All posts in Technology

Yesterday, I worked on getting the live searching setup. Ultimately, I decided to just do an ajax search rather than a live search, as the live search puts a lot of demand on the mysql server. So, basically, instead of returning hits as you type, you just have to hit search. It works for me.

The next step I guess is to implement the comments deal. Either that or try to do a header again. The more I work on a header, the more I think I just should not have one at all.

And, there is always the blasted IE debugging. Fun.

For whatever reason, my file server decided to take its own life. It seems as though the processor fan went, and the crappy AMD processor decided to burn itself out. It actually melted parts of the motherboard. The toxic fumes were something to. My brother thinks that my server keeps dying because it has abandonment issues. I suppose that could be true. Maybe I should spend some more time with my trust server.

I obtained a new motherboard, and processor in addition to a case. The only reason I can think of that was casing it to fail is that the crappy case I had air flow problems, so everything was cooking in it. The new case has the largest fans you can get in it, and they blow hard enough I think you could dry your hair off next to it.

Unfortunately, I think that I might have busted off a transistor, or capacitor…or something when I installing everything. Of course this happened at the very end, so it would take me an hour to get the board back out if I wanted to return it. Luckily, everything seems to work ok, so I don’t think it was anything too important. However, it might be contributing to a problem I am having where it is trying to boot off the primary slave instead of the master drive. I have not figured out a way to override the problem yet. I think that I might just put grub on the second disk, and have it chain load windows.

I’m crossing my fingers that everything is going to work for a long time this time around. I cannot think of anything else to make it run better. I switch to an intel processor, better case, different kind of ram, I have a UPS for it, I don’t have any unnecessarily PCI cards, I added the optional fan to the system.

Normally, I refuse to corrupt my machines by installing games on them, but I made exception here. In order to load test the hardware on my machine, I installed Civilization 4 with all the settings cranked up. I figure if I can play a game of it on here without problems (average games takes around five hours) it should be fine. So far, it has been working alright. But, I still only keep it on while I’m at the machine.

Right now, I am trying to figure out what my safe operating temperatures are for the system. I can enable it to shutdown if the HDD, board, or processor all reach a certain temperature. However, at the moment I don’t know what those maximum safe temps are, so if someone knows a good resource for this kind of information let me know.

This is a good example of why Apple should release different updates for the PPC and Intel Mac.

Allow me to take a moment and reflect on the only benefit that I will be receiving from that update: the update of the daily saving time schedule since it was changed by our corrupt government.

Almost all the other changes are very esoteric, or apply only to the Intel Macs. Sweet.

Clip of the Week [H.264] – Mashed Taters

If figured that since I seem to be recording every episode now, I might as well provide a clip of the week. For promotional purpose only of course. Since this is the first week I’ll let you know that in order to play the clip you should click on “Clip of the Week” or on the screen capture below.

This week, we take a look at the famous Samwise Gamgee “from division” as he is utterly accosted by his sister’s associates. Clearly he played right into their hands with his mindless do-gooding. Also, I figure this might be a good time to give a “shoutout” to Gamgee Count, which shamelessly stole the design of Bauer Count, and did so again after it was redesigned over the weekend. Piracy at its best.

That reminds me, everyone that has not seen the new Bauer Count should go check it out. It has been slightly redesigned, so it is a little more streamlined, and a back end was installed (but that is of no concern to the average viewer).