I recently needed to set up a new reverse proxy as an alternative to pound, and for no particularly good reason chose Perlbal.

The documentation is fairly good, but I didn’t find many (good) examples of working configurations. So I thought I’d include my very simple conf.

Firefox by default does not use your proxy when making DNS requests. This can lead to a bit of confusion if your internal DNS servers are different from your public servers, thankfully there’s a simple fix:

1. Navigate to: about:config
2. Locate network.proxy.socks_remote_dns and set the value to true

Maybe this will help someone else with this laptop:

• If the USB3.0 ports randomly stop working you just need to update the drivers. You can grab them from Station Drivers
• Fn+1 Toggles the fan speed between 100% and normal

I’ve migrated most of my sites / services away from Slicehost this week. I guess the trigger was a combination of the Rackspace migration news, and the desire for lower latency to the server. I’ve been with Slicehost for around 3 years with an almost perfect track record (at least when I don’t let a process use up all the memory and the OOM killer).

I was originally looking at Crucial Paradigm due to lots of positive feedback and good prices. However their prices are really only good for new customers as the double RAM offer is not extended to upgrades/download of plans, which could cause some problems if you ever want to resize your VPS. They also specifically disallow game servers in thier AUP (which is a problem as I’m currently running a Minecraft server).

I tested the new iiNet VPS which is located in iiNet’s WA data centre. While the pricing is good, I wasn’t unhappy with the performance of the Virtuozzo based system (I was unable to run a Minecraft server with a single user without the load > 4.0), and the latency from Melbourne wasn’t exactly great.

I’ve now switched to MammothVPS¹ and so far it’s been a good experience. Their data centre is in Sydney and has a fairly low latency for Melbourne and Sydney users² and their plan offerings are very flexible and are competitively priced for an Australian based server. They use Xen (like Slicehost) so there’s much less risk for over selling.

[1] Yes that’s a referral link.
[2] On a iiNet ADSL2+ connection in inner Melbourne the latency is just 23ms. A TPG ADSL2+ connection in outer Melbourne was much higher at ~60ms.

Note: The information present in this post is a couple of months out of date. I’ve not had the time to re-update WoL data and create new graphs, but thought it might be interesting share the data/code anyway

When choosing a Holy Paladin spec for 10 mans I was never completely sure about benefits of Tower of Radiance or Blessed Life. ToR seems like a safe choice, though the frequency that you DL/FoL your beacon seemed low. Blessed Life on the other hand was obviously a PvP talent, but it would generate free HP from some raid damage.

I set out to scrape the top 200 Paladins for each 10-N boss fights from World of Logs and record their source of HP generation. I created two graphs; one that looks at all 200 parses in general, and a second that only counts when the ability is present. e.g. Only 10 or so Paladins used CS on Cho’gall, and they generated very little HP overall, but if you just look at lose 10 parses, the average is 8. This is used as a crude way to see when certain talents are taken.

Overall

Only when abilities are present

I’ve included the python code used to generate the data for these graphs below. My general disclaimer applies (i.e. be afraid)

grab-details.py

generate-report.py

Yesterday I watched someone play a bit of the browser based game Text Twist. Upon trying myself I found that I was awful, so I did what any programmer would do; cheated.

Results of a few hours hacking:

Features:

• Scan for game area and crash and burn if it’s not detected
• (Crudely) detect what letters are shown
• Find all 3, 4, 5 and 6 letter combinations, and then throw them against a basic word list + simple anagram lookup table
• Send key presses to the window to (try and) solve all possible words (and overwrite any work you were doing when the window loses focus)
• Reliably gets all but one or two words for each puzzle, leaving you plenty of time to go crazy trying to finish it

Horrible source for the curious (it should at least help anyone wondering how to send key presses, or capture the current screen in python)

TextTwistBot.py

Pixels.py

Anagrams.py

Board.py (be afraid)