There and Back Again

Just realized enscript isn’t installed on my server anymore so all my posts with highlighted code examples were broken. Sorry about that, fixed now.

There was an Webthumb outage yesterday, the main server Kernel Panic’d and didn’t reboot properly. DNS was switched to the backup server, and for most users there was no noticable change.

However there was a bit of database skew between the 2 servers so some accounts weren’t available on the backup.
Because of this all webthumb usage on the backup server won’t be charge to your accounts. It also won’t show up in your history so if you need a thumbnail after the cut back please open a ticket and I will grab the files for you.

(You can also grab them directly by replacing http://webthumb.bluga.net with http://api1.bluga.net).

The DNS switch back to the primary server is happening within the hour, let me know if you have any problems.

On an un-related note Bluga.net now has a helpdesk, feel free to use it too notify me of any problems your having.

I just completed my first real fantasy football draft of the season. I think i had a better mock earlier in the day, but I was in 8th position here (out of 12), and had problems executing my plan from that position.

Here are my picks for the Evil Pigeons, I think the worst aspect is the bye week overlaps on my rb1-2 and wr1-2

1. (8) Marion Barber
2. (17) Andre Johnson
3. (32) Chad Johnson
4. (41) Earnest Graham
5. (56) Ben Roethlisberger
6. (65) Laveranues Coles
7. (80) Julius Jones
8. (89) DeAngelo Williams
9. (104) Derrick Mason
10. (113) Anthony Gonzalez
11. (128) Matt Schaub
12. (137) Green Bay
13. (152) Owen Daniels
14. (161) Brandon Jackson
15. (176) David Patten
16. (185) Kris Brown

I just completed my first mock draft. I messed up a the running back picks Brian Westbrook and Michael Turner have the same bye week, i also waited too long to get running back 3/4 especially since I foolishly picked up 2 players with suspensions (Steve Smith, Brandon Marshall).

The only problem with this is I am playing in 2 different leagues with live drafts (Yahoo and ESPN) and neither really match this setup, in one I would need a WR3 and neither have TE in the flex just WR or R so I would be owned with this roster until week 3 when Steve Smith returns.

Here’s what i ended up with (I was pick #3):
R1 P3 RB Brian Westbrook, PHI (7)
R2 P8 QB Tony Romo, DAL (10)
R3 P3 WR Steve Smith, CAR (9)
R4 P8 RB Michael Turner, ATL (7)
R5 P3 WR Calvin Johnson, DET (4)
R6 P8 TE Tony Gonzalez, KC (6)
R7 P3 WR Brandon Marshall, DEN (8)
R8 P8 RB DeAngelo Williams, CAR (9)
R9 P3 RB Felix Jones, DAL (10)
R10 P8 WR Javon Walker, OAK (5)
R11 P3 TE Todd Heap, BAL (10)
R12 P8 QB Matt Schaub, HOU (8)
R13 P3 WR D.J. Hackett, CAR (9)
R14 P8 RB Maurice Morris, SEA (4)
R15 P3 DEF Pittsburgh Steelers, PIT (6)
R16 P8 K Matt Stover, BAL (10)

My week 1 starters would be:
QB: Romo
RB1: Westbrook
RB2: Turner
WR1: Johnson
WR2: Walker
RB/WR/TE: Heap
TE: Gonzalez
K: Stover
DEF: Steelers

I’m now keeping a permanent list of links, so I can easily update my Fantasy Football Links.

With fantasy football season around the bend I thought I’d post some of the sites I read. Mainly so I have a list of them somewhere

• FF toolbox – Rankings, News, Updated Weekly
• Rotoworld – News, Articles, some of the good stuff is premium
• Yahoo Sports – I play at yahoo, good articles, video, rankings from other players
• Fantasy Football Fools – Good in depth articles (just found it, but i like it so far)

I’ve read other stuff here and there but nothing that has become a staple, post a comment if you got any suggestions.

Oh if you have a league with some room let me know, i’m only in one at the moment and I could do up to 3.

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.5. I don’t think i like the new admin theme, too much change.

If you see something broken please let me know.

Having fun with my new camera

(Yes I used WebThumb to take the snapshot)

<webthumb>
	<apikey>keyhere</apikey>
	<request>
		<url>http://flickr.com/photos/joshuaeichorn/sets/72157604167994594</url>
		<outputtype>png</outputtype>
		<width>1024</width><!-- browser width -->
		<height>768</height><!-- browser height -->
		<excerpt>
			<x>420</x>
			<y>180</y>
			<height>80</height>
			<width>350</width>
		</excerpt>
	</request>
</webthumb>

With Jen moving in, I’ve been doing a lot of home improvement projects lately.

