I ordered a new server today to take over as a primary web hosting server so I can clean some things up on the other two boxes. Initially I was going to use Dell but I had some issues with a recent order with them however they resolved those (more on that later) and when I was specing out things today, they had a great coupon: Buy a $2800+ server and get $850 off. Cool! My budget was $3k for this thing, and this deal enabled me to get faster CPUs for significantly less money. So Dell it is. (I'm a fan of having 1 phone number to resolve warranty issues with for 3 years at a reputable company, which Dell gives me. One of my servers is from Monarch Computer which went out of business 9 months after purchasing and it's having a problem with it's RAM or the motherboard :/)

A Dual QUad Core Intel Xeon E5410 2x6MB Cache at 2.33GHz with a 1333Mhz FSB with 8GB of 667Mhz 2GB Dual Ranked DIMMs, a PERC 6i Serial-Attach SCSI PCIe RAID controller with 256MB Cache, 2 146GB 15K RPM Serial-Attach SCSI 3.5in drives, and mounting rails is on the way! (or will be soon atleast.)

When this shows up, all my websites will move onto it (~40 at last count), and the stuff I outlined in my last post can start to happen. Exciting!

ckdake.com has been upgraded to Drupal 6. However, a lot sadly remains broken. I'll get to fixing things over the next week but heres the list of what won't work:

• Random quotes in the top right. (Quotes module doesn't work with 6.0 yet
• Recently listened/shared/bookmarked on the left. (Aggregator module doesn't work with 6.0 yet
• OpenID logging in. (The module won't install the table it needs, and it should because it's a highly publicized feature of Drupal 6)
• Gallery blocks. (The settings page just ends up being a blank page, and the blocks won't work. However, navigating to personal -> pictures will still work and all the URLs to images should still work.)

It's a little frustrating how much trouble this is, but that's what I get for wanting to upgrade to a .0 release and before checking the details of which modules are supported!

If you notice anything broken around here that isn't on that list, leave a comment here and I'll hopefully get to it quickly!

No, not American Power Conversion, but the Alternative PHP Cache. It's not real obvious as to what it does from the website, but if you're doing any serious PHP application stuff, you should take a look at them (and Zend and eAccelerator). I was helping benchmark some things for work and it's amazing the difference in performance that these make compared to a standard PHP installation.

Each of them is or has a PHP OpCode cache. This means that instead of compiling the PHP from the source code on every page request, things get cached and the web server doesn't need to talk to disk as much. Just installing APC on my two larger web servers has made an amazing difference. CPU utilization is down, memory usage is down, and average response times are up. On Pudge which hosts a lot of sites running a lot of applications (including this site), there is over 150Mb of things in the cache. Aurora just hosts Faster Mustache which is only running Gallery and Drupal, and it's cache is around 45Mb.

Supposedly Gallery doesn't work quite right with APC, but I haven't had any problems with it, and the web server process on Aurora crashed once over the last few weeks after APC was installed, but I don't know if APC was the culprit or not. I'm looking forward to setting up fastcgi with suexec and APC to see how well it does with lots of virtual hosts running, and hopefully there will be a new server in the mail in the next month or two for me to do that on..

Infion.com is now live! From the site:

INFION builds energy systems solutions to cost-effectively provide Power for the Life of your Product. Much smaller than micro-fuel cells, our power supplies are combined with storage, generation, and charge control devices to meet specific power requirements for wireless network, consumer, and life-safety products.

My Dad is the CEO, and my friend Kurt (then at Propane Design) and I put together a website for them. They make some really neat stuff!

So a few weeks ago I decided I'd sign up for this "Web 2.0" thing. I didn't really know what that would mean other than I knew people were using a lot of web services that I wasn't, so here's a list of what I've come up with.

• I was using Google Browser Sync to keep my bookmarks in all places, but I couldn't get at them from the web. Supposedly they are adding in the ability for that to synchronize with Google Bookmarks, but it's not ready yet. So I signed up for del.icio.us and imported my bookmarks. It's pretty neat, lets me easily add and tag bookmarks from any of my web browsers or any computer, and that let me add the "just bookmarked" block on the right of this website as well as a block on my Facebook profile. It also let me stick a tag cloud on my "about me"ish page on here.
• Speaking of blocks on this website, the "just shared" block is also new. It's my recently shared items from Google Reader (which also has a new block on my Facebook profile).
• In light of my note on OpenID, I went ahead and OpenID enabled this web site as well as Faster Mustache. It's neat. I also found a few other things to use my OpenID for..
• Plaxo is a web tool that synchronizes calendars and contact lists across platforms. I get in with my OpenID and it keeps Apple Mail and Address Book, Google Mail and Calendar, and a few other things all synchronized and lets me access my information online.
• Basecamp is a collaborative web based tool for getting projects done. I set up an account with it to play with and we're using it to manage the planning of FM.24.07.
• Today I decided to update my wantlist and ended up building a tool that uses Amazon Web Services to talk to my new Amazon.com wishlist and display those things here. So uh, buy me things!
• I've been working on a very neat race administration page for FM.24.07 that will be very interactive and have administrative tools for assigning riders to laps etc, as well as a live map tracking file that shows live updates in Google Earth or on Google Maps during the race. I'm learning my way around Yahoo's YUI to do the dynamic aspects of the page, and that is turning out to be very cool.
• Lastly, and not very web2.0 but close enough for me, I got an Apple Airport Express because the router here was pretty worthless. It's neat because I can actually use the Internet again, but the web2.0ish feature is that I can play music from my laptop to the TV or anything else with a line-in on it. The coolest part of it is iTunes supports multiple speaker targets, so if I had a network with 10 of those routers on it, I could play the same music out of all of them at the same time. It seems that there is a Airport Express player for Linux so I may have to tinker with that some when I get back to Atlanta to wire my desktop into the soundsystem downstairs.

