b.cognosco

I now have a Manila site at my disposal, thanks to the folks at Weblogger.com, and I'm going to use it to host my Radio comments as soon as I can figure out how.

Right now clicking the comment link on this post will open a new browser window that has the whole discussion group page in it. Manila doesn't seem to be accepting the Radio comment parameters from the URL.

Hopefully I'll be able to get this working soon.

The AMD Machine

4:38:37 PM

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A few weeks back I wrote about buying a bunch of parts so I could build a new computer to replace the evil Micron PC. The Micron is now giving me "bad RAM" errors -- I guess it gave up on killing hard drives -- so I started putting the new one together today before the evil PC craps out again. I had much more important paying work to do, but I can't deal with another computer failure. I have to say the new unit looks pretty nice.

Started with an AMD XP 2200+. The Gigabyte GA-7VRXP mainboard has a KT333 chipset, built-in RAID, more USB ports than I can count, and lots of other stuff. The Radeon 9000 video is just fine for the sort of work I do and will output to a TV or deal with a little light gaming if I ever decide I need it. The case is a nice, all-aluminum number from Lian-Li. It can be completely disassembled with the thumb screws, has three drive cages that can all be removed to install drives, and has four well-placed system fans for cooling. And it looks nice. Throw in 1GB of PC2700 RAM, a bunch of hard drives, and the requisite DVD/CD/CD-RW players and we're off to the races.

It will be days (maybe weeks) before I get it loaded with all my apps and get my data transferred, but my goal today was to just get it assembled and get the OS loaded to make sure it wasn't defective. Task accomplished.

The Win2K install routine still requires floppies -- four of them -- and is incredibly slow. This install must have been designed by some anti-social, user-hostile nitwit at MS. But I'm through it -- again -- and now on to other things. I'm really eager to see what sort of difference the new processor speed and RAM make in loading up my 700kb aggregatorData file in Radio!

Preparing for the Switch

10:29:12 AM

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Well, this has been exciting. I switched my RCS as part of the preliminaries for moving my weblog to a new host and broke all kinds of things. I think I'm back on track now, at least for the moment.

This is a test post to see what sorts of theme-ish things are broken.

I see my recent topics are gone. I can fix that later.

What has me confused is the relationship of RCS to the whole upstream thing. Is there a direct relationship between the RCS and the upstream method? I mean, Userland has this xmlstoragesystem thing that only works with Userland. Is it somehow related to the RCS?

My new hosting service is setting up their own RCS, but I'm still going to be upstreaming via ftp. So is there any reason for me to switch? BTW, switching the RCS breaks things. If you do it without knowing the consequences and need to get back here are the instructions.

I just read the RCS features and it says:

Implements the server side of Radio upstreaming, rendered content flows from your users' desktops through RCS to fast static storage. Far more efficient than centralized editing and rendering systems.

I take this to mean it is RCS that manages the xmlstorage upstream method. But would this then tie the weblog directly to the RCS account structure -- i.e usernum xxxx -- rather than a distinct domain? And if so, is ftp the only way around that? Which leads back to my earlier question -- if I'm using ftp does it matter what RCS I'm on?