r3dux.org

Looks like I might not have to use the OpenNI proprietary blob for skeleton tracking in my research project afterall… Ties in with Gnome 3 nicely as well!

Will have to get experimenting with that bad boy! =D

Quantic Dream, who made Heavy Rain (or Chubby Drizzle, if you’re hatin’) just released a short piece of machinima to test out their game engine… and the results are pretty special, and quite moving.

All running live on a PS3, no less. The future’s bright…

When I migrated this site from shared hosting to a VPS, I initially went with some really cheap hosting, and I got what I paid for: The site went down often, like every week or so. Sometimes for days at a time. Support tickets went ignored and unanswered, and I was generally a sad puppy.

After a month or two of this I’d had enough, and decided to migrate the site hosting away from Cheap-O-Host to a company called Linode – and I’ve got to say – it’s been absolutely flawless ever since. I can’t even remember the last time the site went down.

This isn’t to say I haven’t had issues with Apache bogging down and basically killing the site by trying to use more RAM than the VPS has available. If I got more concurrent connections than I had RAM for, then some il-advised Apache settings meant that the server would get into swap territory, and the entire thing would grind to a halt from which the only escape was to log into the VPS from the web interface and reboot it. But this wasn’t Linode’s fault – it was mine for trying to do to much with too little.

I finally solved the problem by disabling all the apache modules I didn’t need (which lowered the RAM usage per Apache process, as well as lowering the server’s attack surface), and limiting the concurrent connections to a number that would happily fit within 512MB of RAM – and since then, not a cough or a hiccup. Everything has been running beautifully.

In fact, at the time of writing, my VPS uptime stats are:

# uptime
21:15:38 up 244 days, 12:26,  1 user,  load average: 0.10, 0.07, 0.06

244 days without as much as a reboot! Sweet!

I’m just writing this post to commend Linode because I got yet another monthly email (from siteuptime.com) today saying “site up-time: 100%” and… well, if something goes wrong then people (and definitely me included, here) tend to jump up and down and make a noise – but when something goes right – we generally don’t say anything at all. Which makes the cost of failure getting slagged off, and the reward for success merely not getting slagged off.

As that’s not a particularly good system, I wanted to say something positive about Linode, because it’s not an accident that their systems so rarely go down – I’m sure that it’s entirely due to their hard work, professionalism, and investment & re-investment in the company infrastructure. And I absolutely cannot fault them on that.

So well done, Linode! You guys rock! =D

P.S. For anyone trying to minimise their apache footprint, the minimal set of apache modules I found I needed to run a wordpress site are:

• alias
• authz_default
• deflate
• dir
• env
• expires
• headers
• mime
• php5
• reqtimeout
• rewrite, and
• setenvif

And my final, working Apache prefork MPM settings in apache2.conf for a VPS with 512MB of RAM are:

# prefork MPM
# StartServers: number of server processes to start
# MinSpareServers: minimum number of server processes which are kept spare
# MaxSpareServers: maximum number of server processes which are kept spare
# MaxClients: maximum number of server processes allowed to start
# MaxRequestsPerChild: maximum number of requests a server process serves
<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
    StartServers          4
    MinSpareServers       1
    MaxSpareServers       1
    MaxClients            13
    MaxRequestsPerChild   5000
</IfModule>

Cheers!

Saw this the other day and thought it’s something worth knowing:

Works a bit like a CRC…

Voice recognition is only ever going to get better (check out CMU Sphinx if you want to play with speech rec. for yourself), but at the moment… um, it’s not quite up to scratch:

Okay, so he’s putting in on a bit for the lulz, and if he’d just said “where’s the nearest pub?” he’d probably get a useful answer – but that’s half the battle with speech recognition. At the moment we have to adapt our speech to the software, but in the future I don’t think we’ll have to at all.

At least for the time being, as Penny Arcade put it, it’s all going to be a bit like this:

Best keep your deer-combs handy.