alan.lamielle.net » Admin Updates

Oh hai! I upgraded your ramz!

Alan LaMielle — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 03:02:50 +0000

Memory upgrade courtsey of Daphne

You probably didn’t notice, but I just threw four times more memory into the server (the one pictured next to Daphne above). While adding a few sets of images to the image gallery a few days ago, I noticed that the machine was swapping (using some disk space as memory) which is considerably slower than actual memory usage. As this machine was originally my high school graduation gift (and therefore six years old this August) I figured a bit of an upgrade was in order. I put in an order at NewEgg for 2x1GB = 2GB of Corsair XMS series, low latency, tested pair, screaming fast, super sweet memory. This is exactly the same as the old memory, only four times as large (from 2x256MB to 2x1GB). 2GB is the limit of this machine, so I’m maxed out there. I could find an old Socket A AMD 3200+ processor, but I don’t know how much of a difference that will make.

Enjoy the ramz! Thank you Daphne!

Image Gallery Finally Up

Alan LaMielle — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:16:16 +0000

I’ve pointed a few people at it already, but it hasn’t been ‘official’ until now. My image gallery is finally up (click that link or the link on the right side of the page). For those of you interested, it uses the Gallery 2 PHP image gallery application. I currently have some more of my recent sets of pictures from hikes and during my SIParCS internship at NCAR in Boulder. I have a decent backlog of other older pictures I’ll be adding to the gallery soon as well as new pictures I take from the vacations I have planned in the near future.

Pictures, Amazon S3, and DNS

Alan LaMielle — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:30:28 +0000

The pictures on the site have unavailable for a while now. I use Amazon S3 for image hosting as my server’s connection is far from sufficient. I’ve setup a CNAME DNS record for files.lamielle.net to point to the proper Amazon domain. However, I’m having problems with this since I’m using 3 dynamic DNS services for redundancy. The two redundant services are just ‘secondary nameservers’ of the primary, this uses AXFR DNS record transfers. For some reason the transfers aren’t working as they should and DNS queries to files.lamielle.net are resoving to lamielle.net, not the proper Amazon domain.

Anyway, I’m working on it. As soon as I get things figured out I’ll have a few nice posts to throw up (one is almost ready as it is): bouldering, 4th of july, hiking, etc. Stay tuned!

Migration to WordPress

Alan LaMielle — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:37:24 +0000

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve now migrated my site to WordPress 2.8 from Drupal 6. I’m almost completely done, and I started last night around 6pm. All I have left to migrate are a few static pages about my research and projects and my recipes.

I was mucking with my Drupal site for most of the day in my free time while I was either building Fortran code or waiting on a run on Bluefire (more details on this in a future post). I’ve been bad at posting regularly over the past two weeks partly due to being quite busy and partly because of Drupal deficencies. My main complaint is with the content editor in Drupal. To me, the biggest part of my site is the editor, where I will spend most of my time. In Drupal, it was a pain to use for many reasons including having to set up my own WYSIWYG editor and configure the image upload/selection tool. It was really the images that pushed me over the edge at the end of the day yesterday. The time I spent on the site was essentially all devoted to getting a satisfactory way to upload and insert images into my posts. The end result: I couldn’t find one.

I originally chose Drupal for its power, but in the end it was it’s power and flexibility that drove me away. With WordPress, the things I want to ‘just work’ do, and I can now spend my time working on sections like my recipe and mileage databases rather than core functionality. I suspect this will be a better use of my time.