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Trucks

September 1st, 2010

Today, I received some stuff for my model train layout. The most important part of that to me were the HO scale trucks, which I will try to do something very interesting with in the future. I also got some street lights, grade crossing, crossing signals, a gazebo, and a locomotive engine block. I was very surprised that the engine block actually was not a one piece casting as I had expected, but a 40 piece kit. Well, I won’t use it for a while, then. :lol:

As for my PHP scripts, I continued working on them a little more these past few days, when my nose was not so runny as to flood my keyboard. My immune system takes bribes from viruses to let them attack me. :lol:

I made a graph to keep track of the UPS line voltage, and I noticed an interesting trend; the voltage drops a bit during the day and then increases above 120V late at night, as you can see in my pretty graph. ;-)

I will maybe set up a section of the site for these and other graphs and stuff that would be similar to the old “Railwolf Labs” site I had before.

I also set up a PHP script to monitor my router’s status and represent it graphically, like the router’s front panel, using the actual front panel icons, plus the addition of the current IP address. The script actually logs into the router’s page and grabs the information from it. It wasn’t easy to do, but I figured out how. This is how it looks:

Posted in Hobbies, Life, Railwolf.com, Technology

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UPS Status

August 26th, 2010

I had a cold again this week, so I didn’t get to work on my model train layout. Since I feel better now, I decided to play with some PHP scripts tonight and see what I could come up with. This is my latest project:

The result was quite good, I managed to convert the old hard drive status script into an APC UPS status script. It will now be much easier to keep track of all of them during a power outage, conserve battery power, and arrange any necessary shutdowns. I can only keep track of three of them at the moment, since Apcupsd doesn’t allow monitoring more than one UPS at a time for now, and it doesn’t work with 64bit versions of Windows, either. But it’s okay, those two units that it doesn’t work with only power my network switches anyway.

Posted in Health, Life, Railwolf.com, Technology

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10 Years

July 17th, 2010

It’s hard to believe that I’ve actually had the domain Railwolf.com for 10 years now, but it’s a fact. A lot has happened since then, but the site itself is still up. I admit that there were times when I just wanted to give up and pull the plug on the server and never power it up again. While it can be a lot of work at times, it does allow people to see what I’m up to and share ideas with me. But one thing had always bothered me…
Girls usually don’t seem impressed by guys’ websites. Maybe they think that their blog will become full of inappropriate posts about them, that it’s simply not interesting, or they just think that it’s a big waste of time. Who knows? I never got a straight answer about that. Since my main method of communicating with girls has always been the internet, this became a problem for me, because they would always find their way here eventually. When you’re as lonely as I was, losing a contact because they didn’t like or understand your website, for whatever reason — became painful. The reality is that if a girl doesn’t like what I do, she obviously won’t like me so much either. And trains… well, let’s face it, it’s not cool to like trains. The same can be said for video games, although to a lesser extent.
But that doesn’t matter now. I’m glad that I stuck with my hobbies in the end. I didn’t need to change, I just needed to meet a girl who would like me as I am. One birthday wish really can change everything.

The question for now would be how long will the site be around for now? 1 year? Another 10 years? We’ll see. :lol:

Posted in Life, Railwolf.com

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WordPress 3.0

June 17th, 2010

I just upgraded the site to WordPress to 3.0. This normally would have gone smoothly, but the automatic updater had an error which rendered WordPress completely unusable. So I had to upload all the files manually to get it working again. It seems that I’m not the only one who had this problem, so keep this in mind if you’re going to upgrade.

Posted in Railwolf.com, Technology

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New Fans

March 25th, 2010

I received some new cooling fans for Meteor. All of the original case fans are dead now, same as those in Colossus. I spent some time installing those yesterday. Three fans in total. Not really fun. But I did finally solve the problem with the fan in the bottom of the case next to the drive cage. The Antec P180 case should have come with a fan grill there, but it didn’t. With 4 hard drives in there, the cables are sure to interfere with the fan. Since I had to remove the fan holder to change the dead fan, I installed a grill on it at the same time. I had originally just placed a grill just leaning against the compartment to keep the wires out of the fan blades. It had worked okay, but it was loose in there. Now it’s attached securely to the fan.

I also got a new D-Link gigabit switch; a DGS-105D. That’s a 5 port version of the switches I have now (DGS-1008D). I got it for Terminator, since it was hooked up to an older 100 megabit switch. Funny that Dell shipped it to me in less than 24 hours, but they can’t get me a monitor, which they make. :lol:

The transition to Terminator has gone pretty well. I had to edit a few scripts to make them connect to the MySQL database on Electrocuter2, and create some new PHP  script images that actually pull an image from Electrocuter2 and then recreate it so that it’s available to the outside world. The Now Playing section, for example, had to be modified this way. It’s not as fast, but it works pretty well.

Once I was done with all of this, I brought the boxes to the basement… it’s starting too look like a warehouse. :lol: So I decided to clean it up and get rid of some of those boxes. That will take some time, but I need to do it.