But that's it for today! It's time to get back to adding things to my Amazon wish list.

Another day at Google, another very neat tech talk. Today I went to a talk by Simon Willison about OpenID. I had heard of OpenID before, and I knew that it was recently added into Drupal by James Walker who wrote the Drupal-Gallery2 module that this site (and many many others) are using. Cool!

However, I didn't really "get it" and never spent the time to read up on things. That all changed today, and I've been convinced that OpenID is the way to go for several reasons:

• One username and one password. No more remembering different things for different accounts, or using the same one everywhere and risking it getting compromised. You have one account with a trusted provider (hopefully eventually banks, etc, but for now everyone that has an AOL/AIM account has one, there are plenty of other OpenID servers out there, or you can run your own) and that's it.
• No more having to register on someone's blog just to post comments. Log in with OpenID (Or just stay logged in with your browser), approve the site accessing your ID, and you're done! Logged in whenever you visit from now on. (This could cut down on comment spam once OpenID becomes more prevalent because a content owner could just require people to be authenticated by some OpenID before commenting)
• No need to give MySpace/FaceBook/etc your GMail/Yahoo/Hotmail account information so that it can get your contacts. You can use OpenID to let one of them into the other instead
• Did I mention it's one password for everything? Alternatively, it could be a client SSL certificate, one time pad, out-of-band provided browser cookie, out-of-band code (via SMS/Jabber/etc), biometric, SmartCard, etc.

So I'm hooked, as much as I can be at least. I deleted my silly LiveJournal account that I only had so that I could read other peoples blogs that were friend only and replaced it with an OpenID one. My OpenID points to ckdake.com (surprise surprise) which points to AOL as my OpenID provider. This lets me use my AIM user/password to get into my LiveJournal account so it's one less account I have to remember. Christian's blog (one of the Gallery guys) will be the first one where I test out leaving a comment with it, once I have something useful to say at least. Sadly, other than those two things, nothing else that I regularly use supports OpenID. Once Drupal 6 is out, I'll upgrade this site and Faster Mustache to use them, (and corndogorama.com and a couple of other sites I manage,) and hopefully other sites will start to do the same. AOL, Microsoft, and Sun are already behind this, so hopefully the ranks of FaceBook, Yahoo, and Google will follow!

Apparently people are reading this because I got enough comments about me not having updated all week and me having "stopped blogging" that I'm here writing something about something.

So a while ago I wrote a little tool to parse my log files from Gaim and make a pretty graph: pretty talking graph. It shows how many lines I've talked to people on AIM in all of my log files, was a bit of a pain to write, and now that it's been around a few years, I look in the code and wonder what some parts are doing. Plus, I wanted newer, cooler, graphs and something that would play nicely with other programs (like Adium on the Mac), and I've been doing a lot of Python at work, so it was time for a rewrite.

So I wrote a Python tool that crawls all of my logs and puts them in a database, and a graphing tool that does things on the database and spits out html for all kinds of graphs. It runs automatically every night and makes a page with all the details: pretty talking graph page. Everything there is done with HTML/CSS (Thanks to the trends graphs on Google Reader for inspiration) and I think it's pretty cool. More graphs in the future (like rates of change, and predictions for when people will pass other people, etc)! I'd also like to figure out some way to graph some e-mail things... We'll see what I can come up with.

I was cleaning up old mailing list email archives on my computer and stumbled across a discussion thread where someone offered a somewhat large offer of money to purchase Gallery from the development team. We thought it was worth a lot more than their offer, and so did LeapFish - a domain name resource center. They pegged our domain, gallery.menalto.com as being worth over 20 million. That's a lot of cash, but this is just an estimation tool. I ran some sites through and here's some fun numbers:

• gallery.menalto.com - $23,024,196.00
• ckdake.com - $29,900.00
• fastermustache.org - $3,888.00
• ithought.org - $2,772.00

Not that I'm taking offers for any of these just yet (unless you have something serious for #1.. :) ).