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So, one of my friends, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
apocalypticbob, was wondering how I was doing, noting that I rarely post about myself these days. As I told her, the reason I don't do this is because my life, while generally positive, is not all that eventful lately. But that I might do an update post anyway, to reassure folks.
Her response was as follows:
Well. After I stopped laughing hysterically, I decided I'd do an update here and let folks know the basics.
So, let's see... I have finally managed the feat of keeping in touch with friends I met at ValleyCon, as I have hung out with friends Sarah and Melissa a number of times. Also been seeing Lynn a bunch, and we have plans to do food stuffs. I was sick for a couple of weeks at the end of January, so our plans back then had to be postponed; I had the Martian Death Flu, which is NOT a good thing to risk giving to a friend who is on oxygen. During this Martian Death Flu, I got so miserable that I called Melissa and asked if she could bring me some medicine, which she was kind enough to do. We then hung out for awhile, because she'd already had the illness.
Anyway, that was kind of sucky, but it's over and done with.
My friend Ed and I have rescheduled our weekly hangoutage and DVD-watching from Friday night at midnight (technically Saturday Morning), to Tuesday night at 6 pm. This works a lot better for us, because he's no longer exhausted after a night of work, and I no longer have my sleep cycle disrupted every week. We've been watching Stargate SG-1 and, since season 8 started, Stargate Atlantis as well. We watch them concurrently, trading off discs, so that we catch any crossovers. They're fun shows, and I wish I'd known about them before. Ah, well, that is the great thing about DVDs.
As far as worky-worky goes, things are pretty good. We just got our new server and RAID unit, which are utterly awesome. Our current Apple Xserve G5, which has served us well, is starting to show its age, although we could probably keep using it for some time without real problems. But, it IS five years old, and we were able to get the financing for the upgrade quite easily, so we went ahead and got a new Intel Xserve.
This takes the number of processors we have from 2 single-core G5s at 2ghz each, to 2 quad-core Xeons at 3ghz each. That's right: EIGHT processors. Plus, it has twice the RAM (8 gigs), four times the disk space (1 terabyte, mirrored in a RAID 1 set with a hot spare), a hardware RAID card so the redundant mirroring of the system drive is done in hardware instead of software, and the new Leopard version of OS X Server. It's a sweet machine, and I'm having fun setting it up.
But the real thing we needed to upgrade, was our XRAID unit. It acts as the main mass storage system for our server and our office LAN, and the old one, with a capacity of 3 terabytes, was getting full. We losslessly compress our imagery to save space (and, as it turns out, improve the speed of rendering, because the task is mainly I/O bound: compressed images take fewer disk reads to load), but even so, we were approaching the limit of how much we could cram onto the thing.
Hence, our new XRAID, built by ActiveStorage, the company formed by the former Apple engineers who built Apple's XRAID. Instead of an array of 14 250 GB disks (which comes out to 3 terabytes when set up as a RAID 50), it's an array of 16 1 TB disks, which I've set up in a RAID 6 configuration that gives us 13 TB of space, and good redundancy. We can lose two disks at once without losing the array, and we have spares already. (I think it works out to 13 TB instead of 14 because of the "powers of 10" versus "powers of 2" thing that disk makers confuse people with.) We definitely need the space. And the new XRAID is very nicely put together, with redundant controllers, batteries, power supplies, and everything.
So I'm going to be spending the next few days happily setting things up. For various reasons, what we need from our software stack does not come in the default installations that Apple provides. In particular, Apple's built-in Apache and PHP do not have all of the modules we need, the system doesn't come with PostgreSQL (MySQL is NOT an option for us), it definitely doesn't come with the GIS-specific libraries and programs like Proj4, GEOS, GDAL/OGR, or Mapserver, and there's a number of support modules for Python that I need to install as well. I have to migrate the databases from our current server to the new one, test our own code in the new environment and fix any issues, and so on and so forth. It's a good chunk of work, but I enjoy this kind of thing.
On the programming, my work is currently focussed on taking our webpage code, separating it out into "interface code" which interacts with the users, versus "engine code" which does the server-side processing, and then reworking it into a generic server-side API. Then I will work with my minions, Arun and Gaurav, to make an external interface to this API, to be used by off-site clients. The end result? We can provide our image processing services to external programs for a fee. And we can write our own clients as well, including websites, through a standardized interface. Cool, huh?
Not a lot else going on for me. I've been reading stuff, of course, keeping up with LJ and with some blogs, comics, and the like. Oh, and petting my cats, of course. The cats continue to, well, rule the house, as any cat would. Right now they are clustered around me, purring noisily.
