www.LenGoldenstein.com

I’ve succumbed to the hyper over Twitter.  Everyone talks about it like it is the next big thing but I don’t see the big deal over micro-blogs – perhaps I’ll be proven wrong though.  I’ve done some integrationg between Twitter and Wordpress so we’ll see what neat things I can come up with.  Maybe there is some Mediaportal plug-in that would tweet what movie I’m watching…

I can’t believe how nice it is outside!  +18c right now!  After months of it being more than 40 degrees less, this is a well deserved change!  A little time outside doing house/yard work, time walking the dogs and time bbq’ing is taking away from all my upgrades.  What kind of nerd am I if I’m not spending my summer indoors?  Just have to wait a little until Hillock…

To keep the upgrade theme going, now that my old Windows server is free, I’ll be rebuilding that Dell P4-1.5Ghz system as a newer MediaPortal system.  I’ve been running an old version of MediaPortal (but it was current at the time!) for well over a year now.  It has been the best addition to my home theatre centre ever!  Currently, it is running on an 8+ year old P3-1000 system that used to be my main computer many years ago and then was Eva’s main computer until she got her iMac.  It has been doing well for MediaPortal but the time has come to update the software and add a little more horsepower to the system as well so that I can run some newer plug-ins like Moving Pictures which are more graphically rich than most plug-ins.  Hopefully with the extra horsepower, I can get back in to building my MAME system for home.  The P3-1000 system didn’t quite cut it for running MAME and handling the Bluetooth Wii remote controllers.

Since I just surpassed 100 posts on this blog, I thought posting some stats would be interesting.  Unfortunately I only started collecting good stats for the blog in September/08.  Prior to this, I was using a Wordpress stats plug-in that did work well with the Wordpress caching plug-in so the stats were a bit skewed and inaccurate.  In September, I changed stats collection to the excellent Wordpress.com stats plug-in.  So let’s see some stats for the last seven months:

Total page views since Sept/08: 73,802 views

Most popular blog entry: Howto: Install Custom Firmware on a PSP Slim – Step 1 – 21,575 views

Combined views of all PSP articles: 59,246 views

Most popular non-PSP blog entry: Apache as a reverse proxy to Exchange 2007 Outlook Web Access – 1063 views

Busiest Day: December 27, 2008 – 768 views (right after Christmas)

Top referrers:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080924004653AAGx9ul – 91 referrals
http://google.com – 74 referrals
http://forums.benheck.com/viewtopic.php?t=26459 – 49 referrals

Top search terms:
psp grader v006 – 2329
psp grader – 1324
psp grader 006 – 277

Links clicked the most:
http://pspslimhacks.com/psp-firmware/official-firmware-updates/ – 3018 clicks
http://www.x-projects.org/index.php – 2345 clicks
http://rapidshare.com/files/155093962/PSP_Grader_v005_-_Lite_Setup.rar.html – 1886 clicks

Average views per day: 420

Most commented blog entry: Howto: Install Custom Firmware on a PSP Slim – Step 3 – 149 comments

The statistics clearly show that most of the traffic on this blog are people searching for PSP information.  It’s kinda neat but I’m certainly not an authority on PSP modding as I’ve only modded two PSPs myself.  Makes me wonder exactly how many people have followed the tutorial successfully on their own.  Also looks like a lot of people got PSPs for Christmas.

Aside from the PSP articles, the other technical blog entries about Exchange, Apache and VMWare have had their own steady flow of traffic.  It’s interesting to see how many people have similar setups to what I work with and the same problems I’ve encountered.  That’s the great thing about the Internet – the ability to easily share information around the globe with the click of a mouse button.

This blog is also 100% free of advertising and despite the moderate amount of traffic, absolutely no revenue is generated.  This blog is a free information service to the public for all the nerds out there like me.

Might as well keep the upgrades rolling so Wordpress is now up to date at the current version of 2.7.1.  Smooth and easy upgrade with no significant problems.  It’s pretty nice having a quick and responsive web server for a change!

My server upgrade is near the end now.  Following up to my previous two problems encountered… To solve problem #2, I simply made the shelf a bit bigger.  There really are not many problems that can’t be fixed without a hammer.  In this case, a hammer and a chisel.  Here’s the modified server rack:

Here’s the complete server rack with all the goodies (cable modem, network switch, wireless router, UPS and MediaPortal PC with a 1 terabyte USB drive attached:

As for the problem with the blog, my initial suspicions seem to have been correct.  After disabling the WP SuperCache plug-in, everything stayed stable for a couple of days instead of this blog getting hung up once or twice a day.  I’ll try tuning the plug-in to use a different file-locking method to hopefully avoid the lock-ups and/or maybe I’ll upgrade to Wordpress 2.7.1 to see if that helps.  I’ve been meaning to upgrade Wordpress anyways…  On the bright side, disabling WP SuperCache isn’t so bad because the ESXi web server is so much more powerful than the old server that serving the Wordpress pages dynamically is actually fairly responsive on the new system.  On the old system, dynamic pages were horrificly slow unless I served static cached pages.   I still think caching is a good idea overall so I’ll keep working on it.

I also upgraded ESXi to Update 4.  This was a total no-brainer.  All you need to do is use the VMWare Infrastructure Update client that comes with the VMWare Infrastructure client (make sure to select the Update client during the install!) and the Update client does everything.  Reboot and ESXi is updated.  Updating the VMWare tools on the guest systems is a breeze too.

I like when updates and upgrades go well!

The best April fools joke this year goes out to ThinkGeek for having a unique and original product being showcased.  The only unfortunate part is that the product was only a joke and is not available.  However, due to amazingly high demand, ThinkGeek is going to try to license and manufacture the TaunTaun sleep bag.  I’d buy one for camping if they make a size to fit a 6′4″ person.

Without a doubt, the most useless day on the Internet when sites that 364 days a year provide accurate & interesting news turn in to wastes of otherwise useful computing cycles just to make up stupid jokes all day long.  It may have been mildly funny a decade ago but it isn’t anymore.  Up yours, slashdot et al.