I'm setting up my computers "for real" at the apartment in NY now, no longer just using a laptop. Along with real computers come "wire messes." I hate them. I wish there was some way for all these things to "just work" without all the messy wires.

Anyway, here's the wire mess behind my iMac.

And here's the wire mess behind my TV.

More wire messes to come for sure. :-(

Update: My mom blogs about her wire messes.

 4/18/2010; 1:57:35 PM.   .

Here's the route I took from Berkeley to NY on my cross-country road trip.

I got creative in Omaha, and went around the center of the city on 680 at the recommendation of a reader. This was a very good idea.

There was a detour around the Davenport crossing of the Mississippi River, the bridge on I-80 is out.

Then after Chicago I headed northing on I-94 through Flint and Port Huron through Ontario to Niagara Falls. This is a bit out of the way, but I avoided some heavy traffic on the Ohio and Pennsylvania turnpikes, a route I am all-too familiar with having traveled many times back and forth between Madison and NYC. Got to see the falls from the Canadian side, and went through customs twice, always a fun time.

I stopped in Elko, Laramie, West Des Moines, Kalamazoo and Niagara Falls.

McDonald's has the best coffee and they all had free wifi. Still, I prefer to log on at Starbucks. No kids, and they're nicer places to get caught up on what's going on in the world. However, there's no comparison between on-the-road connectivity today and a few years ago. You can get online almost everywhere.

The Droid has a nice feature. If you type "starbucks" into the main screen and click the search icon, it shows you the closest Starbucks. An obvious feature, but it was obvious a few years ago too -- now it's here and it works. (The iPhone has it too.)

The trip took six days. A little snow crossing the Sierra, but nothing too bad, otherwise the weather was good. It was cloudy and cool the whole way. Only rain was on the last day driving through Syracuse and Pennsyvania. As always driving in New Jersey headed into NY is the sucks! ">

 4/18/2010; 1:26:11 PM.   .

Two weeks ago, when I was in Calif, preparing my house to go on the market, and moving almost 40 years of possessions, or giving them away, or selling them, and preparing to drive cross-country -- while all that was going on -- scripting.com stopped working.

It appeared the problem might be with the host, the server was running on Amazon, and the people at Amazon went above and beyond the call of duty to try to find a problem on their end, to no avail. I left town with the server turned off, and most of the content and apps ported to run on an older server hosted elsewhere.

On the drive, with time to think, I had an idea I knew what the problem was, and managed a way to get a look at the server (that was a big part of the problem, I couldn't get through to the server from Remote Desktop Connection). Turns out one of Apache's log files had grown to over a gigabyte in size. It doesn't run at all with such a large log file.

Performance degraded over time until finally it no longer took hits and maintaining the bloated log file consumed all the CPU cycles.

I deleted the log file, reattached the EBS volume, restarted the server, and it's been working perfectly for 72 hours. I'd say with a high degree of confidence that the problem is solved.

Bottom-line: The outage was my fault.

 4/18/2010; 11:07:07 AM.   .

A basic question about Apache for Windows.

Is there a way to send it a message from the local machine, that temporarily turns the server off. And then another to turn it off.

I need to be able to do this from a script running in another process.

Why: I want to archive then delete the log files once a day so they don't grow to be a gigabyte in size.

 4/18/2010; 11:23:22 AM.   .

Not sure why this seems right for Rackspace, but it does.

First, if you haven't been using Dropbox, give it a try. It's easy to set up, very reasonable, and useful and fun.

What's great is that it's easy to build a network of cooperating machines, and even use Dropbox for a very simple form of queue management, and while you're at it, why not use it as part of a publishing system? Indeed.

What would be incredibly cool is if there were a way to:

1. Create a hosting account and give it my Dropbox credentials and a path into my dropbox folder.

2. And have that sub-folder (only!) be served over HTTP at a domain address I provide (something like mystuff.scripting.com). I take care of mapping the domain to the IP address you tell me to map it to.

3. There's some bandwidth limit of say 1 terabyte a month, or less or more -- I don't know the economics -- make it competitive. But that's the only UI for the account.

I know that Dropbox will allow HTTP access to my public folder, but there are serious (and very reasonable) bandwidth limits, and I want to use my own domain for hosting so I'm not locked in.

Hey, this could even be a service Dropbox offers.

 4/18/2010; 11:27:13 AM.   .