A couple weekends ago it was building a Dog Garden (Thanks Charles and Alex), then hanging a new door so the dogs could have a doggy door to get the patio and the garden.

Last night it was planting some flowers, I got some nice orange marigolds and some white petunias. Hopefully I didn’t mess anything up too much and they will live.

• Trying to figure out how to use twitter #
• Troy is an old man #
• Trying to fix my imap server #
• That you are #
• rebooting server cause i’ve leaked memory that i can’t seem to recover #
• I feel young #
• Server fixed: http://tinyurl.com/2kr28q #
• The camera stole my soul #
• Back to work #
• Coding on whiteboard with steven #
• Working fine for me #
• Php 5.2.x upgrade meeting #
• Lunch at stumpies #
• I made this site http://bemba.com/u/4672 #
• Working on a search engine #

So i’ve finally given in and joined twitter and started mo-blogging with flickr.

I’m also looking into Bemba, since it’s one of my WebThumb customers.

I’ve been slowly moving all my websites to a new server. Today I moved email. If you try to email me today and I don’t answer there’s a chance thats way. It could also be because I didn’t want to respond .

This blog is running on a new server, you shouldn’t notice anything but faster performance but let me know if find any 404s

I’ve finally launched my new theme.

Let me know what you think, I expect to make some more refinements and to clean up some content yet but the majority of the work is done.

The big new featues are the magic help bubbles you saw on page load. The dock containing secondary navigation, and the new comment styling.

Let me know what you think, and if you see any bugs.

Oh and I only tested things on ie7 and ff so if your running something else and things are totally broken let me know.

I’ve slowly been working on a new theme for this site.

I think i made some good progress tonight.

Take a look and tell me what you think: http://new.joshuaeichorn.com/

Oh and thats not a link for a good reason, its a week old copy of my wordpress DB and I don’t want it too get indexed.

Update
Also check out a page with a lot of comments, I did a neat layout trick that puts my comments in there own column and things line up so each of my comments is next to the comment its replying too.

I’m not done formatting the content in the comment boxes yet, I want to switch too a x days|months|years ago date formatting style

You may have noticed that my blog has been running a bit slower these days. I’ve been getting huge load spikes a couple times a day.

Looking at that and my Akismet counter, its seems im getting 3-4000 spam comment submissions a day. And while the server could handle the load if the spammers were polite about it, its much harder to handle spams coming in 500-1000 spam bursts (less then 1 minute).

I’ve added mod_evasive support to apache but it doesn’t look like things will help since so many different ip’s are being used in the spam attacks. There is nothing like being dos’d by spammers.

I may end up having to rewrite wordpress’s comment submission code in order to get enough performance out of it too handle the attacks. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Update
I moved my comments page and since serving up 404′s is cheap my load is no longer spiking. Now i just need a script that finds 404′s to the old comments page and add them to my firewall.

I got up early to vote before work, the lines weren’t that bad but something got messed up in my registration process so I had to vote on a provisional ballot.

For some reason they had me marked as having recieved an early ballot. 2 years ago I used an online service to signup for my ballot while in London, I wonder if those guys did the really annoying thing of automatically signing me up for another one.

I’ll be at LinuxWorld on the 15 and the 16. On the 15th i’ll be demoing Clearhealth as part of Healthcare Day, and on the 16th I’ll be talking to people about my book.

Let me know if your going to be there, maybe we can meet up.

Megan and I tied the knot on the 29th, and then spent a couple of days relaxing in sedona.

We have a couple hundred pictures from the wedding and reception online. I ended up writing a simple picture viewer to show them all.

Do to lots of problems with my old server i’ve moved to a new hosting company, and have been in the process of moving all the old content. Due to some issues beyond my control the move was forced on me before things were ready so there have been more problems then I like.

If you see any 404′s or missing content please let me know.

WordPress 2.0 has been released, its got lots of new features, but as far as I can tell they are all on the author side, not the reader. A full list of the changes is available over on the asymptomatic blog. There is a bit of AJAX in the interface as well, they could use it remove a couple more dialog popups, but editing is much cleaner now. If your running wordpress and are looking to upgrade there is a good article in the support forums walking you through the process.

The release process seems a bit odd though, the files exist, the website is updated, but there isn’t even an blog post announcing the release.
I’m also using the new akismet anti-spam plugin, I hope its good since they force you to create a blog at wordpress.com to use it.

Update:

Offical wordpress 2.0 release announcement is out, has the complete feature summary.