Mario Lives

Check out this damn cool little project done by some college students using little more than post-it notes and some people with way too much time. It needs some ’shrooms though.

Everquest 2: Let Us Do The Whoring For You

Make sure to check out SOE whoring out Everquest 2’s main evil character to Pizza Hut. Nothing says evil like corporate sponsorship with an in-game hook!

And make sure to check out this set of great ideas!

I want to cry…

A few days ago I sent Red Hat Network support a complaint about download speeds for the x86_64 cd images for the newly released version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. On the same machine with the same copy of wget I was getting 1 to 2 MB a second downloads for the x86 cd images while the x86_64 cd image downloaded at anywhere from 2 to 10 KB a second.

This was the response I just got back:

Thank you for contacting Red Hat Customer Service and we apologise for any delay in responding.

There is no major reason why some download quicker than others, but the x86 is 32-bit, wherewas the x86-64 is a 64-bit so that will take longer to download. Also it can depend how busy the Red Hat Network is at the time, how many others are downloading the same product etc.

Yes… because that extra 32-bits makes it harder for the pipe to swallow it all! Sigh.

If I had to guess I’d say they don’t have enough servers with access to sufficient bandwidth providing the x86_64 version and I’m being throttled because I’m an academic user. Just my theory.

Moves and Upgrades

I moved hosting of shivan.org back to DreamHost. I was getting tired of maintaining the virtual server instance I was using and decided to go with something cheaper. (After I reopened my account DreamHost doubled their setup fees for non-yearly committments to $49.95 to encourage people to cough up a years worth of cash at once… I would normally recommend them but not with those terms.)

During the switch I upgraded quite a few little things the most visible of which being this page. I upgraded WordPress from 1.2 to the newly released 1.5. WordPress 1.5 is an excellent piece of software and the new theme system is encouraging a number of great premade themes. See here for more details on the site design theme and the header image.

The new version of WordPress also can now act as a simple Content Management System so you can add more traditional non-blog pages that fit with your WordPress theme and are managed by the software. The site design information page mentioned above is an example of such a page. Great stuff.

Now if only someone would write a moinmoin wiki markup plugin so I can save precious keystrokes and not have to worry about closing HTML tags when I get around to actually writing posts.