I always have to work hard to remember which server is live, which is for production, which is for development, etc. It’s also difficult to tell at a glance which remote server I’m connected to over remote desktop. Typically I change the wallpaper color to red for production servers, green for development servers [...]

I wrote a post not too long ago about using lighttpd (lighty) to ease your server load. My setup consisted of one high-end server box (2x Dual-core Xeon’s, RAID 5, 6GB RAM) running Windows Server 2003 x64 and Virtual Server 2005. Virtual Server had three VM’s running… my CF/IIS server, my database server, and my [...]

I had a website with an issue. This site is successful on several levels… It gets a good number of visits (500,000/month), each visitor hits nearly 10 pages per visit (so around 5,000,000 page views/month), and ranks well with search engines. While this might sound like a slightly above-average site, the problem lies with it’s [...]

I just added two new sticks (matched pair) of 1GB Kingston RAM to my existing matched pair, bringing the total up to 4GB, but not without headaches. This is on my Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard. Usually, adding RAM is as simple as opening the case, filling some slots, close it up and boot. Granted, with DDR [...]

Not too long after beginning my programming career, I worked for a dot-com company that bought Matrox G400 dual-head video cards for all employees, along with two 19″ monitors. Those of us who use multi-mon setups know that once you move from one monitor to two, it’s very difficult to be happy with just one. Well [...]

Upon returning from MAX 2006 in Las Vegas, my workstation was a little frozen. “No problem, a quick reboot,” I thought. Alas, “NO SYSTEM DISK OR DISK ERROR” greeted me. “Well at least I have RAID,” I thought. Fat lot of good that did me. After days and days of rebuilding my system (and only losing a [...]