Just in case you weren’t aware- Wal-Mart’s auto service shops will replace leaking/broken/etc tire stems for $3.

Working on the Impalas- got the nicer grill changed over to the lower mileage unit which has no issues other than needing a wash- and a back seat.

Took the Challenger down to 7-11 to fill it up with some gas, since it has old gas in it. Everyone turned and stared.. I hate when people slow down to 20mph in a 35 zone in front of me! Yes, it’s a cop car. No, I don’t care. MOVE!

Today was beautiful- it was almost 60 degrees the whole morning!

I was able to tackle repairing my fog lamps on the 9-5, which were weighed down by the snow and ice, causign the upper aged plastic mounts to crack and fail, got the back yard cleaned up, planted zinnias in the front yard, and managed to get two of the cop cars running.

The Challenger needs a new battery. The battery it had was flat when I got the car- but it was reading a whole nil volts today when I tried to see why the car didn’t want to start- despite being on a 2A charger over the entire last two weeks of snow.

I’m trying to coax it into charging enough to be a stop-gap, because I certainly can’t afford $200 for a new battery, just to clean up and sell the car.

Of course, modern battery chargers won’t charge a battery that is below a certain threshhold, since the uninitiated might try to blast the battery with a 200A “start” charge, and suddenly find themselves covered in boiling acid. Knowing better of this, I connected the charger to the battery, then stuck a lower-voltage jump pack atop of that to bring it up to 11.2V (Harbor Freight- decent hand tools, rest- not so good), coaxing the charger into trickling into the battery..

Tomorrow, hopefully it’ll have enough juice for at least one start- if not- time to figure a way to afford a new battery, since I need to move that car to get the other two out for sale!

I try my best to not pass judgement on the various distributions of Linux – but CentOS always ends up rubbing me wrong.

For instance, why does it need 10%+ more RAM than everything else- just to sit and idle? What’s so magical if you are running the same stuff? It’s not like one is compiled with gcc, and the other clang, or major differences in libc, et al..

Today, I was able to witness the joy of a simple qemu grab pulling in GlusterFS, cups, and several other unimportant tools- ballooning this to a 300MB install. Guess what it missed? The BIOS. Yep.. I had to grab seabios separately, but at least I have full CUPS support already.

I can understand that people who are used to RedHat and know this as their native distribution- but it’s just so piggy. I do not see it as useful as stripped distributions for people who are trying to get the most of their hardware- but since when has Enterprise ever been about that?

I considered changing this sites’ platform for the first time in a decade.

Up until 2006, I ran my own homebrew CMS. Many of my links and older posts still reference this, and I have many, many shims that still hide under the works- even if things such as my software have been unavailable for nearly the same time. I decided to discontinue work on the CMS, as it had slowly become bloated (although I made some great features like “automatic listening-to” blogging, a “things that interest me” bookmark blogging tool, and more), but I made it very difficult to re-theme. This is how it looked without CSS abuse- with CSS intact, it looked quite a bit like the MacOS 10 Finder threw up.

I ended up settling on TextPattern, which not only had a neat new way (as of 2002) of doing things without needing to use inline HTML, called Textile, of which Markdown borrows quite heavily from.

Long story short, my site is really looking dated. I lack the enthusiasm I once had to rebuild it’s powerful design into the oversized pretty blue clouds and huge friendly fonts that adorn pretty much everything, with parallax scrolling stock photos beneath.

I started off this new journey with HTMLy, which didn’t foot the bill as although designed for a flat-file build, it just wasn’t to my liking. I’m looking to simplify and beautify. GRAV is an impressively large YAML parser, but it requires quite a bit to setup as a blog- it has a much better design flow for single pages, and does anything BUT simplify.

I’m sticking with good old TextPattern- it’s served me well, and continues to do everything I want, except it looks dated. Maybe I’ll break down and re-theme it one of these decades.

Everything, and I mean everything is either on the “cloud”, moving to the “cloud”, or promoting the entire concept- even if it has nothing to do with it. As evidenced by Kodos (from way back when the Simpsons was still watchable):

I’ve touched on virtualization a few posts ago, so I won’t go on about the means or implementations here.

The OS movement has so many options available to make virtualized systems at the press of a few buttons. There is OVZ and LXC for Linux, KVM for Linux, NetBSD, and Solaris/IlluminOS/SmartOS, and now, OSV comes up with _an entirely different design. This is a new introduction to the party, based on FreeBSD.

It’s already setup to run on EC2, GCE, or even your current machine. as evidenced here, it’s incredibly fast to create an instance, and the most commonly used HTTP/2 development tools are already setup as containers.

I’ve only played with this for a few hours, but it seems to foot the bill for many purposes:

• No overly complex zone setup, which is what keeps many new developers shy away from SmartOS- it has a simple REST API.
• ZFS support from the get-go. No need to muddle around with the 40,960 different filesystems available for Linux. ZFS it is!
• Small Footprint- I did a simple task deployment, and it added about 20MB of itself to my entire task. That isn’t bad, considering that is the entire virtual machine!