MichaelRunyon.com – All Things Geek

Well, if you haven’t been able to tell from talking to me lately (those of you that do), I am been EXTREMELY busy with life in general lately. Work has been incredibly busy this summer, and with a giant product demo to complete by next Thursday morning, my life in that regard is kicking into high gear. I’ve been staying up late trying to get motivated to get that completed before the very last second, but it would appear that is not going to happen. The last time that we had a product demo for that company, I ended up working about 30 hours in 3 days, and not sleeping the last 2 days before the meeting. I drank a whole liter of coffee before the meeting, did the demo, and then fought off sleep during the other 2 meetings that we had with that company the rest of the day. So you can understand why I don’t want to do that again. Plus, my family is coming into town this weekend, so I can’t really do something like that again anyway.

It’s also my mom’s birthday. 50th. And we’ve got some specials plans for it that will require my time, and have already required some of my time. So that’s another iron on the fire.

My grandma went into the hospital for an appendectomy. I’ve been cleaning my house for guests. Main email server has crashed with an I/O kernel 2 times in 4 days. Our main webserver at work suffered a SQL injection attack for a high profile client. There went 2 days of my very limited time. We’re getting bids for projects constantly at work. It’s absolutely non-stop. I take advantage of every break that I get, and absolutely don’t take for granted the motivating times that I can really get work done.

On a lighter note, I ran across a post somewhere else on the Internet where someone posted a picture of a windows box uptime of 716 days, and most of the posters claimed Photoshop. I know that you are supposed to apply patches to Windows machines religiously, but I don’t count that as one of the routines in my systems administration experience. I tend to leave them alone if they are working.The main webserver (the one that houses this website and about 200 others) has been up and running for 1016 days at the time of this post. That’s 33 months and 12 days. That’s just a few months shy of 3 years. And the amazing thing about it all? One of the developers who doesn’t work for the company anymore started an endless loop in Coldfusion that triggered the last reboot of that machine, at which point it had been up for almost 2 years. So, 1 reboot in just about 5 years. On a Windows machine.

Now, being somewhat a Linux evangelist, I’m not going to try and defend Windows, because frankly, it does suck a lot of the time. But there’s a testament to how solid that server environment can be if you are careful and run appropriate loads and tools on it.Below is a 100% un-altered(besides removing some key information) image of the uptime of the server this evening. Pretty impressive, eh?

I recently struggled for a few days to get my old desktop back up and working again under the Windows environment, for some tools that I needed to install under Windows (and possibly a game or two…). I had the hardest time getting the windows installation CD to complete. It literally took me the better part of 3 days standing on one foot, pushing buttons in the lotus position, swapping hardware in and out, before the installation would complete successfully. All the over near 100 times, the system would freeze, the CD drive would spin down and stay down, effectively freezing it, it would overheat, it would get a dirty read from the CD drive, it would blue screen and give a page fault….on and on and on.

After finally getting windows and the essential applications back up on the system, I started thinking about the machine and the many iterations that it’s been through ( read: a long time in the computer world). I still use it as my main machine when I work from home, which is rather amazing, given the amount of bloat in some of the dominant software industry tools. For instance, Aptana takes nearly 20 seconds to start up on my machine at work (which is much faster and newer than my home machine), so taking 30-35 seconds at home is not too different. Similarly, SQL Server Management Studio takes only about 10% longer, to an already long start-up time. All the tools that I use on my 1-year old machine behave rather similarly, if perhaps a little less snappy. And this machine is going to be 6 years old in just a month or so.

I built the first version of this computer the fall of my senior year of high school, after working in painting and apartment maintenance for $6/hr the whole summer ( and learning quite a few lessons, but that’s another story…heck, another book! ). The only home computers that we’d had prior to this one was one that our family bought in 1997 during one of the waves of the PC affordability periods. Needless to say, it was highly insufficient for playing games, developing OpenGL games and using Photoshop, etc, which is what I was mainly using computers for at the time. I got an internship (kick-starting the job that I still work at today) and promised my parents that I wouldn’t spend all of the money that I had made on a new computer. But I was determined to get one that would last me a while.

