Anthony’s Ramblings

A few months ago I went on a quest to replace all the O2 sensors in my T-Bird.  The car has 4 O2 sensors.  Each side of the engine has it’s own pre-cat, and there is a sensor before and after both pre-cats.  To my dispair, there were only 3 O2 sensors in stock for my car within the entire Merced county…one in Atwater, and two, each at a different store, in Merced.  One of the O2 sensors looked like it had been replaced recently, so I decided 3 was okay and replaced the 3 stock sensors.  Everything was fine.

Then recently, as seen below, I began having trouble.  Rough idle and lag, plus the odd smelling exhaust.  I had no idea what was causing it and was going to go insane.  Some people I had talked to said that I may have a pre-cat or main-cat on it’s way out.  Boy I hope not!  They’re not cheap.  Lucky for me, the car finally threw a check engine light yesterday.

I run to Autozone and use their OBD-II code reader to grab the trouble codes.  I got two codes: P1131 (Oxygen Sensor Lean Bank 1) and P0131 (Oxygen Sensor Low Voltage Bank 1).  Sone of a bitch, that’s the O2 sensor I didn’t replace!  So I ran down to the local Kregans, bought an O2 sensor and replaced the one that I skipped.

I started the car and instantly it ran like crap.  I gave it 5-10 minutes, and it still ran like crap.  At this point I was starting to get a bit frustrated.  Maybe I have a vacuum leak somewhere…maybe I have a misfire due to a bad spark plug wire or fuel pressure system not operating properly…I don’t know!  I decide to go for a test drive anyway, and wash my hands.  All of a sudden, the car revves, all on its own, to what sounded to be about 1,500 RPM, comes back down to idle, and is as smooth as glass.  Hmm…let’s not get our hopes up.

So, I took that test drive. Drove around with a mixture of freeway and residential driving.  Every stop I made I sat there for a few seconds to feel the car.  Smooth as glass.  By George I think I solved the problem!  But wait…let’s not get our hopes up.

 So far, today, it’s been smooth as glass.  I can’t even feel the car running at idle.  It’s smoother than the day I bought it.  I’m quite happy.  April 10th I’ll be driving down to Fresno State to tour their server rooms and IT dept. facilities, so that’ll be the true test.

I got home Wednesday night around 4:45 PM. An hour and a half later, I walk out to the garage to get something, and there is anti-freeze all over the floor. Not good. I have my dad check it out with me, and we determined that it was a rear freeze plug. This meant that the engine would have to be pulled for it to be fixed since there is no room to work. However, we weren’t completely sure, but didn’t see anything that told us otherwise. So, we let it sit.

I re-examine the car Thursday afternoon. I found anti-freeze puddling under the intake manifold (since the car has overhead cams, there is a big empty space in the middle of the engine), and anti-freeze around the outer left side of the intake manifold. I show my dad the findings, and we rule that it’s the intake manifold gasket. We don’t want to deal with the mess of hoses that cross over the intake manifold, so this means it’s shop time.

• Replace intake manifold gasket
• Replace radiator (because it will need one eventually due to a very very small leak coming from the bottom passenger side of it, might as well do it now)
• Replace heater core hoses (might as well replace ‘em while you have access to them).
• Refill system with water/coolant

Update: $800, 2 days at the shop, and it doesn’t leak coolant any more!  However, the shop refused to hook up their OBD-II code reader to my car because the interface port was a little corroded (which I cleaned with no problem…not sure why they didn’t want to clean it).  It idles rough and the exhaust has an odd smell, which it didn’t have before I took it to the shop.  I’ll have Autozone grab the codes from the computer and see what’s up.  Kinda frustrating but eh well.  I do like the car, so I’m going to stick through it.

As of 9:11 PM PST, the HP NetServer LC 2000r (aka debsrv01) was shut down. The migration to the Dell PowerEdge 830 server (aka debsrv02) has been successfully completed. I’m going to miss the big ol’ noisey system. It served me well. Now I must move on. Godspeed, my friend.

Let’s take a moment of Coldplay for the NetServer.

Coldplay – Clocks

Lights go out and I can’t be saved
Tides that I tried to swim against
You’ve put me down upon my knees
Oh I beg, I beg and plead (singing)
Come out of things unsaid, shoot an apple of my head (and a)
Trouble that can’t be named, tigers waiting to be tamed (singing)
You are, you are

You are [continues in background]
Home, home, where I wanted to go [x4]

Akismet: A centralized blacklist that comments left on your blog are checked against. Any comments that Akismet may miss and you mark as spam are contributed to the Akismet blacklist. This helps build a blacklist so bulletproof that you should never have to worry about comment spam again. It is explained better here.

————

I’ve been trying out Akismet for a few days. It definitely gets the job done in terms of catching comment spam. However, it still is not as good as a captcha.

Before I started using a captcha, I was getting at least 50 comment spams a day (sometimes up to 200!). It was ridiculous! I was fed up with the spam. So I decided to give SecureImage a try. It took a little tweaking and searching for a decent font. Once I got it working, it worked like it was supposed to. Humans posted comments…bots did not. I never ran into a single piece of comment spam again. The captcha did not allow bots to successfully post!! Whoo!!

About a week ago, Sam had sent me an e-mail about Akismet and wanted me to try it. I figured it was worth a shot, so I disabled my captcha and put Akismet to work.