Posted in Lair, Railwolf.com, Technology

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Downtime

March 18th, 2010

There was some server downtime since last night when I shut down Colossus. I’m really thinking about scrapping that machine now, I’m fed up with all the problems it’s been having. It’s not only the monitor problems, but Nvidia chipset drivers that cause blue screens, etc.. I tried many different versions, but they all cause some sort of trouble on occasion. Not to mention the shorted out network chip on that motherboard, and unstable USB… it’s time to retire it. I can keep it as a spare machine for just surfing the web or whatever, but that’s about it. Never again will I buy a motherboard with an Nvidia chipset, nor a video card. Too many problems… :P

So now I moved the web server job for Railwolf.com to Terminator… yes… and my internal lab stuff has all been moved back to Electrocuter2, which works fine now that I have removed those failed drives. I’ll be moving some of the drives from Colossus to Meteor soon, too.

The idea is to cut down on the heat produced in my room, especially since it seems that this summer will be hot. It’s only March and it’s already getting pretty warm. Nice weather, though, like spring.  It was 16°C / 60°F yesterday.

I still haven’t gotten my monitor. I don’t know why, but it’s taking much longer than reasonable for a monitor. I ordered it from Dell.ca on the 2nd of March. So it’s been more than two weeks already, and they don’t even know when it will ship now. It’s just a monitor, do they have to make it especially for me or what? I can probably get something shipped from Taiwan myself faster than that. :lol:

Posted in Railwolf.com, Technology

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More CDs

February 19th, 2010

I received a couple more CDs from Amazon.ca today. I had also ordered a couple of Saxon albums that have been recently re-released, but they seem to have been delayed for some reason.

Here’s what I got:

  • Piece of Mind – Iron Maiden
  • Seventh Son of a Seventh Son – Iron Maiden

Other than that, everything has been pretty much the same as usual. I did have a bit more trouble with Colossus, but it seems to work fine if I turn off the monitor while it boots up for some reason.

I got a couple of Scythe Bay Rafters to mount the SSD drive. They hold two SSD drives and one 3.5″ hard  drive in a 5″ bay. I won’t be using them for anything other than SSDs, though. Now I’ll have the capacity to add one more SSD to Colossus, and 2 more in another later.

Posted in Loot, Music, Railwolf.com, Technology

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Raptor Extinct

February 7th, 2010

Last night, I found Meteor dead with a blue screen. I tried to reboot it, but about half-way through, the same thing happened. So I powered it down again, and I heard some pretty strange noises that I’ve never heard before coming from the drive cage.

I never thought that a Western Digital Raptor would fail me, at least not that one. The Raptor in Colossus is the original model, it’s older, it has been running for much longer, and I thought that one would be the first to go if any. But no, the Raptor in Meteor failed instead. So the Raptor WD740ADFD has gone to extinction just like all other dinosaurs :lol:

I ran the WD diagnostic program, and not surprisingly, it failed all tests.  Here are the details:

Extended test failed
Error / Status code: 0226
226      Sector Relocation Error      Failure to relocate a sector during drive repair. The drive has to be replaced.

It was one bad sector that cannot be recovered caused all this. Luckily, I was able to use the WD Edition of Acronis True Image to clone the drive to a spare 250GB drive that I had recently installed in the machine because the Intel Matrix RAID kept dropping the drives “failed” from the mirror (that’s another story).

True Image is a nice program, and very useful. Even though it obviously could not copy the bad sector in question, it got everything else from the drive. After that, I just had to use the Windows XP CD to repair the replacement drive’s XP installation. I didn’t even have to do the entire reinstall process, it repaired some drive errors at the beginning, and then it was fine.

Now I’m not happy about the failure, but as has been my experience with Western Digital hard drives, I almost always am able to recover even when a boot drive fails by cloning it to a replacement drive. So I will stay with them, although I’m now going to experiment with solid state drives. Western Digital makes those too, but they don’t sell them to consumers yet. I guess that’s not surprising, SSDs might cut their traditional hard drive sales.

I ordered a 30GB OCZ Agility SSD just to try those out. They’re starting to become affordable now, and despite their size, they make good boot drives. Should be interesting…

Posted in Railwolf.com, Technology

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MostWeirdo.com

January 6th, 2010

I finished up the theme, and now MostWeirdo.com is up. I deleted the most recent junk mail from here, and moved it over there. I used the classic WordPress theme as the base for my theme, and it looks okay. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on that, since it’s not really important for it to look pretty.

Funny that WordPress only suggested the upgrade to version 2.9.1 (yes, already) on one of the sites, but not the other. I updated both, though.

Posted in Railwolf.com

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Happy New Year

January 4th, 2010

I wish you all a Happy New Near, including those who have seemingly disappeared. ;-)

I realize that I’m a bit late in posting this. I usually would have posted it on January 1st, but this year, I was pretty tired and depressed. Despite the fact that 2009 was not a bad year, some things didn’t go so well. As always, I was alone when the clock struck 12, and that wasn’t so great for my mood.

I need to work on my writing more, but I often have almost no energy, along with lots of brain fog.  I do still write some lyrics and poems now and then. I can focus on a verse, but the pages of a story are not so easy to focus on. It’s a challenge, but I still enjoy writing, even if I’m like a tortoise with a typewriter. :lol:

My bass playing has improved a lot. It’s only been two and a half years since I started, and it’s getting closer and closer to my guitar playing, but I still have some more work to do.

I’ll be moving the junk mail posts over to another site which suits that better, and that will keep this site more clearly focused. I will have that ready pretty soon. I just need to make the theme for it. That site has been around for a long time, but I never really did anything with it, so I might as well do this.

Posted in Life, Railwolf.com