Red Drag Diva

Can anyone get to E17 over the next few days (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) and help us with cleaning our old house? LOVE YOU LONG TIME.

We got the keys OK. Survived the day of box lugging with only a slightly screaming in agony back and one waffer-thin car crash. Here's to hire companies who rush to take care of all the details for you; I should only have to pay the £250 excess. Happy customer of Enterprise here, highly recommending them. (Pro tip: Always book online — if they don't have the size you booked in stock, you get a free upgrade.)

Internet will be patchy indeed. arkady and I have phones. Monday I'm back in the office. The phone line account for the previous tenant is apparently still active, so Zen can't just grab it; waiting for the real estate to ask the landlord to ask BT about that, tralala.

Also can't work out how to switch on the hot water. There's an immersion heater (= horribly expensive storage heater powered by electricity rather than gas), but there's also a gas boiler which has no power.

We're moving house again! The ongoing problems with this house (e.g. mould in strange places) turn out to require serious building work, which is basically incompatible with using it as a house. Our delight at this is unalloyed. Anyone in London got a car we could borrow in early-mid May? Also, we'll be seeking volunteers to help with cleaning this place. Which is really very easy to clean. Barring the hideous mould.

One plus point is that, the older teen finally being elsewhere, we can move somewhere smaller. There's a lot of two-bedroom houses and ground floor flats in E17 for £1000 or under. The utility bills should be smaller, too (this place is heat-inefficient to Australian standards).

Life otherwise continues quite nicely. arkady remains gainfully employed, and has successfully convinced her victims coworkers that the other sysadmin is the bad cop and she's the good cop.

I am continuing to bang my head against the RationalWiki blog. Writing a post every day is exhausting — even just polishing up a wiki article as a blog post requires a complete reference check and quite a bit of rewriting — but hopefully it's helping in the eternal battle against public stupidity. (Typical ~200 hits/day, the occasional popular post might be 5000-8000.) The things I'll do for charity. I need to fix the theme again (the header), and move it to the RationalWiki Foundation server (it's currently camped out on someone else's VM they want to get rid of). If you like it, tell your friends! And if you don't, tell them anyway. You can also sign up to get it by email, which saves remembering to go to the site.

Running the Twitter has a much better fun:work ratio. Edzard Ernst even retweets it on occasion.

Forgot to post these before. Enjoy.

( TAKE DOWN THE LINK TO OUR SITE IMMEDIATELY. )

( You're an idiot. )

• Rocknerd: Monty explains how digitising signals actually works.

arkady has a job! Part-time PFY to hawkeviper, who seems to have told her boss to employ her before actually telling Arkady herself. This of course saves a certain amount of fuss. Starting Monday. I am enormously proud.

Still getting a post up every day on the RationalWiki blog; mostly rewrites of RationalWiki articles. The latest homeopathy one is the most popular thing ever posted there, even if making fun of homeopaths is like shooting 10¹⁰⁰ fish in a molecule of barrel. There's lots of great stuff there if you read back ... I need to get around to making a new front page for the Twenty Twelve theme, 'cos every magazine theme I've looked at seems to suck or be broken.

So yeah, it's still eating my life. At least I feel like I'm getting something useful for the world done. Still unwritten: an article on cancer quackery — not just that it's particularly evil, not just why it's evil, but how the false hope works.

"Hallelujah 2000" is the conclusive argument in favour of record bonfires in Chicago stadiums. I lasted until the banjo. Fortunately disco has its high points too; still on large doses of Yellow Magic Orchestra, whose name you don't hear so much these days, but you really should. (Lots on YouTube if you're curious.)

• You know how stupid baraminology is? QuantumMAN could actually be stupider.

• I concur wholeheartedly with this Register piece on netbooks, my favourite computer form factor ever.

I spent most of the week thinking about RationalWiki's social media strategy, and I am slightly horrified to use that phrase as if it means something. The blog is ticking along at about 150 hits/day, which is not terrible for something completely new. There's some really good posts on the blog, and of course they disappear in time almost immediately; if you like a post, please spread the link around lots. There's a lotta stupid out there in the world to clean up. I also have the keys to the @rationalwiki Twitter.

If you ever need to grep -r a whole codebase (or other huge directory tree of text), just use ag instead. It's really nice and ridiculously faster. Not in the distros yet, but there are developer-endorsed debs and RPMs.

Started using RT at work. It really is just completely a bucket of cocks. Still a better love story than Remedy, though.

• New Wikipedia by me: Kalima (band), Category:Factory Benelux artists.

• RationalWiki: Isagenix.

