Chicken Donut

Well, it only took 32 years but I am finally the owner of a gaming console. Kate, A.K.A, the greatest fiancee EVER gave me a Wii for my birthday. I mean, seriously, how great is she? We are heads down in the wedding with just a few weeks to go and she hits a home run. I’m feeling some serious rounds of tennis and bowling coming on this Wii-kend.

On top of my iPhone and QuickCam posts a week ago, this is a ridiculous technology month at the Burke house…oh yeah I also got talked in to joining facebook.

Kate and I went to the Fox last night to see the movie version of Mamma Mia! We of course new a bunch of the music but neither of us have seen the musical.

It also happened to be my first movie experience at the Fox. Man what a great way to start off. I don’t remember ever going to a movie where the audience was having so much fun. The movie may have been rated a so-so by the critics but the combine theater, audience, movie, music experience got a 10 on my movie meeter.

I found this old Schwinn frame thrown away on the curb when I was walking Foxy and Neena this morning.  I’m betting it was set up as a pretty sweet single speed rig for some urban hipster.  Whoever owned it has some cred in my book.

First of all there is an “Andre The Giant Has a Posse” sticker on the frame, 10 points.  Second, the owner used a coke bottle to shim the seat post.  Not a rookie move.  The headset bearings need some attention but overall this frame is in great shape with no rust to speak of.  It is a little bit bigger than my blue bomber urban rig and should fit a six footer well.

Saw this on Digg today. This dude took JC to the mat.

Its been a pretty good couple of weeks for personal technology, starting with the longest running impulse buy in history…my purchase of an iPhone 3G.

To say this thing is incredible is 1) an understatement and 2) been said so many times around the net that I won’t go into it all again.

The crack in the armor started when I could not get my iPhone working satisfactorily in Ubuntu. I gave up and put windows back on our old kitchen laptop. Fortunately, I had not thrown away my old Apple AirPort Express so I hooked it up to the stereo to enable iTunes audio around the house. Coupled with iTunes Remote for the iPhone, this is everything I wanted in an audio server and all I had to do was buy back into Windows and iTunes, abandoning the Ubuntu do-it-yourself route.

The second “damn-it Ubuntu” moment was when I couldn’t get my new QuickCam to work. I know there are people out there using the model I bought but I put a half hour in without results. I ended up plugging it into the Window-ized kitchen laptop and it worked falwlessly with skype.

Finally, I was having trouble getting various video encoding packages working on my Ubuntu desktop/storage/media server. I also discoverd the existance of a DVI-HDMI cable that would allow me to hook the computer up to my Sony home theater. Since I had a semi positive experience with the laptop I decided to redo the desktop as an XP/Ubuntu dual boot.

End result, SUCCESS! Easy video from the computer to the home theater to the TV. Rock on.

In review

• iPhone 3G
• iTunes to home stereo
• iTunes Remote for iPhone
• QuickCam + Skype
• Video from PC to home threater to TV

Clearly, Windows does not get credit for the iPhone, but it definately smoked Ubuntu for me for media related usability.

One of the reasons I have not posted much lately is that wordpress was blowing up all the friggin time. I thought it was an overloaded OpenVZ situation caused by VPSLink (that still may be part of it) but a few memory monitoring scripts helped me track down the culpret. Apache was starting numerous workers processes that were blowing up the memory and not being reclaimed.

Tim and I compared notes on our apache2.conf files and finally came up with a configuration that can handle my light load and most importantly allows worker processes to and their memory allocation to be reclaimed.

The end result…when I logged in this morning, chickendoughnut.com was alive and well!!!

Exert from apache2.conf
—–
<ifmodule mpm_prefork_module=”">
StartServers 2
MinSpareServers 2
MaxSpareServers 2
MaxClients 100
MaxRequestsPerChild 0
</ifmodule>
—–

Happy Dogs, originally uploaded by wells.burke.

Another test of photo blogging

Test Camera Phone Post via Flickr Originally uploaded by wells.burke

This pic of Gavin from a few weeks ago seemed like a good choice for testing out photo blogging.