Silentelsie is not well
Posted by sffubs on Sunday 18th July, 2010 at 14:08:11 BST
I'm afraid that silentelsie's run of nearly 9 years faithful service is coming to a close. She seems to be suffering from a failure in her IDE controller, which is causing the disks to drop off the system one by one. The latest casualty is the disk that holds the photos - you'll find that as a result, the photos area of the website is no longer working.
Fortunately, over the past month, silentelsie has been training a successor: flatelsie. This is an Intel Atom 330 machine, which means it has considerably more horsepower. That should mean that the site, particularly the photos area, runs much quicker.
The changeover process is unlikely to be seamless, so expect some more disruption in the next couple of weeks.
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elsie.org.uk opts out of BT Webwise
Posted by sffubs on Monday 23rd March, 2009 at 14:50:37 GMT
Following the Open Rights Group's call for major websites to opt out of phorm, I've asked for elsie.org.uk to be added to their opt-out list. Obviously this isn't a major blow for internet users' rights, but it can't hurt for as many minor websites as possible to opt out of their scheme. I would encourage any other website operators out there to do the same!
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New Operating System
Posted by sffubs on Sunday 23rd September, 2007 at 12:26:28 BST
Silentelsie has been struggling for the past month or so with an intermittent problem which would cause the web server to stop functioning. I've been meaning to update the old version of Slackware that was installed on silentelsie for some time, and this problem was the last straw. I've finally migrated across to Debian (Etch).
There may well be some teething troubles - I've had to move to new versions of most of the software that runs this site. Please let me know if you find anything that's not working as it shoud.
Edited once. Last edit by sffubs on Sunday 23rd September, 2007 at 19:41:23 BST.
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More Photo Improvements
Posted by sffubs on Wednesday 17th May, 2006 at 18:52:40 BST
Silentelsie has been struggling a little still with the photo system, particularly with the pictures from my new camera.
Hopefully today you should see some improvements. Silentelsie now has 512MB of extra RAM to help resize the photos, and thanks to some software tweaks, you shouldn't see any performance issues when someone else is viewing an album for the first time.
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Photo Software Improved
Posted by sffubs on Tuesday 7th March, 2006 at 22:55:44 GMT
I've received a number of complaints about the speed of the new photo thumbnailing system - it's been slow not just when processing thumbnails, but also when displaying albums that have already been resized. This was due to my laziness when writing the thumbnail server.
I've since realized the error of my ways, and added code that Does Things Properly. I reckon it's a whole lot faster now.
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Photo Software Upgraded
Posted by sffubs on Friday 3rd February, 2006 at 22:48:21 GMT
I've rewritten the program that creates the thumbnails/scaled down images for the photos section. This was mostly because the old system wasted an enormous amount of disk space.
On the plus side, the thumbnails are now slightly better quality, and I have enough disk space to last another couple of years. On the minus side, all the thumbnails have to be regenerated from scratch (and the new system is slower to generate them).
This means that when you are the first person to visit an album, or look at a photo, you will have to wait for my poor little machine to process the photos. Sorry and all that.
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Octomonkey Ident Daemon
Posted by sffubs on Friday 13th May, 2005 at 13:12:06 BST
A simple Python identd with the following features:
The full distribution is here, but for Gentoo people there is also an ebuild.
Edited once. Last edit by sffubs on Tuesday 17th May, 2005 at 12:59:09 BST.
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PyRC: Remote Control For XMMS and MPlayer
Posted by sffubs on Thursday 14th April, 2005 at 23:18:04 BST
Do you have a wireless-networked device that can run Python? Turn it into a remote control!
More info and screenshots can be found here, and the program itself is here.
(Now updated to make it prettier, with proper playlist support.)
Edited once. Last edit by sffubs on Wednesday 20th April, 2005 at 23:20:06 BST.
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My Camera Has Returned From The Dead
Posted by sffubs on Monday 21st February, 2005 at 16:51:22 GMT
Well, from Canon at least. All cleaned up, with the software updated. Apparently the market value for the repairs carried out was 294.93, and included a replacement flash unit, two main PCBs, a JAL pcb and two DC/DC PCBs! Looks like about the only electronics that were left alone were the CCD and the screen.
Anyway, thank you Canon for sorting my problem out relatively quickly, and to my full satisfaction.
I hope that my story is (a) an isolated case in that the camera failed (apparently pretty catastrophically) and (b) is not an isolated case in that the camera was repaired free of charge.
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My Camera Has Expired
Posted by sffubs on Sunday 30th January, 2005 at 17:59:44 GMT
After 13,441 shots and slightly under two years, I think my camera has flashed its last flash. It no longer powers on, and Jessops want 164 to repair it (which is well over its second-hand value).
To be honest, I really expected a 400 camera to last a lot longer than two years. I guess I'll have to think carefully before I consider another Canon.
If anyone needs some spare parts for a Canon S45, let me know...
Edited once. Last edit by sffubs on Thursday 3rd February, 2005 at 20:56:15 GMT.
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