if I had voted, it would have been for him. McCain’s gaffe of selecting Robotron Retard Bot 2008 (AKA Sarah Palin) as his VP running mate just proved he was totally incompetent. Have you listened to this woman talk? My head aches every time I hear her open her stupid, useless mouth.

Congratulations to Obama. Do not disappoint us. We have spent 8 years under the wing of a Idiot in Clown Shoes and it’s time to replace that which has run this country into the ground.

No Bullshit, Obama. Be the man and show the world that we are STILL a power to be reckoned with - just not with guns, cannons, bombs and death. Our military might may be unmatched, but we were also one of the most respected countries in the world when it came to science and peaceful negotiations. Let’s go back to that.

My regards to you, President Barack Hussein Obama. Good luck on this journey.

Sheriff Dart has noted that Bank’s are not following the letter of the law and doing their due diligence (finding out who actually resides at a given residence). This is against the law and is putting Sheriff Dart and his Officers in an odd position.. one of potentially breaking the law themselves by serving these evictions.

It’s nice to see a Sheriff doing the right thing and standing up for the citizens he is ment to protect and serve.

Keep doing the right thing, Sheriff Dart. Lead by example and show the people of this once-great country that we can turn things.

I salute you, Sir.

I’ve spent the last two weeks writing documentation and laying all of my thoughts down in concrete (electronic concrete?). I have the general idea hashed out and the general structure of the site in the roadmap/wiki. None of it will be publically available until after the site is in beta.

The site itself will be community oriented in general, but focus on groups of users rather than the individual user. It will also be more geographically oriented than other community sites in that the general goal is to bring people together in-person for LAN Parties with the secondary goal of giving gamers another place to find other remote gamers.

This is going to be a lot of work, since this will be programmed from scratch on my own - I refuse to use garbage such as Dolphin or other such community applications.

I can’t wait to really get rolling on this project - just have to dig up some more talent for the design portion of it.

I’ve begun to re-realize my desire to start that project up again. The original plan was very simplistic and … well, boring. Very social-formulaic.

Based upon the name of the domain: Geek LAN (Local Area Network), this social site will be local-centric with the ability to tie across localities for friends. In general, though, this site will be focused on helping geeks setup… what else? LAN PARTIES!

I haven’t come up with a completely solid plan.. let alone how it’s going to function in general. It’s just an idea floating in my head. I kinda like the current theme of GeekLAN and may very well adapt it.

As for IgnitedJobs, I’m done with the project code-wise. The next step is to find traffic for it.

Now to figure out how to get traffic..

I’ve decided against going with partitioning for version 1.1 until the development of partitioning in MySQL 5.1 stabalizes a bit more. Seems like it’s still under heavy development which tells me it’s potentially unstable.

The administrative interface is about .. 10% complete - mostly a bunch of template-less pages with some data for me to go over. I’ll probably release the Administrative functionality in version 1.0.3 or 1.1 - it’s slated for 1.1, but I’m undecided on how fast I can get it done.

That’s all I have for now.

At this point, it’s time to find and squash bugs. Overall, the project has 160 lines of code, not counting the Views.

CodeIgniter is a very powerful Framework and has enabled me to create a feature-complete web application in about 3 total hours of coding. And that’s not even a planned application. IgnitedJobs.com’s features (the idea itself as well) are off-the-cuff as soon as I thought of the domain name.

Check it out!

Also, check out the changelog.

And if you find a bug.. Report it!

Just thought I would post so that all my numerous (2.. maybe 3?) loyal readers could check out my newest project. Feel free to let me know what you think!

Check it out!

I’ll try to approach this from my original idea down to what it has become (and may expand in to).

GeekLAN Then

GeekLAN was originally owned by a good friend of mine. It’s purpose was to create a website for a couple AZ-based geeks to fool around with outside of our numerous get-togethers for gaming. I took over ownership of the domain when registration lapsed (and strangely, no one snatched it up).

After taking the domain over, I had an intention to follow the original vision of the site, but expand it further into a ‘world-wide’ community (Yeah.. social website) for geeks. Specifically, those that wanted to get together and game or.. whatever. This idea was on the move for a good six months before I decided to give up on it. I realized it was to large of a project to tackle completely on my own, and good developers don’t come cheap (not withstanding the fact I couldn’t afford one).

GeekLAN Now

The site sat dormant for a good 3 months before I decided to start up a blog and talk about general geekery. Two things became readily apparent (and they remain true - but I’m working on it!):

- I’m not a good writer
- My grammar leaves much to be desired
- I don’t have many interesting things in mind to write about

The few posts I’ve made so far have been an absolute blast to put together and write. And I used to hate writing.