Anyway, that's the state of the Flewnion.
apocalypticbob, was wondering how I was doing, noting that I rarely post about myself these days. As I told her, the reason I don't do this is because my life, while generally positive, is not all that eventful lately. But that I might do an update post anyway, to reassure folks.Her response was as follows:
Might not be a bad idea. I know I'm interested, even if it's just, "I'm
doing okay. The voices are relatively quiet. I put peanut butter in my
underwear today, but thankfully it wasn't tainted with salmonella."
Well. After I stopped laughing hysterically, I decided I'd do an update here and let folks know the basics.
So, let's see... I have finally managed the feat of keeping in touch with friends I met at ValleyCon, as I have hung out with friends Sarah and Melissa a number of times. Also been seeing Lynn a bunch, and we have plans to do food stuffs. I was sick for a couple of weeks at the end of January, so our plans back then had to be postponed; I had the Martian Death Flu, which is NOT a good thing to risk giving to a friend who is on oxygen. During this Martian Death Flu, I got so miserable that I called Melissa and asked if she could bring me some medicine, which she was kind enough to do. We then hung out for awhile, because she'd already had the illness.
Anyway, that was kind of sucky, but it's over and done with.
My friend Ed and I have rescheduled our weekly hangoutage and DVD-watching from Friday night at midnight (technically Saturday Morning), to Tuesday night at 6 pm. This works a lot better for us, because he's no longer exhausted after a night of work, and I no longer have my sleep cycle disrupted every week. We've been watching Stargate SG-1 and, since season 8 started, Stargate Atlantis as well. We watch them concurrently, trading off discs, so that we catch any crossovers. They're fun shows, and I wish I'd known about them before. Ah, well, that is the great thing about DVDs.
As far as worky-worky goes, things are pretty good. We just got our new server and RAID unit, which are utterly awesome. Our current Apple Xserve G5, which has served us well, is starting to show its age, although we could probably keep using it for some time without real problems. But, it IS five years old, and we were able to get the financing for the upgrade quite easily, so we went ahead and got a new Intel Xserve.
This takes the number of processors we have from 2 single-core G5s at 2ghz each, to 2 quad-core Xeons at 3ghz each. That's right: EIGHT processors. Plus, it has twice the RAM (8 gigs), four times the disk space (1 terabyte, mirrored in a RAID 1 set with a hot spare), a hardware RAID card so the redundant mirroring of the system drive is done in hardware instead of software, and the new Leopard version of OS X Server. It's a sweet machine, and I'm having fun setting it up.
But the real thing we needed to upgrade, was our XRAID unit. It acts as the main mass storage system for our server and our office LAN, and the old one, with a capacity of 3 terabytes, was getting full. We losslessly compress our imagery to save space (and, as it turns out, improve the speed of rendering, because the task is mainly I/O bound: compressed images take fewer disk reads to load), but even so, we were approaching the limit of how much we could cram onto the thing.
Hence, our new XRAID, built by ActiveStorage, the company formed by the former Apple engineers who built Apple's XRAID. Instead of an array of 14 250 GB disks (which comes out to 3 terabytes when set up as a RAID 50), it's an array of 16 1 TB disks, which I've set up in a RAID 6 configuration that gives us 13 TB of space, and good redundancy. We can lose two disks at once without losing the array, and we have spares already. (I think it works out to 13 TB instead of 14 because of the "powers of 10" versus "powers of 2" thing that disk makers confuse people with.) We definitely need the space. And the new XRAID is very nicely put together, with redundant controllers, batteries, power supplies, and everything.
So I'm going to be spending the next few days happily setting things up. For various reasons, what we need from our software stack does not come in the default installations that Apple provides. In particular, Apple's built-in Apache and PHP do not have all of the modules we need, the system doesn't come with PostgreSQL (MySQL is NOT an option for us), it definitely doesn't come with the GIS-specific libraries and programs like Proj4, GEOS, GDAL/OGR, or Mapserver, and there's a number of support modules for Python that I need to install as well. I have to migrate the databases from our current server to the new one, test our own code in the new environment and fix any issues, and so on and so forth. It's a good chunk of work, but I enjoy this kind of thing.
On the programming, my work is currently focussed on taking our webpage code, separating it out into "interface code" which interacts with the users, versus "engine code" which does the server-side processing, and then reworking it into a generic server-side API. Then I will work with my minions, Arun and Gaurav, to make an external interface to this API, to be used by off-site clients. The end result? We can provide our image processing services to external programs for a fee. And we can write our own clients as well, including websites, through a standardized interface. Cool, huh?
Not a lot else going on for me. I've been reading stuff, of course, keeping up with LJ and with some blogs, comics, and the like. Oh, and petting my cats, of course. The cats continue to, well, rule the house, as any cat would. Right now they are clustered around me, purring noisily.
Anyway, that's the state of the Flewnion.
