Some Apple news reporting today:

Macworld’s Speedmark tests of Apple’s latest high-end desktop system—the eight-core 2.8GHz Mac Pro released earlier this week—show that it’s notably faster than the four-core 2.6GHz Mac Pro it replaces in Apple’s product line.

Thankfully some other people have provided me with an appropriate collection of responses:

1. In other news 2 pounds of feathers weighs more than a pound of lead.

2. Hmmm, new 8 core 2.8 ghz Mac Pro is faster than the old 2.6 ghz 4 core? Alert the press! This is huge!

3. OH MY SCIENCE

But wait, this astounding piece of news continues…

Even more impressively, the new Mac Pro comes close to matching the speed of the previous-generation eight-core 3GHz Mac Pro model, suggesting that internal changes to the Mac Pro line are bolstering performance.

…so it’s pretty fast. But the real innovation here is that it’s almost as fast as a way older model. Well fuck me, I’ll take 2.

o.o

I’ve been making excuses for a while now for why I shouldn’t finally own one. I don’t really have the money, I have other activities that I enjoy to spend my time on, maybe I’ll wait until they come in more colours, or until there’s some good homebrew. Some of these reasons still remain, but a few of them recently changed in a dramatic enough fashion that I’m now a proud owner of a bran new Nintendo Wii!

It happened while visiting Andrew at the opening of his new workplace, a Best Buy store, on Friday. I got to say hi and just hang out for a bit, going to have to try that again in a non-work setting though sometime soon It was fun to hang around the store and talk to some of the other staff too. A lot of them are just starting working for Best buy for the first time and it’s interesting to view the greeting, product pitches and of course the nervousness from them considering that I’ve worked for the sister company before. On a side note, I can’t believe their sale system didn’t change, it’s still that piece of shit green/darker green/black text system that we’ve used (it’s absolutely horrible, and the more you use it, the more you realise this).

But, we’ve come to see some Nintendo goodness and that’s exactly what we shall have!

Here it is still all dressed up!

Getting some more exposure.

I think more and more products that are considered stylish seem to be using the minimalistic packaging and look themes. Plain and simple colour choices and simplicity, Apple does it, Nintendo does it, and my cell phone maker Sony-Ericsson does it and I like it.

There’s definitely some kind of modeling thing going on in those last few shots. It’s definitely awesome looking for no real reason other then it looks really nice. Be warned, fingerprints are impossible to not get onto it immediately. I can’t imagine how people who have the gloss black PlayStation 3’s deal with that. Also, unfortunately, these pictures don’t entirely indicate how large it is and it’s pretty tiny. I can cover most of it with the palms of my two hands.

It’s smiling, that’s for sure. I was just debating if it looks more like KITT or a Cylon if I put some red moving lights in there

The comic joke of the whole situation is I still have nowhere to really put it and even try it. I am thinking I’m going to take it down to the lounge today or tomorrow, gather some people, and try it there. But if anyone’s looking for some Wii game nights, I have it, and 2 sets of controllers (I just couldn’t justify affording more) and let’s do it! I was also talking to Alice over Mongolian, thanks for coming again!, and I think I’m starting to become a bit of a Nintendo fanboy. I don’t think we have one of those yet, so I guess it’s alright. Oh, well, more later, cya!

I don’t like the look of vanilla windows. So, I usually theme it courtesy of StyleXP. I’ve had a minimalistic darker theme for the longest time now, and I finally decided to get something different with a happier mood for the summer. After some searching of various sites, including DeviantART, I came accross something I really enjoyed. It’s still simplistic, but it’s based on bright colours and includes some glass highlights on elements.

In the process I also founda really fun login screen and then some “photoshop” (don’t sue me Adobe, it’s a verb!) work later I got my background to match. Since I know pictures will make more sense anyway, here we are:

Login

Theme

45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2: The return of the Code, randomly generated and assigned courtesy of Freedom to Tinker of course.

One thing that certainly makes using NginX a fun experience is that since the version I installed when I first got the slice, it has already gone through 2 revisions. Thankfully the upgrade process could not be any simpler. There is a pretty on the run replacement method, which is outlined on their wiki, or for my case, there’s just take it offline for the whole 5-10 seconds that it takes to do the upgrade.

On the to fix list there are really two items, maybe 3.

1. Rewrite rules for WordPress, seem to continue to elude me. What seems to be working for several other people is still not giving me the desired result. This is for now fairly low priority as I don’t care about SEO on my personal blog.

2. FastCGI, seems to sometimes go on vacation. I’ve had to restart it once now, and I guess we’ll see if it was a fluke or if this is something that needs to be looked into and fixed. I haven’t seen this on any of our in-house servers, but granted none of them run this exact setup, yet.

3. I should probably look into using SFTP as per the suggestion to another user on the SliceHost forum, I mean it’s sort of amusing to watch the attempted brute-force attacks against your FTP server login, but I don’t like them. Even though they’re not going to get the right login and I take FTP offline when I don’t use it, still, it’s just a small to fix thing.

Tonight, I think I need to write something not technical

If you don’t like geeky technical explanations you really should stop reading now, because this will make absolutely no sense.

I moved my main website over to a VPS provided by SliceHost from the GridServer that MediaTemple offers. In case you’re actually wondering what prompted the change, well a few factors, mostly the completely unreliable MySQL performance on the GridServer setup that can on good minutes be extremely fast and on average makes me hate visiting my own website. The final straw pretty much came when I got a reply to an FTP question that said that the PHP mode would have to be changed to a slower one to accomodate larger FTP transfers not working, I said wtf and moved on

I’ll be writing a few more bits later, but they’ll mostly be how-to and once again geeky articles that shall go on my alternate blog. But for now, as a summary, I’m running the following setup.

- NginX is my front-end webserver that serves any static content on the webpage.
- PHP is v5 and is proxied off to a FastCGI PHP server.
- When I get around to moving the 2nd blog, which is based on Ruby on Rails, it will likewise be passed off to FastCGI. I decided not to go with Mongrels since they offer scalability, but not the performance of FCGI, and since this is a single server setup
- FTP is being catered to by vsftpd, which has the most paranoid upload permissions *ever*.
- And to make things easier and save on system memory, email is being done through Google Apps.

As for what will change for you? Absolutely nothing, except hopefully faster page load times and that’s about it!

I didn’t screw up A/NS entries for domains : )