Another quick update:

As of Thursday the 11th I’ll be starting my new job, which means much less time to spend on comicsearch. Things should keep ticking over under the watchful eye of the mods, and of course I’ll have time in the evenings to fix any glaring problems.

This week I’ve been fixing various things and generally cleaning up so that I don’t have to worry too much about the site. One of things I’ve done is implement a new RSS feed that’s compatible with uTorrents RSS downloader… so you can now set utorrent up to automagically download any new releases from comicsearch.

The feed is located at: http://www.comicsearch.co.uk/torrentfeed.php

Discuss this post on the forums

So, I’ve always wanted to be a writer.  Thing is though, I never actually finish anything I write.  So, yesterday I decided to actually sit down and write something.  By pure chance, the writing forum over at Penny Arcade has a little writing competition thing going on.  The round I entered had these entry requirements:

1000 words or less

Involves a hospital, an interview and a packet of cigarettes.

Here’s my entry.  Remember, this is the first creative writing piece I’ve ever actually finished, be gentle with your comments

Discuss this post on the forums

Just a quick note: if you have firefox 3 you can now add comicsearch as a search engine, like this:

And it’s easy peasey to setup.  Just click the little drop down box next to the search engine name (yours probably says ‘google’ at the moment) and you’ll see a list of currently installed search engine plugins.  Under the list you should see ‘add comicsearch’ or ‘add comicsearch v2′ (depending on which version of the site you’re using).  Click that and voila, you can now search comicsearch from the menu.

Discuss this post on the forum

After this thread in the forums, I’ve implemented a forum map.

It looks a bit like this at the moment:

As you can see, it’s a bit sparse so go and add yourself, pronto!

In other news this week, as seen in this thread, I got a new job!

I’m going to be doing PHP development for a building integration systems manufacturer which should be interesting.  It’s not much more money than I’m on now but, more importantly, it’s a step onto the development career path which is where I’ve always wanted to be, and it’s much closer to home than my current job… so more time with the family. Also, the company has generously offered to pay for me to have driving lessons.  Which is always useful.

Discuss this post on the forums

So, the last couple of weeks have been a bit hectic due to personal stuff… but just before all that kicked off I managed to migrate the site to its new home.

Old Server:

1.66 GHz Pentium-M (laptop), 512MB

New Server:

Opteron 170 @ 2.2GHz, 2GB

Due to using this hardware as a media server as well I was unable to go with my first choice of installing Linux as the OS (the media server uses a TV Tuner card that isn’t supported by the Linux TV drivers) so I got a bit sneaky…

The hardware runs Xp and on top of that I have the actual web server running in a virtual machine. The virtual machine runs Linux (Ubuntu to be precise). This way I get the stability of a linux server for my Web stuff, and I get to use my media centre stuff (Media portal) in the XP host.

The setup seems to be running well so far except for a few teething problems, which were down to my ‘Getseeds’ script (which scrapes every single torrent in the database when it’s run) causing issues. Today I found out how to do an incremental backup of the web server over FTP to a folder on the Host machine (like this).

Nice.

Just as an aside: I read a post a few weeks ago in which two old linux hads were wondering why Ubuntu has taken off so rapidly to become the distro of choice for relatively new Linux users.  That type of community documentation, and the helpful nature of the community in general is why Ubuntu is so popular.  Up until a few weeks ago I’d never tried Linux, now I have a web server doing automated backups over FTP.  I have a latop which runs XP seamlessly (so you can have windows apps appearing on your linux desktop, it’s pretty nifty) inside a virtual machine.  I have a desktop with much fancier effects and looks than any Xp / vista or OS X desktop and it’s all down to the helpfullness and openness of the Ubuntu community.

Anyway….

The physical server was a bit noisy (it used to be my gaming machine) so I removed the 80mm fan from the CPU cooler and stuck a 120mm fan in there using the tried and tested mounting method of ‘wedging it in between the RAM and the northbridge heatsink. There’s just enough space to hold the fan securely and this method seems to be keeping everything nice and cool.

The only thing left to do now is somehow get all the data from my file server (which has a 600GB motherboard hardware RAID) into this new server (the RAID on the new motherboard isn’t compatible with the RAID on the old one) then I can decommision the old file server… and use the hardware for a hackintosh or something.

For anyone interested in pictures, here you go:

From left to right: my settee, server farm (web / media at top, file at bottom), my front window.

Compare and contrast with the Hardware the pirate bay guys get to play with:

Sigh.

Discuss this post on the forum

I just had a shock when I glanced at the post date on my last post here… it’s over 3 weeks ago!

I’ve been pretty busy since then dealing with some family issues (more about that later), but I’ve also done some stuff to the site:

The site has moved from it’s old home (a crappy old laptop) to it’s new, improved surroundings (a virtual machine running on an opteron based server).  I’ve also moved from windows to Ubuntu for my hosting needs and, apart from some ‘Case’ issues (Linux recognises the difference between ‘This’ and ‘this’, windows doesn’t) the move went pretty smoothly.  Since then I’ve fixed a couple of bugs and re-instated the ‘Thank-you’ functions that used to be present on the site.  Make sure you start thanking those uploaders

The Move to a virtual machine means I can now backup the entire server in minutes, and restore it ina similar timeframe if there’s a problem.  Which is nice.  I can also shift the server onto different hardware easily, should I need to fix a hardware fault with the server.  The only real issue (albeit not much of one) is that to do this backing up process I have to take the server offline briefly.  That’s not a massive problem though, especially since the site usuaully goes offline a couple of times a day anyway.