As you can see, that hasn’t stopped me. I’ve been taking the time to read posts at Write To Done, just to get ideas and a better feel for how I should approach new posts. It’s a lot to mull over and even more to take it. I’m taking notes from the site and using that appears to be appropriate in any given situation.

When I getter a better feel for things, I’ll decide wether or not GeekLAN is going to get buckled down to being a niche-specific blog or just a general ‘whatever goes’ type of blog.

GeekLAN Soon (maybe)

I’m still not completely sure where GeekLAN may go in the future. If the community grows enough, I may put some effort into bringing the community aspect of the original design into play. Most of the general code is written and ready to go. I just need a reason to continue fleshing the idea out and make it happen.

Why don’t you tell me how I’ve done so far? I’d love to hear from each and every one of you that happens to visit this little unknown hole in the wall.

That’s all for now.

• Must not require a secondary application install (Gallery, CopperMine, et al)
• Must not require extensive modification of file-system permissions
• Must be simple to manage from an administrative stance
• Not exactly a must - Widget desired

Below, you will find my (short) list of Gallery plugins I gave a run.

• PHP 5 (Good! PHP4 BAD!)
• allow_url_fopen() enabled (Oops, bad. Most hosts do NOT allow this)
• Gallery installed
• Gallery-Remote Module enabled
• WordPress Lightbox Plugin

Right out the door, we have bad things. For those people who run their site on a Shared Host (ex; Go Daddy), this plugin will likely not work since allow_url_fopen is disabled and can not be enabled short of getting your own Virtual/Dedicated server.

The installation itself is as easy as any WordPress Plugin. Drop it in your wp-content/plugins directory and activate it.

The actual setup of WP-Gallery-Remote is also quite simple. Point it to a live Gallery install (with the Gallery-Remote module activated) and you’re off. There really isn’t much to say about this plugin. It’s simple, gets the job done.

I highly recommend this plugin if you already make use of Gallery. It’s rock solid and easy to setup.

In summary:

• WP-Gallery-Remote does NOT meet my specific criteria, but in the interest of fairness, it was reviewed.
• WP-Gallery-Remote does NOT come with a widget - It’s nice to be able to stick a few randomized pictures on a sidebar.
• WP-Gallery-Remote depends on Gallery. Fine for a professional photographer, but not that great for a casual blogger.

Rating: 4/5 Points

Next up: nextGEN Gallery

Strangeness, indeed.

I spent about 15 minutes messing around before I discovered that all I was getting back with AB was some headers. For some reason, apache was having a hell of a time returning the headers. Strangeness. This time I then ran AB against my APC Status script. 400 requests/second. That’s far more reasonable than 13-14 requests per second.

What the hell is going on?

I still haven’t figured that part out yet.

Running ab -n 100 -c 10 http://www.geeklan.com/ still only returns 13-14 requests per second. I can tell the site is running better than that, but AB just isn’t getting to it. It’s literally only able to pull down headers. If I kick off a wget against the domain it pulls down proper, fully-loaded index.

I’ll be working on this a bit more tonight - maybe I’ll figure out why it’s misbehaving.

And no, specifying geeklan.com/index.php doesn’t help.

UPDATE:

This is very interesting. When utilizing AB, I get this in the log file;

[Fri Feb 22 22:25:00 2008] [error] [client 64.41.145.110] PHP Warning: sem_release(): supplied argument is not a valid SysV semaphore resource in ***/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 116

(*** is me hiding the real path)

UPDATE 2:

Fixed that by setting $use_flock to TRUE in the wp-cache-config.php file. This still has not fixed what apache responds with to AB. There are now no entries in the error log. I’m completely stumped at this point.

UPDATE 3:

Okay, now THIS is weird. I sat back for a second and thought, ‘Okay, so ab doesn’t show what it’s getting as headers.. AH HAH! strace!’

Here’s what I ran (and an excerpt from the log):

strace -o trace.log ab -n 1 -c 1 http://www.geeklan.com/

And the output that caught my eye;

write(4, “GET / HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: www.geekla”…, 90) = 90
read(4, “HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently\r\n”…, 8192) = 255

Now THAT has me stumped. wget, links, lynx nor any browser I can throw at geeklan.com catches a 301 Redirect off of the page and I know that WordPress doesn’t do any form of retarded redirects (let alone a 301). This sorta smells like an apache issue, but I’d see the same if I ran it against test.php or some of my other benchmark files. This happens even if I specify /index.php

Blech.

UPDATE 4 (Final):

Turns out it was, in fact, wordpress. I’ve got WordPress setup to run as http://geeklan.com/ and requests to http://www.geeklan.com/ were 301′d to http://geeklan.com/. Ugh. At least I know what was up. Here are some fun stats from Apache Benchmark:

ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://geeklan.com/

Requests per second: 384.43 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 260.122 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 2.601 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)