Server downtime

Wednesday, May 11. 2005
Last thursday, the harddisc of my root-server, which I rent at a housing company, broke down - I only wanted to reboot the server after a software upgrade, but it did not come back. First I suspected that I trashed the Linux installation, but it turned out that the harddisc broke down. Thus the ugly downtime of my blog, my websites and even of some other people's websites hosted on this server. Even worse I was not able to receive a single mail for five days - all in all a very unpleasing situation.

On the other hand, I decided to upgrade the server to a faster and bigger model with twice as much RAM (256MB instead of the lousy 128MB before). After I informed the housing company I got a new server monday, and the installation fun began. Fortunately I made an automatic backup every night to my local file server at home, so no data should be lost. But the configuration of the new system almost drove me mad. First I wanted to use VHCS as a server management system (I used Confixx before), but it turned out that this piece of software is only useable, if every user has only one domain - or else everything will get complicated. So I decided to use SysCP, another open-source server-management system. And it turned out to be a good decision.

Now my email works, most of the web-pages are back again, but I am still busy restoring all the mysql-databases of all users. I hope the new server won't break that fast again.

Kaya
Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt in General at 19:54 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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New ISP at home

Sunday, May 1. 2005
I have been a faithful customer of the biggest german telephone and internet provider (Telekom and T-Online) for years, but I have thought of switching to another provider more than once. The T-companies offer very good technology, but their prices aren't just fair any more. So finally I decided to switch my complete telephone and internet connector over to Arcor, one of the few german companies who really have their own backbone and telephone lines. Of course I was afraid that this switch will cause some trouble with the result of a dead telephone for some days - but everything worked surprisingly well, they switched over in a couple of minutes without any problems.

And the best is: Now my internet connection is two times faster (3MBit down / 512KBit up) and I pay significantly less than before! I can only recommend to all T-Online customers to think about switching to another ISP (maybe except for AOL). You can save some money and get a faster connection at the same time.
Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt in General at 20:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Serendipity Upgrade

Friday, March 18. 2005
Just a short note: Today I upgraded the blog-Software to Serendipity 0.8, hoping that the new version will fix some bugs without introducing new ones. If the layout of the page seems to be incorrect, your browser may be caching an old CSS file, so simply force a fresh reload, and everything should be fine again.

Kaya
Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt in General at 16:01 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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Magical Macintosh Key Sequences

Thursday, March 3. 2005
The problem arose when I wanted to make a screenshot within Mac OS X. There has to be a key combination to do that, but which? Or do I have to use a third-party tool for such a simple and common task?

Well, after googleing around, I found a very informative and useful page describing all kinds of key sequences on the Mac. There is even available a pdf version for download on that page. If you have a Mac, you should grab a copy!
Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt in General at 12:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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It's Winter again...

Saturday, February 19. 2005
It is Winter again in Frankfurt! During the last 5 years that I have been living in Frankfurt, I never experienced that much snow in the city as today. Although people from other regions might say that 4cm are ridiculous, but for Frankfurt, that is a lot. SO I guess I will go for some bicycling later, together with my camera and take some shots of the forest in white.

This week, there haven't been many updates in this blog, my apologies. I have been thinking about some WLAN problems, I have been working on frustum culling (which is almost working perfectly, I only have to refine the frustum-box-intersection test) and I have encountered some difficulties, which seem to be related to my last Nvidia driver update on my notebook.

This last topic is really strange: Suddenly one of my test programs stopped to work on my notebook with Nvidia graphics, although it is still working fine on my PC with ATI graphics. I tried to debug the application, and I found something really wired: The program allocates a bunch of index buffers, each getting an even id on the Nvidia graphics card. Then the optimiser tries to merge all index buffers by allocating a new one - which for some odd reason gets an odd id from the driver. After releaseing the first bunch of index buffers (which aren't needed any more, as their content has been copied into the last one with the odd id), the big optimised index buffer seems to be deallocated, too by the driver.

On the one hand this seems to be a driver bug, but on the other hand I cannot believe that such a simple OpenGL command sequence will evocate such problems. Maybe I try to tackle it down, by writing a much simpler application that tries to reproduce the odd behaviour of the driver. Or I simply reinstall an older driver and see if the problem persists.

Kaya
Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt in General at 09:25 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Busily Working...

Tuesday, February 15. 2005
So there have been a couple of days without an entry in my blog. I really wanted to update it on a frequent basis, so here a little status update, what is happening "behind the scenes".

1. My new notebook was WLAN support, so I was thinking that it would be nice to have a WLAN access point. First I was considering to build one myself based on a little ITX form factor PC running Linux that has a MiniPCI slot. So I bought a MiniPCI Atheros based WLAN card, but it does not seem to work correctly, maybe simply because I still don't have an antenna (it is not so easy to get one that has the right connectors and isn't too expensive).

Currently I am considering to buy a Zyxel ZyAir WLAN Access Point. These are a bit more expensive than the ones produced by Netgear, D-Link etc, but Zyxel products offer very nice professional features not found at the other products, unless you spend a lot of money for 3Com, Cisco etc.

I already have a Zyxel Prestige 310 Router for my DSL access, and although it is already getting old, it still rocks. It has such nice features like a serial console, a telnet interface which is far more powerful than the web interface, multiple IP adresses (which enables different subnets), etc.



2. I am still working on two subprojects: One is to get culling done (I made some huge progress concerning view frustum culling) and the other is to get some more interesting effects out of the spring systems.



Kaya
Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt in General at 09:38 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Blog Search Engines

Monday, February 7. 2005
For a while I was thinking "Hell, I already wrote about 50 entries for this blog, but there aren't that many people reading". Now I was sure there must be some sort of yellow pages for blogs in the internet, where I can advertise mine. After googling aroung for one or two minutes I found an entry in another blog that gives an extensive list of blog and rss search engines.

If you want to submit your blog to such engines, simply go to Ar Paparo's Big List of Blog Search Engines.

Kaya
Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt in General at 15:16 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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2001: A Space Odyssey

Monday, January 10. 2005
While browsing through the endless space of the internet, I found a page containing some nice models inspiried by Stanely Kubrics great film 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can download the models at http://www.strafe.com/2001/and play with them - expect the next demo to be using some of these models.

I have to admit that I never saw this film completely, the plot was always a bit too slow for me, but I am still planning to take some time to enjoy the whole movie some time...

Kaya
Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt in General at 22:44 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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