What else has been happening…. well, not much really.  I’ve been off work for over a week now, looking after my fiancé who’s recovering from being admitted to hospital last Tuesday.  She’s suffered with depression for a long, long time and after a year of dealing with that on top of the pressures of looking after a very demanding little girl things came to a head.  She’s relatively okay now, although it’s going to take a long time before she’s actually ‘okay’ I think.  Thanks to everyone who posted well wishes in this thread.

The company I work for have been really good to me during this little crisis, letting me take time off work with no notice and even finding us a counselor through their employee assistance program, which makes me feel really guilty about the fact I’m actively seeking another job.  Basically I’m bored of my current position, there’s no opportunity for advancement or anything exciting where I am so I need to move on.  Also, I need a job that’s closer to home (I currently spend 2 hours a day travelling to and from work) and pays a bit more.  Does that make me a bad person?

I actually have an interview tomorrow, for a PHP development position.  This would be pretty cool, it’s a much more interesting role and might actually keep me awake during the working day, it’s much easier to get to (20 minutes on a bus) and it pays more.  However, there’s still that niggling feeling that I’m screwing over my current company.

On the gadgets front, I’ve recently discovered Media portal.  I’ve been looking for a windows replacement for Myth TV for some time, and this seems to be it.  The major benefit of myth TV (and media portal) over other, simpler media centre solutions is that they can be run in a client / server configuration.  This means that you can have a large, beefy machine stacked with TV tuner cards hidden away somewhere in your house while you have small quiet machines connected to your TVs.  Myth Tv is perfect for what I want, but it doesn’t support thetuner card I have…so, we’ll see how I get on with Media portal.  The only problem I have now is how to connect my PC to my TV.  My TV only accepts composite or RGB over scart, the only adaptor I have for my PC puts out S-Video. However, after reading this thread over at AVforums, I’m now on the hunt for someone to build me a VGA->RGB Scart cable since by pure chance my media PC has a radeon card in it (Nvidia cards apparently can’t do direct drive of a TV).

Discuss this post on the forums

So I haven’t posted anything on the blog for a while, I’ve been playing around with several things since my last post (mostly the Ajaxification of comicsearch) but my main project over the last week or so has been switching my main laptop (that I use every day at work and at home) to Ubuntu Linux.

The Switch has gone pretty smoothly (bar a few niggling faults that have had me tearing my hair out, see below).  All my hardware was detected, I got Compiz Fusion running with some tinkering so I now have a rotating cube thing going on  (see this for an example) and my desktop looks pretty sweet.

Performance seems (subjectively) much faster and ’snappier’ than windows, everything seems to happen pretty much instantly with none of the annoying ‘thinking’ that windows regularly has to do.  I’m hugely impressed with how smooth the effects (like wobbly windows) are.  Vista on this laptop always felt a little sluggish when anything taxing happened, but Ubuntu handles everything without breaking a sweat.

For those applications that simply have to have windows, I’ve installed XP in a virtual machine, then setup a seamless RDP session to that virtual machine (following this general procedure) so I can run windows applications on my linux desktop.  For example, the company I work for uses a softphone IP endpoint which doesn’t have a Linux version.  I run this on the XP machine and connect my USB headset directly to it.  Sorted.

The main applications I use on a day to day basis are a web browser, and a text editor.  Both are ably provided by Ubuntu (they’re hardly taxing) and I’ve also been playing around with MonoDevelop as an alternative to Visual studio for continuing development of ComicTree.

So, in general, everything is going well.  However, there’s a few things I can’t get working:

1) My wireless connection doesn’t start until I manually switch it on (using the front panel switch) and then run this script:

#!/bin/sh
rmmod -f iwl3945
modprobe iwl3945 disable_hw_scan=1
ifconfig wlan0 up

Which is a little annoying.

2) bridging my wireless network to my virtual machine (the XP one) causes my Host networking to stop working (see this) for more details.  This means I can either have networking in Xp (for my softphone) or in Ubuntu (for everything else) but not both at the same time.

update:  I’ve now resolved this issue by changing the static route command used in the bridging script.

3) I can’t get the firebird embedded database that ComicTree relies on working under Mono.  This isn’t really an Ubuntu issue, it’s Mono… but it’s still annoying.  I get a “type initializer error” every time I try to access the database under mono, it works fine in .Net.  For now, this issue means that Comictree doesn’t work on Linux (or OSX).  Annoying.

Discuss this post on the blog

Long time ComicSearch Member Varth Dader who yesterday recieved a 2.1 in Geology from Exeter University.

Congrats Varth, and any other members who received results recently.

As a tribute to Varth’s chosen subject, here’s a picture of a rock. I’m sure Varth could tell us what it is

Discuss this post on the blog

Still using Comicsearch v1? Then you’re missing out on shiny web wonderfulness like this:

Check out this (and some Ajax / web 2.0 goodness) Here.

Also, in related news, I’ve signed up to Twitter since everyone else seems to be doing it. I believe you can ‘follow’ my ‘tweets’ here

Discuss this post on the blog

The more astute among you may have noticed that we now have a new front page offering a choice between ComicSearch v1.0, and Comicsearch v2.0 beta. v2.0 is what I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks, and is pretty much a cosmetic makeover. There’s jazzy new ajax effects to start with, and over the coming weeks I’ll be revamping the search functions, removing some superfluous code from the site and generally make the site easier to maintain and improve.

It’s still a bit flakey at the moment, you might find there’s certain things that don’t work on the new site, or weird errors so if you want to help out report any bugs or errors you run into. If I don’t know something’s wrong, I can’t fix it. As I’m sure anyone involved with ComicTree will tell you, once a bug is reported I generally resolve it very quickly.

Anyway, enjoy the new functionality, get in the chat room (it sits at the top of every page now, so you’ve no excuse) and get involved

Discuss this post on the forum