Server Online

Whew! That was quite a thing there!

Oh, hello. I didn't see you there...

Once upon a time, my server took a crap a few weeks ago. All of a sudden, I was getting I/O errors on my main drive in my server. Bad stuff.

I immediately ordered 2 drives (refurbished, since hard drive prices are highway robbery high nowadays). I had a laptop hard drive handy, so I threw that in as a stop gap measure, except Linux would not install properly to it. Or any drive I tried. Hmm...

I put the original drive that the server was panicking about in an external dock, and successfully installed Linux to it via a laptop. I also did a memory test on the server, all clean. I took the dock to the server, and tried installing Linux via the server, and that went well.

So the diagnosis was not bad hard drives, but a bad disk controller on the motherboard. So I rebuilt my server, and got it more or less running about two weeks ago. I've only now got Glassfish back up and running (as you are reading this).

It also turns out that the little backup thing I built does not work properly, and vomits on the JPEGs. Praise the Lord for other backups. Oh goodie.

But this calls for MORE SKYRIM!

You can't complain about this anymore. It's perfect!

Since you've made it this far, you might be interested in reading:

Don't Preorder Games
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Toilet Blog Engine, Version 10
I've been improving this blog, despite not posting about it for 5 years. I've been quite active lately. My last post was about version 8, but now Toilet is on version 10. I'm not sure where to start with this, but let me describe some features that I've added. I've also dropped a few things, but that's for good reasons.
Toilet Blog Engine, Version 8
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Background Text and Fake jQuery
I love having a fast website. A lot of it comes down to not having a lot of frameworks and libraries running. On my page, I only have one stylesheet, and one script. That doesn't mean that I can't get creative. My favorite is the glowing links when you hover over them. The summaries that look like rockstar autographed posters on the homepage are pretty sweet. (Those posters might be my favorite, if it wasn't for the difficulty in getting it to work just right.)
Multithreaded Rockstar AMP
Despite the fact that this blog does what it's supposed to do (I hope), I can't help but keep messing with it. I guess with my day job being mostly backend work on internet shopping websites, this is my way of venting. Sometimes, it gives me an idea of what is going on behind the abstractions beneath what I work on, like search indexes. Other times, I want to toy around doing visual design.
Responsive Images & Remote Debugging
I got a new phone last month, because the screen on my old one broke. My new phone has a 5-ish inch 1080p screen. That's means it has an insane pixel density! On my podcast, I occasionally talk about some new program that increases efficiency, but doesn't change standards and fits within existing ecosystems. My favorite is MozJPEG. It's a program that encodes JPEG images much better than (almost) all others. Since I keep high resolution images of almost all the images on my blog (and share them), I experimented.