About

Trever Fischer is a sophomore at The University of Akron with a strong enthusiasm towards coding, writing, good music, photography, and above all: oranges. This is his site. Specifically, this is his "About" box. In addition to recently having finished his first year of college, he is also a hacker who tinkers with Amarok, Plasma, Perl, and PHP.

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#341
7
August
08

The Timeline of Internet Memes

First, as /b/ would say, “This is the cancer that is killing /b/.”. True enough, I believe.

Second, the link.

I haven’t been on /b/ in ages, but I still think that the general public shouldn’t be allowed to comment on memes. You can’t really put an exact time on the invention of a meme; even a year is too narrow. It also doesn’t feel right to take some catchy idea and try to popularize it outside of the original culture. At least not at this speed. But such is the Internet, with its instant communication.

Excluding all that, this is a cool idea.

As posted on Webware

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#340
7
August
08

Keeping your mythbackend alive

For my network, I’ve got two Mythtv machines. One is Saturn, the main recording backend. The other is Neptune, the supercharged media workhorse who has a frontend in addition to running my distributed DVD ripping, being part of a compile farm, holding all my music, and mysql databases.

Neither of the two are on a battery backup because I’m cheap, so when things go down, they don’t always come right back up. And sometimes Saturn’s mythbackend crashes. It happens.

So to prevent this, I added my mythtv-frontend user account to Saturn’s sudo list. Then I generated a ssh key and put it into the authorized_hosts file. Since all my accounts are managed with LDAP and /home is mounted over NFS, its really easy to syncronize both machines.

The final step is to change the ‘WOLBackendCommand’ setting in the database. The only sudo command mythtv-frontend can execute on Saturn is /etc/init.d/mythbackend restart. So I changed that setting to ssh saturn sudo /etc/init.d/mythbackend restart;sleep 5. The extra sleep allows for startup lag.

Now, if both machines go down, there isn’t a race condition between saturn waiting for neptune’s database to start before starting mythbackend. Once Neptune’s mythfrontend starts up it notices there isn’t a backend connection available. So it ssh’s into saturn, (re)starts the backend (It might be hanging, so thats why it restarts it), and waits politely for it to start.

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#337
5
August
08

Another Twitter Video

From Twitter themselves, a good video of people who actually use Twitter and why. I previously mentioned “Twitter in Plain English”, another video that explains what twitter is to newcomers, and I think this testimonial format does it just as good.


How Do You Use Twitter? from biz stone on Vimeo.

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#335
4
August
08

A Small Orange

Recently, I heard about this little hosting company called A Small Orange. It had to do with oranges so naturally, I was intrigued.

Turns out, A Small Orange is an incredibly cheap web host. Far too small for wm161.net, but an incredible value anyways. For only $5 a month, you can have 400Mb of space, and tons of bandwidth. Thats a medium-sized website right there, with unlimited databases, e-mail, and even shell access.

If you’ve only got a small website, its only $25 a year for 75Mb of space and all the same features. For someone who has a tiny starter blog, and maybe a few pictures, thats perfect.

For me though, it doesn’t quite work. I signed up for their medium plan at $10 a month and spent a few days with it. They have a 30-day guarantee, so I gave it a spin and thoroughly checked it out. I still like MediaTemple more though.

First, I love MediaTemple’s directory layout. All your websites are stored in ~/domains/, which keeps things neatly organized. Any folder in ~/domains/ gets served up at that domain, so you don’t have to mess around with a control panel like cPanel or something. It lets me do all my dirty work in the shell, the way real men do it. At A Small Orange, you can set up your subdomains and addon domains to point to any directory you want, but your main website must point to ~/public_html/. The support staff at ASO are very friendly and fast, so I suppose if you ask them nicely they could change it for you.

Second, MediaTemple’s website shows that they know what they’re doing. Some people would look at me and scoff that you can’t always judge a web host by their own website, but this time you can. MediaTemple’s website shows that they have a strong passion for their work. A Small Orange tries to look eye-catching, and their minimalistic approach shows they are exactly what they are. Nothing too flashy, but very cheap and good. However, they use packages like ModernBill and cPanel to try and make things easier on everyone. Those two bits of software do the job, but they look absolutely hideous. If this was the 1990s still, they’d be on top of things. But I suppose the new wave of modern designed websites have spoiled me. And I digress.

While A Small Orange just isn’t right for hosting wm161.net, I still think it works for getting around that tiny little annoying nitpick in the MediaTemple contract: no hotlinking. I’m downgrading my medium plan to the tiny $25/year plan to host various images, and to otherwise mess around with some cheap hosting.

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