DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I’ve been hosting my own websites since 1996, using a parade of hardware:

• Power Mac 6100 (October, 1996)
• IBM PS/2 486
• homebuilt AMD tower (April, 2000)
• near-silent 1.13 GHz Tualatin desktop (December, 2001)
• 1U rackmount P4 (July, 2003)
• leased 1U #1 (January, 2006)
• leased 1U #2 (March, 2006)

Why would I change out the hardware every 16 months on average? Because traffic growth demands increasingly powerful servers just to cope with the crushing load of your frantic clickthroughs? Sadly, no.

Because deep down I’m an inveterate hardware hacker and I really enjoy researching the latest hardware and assembling servers out of component parts? Urgh, not.

No, the reason is this: computers suck ass.

Of the six retired servers, only three were still running when they were replaced: the Mac, the PS/2 (which served another 5+ years as my firewall, and even now needs only a $3 ISA ethernet card and it could be back in production; the thing simply won’t die), and the Tualatin machine, which is even more silent sitting unplugged in my closet.

The white-box AMD tower stopped recognizing its SCSI card, so I had to junk it. The 1U I bought for $1800 lost a disk drive, and then another, and I decided that I’m done with hardware maintenance, so I moved the sites to a leased server, the idea being that someone else would have to fix broken disk drives.

Except that this time, the drives didn’t break… they just changed files randomly every couple weeks, until Saturday, when they changed a bunch all at once, and Sunday, when the OS declared that the entire filesystem would henceforth be read-only. What the fsck is up with that?

The ISP gave me a fresh 1U server to migrate all my services to, but this is scarcely an improvement over doing hardware maintenance. Who wants to spend a day recovering from backups and rebuilding server applications and testing? I think I don’t need a leased server so much as a managed one.

Driving to the City Saturday morning, we caught a glimpse of Armageddon on 101N — peeking over the high guard rail, I saw what looked like about 100 cars strewn across four lanes of highway. I thought I saw a bulldozer, too, but that was probably a synaptic misfire brought on by the stress of carnage.

Equally shocking was that the highway was completely empty beyond the wreck — meaning, there weren’t 10,000 cars waiting for a lane to open. It was eerie. Highway 101 is never empty, especially not at 9:00 AM on a Saturday.

After passing through the Waldo tunnel, we saw the reason for the empty highway. Police were forcing everyone to exit 101N into Sausalito, at the bottom of the Waldo grade. 101N was closed! Another thing I’ve never seen.

Southbound traffic was moving quickly across the bridge. I asked the woman at the toll booth what radio station would broadcast traffic information, so I’d know when I could get home. She said “The CHP will have the road open by 5:00 PM.” 5:00 PM?! What kind of wreck takes all day to clear?

We heard the story an hour later: around 2:30 AM a driver had lost control and slammed into an SUV, killing the smaller car’s two passengers. [Insert SUV high-bumper rant here.] Because the road at the site of this accident is a steep downhill with blind turns, 26 more cars piled into first two. The CHP had been on site for something like seven hours already.

The Chron ran a full report on Sunday, with a better explanation for the initial crash: HUGE PILEUP IN SUDDEN BLIZZARD

More coverage: Marin Independent Journal (for 14 days only, hmph)

So, let me get this straight: if you have a deadly peanut allergy, you shouldn’t eat these peanuts because they’re produced in a facility that processes peanuts.

Ways to use del.icio.us:

del.icio.us is an open-ended system. You decide how you want to use it.

I think most bloggers and journalists have two primary uses for it:

• Store bookmarks for future reference/research
• Tag one’s own blog entries / articles, both to promote them to anyone monitoring those tags and to track the articles’ reach

I’ve done some of both, and I think the result is clumsy: my own blog posts appear in the same list with the rest of my bookmarks. Mingling these two disparate data types seems nonoptimal, as if Flickr wouldn’t distinguish between “my photos” and “my contacts’ photos.”

I spoke about this briefly with Jon Udell at Etech. He distinguishes the two data types by tagging his own articles with his name. It’s an easy solution for accessing “stuff I wrote” quickly, but doesn’t address what I think is the more interesting question: “show me my bookmarks but not the stuff I wrote.”

del.icio.us has a tag intersection feature to allow retrieval of bookmarks tagged with both of two terms, but it doesn’t currently have a negation feature. There’s no easy way to tell del.icio.us “give me everything tagged ‘foo and not bar’.”

Yes, I could write my own filter, sigh.

The pastry chef at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego does a pretty phenomenal job. In my four days at Etech I witnessed over a dozen varieties of coffee cake, cheesecake, cookies, petit fours, frangipani, croissants, napoleon, upscale Krispie treats, on and on and on, a heart-stopping convoy of white flour and sugar and eggs and an occasional taste of nuts or berries as if just to break up the monotony.

I like desserts, but not the first thing in the morning, which is when they served half these pastries, with three kinds of coffee and no juice. I don’t like eggs so much, but I’d have strangled a chicken if it meant not eating a half-pound of banana bread for breakfast again.

You could argue that the conference organizers really know their audience. What refreshments would 1200 alpha geeks desire more than sugar and caffeine? In retrospect it was surprising they didn’t serve Bawls for breakfast.

I commented to one of the O’Reilly staffers that the food at the Web 2.0 conference was far and away better than what we’d been served at Etech, and he pointed out that Web 2.0 costs twice as much. It’s O’Reilly’s flagship tech conference, I guess, so it comes with a high profile, a full bag of schwag, and a plate of eggs.