Jeremy Chase

A long uptime is often spoken of as if it is a badge of honor, and many of us parade this number as if it means something. I’ll grant you that it feels cool to have a machine up for 383 days, but you give something up by allowing things to go so long. You lose the knowledge that your machine is going to boot in a state that you are happy with.

This frequent rebooting hypothesis has been kicking around in my head for a couple years, and tonight I finally had an experience that cemented it for me; I rebooted my server and one of my web sites was simply all messed up. The site was supposed to be a simple graphic design portfolio, but instead I was seeing network statistics generated by ntop; ntop?? What?? Why??

Here is what happened; this website is a Rails site using Mongrel running on the default port of 3000. In previous reboots there was no problem and the site came up fine. However, I installed ntop a few months ago and hadn’t rebooted since. Well, it turns out that by default ntop runs some kind of informational webserver on the same port. Since ntop is started before Mongrel the nice design site was replaced with network usage graphs.

Fortunately the timing of this reboot was at a time when it isn’t critical that the site is up, but had the machine had an unscheduled reboot during business hours I would have had to fumble around with this then.

Long story short; reboots aren’t so bad.

Hello all,

I wrote a weather app using Ruby on  Rails, and just recently put it up. Take a look: http://weatherfinder.info/

Jeremy

I started building a Norcal 2N2/30 the other weekend. The last thing I can remember testing is the RX pre-amp and so far everything has worked well. I am trying to understand the circuit as I am building, but that is a challenge to say the least!

My first impressions of the kit and manual are that I am really impressed! Having the photos of each stage makes it much simpler to locate things on the board, and the stage by stage testing really is making me feel better as I go. I do wish there was a sentence or two at each section describing how that stage worked, but alas the manual is already 65 pages long!

Jeremy

Old Man Colpitts is happy from Jeremy Chase on Vimeo.

Here are some funnies.

Outtakes from N1JER’s videos from Jeremy Chase on Vimeo.