Diary of a Mad Natural Historian

You might have seen long load times for DoaMNH over the past couple days (or maybe not - what do I know?). I’ve been seeding the Ubuntu Studio torrent - I have the torrent bandwidth throttled back, but the number of simultaneous connections is stressing my little consumer-grade router. I’ve turned off BitTorrent for the day - I’ll probably try to run it overnight (east-coast US, which means late night into the morning UK/Europe and early evening to late night western US). The Ubuntu Studio folks are getting hammered - their web site is currently down - but for those who don’t follow such things, Ubuntu Studio is a variant of the very popular Ubuntu Linux distribution with added packages for audio, video and graphics editing. Tutorials and Studio download status here.

Non-technical version of above - the site may be slow - it’s probably on purpose, because of weird stuff I’m doing - I’m going to try to make it as painless as possible.

We’re back - hopefully for a while. A little bit of New England springtime knocked out power sometime in the wee hours last night, power came on this morning just long enough for me to brew a pot o’ joe (hallelujah) and came on again - for good, I hope - a half hour or so ago.

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There’s always a silver lining - to keep the house warm, a nice fire in the woodstove was needed. Janey was able to work on her research project: testing how close to a stove a dog can lay without bursting into flame.

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Occasionally you may have trouble getting at my blog. I host the site myself - at home - so when the power goes out for a while, or my cable goes out or any number of other things happen -> the blog goes dark. Keep checking - sooner or later I’ll be back.

The DoaMNH technical mini-FAQ:

Q: Why host the site yourself?

A: Um… seemed like a good idea at the time? Actually, I like the feeling of accomplishment I get - additionally, throwing WordPress software on the server I was already running was not a big deal.

Q:Why is it slow?

A: Because US broadband providers don’t get it. They think of residential customers as consumers - passive web surfers - rather than folks who both use and produce info. Bandwidth inbound (from the web to me) is approx. 8Mb/s; outbound (my blog to your browser) is about 750 Kb/s.

Q: So what are you running?

A: From the bottom up:

• Mini-ITX based server (low power consumption) - VIA EPIA SP13000 mobo w/ 512M of RAM and 2 120Gb SATA drives. Parts from Logic Supply.
• SME Server Version 7 - a great, easy to use Linux server distribution. It’s absolutely perfect for a home server.
• WordPress 2.x blogging software with a bunch of plug-ins.

Probably more than you wanted to know.

Taking a break from doin’ the domestic thing this morning - time to clean up a couple loose ends I’ve been meaning to post about…

First - Saturday morning, regardless of what you’re doing, is always improved by Kathy and Red Eye R&B on our local college radio station: WUNH. You can listen across the net and this is one of those cases where, because you can, you should.

Next - a couple new interweb vocabulary words: crowdsourcing and sockpuppet. Crowdsourcing is the strategy Neuros is using with their OSD box - release the hardware, open-source the software and let the hacker community take it from there (with the crowdsourcing company continuing to develop high priority applications and attempting to influence the direction the crowd is taking). A sockpuppet is an identity assumed by a blog author in order to comment favorably on himself, esp. on his own blog. Watch the comments on this post for an example.

Finally - search terms. I run a log file analyser on my little web server; one of the things it shows me is what search phrases bring people to the blog. Number one with a bullet is ‘litel man’ - I have no idea what folks are trying to find, but at least some of them (not many) end up here. Another ‘what are they trying to do?’ phrase is ‘netware hezbollah’. I know there’s a lot of information out there about fourth generation/open source guerilla warfare (see John Robb’s Global Guerillas in the blogroll), but this is crazy. Seriously. The last term I want to throw out there brought a smile to my face - ‘knicker critter’ - yes, at times my sense of humor is not particularly sophisticated.

Back to work…

…because I can. The view out the window:

I’m sure that this (me putting up a blog) signals the death of the medium - regardless, here’s the canonical ‘hello world’. Here’s a link that should start to explain my nom de guerre…