Kev’s Blog – Page 181 – Kev's Development Toolbox

February 21, 2015

The computer on the shelf in WarGames

I’ve just finished reading the first 3 chapters of Fire in the Valley, a history of the development of the PC. These first chapters were history prior to development of the Altair (which was before my time, but I’m familiar with the history), and centered on IMSAI and development of their 8080 computer.

Not having any personal experience with an IMSAI these first chapters were rather dry and slow going, but on the last page of chapter 3 it mentions IMSAI’s one and possibly only claim to fame was that an IMSAI 8080 was used as a prop in the background of WarGames when Matthew Broderick’s character was seen using his computer at home. Given that WarGames is one of my favorite films, this suddenly brought some conext and interest to this first part of the book. I always though that was an Altair on the shelf in the background, but apparently it’s an IMSAI 8080. More info on their site here.

October 20, 2014

Computer History Museum release source for early versions of CP/M

Press release here. CP/M was significant in the history of the development of the IBM PC as IBM famously approached Kildall to license CP/M for the OS for the first IBM PC, but failing to work a deal approached Bill Gates at Microsoft instead.

October 2, 2014

James Gosling at JavaOne 2014 vs JavaOne 2009

JavaOne 2014 wrapped up today, and was another great year, with plenty of awesome sessions. James Gosling played an active part in the Q&A during the Community Keynote this morning, and also gave a retrospective of the development of Java. He was wearing one of his Nighthacks Diner shirts, which I think we’re given out as a special prize at a JavaOne several years back (based on the painting by Edward Hopper, ‘Nighthawks Diner’). I seem to remember the design on this particular shirt, so did some digging in my photos from JavaOne conferences in the past, and here you go:

This is from JavaOne 2009 – I believe James was visiting some of the exhibitions in the Exhibition Hall:

And from this morning during the Community Keynote:

July 10, 2014

Another server drive failure – so migrated my WordPress blog to OpenShift

So it happened. Again. Although the last time was at least 5 years ago. A ton of i/o errors in syslog, and one of my drives in a RAID1 array is not responding. Strangely the other drive although still working is reporting in SMART that it is also about to die. That seems unlikely to have two drives go at the same time?

SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.

Uh-oh.

So here’s the deal. The last time, roughly 5 years ago, I had a drive completely die and my Ubuntu server than I run from home wouldn’t boot. I lost several months of blog posts and notes. When I rebuilt it, I installed a pair of 250GB Hitachi Deskstar P7K500 drives in RAID1 configuration. The odd thing is that one of the drives kept dropping out of the array every few months in the last year, but it could be added back with the mdadm commands so I didn’t think much of it. Maybe I should have looked more closely in the logs what was going on.

So I’m at the decision point. Probably shouldn’t just replace one of the drives if one is alreay bad, should probably replace them both. Do I want to spend a couple of hundred on another pair of drives? At least the RAID array probably saved me from completely losing everything again.

I’ve run my own Linux server from home since about 2000. It’s physically changed motherboards a couple of times, its been a PIII and most recently a P4 with just 512MB of RAM and I’ve run JBoss versions from 3.x or so upto 5.x, Glassfish 3.x, I’ve run my blog on on my own custom app (BBWeblog), then Drupal, Joomla, and most recently WordPress on Apache. I’ve enjoyed running my own server since it means I can do whatever I like with it, and other than the cost for the hardware, there’s no hosting costs for my sites.

I think it’s reached the point though where enough is enough. Time to move online somewhere. Given that I’ve been using OpenShift for a number of projects at work, it seemed an easy choice to spin up a gear using the WordPress template and just import my site. And it only took a couple of minutes to get it up and running. I spent more time playing around with the WordPress Themes than I did actually setting it up and importing my site.

The only slightly tricky part was to update the DNS entry to point to OpenShift, which involved the following steps:

Update my record on zoneedit.com to delete the entry for my domain. I’ve been using ZoneEdit because they support Dynamic IP addresses by giving you a script to run locally to update what your actual IP address is periodically.
Update my GoDaddy account to remove the ZoneEdit DNS servers, switch from Custom DNS settings to Standard, click on DNS Zone File, and then add a CNAME record for ‘www’ pointing to my apps’s URL on OpenShift
Back to OpenShift, run ‘rhc add-alias wordpress www.kevinhooke.com’ where wordpress is the name of my app.

This post was useful, and here’s the docs for ‘rhc add-alias’

Done! It actually only took a couple of minutes for the changes to get reflected too, i.e. if I ping www.kevinhooke.com it’s now picking up the new IP for my OpenShift server on AWS.

I’m probably still going to play around with some customization options on WordPress, but from start to finish it was probably less than an hour. It would have taken me far much longer than that to install new drives in my server, reinstall from a drive image, and get it all set up again. So, fingers crossed, here’s looking forward to my new home on OpenShift 🙂