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Time to upgrade the server

The server that hosts lowtek.ca sits in a dusty corner of my furnace room. There are lots of good reasons to not host your own web presence, but if you are stubborn like I am you might find this interesting.

The current hardware is an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ that I bought back in 2001 – I remember it cost me a bit more than $1700 at the time. This used to be my desktop until I upgraded to a much quieter (and slightly faster) refurbished machine a couple of years ago. For the most part I’ve been avoiding buying new hardware to avoid the steep price depreciation.

Last week the server machine shut itself off, two days in a row. There wasn’t much data in the logs, but poking around I’m fairly convinced that the CPU was overheating. The sensor data claims a 23C swing in reported temperatures (55C-78C). Either way, the machine is now unreliable in my mind and I need the server to be reliable.

While I was tempted to go the refurbished route, as I can pick up a reasonably capable system for about $100 – I really wanted to avoid getting in the same mess in a few years. So after some amount of searching, I settled on the following components:

Total works out to under $200. I can reuse a case (or steal one from a friend) and the drives I have already. I do plan to measure the power consumption of my new system vs. the existing one, I’m hopeful I will get results similar to this claim of 41watts.

My thinking here is that by buying new, I’m going to have a more reliable system for longer. The energy savings are a sensible investment over a few years, thus both the Atom CPU and 80Plus power supply make sense. Less heat (again the Atom) should mean easier cooling, and again hopefully longer life.

Exit Review: Nokia 6585

This post is inspired by Bunnie’s Exit Review of his Blackberry, he also did one for his Thinkpad T60. The concept is a good one, often our new gadget purchases are based on our personal past experiences as much as they are influenced by our friends and “the latest new thing”.

From the picture above, you can see that its had a hard life. The paint is rubbing off on the corners, the keypad is starting to show black plastic under the chipped keys and the screen is held on with some scotch tape. This phone has survived countless high impact falls to the floor, a few to pavement- and a handful that resulted in a yard sale style disassembly upon impact.

This was my 3rd Nokia phone. When I purchased the 6585 in late 2004 I was switching from a GSM based carrier onto a CDMA carrier, my reasoning here was for improved coverage. At the time, GSM coverage at my home was spotty (it has improved since). I was attracted to the form factor (4.17” x 1.77” x 0.80”), and battery life (standby time 6 days).

Via eBay I did pick up the headset (with integrated radio antenna) which served me well. Both the speaker phone and headset voice quality were such that I could be on a business conference call and people couldn’t tell that I wasn’t on my office phone. As for extras, there wasn’t much to rave about. The web browser would quickly drain your battery. The screen 128×128 resolution and 4096 colours was poor. The embedded java was only MIDP1.0. The radio was a neat addition, but I never used it.

This phone does have an IRDA port on it. This let me synchronize my contacts with a PC with the Nokia PC Suite. I could also store pictures (low quality due to the display) on the phone to customize it. This was also the first phone which I did any amount of text messaging with, and found the predictive T9 input to be fairly usable. I also found the alarm clock to be invaluable when traveling – hotel alarm clocks can be challenging when you’re jet lagged.

I probably would still be using this phone had the battery life not degraded to the point where it needed charging daily to be reliable at all. It was far too common to hear the sad ‘dee doop’ Nokia low battery sound from my pocket.

While the 6585 didn’t offer a lot of whiz bang features, it did work well as a phone. The PC connectivity is something I can’t imagine not having now. My new phone is another Nokia, more on that in a future post.

Playing in the Cloud

mirrors_edge_2d There has been lots of talk lately about “the cloud” – I was a little taken aback by this blog posting from Google which implied that Google is the cloud. Pat also recently posted about web UIs that I’d recommend people check out. I’ve been keeping an eye on some of the instant on OSes, and it turns out a friend of mine is involved with one of the companies offering a cloud solution. I’ll admit that the cloud concept is very cool – but what I really want is to host my own cloud (and yes, that does seem a bit backward).

Let’s get back to what computers are good at – entertaining us. If you haven’t seen this yet, you need to check out mirrorsedge2d.com – a pretty neat flash based game that is a 2D take on Mirrors Edge. It only take about 30mins of toying around to exhaust the content on the beta site right now, but if you enjoy 2d platformer games this will hook you.

The other night my internet connection was down for about 30 minutes. How annoying will that be once all our data is in the cloud?