Slacy’s Blog

I’ve been doing some experiments and data gathering for the traffic to this blog.  I’m actually surprised by the Google Analytics numbers.  On an average day, I get just about 150 unique visitors per day, summing to about 4,000 unique visitors per month.  That number really surprises me.  Who are these people?  Where do they come from?

And, more importantly, what factors make those numbers go up and down.  So, I’ve decided to move my blog hosting from my home DSL line (a congested 768kbps uplink) to my hosted server (essentially unlimited, but practically can send 10Mbps if you can consume it).  This means that you should have a much faster experience when visiting slacy.com, and crawlers will be able to more quickly consume my RSS feeds and content, which may mean more traffic.

So, I’m going to wait a couple of weeks, and post again about whether I saw any uplift of traffic to the site.  I suspect there may be a small upward trend, but it’s also possible that there could be a big jump…

UPDATE:

Well, it’s been a couple of weeks since I moved to the faster server, and I’ve seen absolutely no increase in the amount of traffic to the site.  I suspect that Google doesn’t include site speed as a factor in page rank (which is somewhat surprising, since the old server was quite slow and had frequent outages).

So, I just upgraded my home computer from 500GB of storage that was 95% used to 2.0TB that’s now only 25% used.

That’s a fairly big jump, but the funny thing is, I imagine using up 2.0TB of content in another couple of years.  The biggest users of space on my system are photos (150GB) and music (200GB), with lots of other GB used up with random “small” files and my operating system.  I can easily take photos (in JPG format, even) at the rate of about 4GB/week if I’m active with my camera.  If I use RAW, I could likely do 4GB/day.

It’s very likely that hard drive space is going to continue to grow, even if the world switches to solid-state storage in the next decade, I’d still expect to be able to buy 1PB (one petabyte = 1,000 terabytes) of storage at your local computer store by the year 2020 for somewhere in the $100 price range.  Even if the industry switches to SSD technology, I’d expect a 100TB SSD drive to be in this price range by then.  (so if this happens, just divide the numbers below by 10).

The question is:  What will be filling that space up with?  CCDs on cameras aren’t really getting that much bigger, and we’ve already got plenty of storage for photos.  Music isn’t getting any more bytes than 44kHz * 16bits * 2 channels, and HD video at approximately 20Mbps is pretty reasonable.

1PB = 111,111 hours (12.6 years) of HD video @ 20Mbps

1PB = 26.66 million 10 megapixel images stored as raw 30-bits per pixel

1PB = 1.5 million hours (179 years) of uncompressed 44kHz stereo audio

So, what do you think you’re going to do with your PB?

Yesterday, I finally finished updating this computer from Fedora Core 6 to Fedora Core 8. I’ve completely swarn off Fedora, and if there were an easy way for me to migrate away, I’d do that instead of these insane upgrades.

Here were the major stumbling blocks:
1. The “depsolve hang in upgrade” bug which meant I needed to wait for a respin or follow instructions listed in redhat’s bug database. (I decided to wait for the respin)
2. The “respins” from fedoraunity.org took a while to be created, and use the totally insane ‘jigdo’ downloader. They took about 2.5 days to download 4GB. By contrast, a bittorrent download af the same data takes about 4 hours.
3. The installer ran mostly smoothly, but took several hours to upgrade my system.
4. The installer didn’t upgrade over 1100 packages on my system. I had to boot it up and run “yum update” to finish updating these.
5. Even after ‘yum update’ I had a bunch of issues getting my monitor resolution back to 1280×1024 (it wanted to be 800×600)
6. Fedora doesn’t inculde mp3 playback, mencoder, or mplayer, so you need to enable ‘extra’ yum repositories to get these files. There are several choices, and they usually just fuck up your system beyond repair. (atrpms, freshrpms, dag, livna, etc.)

All in all, it took about 3 months to progress from step 1 to step 6.

At least my system still works. Mail works, the web works, gallery works, music works. Phew.

Next time, I’m going to build a new computer, and I think I’ll just install gentoo. I’m not sure yet, though.