• My Wikimedia blog: ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED.

arkady asks the world: "How do you market your skills and sell yourself as an artist? How do you turn talent into earnings? I seriously need to learn." Because basically, we need the fucking money. She has a Facebook page (please like it and each post on it), Twitter, DeviantArt, CafePress. Commissions eagerly accepted!

Spent half the week sick in bed, thus missing Perth friends Wendy Smith and Gareth Jones visiting. Bah!

We now have two 30W 6400K daylight-spectrum bulbs in the lounge. That's 150W equivalent. Bloody hell, they're bright. arkady is finding herself perking up a lot — turns out bright light is good for wakefulness, particularly in this weather at this time of year. Though it's utterly unforgiving for any trace of grime in the room.

I don't need to detail Freda's reaction to the SNOW!!! Or mine. Annoyingly powdery, though; impossible to make anything out of. She enjoyed throwing snowballs at me, of course.

If they'd had the Internet in Biblical times, "don't read the comments" would have been in Leviticus right after the shellfish.

• "... a generation of men and women who literally don't understand what sexual consent looks like."

• NewsTechnica: Archbishop: "Christmas is all about the bumsex". THREE IN A YEAR.

• Rocknerd: Party Fears #18¾ and #19 published at last; Record your voice! Amazing novelty!; Science proves it: rock stardom is bad for your health; A Lord Horror timeline.

arkady's body is not so much a temple as a flat conversion. Due July. || Freda is, of course, delighted at the prospect of getting to be the big sister.

I think we survived Christmas. Freda got a bike. I did the same trick to her that my parents did to me: bike in lounge so I could see her face. Success: 1, 2. I got a couple of books. Arkady made a BLOODY AMAZING Christmas mead that smells and tastes just like a Christmas pudding, except about 20% ABV. Christmas treat: lightly microwaved Tesco Value Stilton. OH MY GOD THIS IS WONDERFUL. The destruction of all life on Earth is a small price.

What I did on my holidays: cleaned up OpenOffice on Wikipedia. I am interested in your thoughts as readers.

RationalWiki got Redditdotted and I didn't even notice. So our work on the servers paid off, then.

Has First Monday ever published a useful and important paper? I see only bad papers on good subjects: trolling for academic hits. (Though they've had the good taste to take down "A Critique of Vulgar Raymondism" at long last.)

• That disconcerting sensation of wanting the Daily Mail to win.

• RationalWiki: Examiner.com, Continuum fallacy.

• Rocknerd: Party Fears #17 scanned and online (also done most of what would have been #19); Simple Minds, Devo, The Church: Palais, November 30.

You have a problem, you think "I know, I'll use PHP!" Now Ukrainian h@xx0rs pwn your problem. I've been clearing out stuff at work, putting the PHP onto one server and getting PHP off any URL it doesn't belong on. As a drug, PHP is not like heroin, more like petrol huffing. As a weapon, it's a dirty bomb: not much visible damage, but a nasty cleanup job. I picture post-apocalyptic three-headed mutants chewing on roast mutant dog around a PCB fire, communicating entirely in PHP. I so wish people would stop building useful things on a foundation of retarded toxic waste.

We have also looked at 'l33t3r alternatives to Apache. The trouble with getting rid of Apache is that it ends up like replacing a Swiss army knife with a kitchen drawer full of 20 individual replacement gadgets. Which jams shut a lot.

It's the same fallacy as the NoSQL movement: you are not Google, you do not have Google's problems of scale and you'll end up building the equivalent of a relational database on top, except even worse than MySQL.

tl;dr If you have WordPress on a server that's short on memory, use fcgid, mpm-worker and WP Super Cache. fcgid is also good for MediaWiki on a cramped server.

The below is currently in place on davidgerard.co.uk/notes, rocknerd.co.uk and newstechnica.com, which live on a 512MB Ubuntu 12.04 VM (Rackspace's cheap loss-leader option; 1GB costs three times as much) running WordPress. It is a first draft. I welcome your experienced advice, suggestions, tweaks and "oh God no that's stupid." This post will be edited as I go.

(Why do you want to do this? When your site runs useful applications like WordPress or MediaWiki, and you have any popularity at all and find yourself running out of memory alarmingly fast and the box choking on swapped Apache processes. So you want to shove PHP off to be a separate problem, and without libphp5 you can use Apache mpm-worker, which is smaller. fcgid is not as fast as the module, but if your limiting factor is memory then it's just the thing.)

