Suspekt (Danish hip-hop group) and Flyh (Swedish progressive psytrance group). I wasn't really sure what progressive psy[trance] was, as I usually listen to dark and melodic psy. It turns out, its quite different (but still in the same realm) than other subgenres. It focuses more on the 'background' than the 'foreground', to say. Equally intensive.

On another note, I'm akin to non-English rap (and other genre's too ). Edo Maajka, Asa, NTM, Tungtvann and now Suspekt make up the majority of my non-English rap/hiphop listening experience.

English lyrics is soo overated.....

Having to switch between computer to computer [locally] is tiresome. Yes that's right, rotating your head 75 degrees hurts after a while, nevermind the shift in your body. 

I have a tri-monitor setup, plus two laptops. Moving my hands each time to keyboard sucks. This is where Synergy comes in. In short, it's software KVM, so to speak. That means no special hardware. Share one keyboard/mouse between multiple clients. Interesting, eh?

Here's a quick tutorial on getting it set up.

First thing's first, download the binaries here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergy2/files/
For those Debian users:

apt-get install synergy

You'll need to run the server on your computer which you'd like to share your mouse/keyboard. Since my server is Windows XP and the clients are Linux, combinations vary. In any case, you'll need to set up screens and links. Click on "Share this computer's keyboard and mouse (server)" in the main Synergy window, add a screen by clicking on the + and proceed to add your servers name (thecreator in my case) and your clients (unicorn and centaur for example).

Screenshot in the case you're lost:

As you can see, the screen section has both the servers and clients host name. Next is to set up links. Physically, thecreator is in the middle (tri-monitor) with unicorn on the left and centaur on the right. Fill out the following information under the links section. Select the position of the link, the hostname and then finally the host's hostname.

Start the server on your uhh server, and connect via other clients. In Linux, connect to the server by:

synergyc 192.168.x.x

Where x.x corresponds to your IP address. And that should be it. You'll be able to share the same keyboard/mouse (and clipboard) with other computers.

I'm no amazing blogger so any comments are appreciated ;)