Category: Computer bits

Computer stuff

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The wikis are multiplying

The two wikis I set up for other groups to manage their documentation have now expanded to four (including my Medical Physics wiki). At about 45 MB for just the code, I realized having multiple Mediawiki installs running around was quickly going to suck up a lot of disk space and be a PITA to manage, especially for upgrades.

Fortunately after combing through the manual and FAQ I came across pages about setting up a Wiki family and another helpful link for setting up multiple wikis on the same server.

After trying it out on my test server, I now have all four wikis running off the same installation (took about 20 minutes). One copy is much easier to maintain than 4 separate ones, although one significant flaw in Rumberg’s approach is that if future versions introduce new files, some of them (depending on where they’re located) will have to be manually linked into the other wiki’s. Still much better than having to manage multiple installations.

Now what I need to do is set them up with a common help that’s sufficiently customized for the local installation.

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How the mouse cursor really moves

This is too funny

http://www.1-click.jp/

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iRobot Create

People have been hacking iRobot‘s Roombas almost since they came out, taking them apart, reprogramming them, adding more sophisticated components. I remember reading about one sacrificial effort where some guys took a Roomba, reworked it a bit and used it to play a real-life game of Frogger. I think they made it across the street and back once or twice before the Roomba got squashed.

A little while ago, the iRobot guys opened up the interface for the Roomba. Now iRobot has a new platform just for those robot hackers out there, the iRobot Create. You’ve got access to all the sensors, servos and motors, port interfaces for attaching other hardware (with the optional Command Module) and all the software you need to program the sucker.

To help kick things off, Tom’s Hardware and iRobot are having a robot building contest.
Sounds like fun 🙂

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There’s an echo in here…

I think I’ve figured out why the server stats spiked with the new server.

After looking at the web server stats and access logs, the visit volume hasn’t changed, but the bandwidth per visit doubled for some reason. While monitoring the access logs, I noticed that page requests were being logged twice for some reason. So either the webserver is logging things twice for each request, or the server is serving up each request twice, effectively doubling the bandwidth.

So, now to figure out why Apache is acting up like this and how to fix it.

Update: Found the culprit. Turned out to be an extra CustomLog directive in the config file that was causing requests to be logged twice. That means the increased web server bandwidth is just an illusion.

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Web access spike

I’m still digesting the data from awstats, but for some reason web server stats on the server has been skyrocketing (double over the previous month) ever since the new server came online.

Radinfo was serving up 50-100 MB/day (and about the same added on for bot traffic), but since the new server came online last month, anywhere from 120-300 MB/day has been the norm now, averaging 240 MB/day. So far this month the server’s been averaging almost 270 MB/day! At that rate, I’m looking at a little over 8 GB for this month alone. With bot traffic using up about the same amount of bandwidth, that’s a total of 16 GB/month!

I’m not sure why traffic has spiked like this. Awstats doesn’t really break it down that much in terms of who is accessing what although there’s still a lot of data there to digest. Might have to stuff the web server logs into a database and do some of my own data mining to figure out what’s going on.

What the heck is going on and what the heck are all these people doing here?