So, for the 1^st time since 2001, with the exception of when I moved, I'm allowing my Cube to go to sleep and sleep hard drives when idle. Yes, my trusty 500MHz G4 Cube, perhaps the single most reliable computer I've ever bought, serving up pages 24/7 for the last 8 years without a sound or a complaint (bought a few months before it was discontinued), is no longer my web and database server. It is now free to live a life of leisure and spiritual fulfillment.

The Cube was never the limiting factor on my web serving. The limiting factor was the DSL line that I was using from home. But I got fed up with the maximum speed that AT&T has forever cursed DSL customers who live near me and the high price being paid for it. So I switched to Cable for my home service, and am now sharing an dual-G5 Xserve, colocated at a place with a fat pipe to the net. The speed gains are probably obvious to anyone stopping by before and after. And all this is costing me less than before. A happy change. [Read more…]

Everything in my web domains has been frozen for the last 3 weeks as I've been slowly moving everything to a friend's dual-G5 Xserve colocated in the area. Better bandwidth and higher speeds means that I'll also be able to try some web experiments that I've so far been unable to try out. The DNS is ready to start pointing people over there as soon as I get a few kinks worked out. Right now the hold-up seems to be getting some ObjC code to talk to the MySQL processes, which I'm hoping to get done today. [Read more…]

I moved my E&M History page from a very old single-table html page to a nice database-driven, PHP/HTML/CSS combo that uses this site's template engine. Originally I just sat down to see if I could quickly fold in the images into the table to make the text flow elegantly around them. Then I thought I should just move off tables. Then get the info in a database. And so on it went. [Read more…]

What I want is to have my own current-generation Xserve running Leopard Server co-located someplace and attached to a fat pipeline. That what I want. This is much more than I need, but this is my id talking today. What stops me always is the price. I haven't looked in a while. Time to take a look… [Read more…]