I've a general interest in steam engines, and today I received a lovely little toy "steam boat". This is the first time I've bothered to look for or purchase something water-related. I figure there are ponds and lakes nearby, but if I got a steam-boat it would most likely stop running in the middle of a lake far from me!

Sure I can swim, but I think paddling to recover a dead engine - hoping that it doesn't boil dry and explode as I get close to it is just asking for trouble!

Anyway this new boat came all the way from India, via E-bay. It isn't strictly speaking a steam engine at all, just a "put put boat". I've never seen nor heard of these until recently but from what I could read I thought they looked like fun, and at only £10 it was impossible for me to resist!

I've updated my mini steam page with a picture & tiny youtube video.

If anything this has whetted my appetite for a real steam-powered boat..

I've made a few tweaks to the javascript used upon this site:

jQuery

The jQuery javascript library is behind all the functionality of the site.

(By which I mean that all of my custom code has been removed or replaced.)

Tag Completion

Each of the "add tag" sections should now offer tag completion, which is pretty neat.

Comment Entry

The comment, and weblog, entry textareas should now resize automatically as more text is inserted.

Any feedback is most welcome.

I don't love javascript to the extent I'll add it arbitrarily over the site, but there will be a few more enhancements added to the site in the near future - I see no harm in improving the site for those that have javascript enabled.

This site has been hosted for the past couple of years on a machine donated by Bytemark, and it has been suffering under load.

I've been given replacement hardware which should solve these stability problems, so another big thank-you to Bytemark!

The IP address of the site will have changed too - so here are the details:

Old Site: 89.16.176.176

New Site: 89.16.161.98

I've installed rinetd to forward connections from the old host to the new, and I'll leave that in place until DNS updates.

I've been quiet here for a while, for a couple of different reasons.

But there have been some changes recently to the code behind the site, nothing major just incremental updates to things like the weblog feeds.

The site itself has had some stability problems, which I mostly suspect are due to a combination of bad coding, and dodgy memory - will find out shortly if the latter is the case.

Thankfully Bytemark who supply me with the host running this site, (and a job!), have agreed to give me a replacement host and that will be coming online shortly. Hopefully that will mean an end to any stability issues.

For the curious the code is currently running on a machine with:

steve@debian-administration:~$ head -n 5 /proc/cpuinfo 
processor	: 0
vendor_id	: AuthenticAMD
cpu family	: 15
model		: 44
model name	: AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 2600+

In terms of memory there is:

steve@debian-administration:~$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           940        479        461          0         54        245
-/+ buffers/cache:        179        761
Swap:         1023          0       1023

(Memory usage climbs over time, the machine had a reboot yesterday and will slowly rise until swap begins ..)

The new machine will have a better processor and 4Gb of memory.

Migration will be nice and easy since it mostly involves checking the code out of the mercurial repository and then moving the database contents over.

Finally several people have noticed the stability issues and have offered to run mirrors - I'm enormously greatful for the offers. But currently I have no plans to take anybody up on them.

Why? Because adding a mirror is hard. We'd have to need to begin looking at MySQL replication, and similar issues. If it were possible, easily, to have a static site then I might go for that.

Static Site?

I think I'd be willing to make "static.d-a.org" which just hosted the articles, and comments, on a separate machine. Would that be useful to people?.

I could easily export articles 1-N with all comments in a simple manner and setup an hourly rsync, or similar to make sure it worked in an efficient manner. There would be no polls, no weblogs, no ability to comment, and no RSS feeds, but it would make the site "available" in the case of extended downtime.

Then again maybe people just do what I do and look in the google cache in the event of issues?

Comments welcome.

So recently I've been playing with some new toys - steam engines!!!

They rock!

It is very refreshing to debug physical problems, rather than computer-related ones. But at the same time I've been doing a fair bit of debugging too.

Recently I've fixed bugs in GNU Screen, GNU Make, GNU Less, and I've also introduced a bit of new Javascript to the Debian Planet.

(Actually I think the Planet Debian changes should probably be applied to our planet. I'll think about that later.)

The other thing occupying my time is spam. Fighting spam for other people is both rewarding and frustrating! Good because I'm making a difference, bad because they only see the mistakes.

I'm still trying to attract new customers for my managed smtp-scanning service, so if you're interested please do let me know.

Although I'm posting less often I'm still very much alive and well. I just noticed that I'd not posted a weblog entry over here since December and figured I should!

When I write things publicly I usually do so over here:

• http://blog.steve.org.uk/

That's the feed which is syndicated to Planet Debian so you might or might not have seen it already.

These days I'm learning far too much about fighting spam in a large way. I'm processing in the order of 100,000 messages a day. That takes me up a level from that which I'm familiar with.

Personally I receive around 10,000-15,000 mails a day, but thankfully the filtering scales nicely. Mostly.

Don't forget if you have a good idea for an article please submit it. We're very short recently and I've been a little too occupied to write myself..

I'm still in Devon, but I've fixed the planet Debian administration website - which hadn't been updated since November 24th.

Oops!

I'm going to catch a plain to Devon tomorrow. Back in two weeks.

PS. We passed the three-year anniversary of this site recently. Doesn't time fly?

The SSL certificate for this site had expired, so I've generated a new one which should be valid for the next 365 days.

If you wish to validate the new certificate please follow the SSL certification validation instructions.

Anybody who wishes to donate a real SSL certificate is welcome to offer ;)

The only other thing I've done today is write a small tool to allow people to run SQL queries against Apache logfiles.

If that sounds useful take a look at the asql page.

I'm hungry now, but all is well I've got some bacon ... Mmmm bacon.

My migration over to mercurial (away from CVS) is going well.

So far I've moved the code which generates our planet - the next job is to move the code behind the main site.

I'm getting the hang of the migrations now, having moved several projects.

All being well my CVS server will be empty within the week.