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That's All, Folks!
FIN.
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Posted 28th April 2008
Hi folks,
I'm still alive, believe it or not.
The plan was to get the new website up several months ago and shift the blog there, but that ain't happening any time soon.
Update: Expect the new website in September. (Famous last words!)
Cheers,
Ben
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Ripping Sprites with GIMP [+Video]
Joe Blade gets ripped.
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Posted 10th January 2008
Happy New Year, folks!
I promised Hotshot I'd make him a video tutorial showing how to do it.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
For reference, I used recordmydesktop and gtk-recordmydesktop to take the recoding, and the following horrible command-line mumbo-jumbo to convert my ogg into a lovely flash video (all one-line):
mencoder out.ogg -o out.flv -of lavf -ovc lavc -oac lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=250:autoaspect:mbd=2:mv0:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3:predia=2:dia=2:precmp=2:cmp=2:subcmp=2:preme=2:turbo:acodec=mp3:abitrate=56 -vf scale=608:480 -srate 22050 -af lavcresample=22050
Cheers,
Ben
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The Realistic Home Server
I'd like to see a Microsoft Server run in 20MB of RAM!
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Posted 23rd December 2007
The Christmas holiday means two things to me: lots of alcohol, and lots of programming. Sometimes both at the same time (thanks, xkcd)!
As well as Omnircron, I've got an idea for turning what is currently my home network Apache server into a neat web server - without totally swamping my Internet connection.
See, I set up a box with Damn Small Linux that ran amazingly with just 64MB of RAM and a processor that runs somewhere below 500Mhz. I was so impressed that I found another 64MB of RAM and chucked that in. It was sweet; 128MB really is enough to run everything in comfort. So I installed Apache 2 and PHP 4 on it. It runs in graphical mode using less than 20MB of RAM. It can seriously serve some dynamic ownage.php in console mode.
So that's my server. But my bandwidth is only 25 kb/sec upstream; it would take a whole second to upload a webpage, before it has even travelled across the Internet to anyone who wanted to download it. I can't just open this to the whole Internet - I'd never be able to upload anything faster than a byte per minute! I don't fancy my IP address floating around either.
So what I want to do is take my Servage hosted shared server and use that to "mirror" my local server. Every time a page is requested on the Servage website, I want to write a script to check if a copy of the file exists and is less than an hour old. If not, automatically connect to my home server and upload it to my Servage site. If the home server is off (another problem with making it a real web server - it'd be off frequently), then display an older copy.
I'd have to figure out what I'm going to do for parameters passed to scripts - I don't want to keep uploading the same error page for ?foo=i-steal-your-bandwidth ?foo=i-steal-it-again and ?foo=has-your-isp-banned-you-yet - instead I might keep a white list of accepted values on the home server and just reply 404 to my web server when it receives a bad parameter. Also static content like plain html and images I might want to just check once per day instead of uploading them hourly. I'm not crazy enough to serve zip/rar/tar archives this way though!
120GB of bandwidth per day
360GB of webspace
But why bother when I have a decent web server already? I think I have more room to experiment with my own one - I can compile any modules I want and write the most demanding scripts in the world without getting my account deleted. I know that my Servage website runs on blazing fast servers with 12GB of RAM, dual core processors, etc, but I'm still sharing that - my modest machine can perform just as well, without decreasing the performance for anyone sharing a hosting cluster with me.
See, I'm a nice neighbour to have on your shared hosting package!
But this also leaves me open to the possibility of experimenting writing my own server software ;-)
We'll see. The gcc (GNU C Compiler) is quite broken on the machine though, which is a shame.
I'll experiment ;-)
Happy holidays,
"Hobo" Ben!
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