I already mentioned that I was into video games. I longed to join my geek friends from high school in their LAN parties that were being held about every 2 weeks, as they seemed like great fun, and I had a few classes with some of them, who regaled me with tales of their epic adventures. So, I splurged on the video card, really the only component that I bought above “the line” (the line is the point at which the price and power of the component are at their optimum. This is typically a component that is about 4-5 steps removed from the apex of power). Here is what the specs of the original machine looked like. It cost about $775 at the time:

AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.6 Ghz)

256 MB of PC-2700 DDR RAM

60GB 7200 RPM IBM ATA Hard Drive

128MB GeForce Ti-4200 AGP 8x

LiteOn 48x CD-RW/DVD-ROM

This computer, while meager to laughable in today’s standards, was for a few months probably the best machine at the LAN parties that I went to (remember, these were all high school kids working at Subway 15 hours a week. The adults at the time had machines that would’ve crushed mine, but I was barely making gas money each week). After about a year of joyous ownership, my motherboard died a smoky death, the day after a major solar storm was supposed to have dissipated with “fewer than expected effects”. I suspected that it was dead, and it was. So, i pumped a few more dollars into a new Motherboard/CPU combo, stepping up to an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.06 Ghz). And then, the most amazing thing happened: a wonderful man at church, whom I was casual friends with, asked if my computer could handle PC-2700 DDR. He then gave me a 512MB stick of it! That tripled the RAM in my machine. Now I was really cooking with gas.

Fast forward 5 years. I have purchased 4 external hard drives (2 died, taking with them a combined 23,000 songs and countless other things). I now have a 250GB and 180GB drives (the 180GB backs up the 250). I have installed and uninstalled TV tuners, modems, NICs, replaced the motherboard 3 more times, the CPU twice more, a new heat sink, 3 new fans, 2 new power supplies, 2 new cases, more RAM (now at 1GB). But the basic computer is still more or less the same that it’s been for nearly 6 years now, and it still handles nearly everything that I would want it to do. Even though it protests, it runs Half Life 2 at medium textures at 1680×1050. It runs Photoshop, Aptana, SQL Management Studio, Dreamweaver, and whatever else you can throw at it.

Amazing to think about really, that a new dual core machine with twice the RAM, 3 times the memory throughput, a newer videocard, better hard drive (SATA), faster processor (by 1 GHz), and more….is not that significant in speed difference. i chalk much of it up to my careful cycle of reformatting windows and trimming down the system for maximum speed. But when this computer finally goes to the wayside (either through sale or a fiery death), it will have long outlived the expectations set out for it when it was purchased. My family’s computer at 6 years after purchase was an antiquated dinosaur, incapable of even opening Internet Explorer or (heaven forbid) Outlook Express. As hardware plateaus and the costs keeping down and down and down, the software just keeps getting bigger, more bloated, and more buggy. I’m not even that old and crochety, and I still long for the days when people cared about hand-optimizing your code before pushing through to development. As a developer, I still try to remember those practices of efficiency that were so prevalent in my youth. And I hope for a better future for the relationship of the developer and the machine once more.

For all who did not know, Leah had another laparoscopy yesterday at St Joe Regional Med Center in South Bend. It was her 3rd diagnostic/reparative laparoscopy for endometriosis, and her 4th laparoscopy in 5 years (one was for an appendectomy).

Essentially, they make a small incision in the abdomen and then burn out endometrial cells that they find in and around the uterus with a CO2 laser. With this particular surgery, they were going to take a look around in the bowels and gall bladder to see if they could find some additional endometrial cells there, too.

The doctor told me after surgery that he found a moderate amount of endometrials cell on the back of the uterus and that they did not find any other cells in the aforementioned places. This is both good and bad news; good because a positive diagnosis for endometrial cells on the gall bladder or bowels is essentially untreatable, bad because now there may be another thing coming into play for her.

She is feeling much better after this surgery than she has after some in the past, though she took even longer to come around from anasthesia this time. Every time it takes a little longer, but I think I remember reading that is normal, and also why they don’t like to do too many general anesthesias on particular individials in a certain timeframe.