The Art of Dumpster Diving

When I woke up this morning, my first thought was “Sweet, going dumpster diving today”. After thinking about it for a little while longer, I started to get a little depressed about going, it seemed almost like a waste of time on a monday morning, there wouldn’t be anything good in the dumpsters!

Despite these thoughts, I called up Joe and we went anyways. Bright and early. 10 oclock.

Now, of course, thinking I wouldn’t find anything, I practically struck gold. After careful observation of the electronics dumpster, Joe and i managed to pull out two old Compaq servers. One 5U rack server, and one enormous tower server. Each has 5 hotswap bays which I am very excited about. Now of course, seeing as they were in the dump, neither are in working condition, but I do plan to change this. Me and Joe will be directing attention to them Wednesday evening to swap some parts here and there and see what will do.

I was very surprised to see that the tower still had all 5 hard drives in it. I believe each one is 4.5 Gb, but since the computer doesn’t turn on, I don’t know for sure. Thats just what the labels on the bays said. The drives could be bigger. We’ll see once i get it up and running. I plan on swapping out the motherboard and power supply with newer ones. and then i can use the RAID controller thats already in there and hook up all the drives. We’ll see if we can get it working.

As for the rack, I’m not quite sure what I can do with that one. It has no drives and seems to only take SCSI drives which I don’t have any of. But i have yet to fiddle with that as well.

Definitely will write more on what happens with these computers soon.

Heres pics:

http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm238/theanti9/?action=view&current=IMG_3529.jpg

http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm238/theanti9/?action=view&current=IMG_3530.jpg

http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm238/theanti9/?action=view&current=IMG_3531.jpg

http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm238/theanti9/?action=view&current=IMG_3532.jpg

New Rack Server Cluster

Ok so despite lack of recent blog activity, I have been fairly busy doing things. Not too much on the programming side which is really why I haven’t been posting. But lots has happened on the hardware side.

My friend Joe found a steel rack enclosure back behind the movie theater (don’t ask me why it was behind a movie theater because I honestly don’t know), and so we lugged it over to my house and stuck my racks in it. That is, after getting all the racks working. We are still working on clustering the 3 racks together but we are running into some difficulties with that. We’ll figure it out eventually. Anyways, heres pictures!

The Library

Ah, the library grows once again. I either need less books, or a bigger shelf. Its even starting to bow from the weight. And its out of room. Damn….

C# Web Requests

Web Requests are amazingly easy in C# - All you need is this:

WebRequest myWebRequest = WebRequest.Create("http://www.google.com");
WebResponse myWebResponse = myWebRequest.GetResponse();
Stream ReceiveStream = myWebResponse.GetResponseStream();
StreamReader readStream = new StreamReader(ReceiveStream);
String Response = readStream.ReadToEnd();

Returns everything from wherever you request. So simple. Need I explain more?

C# Foreach Loop

ok so this is a little code snippet. Lets say I have 10 text files in a folder and I want to add my ASCII signature to the end of all of them. I can put them in an array, and use a Foreach loop to do it to all of them at once. Heres how:
public static void write(String[] files)
{
foreach (String s in files)
{
FileStream fs = new FileStream(s, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Write);
String[] line = {” ..jjLLtt \r\n”,
” GGffiiGGLL \r\n”,
” iiDD ,,EE,, \r\n”,
” ttGG EEii \r\n”,
” ;;EE.. ;;EEtt \r\n”,
” LLEEffGGEEtt \r\n”,
” ;;;;..KK;; \r\n”,
” ;;,, ;;KK.. ;;;; \r\n”,
” ..KKDD ii,,;;EEtt KKEE \r\n”,
” ..LLtt LLDDDDtt LLjj \r\n”};
for (int i = 0; i < line.Length; i++)
{
Byte[] buffer = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(line[i]);
try
{
fs.Write(buffer, 0, line[i].Length);
}
catch (Exception e)
{
// Do Nothing
}
}
fs.Close();
}

Now unfortunately because it gets rid of all the tabs, you can see what it actually looks like, but you can see it here

The parameter for the write method is an array of strings. The strings in this case happen to be file names. So the method will take all the filenames into it, and for each one, open them in a filestream, and using the filestream for each one, will write the ASCII signature in the file, and then close the filestream.

Is It Really Web 2.0?

http://web2.0validator.com/

I found this cool little site this morning while surfing along. Type in any site to see if they really are Web 2.0 or not! Put your site in there and see what you get!

Microsoft - It’s a Love Hate Relationship

So first off, let me say, I’m pretty neutral about the different major Operating Systems. I like Windows for surfing, programming, and basic stuff.

I like Macs for their power with photo and video editing and unique and creative features.

I like linux for programming, and using as a server. It’s quite good at those things.

So now we can see some of the nice things about each. Now for most of my computers I’m running windows. (except 2 that are running ubuntu  server) The reason for this is because I’ve been doing so much programming in the last few weeks. I’m putting out about 300-400 lines of code a day.  Thats a lot. Now, at this point you probably know that I’m going to talk about the .NET framework and the Visual Studios IDE’s. I really REALLY hate the .NET framework because it is Microsoft only, just like everything else Microsoft makes. Though with programs like Mono, which I talked about two or three posts ago, I don’t really have to worry about the portability of the .NET framework. So that is one thing that makes me happy about Microsoft; It is still portable despite the fact that they don’t want to be.

Despite those things, I still like the simplicity of most of Microsoft’s programs. Microsoft stuff like Office and Visual Studios are quite nice. They hog memory, but other than that they are very nice. I love Visual studios. It makes programming in any .NET language so much easier and the form designer is probably the best thing about it. Choose the things you want, and drag and drop them. The IDE is so great also for people like me who just wan to experiment. The intellisense in Visual Studios is very nice, and makes it easy to just explore the language itself so you don’t have to go looking through man-pages to find out how to use a function, and that is so convenient. Hooray,  Microsoft made something that I really like for once :]

I still hate Microsoft’s web site. It’s impossible to navigate…

Nifty Web 2.0 Gadgets

I was just surfing along the other day, and I found 2 pretty cool web site’s that I thought were very useful and rather amusing at the same time. Here’s the links, go play with them:

http://www.lightsphere.com/dev/web20.html

http://www.dotomator.com/

Cross Platform .NET

Finally, something to make it easier to develop programs for all platforms. I have been so sick of being stuck using the .NET framework, only running on Windows. But Mono has come to the rescue.

Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. Sponsored by Novell, the Mono open source project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community and is positioned to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications.

As you can see, for any programmer using a .NET language, this is an amazing tool. This allows us to not have to think so much about which programming language is the best to use. In my case, that is especially important because it is generally more like “what programming language should I learn to enable me to make this?”

A Change Of Plans

Ok so basically, as of a few days ago, Fizzure was scrapped due to liability issues. Boo~ I’m sure you’re all so sad. But to me, it’s alright. Fizzure was a great learning experience. And to make up for it, I have another project - yet to be named - that will be a huge project and hopefully spread very nicely. I’m not going to reveal it to you (mostly because we havnt named it yet, [yes, I did say "we"] ), but it’s an original idea with some twists. We’ll see what happens. Not even sure what language we are going to use for it, though it is probably going to be C# again, despite my ever growing dislike for the .NET framework.

More updates later…