The Cult of Gary

It’s snowing again.
I live on top of Burnaby Mountain near SFU, so it’s somewhat expected. Since xmas day, it’s snowed every day up here, which is unusual. It mostly rained yesterday, so a lot of the old snow is gone. It didn’t snow this much all last winter. It looks like it’s starting to [...]

We got 3 duplicate DVD’s for xmas this year. Yesterday morning I tried to return them to Futureshop for store credit. I stood in line for about 45 minutes (and I got there early! The line got longer behind me).
They were gifts and I didn’t have any receipts for them. Apparently they have a new [...]

I got Alexa a domain name for xmas. She likes to to craft and eventually wants to get more involved in the community and sell her stuff online. We figure a blog is the first step towards this goal.
I set up my blog with blogger. I mostly picked it because I could use google to [...]

Morgan Tocker has some EC2 benchmarks for MySQL. The performance doesn’t stack up all that well. He says EC2 tends to be inconsistent, which makes sense on a shared machine. 
It would be interesting to see a Xen VM in the mix for comparison. It may give clues as to how loaded up each Amazon Dom0 [...]

I never got around to updating my Safari Adventure.
About 2 hours after reseting Safari, it started crashing. I reset Safari again, and it lasted about 10 minutes before it started crashing again. I went through various dances, like shut down safari, start safari, reset safari. That didn’t work. I tried shut down, start, reset, shut [...]

Or: “If I had read the documentation, I’m sure I wouldn’t have wasted an hour”
In your Xen DomU config files, if you put in:
vif = [ '' ]
To configure your interface, it will go into ‘NAT mode’. It seems that it will DHCP you an IP address that’s probably not what you expect. If you [...]

I figured it’s about time for another update in my EC2 Uptime Series. The Nagios gui doesn’t let me specify time frames more than “this month”, “past 30 days” etc, so I’ve only done December.So far, 0 downtime. If you add the other graph (which covers November 27 till Dec 4), that’s 22 days of [...]

I’ve been a VMware boy for years. I started with at least Workstation 3, probably Workstation 2. I think they have an excellent product. VMware Infrastructure is quite amazing and VMware server is a great free product.
I’ve been half heartedly trying to get Xen vm’s up for the past couple of weeks. I haven’t really [...]

Wow, I was thinking about something like SimpleDB two days ago.
SimpleDB looks awesome. It actually looks a lot like CouchDB. Maybe that’s what they are using? They are charging per “CPU cycle”, so they could have CouchDB servers running in EC2 and are measuring the resource usage.
Going back to my design.. I was thinking of doing [...]

I’ve been using Firefox on my mac. This is mostly because I feel like I can’t do without all my plugins for various things. It kinda freaks me out to not have things like the AWS tools (s3fox and EC2 UI), various proxy tools, YSlow, Firebug, etc.
Yesterday I went to start up Parallels, but it [...]