The first night running Akismet went very well. It caught 2 comment spams! I was shocked. Only two?! Surley it had missed something! Nope…it didn’t. The second night it caught 4. Third night, 16. And tonight, 46. Akismet never skipped a beat and caught all the spam. But wait, the spam is coming back…with buddies! Ahhh!!!

I gave these numbers some thought, and only have one conclusion. The captcha was deterring bots from even bothering an attempt at a comment post. Disabling the captcha with a return spam rate that is very low…it’s got to be doing the trick. I can’t think of anything else. This is especially good news for those who pay for bandwidth by the unit. Hmm…maybe spambots have the winter off?? Nah.

Akismet does exactly what it’s designed to do, catch all comment spam, and it does it well. However, if you are picky like me and don’t like to see wasted bandwidth, CPU cycles, and hard drive writes due to the spam flowing through your WordPress database on your home-brew server with a measily DSL WAN connection, a captcha may be the way to go. Of course, if you could care less about the unnecessary load on your host and its Internet connection, Akismet does work.

To sum everything: As annoying as a captcha may be to your blog visitors, it is still the better way to eliminate comment spam.

Another interesting read brought to you by Sam. Read it: This Essay Breaks the Law

Companies have patented their method of hiring, and real estate agents have patented the way they sell houses. Lawyers now advise athletes to patent their sports moves, and screenwriters to patent their movie plots. (My screenplay for “Jurassic Park” was cited as a good candidate.)

Michael Crichton – Excerpt from This Essay Breaks the Law – NY Times

(If it asks you to log-in, I printed the article to PDF for an alternative viewing source. Click here to view it.)

I hope nobody has patented “referring and/or linking to news articles in weblog posts” yet. I wouldn’t be able to afford the royalty fee.

You are now looking at Wordpress 2.0.2 on my new Dell PowerEdge 850 server. The only thing that I haven’t moved yet is Jabber. So far it’s been zero downtime, baby. Man, I’m getting good at this server juggling business!

On the left, you see my old server. An HP LC 2000r (that takes rather expensive memory). It’s got two 9 GB SCSI-2 drives. For now, it’s still taking care of Jabber. On the right, my new server (obviously). The Dell looks so much cooler. And look, it has a blue light! The Dell is fast, quitet, smaller, and bit stylish (for a server). I like it. (Click the picture to enlarge).

I dumped CMS Made Simple for a much better site design. Let me know what you think! http://www.hhsn.net/

Somebody needs a little more science in the classroom…

ABUJA (Reuters) – The Nigerian government, anxious to avoid a repeat of riots that marked a solar eclipse in 2001, warned citizens they may suffer “psychological discomfort” during a new eclipse this month but urged them not to panic.

Information Minister Frank Nweke said an eclipse five years ago caused riots in northern Borno state because people did not know why it happened.

“Some people even felt some evil people in their communities were responsible for the eclipse,” he said in a statement on Thursday aimed at reassuring Nigerians that the eclipse is expected to darken parts of the country on March 29.

“The eclipse is not expected to have any real damaging effect, only social and psychological discomforts are envisaged,” Nweke said.

He did not explain what the discomforts might be.

Link to Article

I stole this from Sam’s Blog. It is a must read…and is very true.

Seth Godin explains the marketing problems with “what might be the greatest threat ever to the future of mankind.” This is two minutes of required reading for any citizen of the planet Earth. Go!

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/03/the_problem_wit.html

I never even thought of trying this…

http://phoenix.cc.edu/MegaFloppy.htm

The only downside, since they did a striped set, is if ONE of the floppies goes bad…all data is lost. We all know how reliable a floppy disk is…yeah.

A co-worker of mine asked what type of memory my current server takes. I wasn’t sure, so I checked it out via Crucial. It turns out that the server takes an odd ball type of PC133 ECC RAM, and all I have to say is, damn. To put things into perspective, the server has three 1GB sticks.

Some of you may know that I’ve been trying to find hard drives for my server. It was turning out to be an expensive task. After doing some research, I’d be better off buying a new server. So, that’s what I pondered for a while. I did some research and was very close to purchasing a server a few days ago, but wasn’t satisfied with the deal. I decided to re-browse Dell’s site yesterday and found a deal I had a hard time passing up.

Power Edge 850

• Intel Pentium D 3.0GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2×1MB Cache, EM64T, Execute Disable Bit, Dual Core
• 2GB DDR2 533MHZ RAM
• Three 250GB 7.2K SATA Hard Drives configured as RAID 5
• CERC 6-CH SATA RAID Controller
• 10/100/1000 Onboard NIC
• CD-ROM, of course
• 3 Year Warranty /w Next Business Day Response

Unit Price: $2,304.00
$1056 OFF PowerEdge 830 servers from Dell Small Business!
Sub-Total: $1,248.00
Shipping: $39.00
Estimated Tax: $93.32
Total: $1,380.32

I had previously worked out a similar deal with the Power Edge SC1450 for a similar price. The differences: 3 160 GB SATA drives, 1 GB 400MHz RAM, and a Xeon 2.8 GHz processor. Come to find out, the Xeon has all the features the Pentium D does, and then some. Nothing noticable for anything I’d do, though. A guy at work is going to buy my current server from me, which is cool. Of course, as I was browsing eBay today…I found some affordable 80 GB SCSI drives for my current server. So I told my co-worker to order them…lol. Murphy’s law strikes again!