Digital Nocturne

From my past blog entries, I don’t remember mentioning that I have a scholarship with Procter & Gamble Philippines. Anyway… now you know.

My first year experience in 2003 about this annual summer outing and learning event was memorable and highly educational. It was held in Fontana. It’s about 7 Habits of Highly Effective People; however, it’s not the highlights of my stay there. I rather not discuss it here because I am not proud of the outcome. That’s why I promised to myself not to be intoxicated again. I missed last year’s (2004) seminar because of my schedule (I was enrolled in a community welfare service). Now, on my third year I’m more anxious on what’s going to happen there. >_<

Anyway, this year’s theme is “Personal Effectiveness and Personal Leadership: Key Ingredients to make College Life Worthwhile!” It will be held on April 1 – 3, 2005 at Manila Peninsula Hotel. This is a resident-type training so we stayed in the hotel during the entire event.

Here’s the overview of the planned events:

On April 1, (Friday) we should be at Garcia Villa / Balagtas for registration, and then there will be an opening remarks / introduction / agenda review. After that, we will eat lunch! Then, we will check-in to our respective rooms. There will be a roll call about house rules after. Then Team-building will proceed after. Group dinner will be served and a group work will follow. (Hmmm… how come there’s no “sleep time” in the plan??)

On April 2, (Saturday) we are expected to be up by 7:00… Then finish breakfast by 8:00am. Personal Leadership and Career Preparation training will commence by 8:30 am to 5:00 pm. There will be lunch break though From 5:00am to 7:00 pm we are free to do whatever we want (I’ll probably roam the rest of the hotel for pictures and stuffs!) and group dinner will be served.

On April 3, (Sunday) same routine in the morning but the training will finish by 12 noon. We will have a lunch break then we will check-out. After that, there’s a so-called “Personal Commitment Session” which I’m really clueless about. Then we are expected to wrap-up by 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm. By 6:00 pm I’ll be home to continue whatever I left hanging in mid-air.

My friends and I formed a team and this team shall remain nameless. We have started several projects and some of these projects are still on-going. Suddenly, most of them gone missing.

I don’t know what’s wrong with them. I’m left thinking about their inactivity in the internet. Hmmm… I really don’t know if they are in the province, playing games all day long, taking a week-long break or they are just slacking off. I wouldn’t know. Wala man lang notice kung saan sila lupalop ng mundo napadpad. I think that for some kind of formality, at least, they should have sent a short private message telling me where they have been or what’s their plan for the holidays so that I am clueless on our project timelines. Maybe I am not in the right position to know their whereabouts but I think I deserve a bit more respect.

No, it’s not the song… this post is about GM Mickey.

For starters, I play Rose Online as a sub-pilot for my brother’s avatar/character. We are lucky to see a GM this morning and we stalked her like hell. The server was always full and we were disconnected several times. Logging in was very difficult. Even worse, the server was very laggy because too many players crowd together. But it was alright. We’ve seen very strong mobs that GM Mickey summoned while many players crowd beside her. I was able to take a clear screenshot of her avatar. Take a look.

Finally… Mambo’s homepage became more friendly and easier to navigate. I really like the new design. It somewhat resembles Mozilla’s rollovers and rounded-edge CSS design. It’s also a good idea that the segregated the different sections of Mamboserver into 5 different sections namely, www.mamboserver.com, news.mamboserver.com, forum.mamboserver.com, projects.mamboserver.com and help.mamboserver.com. The only sub-site that wasn’t changed aesthetically was projects.mamboserver.com (mamboforge.net)

Kudos to Mambo web design team!

Yes, the problem continued, but this time it was a bit modest. It didn’t have any impact to the server because the support system script simply sent out warning inside the admin panel. About 72 warnings appeared telling me that the message wasn’t delivered because the user’s email box was full. Now I learned why setting inbox quota is VERY important. It’s better to have my inbox full than having our server hard drive choke!

I needed to go out yesterday and I did not worry about our server because everything was running fine before I left.

Then I went back home last night, plugged the computer and do my routine… I checked the server with a big surprise. I was terrified when I clicked an email and viewed a long list of reply history, in loop! I don’t know what happened but it’s probably because of the email configuration that I made the other day. It triggered an email loop that made the CPU load of our server terribly high this evening. The email loop inside was “piped” in an email system and 4 hours or endless loop, it resulted to 2.8 gigabytes of redundant data.

If you don’t know Piping is a technology that immediately query an email right inside the database for storage. In other words, it “capture” the email for instant logging or input. So in simpler words, in every loop, the email was stored repeatedly in our database as it snowballed.

I’m quite amazed that our Linux server still managed to survive this kind of stress test! It was able to withstand 100% CPU utilization for 4 hours without crashing. It proved that our server is powerful enough to host heavy loads without immediate risk of system failure.

This incident not only tested the power of our server but also my patience. Luckily we have the hardware to support this kind of abuse and I was not pushed to my limits.

Lol, I think I need to remind myself quite often that I’m a young man and I need to groom myself quite often. I spend most of my time on bed sleeping or in front f my computer, doing work on my PC, so I didn’t notice that my facial hair is already growing fast. I felt aged this week because of my haggard look and because of that I shaved this morning not because it was obligatory but because I felt I need to take care of myself more often. But who cares about my facial hair anyway. Do you?