What I did:

• sudo -s
  apt-get install libapache2-mod-fcgid php5-cgi
  
• Edit /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini and uncomment:
  cgi.fix_pathinfo=1
• Here's my /etc/apache2/sites-available/rocknerd.co.uk, changes in red (is there a way to do this for all vhosts?):

  <VirtualHost *:80>
  	ServerAdmin dgerard@gmail.com
  	ServerName rocknerd.co.uk
  	ServerAlias www.rocknerd.co.uk
  	ServerAlias rocknerd.org.uk
  	ServerAlias www.rocknerd.org.uk
  	DocumentRoot /home/fun/www/rocknerd.co.uk
  	<Directory /home/fun/www/rocknerd.co.uk>
  		Options Indexes FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI
  		AllowOverride All
                  AddHandler fcgid-script .php
                  FCGIWrapper /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php .php
  		Order allow,deny
  		allow from all
  	</Directory>
  	ErrorLog /home/fun/log/rocknerd.co.uk/apache2/error.log
  	LogLevel warn
  	CustomLog /home/fun/log/rocknerd.co.uk/apache2/access.log combined
  </VirtualHost>

• I put this in a file called /etc/apache2/conf.d/php-fcgid.conf (these numbers were for a VM with 512MB memory and PHP memory_limit=64M; I have no idea if the numbers in the bottom half are at all sensible):

  <IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
    AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi .php
    FcgidConnectTimeout 20
    PHP_Fix_Pathinfo_Enable 1
    # Where to look for the php.ini file?
    DefaultInitEnv PHPRC        "/etc/php5/cgi"
    # Maximum requests a process handles before it is terminated
    MaxRequestsPerProcess       1000
    # Maximum number of PHP processes
    MaxProcessCount             10
    # Number of seconds of idle time before a process is terminated
    IPCCommTimeout              240
    IdleTimeout                 240
    #Or use this if you use the file above
    FCGIWrapper /usr/bin/php-cgi .php
  
    ServerLimit           500
    StartServers            3
    MinSpareThreads         3
    MaxSpareThreads        10
    ThreadsPerChild        10
    MaxClients            250
    MaxRequestsPerChild  1000
  </IfModule>

• apache2ctl restart; apache2ctl status and verify the site still loads. All good? Proceed:
• apt-get install apache2-mpm-worker; apache2ctl restart; apache2ctl status and verify the site still loads.
• Now work out how much memory you want to give PHP in /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini and the MaxClients for Apache itself (to serve static content). Read through the mod_fcgid documentation to configure things sanely for your box.

Experienced advice welcomed. The above is currently in place; in my initial attempts to utterly hammer it, the memory fills and the box goes 250MB into swap, but it appears to actually be swapping swappable stuff, the pages get served (eventually ... a bit of a queue), the load average doesn't go nuts and stuff doesn't fall over. In later attempts to hammer it (wget in a loop), it didn't fall over but did take minutes to serve pages on uncached blogs; I'll need to do something about that.

Next victim: rationalwiki.org, which thankfully has 4GB to play with but is actually a bit popular. Victim after that: the LAMP box at work.

Update: I have just put WP Super Cache in front of all the blogs. It caches using mod_rewrite trickery such that Apache does all the serving for cached pages and requests don't touch PHP. So hammering it for 1000 of the same thing, it served them in a few seconds. I also tried hammering the site with 1000 different nonexistent URLs and it was slow but kept serving (and returned blank pages for most of the 404s). I am now confident that if I write something popular, then (a) the server will stay up (b) people will still be able to read it. If I write something unpopular then (c) it should stand up to a mild one-person DOS.

arkady's Dell 1012 netbook (Atom N450 CPU, NM10 chipset) has been a nightmare since Ubuntu 10.10 support ended.

Ubuntu 12.04 has a kernel-oopsing Bluetooth bug introduced by Canonical, and 12.10 has a terrible tendency to run fine for a while then go nuts, have all its CPU taken by ... something ... then overheat and shut down.

So I thought, "let's get back to base: Debian." I put Wheezy on with LXDE. Which is nothing like as awful as I've been told, even if bits of the interface tell you to look up man 3 strftime (seriously, that's what LXDE tells you to do if you want your clock to show seconds). Debian remains a piquant blend of 2012 and 1993. Trouble is, it started doing the "go nuts, CPU locked up, die" thing as well.

(By default, Debian Wheezy boots into GNOME 3, which is so superlatively intuitive I literally couldn't figure out how to start an application. The only thing I could do was shut it down. With great pleasure.)

So I took it back to Ubuntu 10.04, which is supported until 2015, and everything is usable now, thanks (even if bits are the Museum of Old Software). Although Arkady is actually using the monster truck gaming laptop for daily work. But the netbook makes a lovely portable and non-fragile video player for Freda.

(Man, Ubuntu GNOME 2 is just so damn easy to use. I really hope MATE can attract a critical mass of developers.)

My question is: do you have a Dell 1012 running a recent Linux of any distro, and have you seen anything like the above pathological behaviour?