yui-life.com

The meaning of life, according to me

2008-05-19T09:59:24Z


Eating under the dinner table is something I hope to experience

Yesterday, I watched Memoirs of a Geisha, and decided that life is art. Graduation is in a week, and the time for highbrow philosophizing is over. I’m not going to rant anymore about freedom or human zombies or personality change… well, maybe just a little bit. Heading into the real world with unrealistic expectations, my only thoughts now are “go to Japan” and “my bank accounts can only hemorrhage for two more years.”

I was never one to believe in work-life balance. Life is art; risking it all, I’ll be a full-time artist. This is vague, but it is enough to act on. This is a proper course of action for a self-serving child born from a generation of self-sacrificing parents. This is the right path for yuppies with broken dreams.

Litespeed on Dreamhost PS: Final Optimizations for Stability and Lowest Cost

2008-03-15T21:43:39Z

So we’ve already installed Litespeed, PHP5, and eAccelerator. The final step is to optimize our Litespeed and PS settings.

First, make sure that ALL of your domains on the Dreamhost PS are proxied through Litespeed. This allows Dreamhost’s Apache to only use 6MB of RAM per thread, instead of the usual 8MB. This is a huge memory savings. Each domain must be forwarded to a different internal port within Dreamhost’s proxy interface. A new listener with the corresponding port and a new virtual host must be defined within Litespeed’s configuration for each domain.

Next, in Dreamhost’s “Manage Domains,” “Extra Web Security” should be turned off since Apache is no longer used. When it is on, mod_security is loaded, which wastes RAM. Security and request filters can be tuned in the Litespeed web console. This can possibly reduce server load from spam bots. In Server/Request Filter, turn on “Enable Request Filtering” and “Scan Request Body.” Disable the “XSS attack” rule set because it breaks certain applications such as Wordpress.

In Litespeed’s Server/Tuning/GZIP Compression, turn on compression, but leave dynamic compression off. There is insufficient CPU on a downscaled Dreamhost PS to perform dynamic compression for each request, and if it is on, the web server will suffer. If you have a larger Dreamhost PS, you can turn it on, but should leave the compression level at 1 for best performance.

In Litespeed’s Server/Tuning, reduce the Connection Timeout, Keep-Alive Timeout, Max Request URL Length, and Max Request Header Size, using the values in the tooltips as a guide. Again, this may reduce load from spam bots and DOS attacks.

In Litespeed’s Server/General/General settings, turn on “Use Client IP in Header” becaue we are behind a proxy server. This will allow Litespeed to read the HTTP 1.1 X-Forwarded-For header, which contains the actual IP address of the web connection.

In Litespeed’s Server/External App/phpLsapi, set Max Connections to 3, Persistent Connection to Yes, Instances to 1, Max Idle Time to 60, Connection Keepalive Timeout to 60, and use these lines in Environment:
PHP_LSAPI_MAX_REQUESTS=10000 PHP_LSAPI_CHILDREN=3 LSAPI_AVOID_FORK=1

If the server has more than 512MB of RAM, set Max Connections to 5 and PHP_LSAPI_CHILDREN=5. If it has more than 1024MB of RAM, use 10, and so on. This will help the concurrency of busy servers.

In Dreamhost’s Stats/Site Statistics, uncheck the “Run Analog Reports” box for all of your domains. The calculation of the stats uses up a lot of server resources each day, and although you will no longer see useful information about individual requests and bots, a non-server-log-parsing tracker such as Mint or Statcounter is preferable.

Tune Dreamhost PS’s CPU/Memory settings, maintaining at least 200MB free swap memory AND keeping the 15-minute load average below 1. After a short burst of CPU Usage or Memory past your limits, the speed of the CPU or memory will be throttled greatly. If PHP decides to use those slow resources, it can cause a chain reaction that starts too many Apache threads, possibly bringing the server down.

Mem: 307200k total, 253608k used, 53592k free
Swap: 307200k total, 0k used, 307200k free

That’s all! Your Dreamhost PS should now be running in top shape.

Shigofumi 06 - he’s a criminal for that scum

2008-02-21T17:21:01Z

Humans are called social animals. An eye for an eye? Then he’s just a caveman.

Socially, he died.
However, as an animal, he lives.

Compiling PHP5 and eAccelerator for Litespeed on Dreamhost PS

2008-05-03T01:46:55Z

The standard PHP4 installation that comes with Litespeed may be missing important libraries that you require for your PHP applications. Also, the bundled APC accelerator is not always enabled. Chances are that you will want to compile PHP5 and eAccelerator yourself for maximum compatibility and performance. Luckily, Litespeed has a built-in PHP compiler that simplifies this process.

First, make sure that your Dreamhost PS is temporarily set to at least 600MHz/600MB. Compiling is a CPU intensive task, and without sufficient CPU power, it will take far too long.

Next, connect to your shell account via SSH.

Download, extract, and compile autoconf and automake:
wget ftp://ftp.ucsb.edu/pub/mirrors/linux/gentoo/distfiles/autoconf-2.61.tar.gz wget ftp://ftp.ucsb.edu/pub/mirrors/linux/gentoo/distfiles/automake-1.10.1.tar.bz2 tar xzf autoconf-2.61.tar.gz tar xjf automake-1.10.1.tar.bz2 cd autoconf-2.61 ./configure --prefix=$HOME make make install export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin cd $HOME/automake-1.10.1 ./configure --prefix=$HOME make make install
Compile PHP5 from the Litespeed web administration interface. Note that the compile options and file paths in the below image differ from the defaults. Replace username with your user name. gettext is important for international language support, mysql is important for Wordpress, jpeg is important for image manipulation, and PEAR is not used very often. Each PHP web application has different PHP requirements, and not everything was included here, so please make sure to include the compile options that you need. If you are unsure, take a look at Dreamhost’s default compile options to see many other possibilities. In the interest of keeping a small PHP memory footprint, include only necessary compile options.

Next, we must compile eAccelerator manually. If you are compiling PHP 5.2.5, you can skip this and download the binary here.
wget http://bart.eaccelerator.net/source/0.9.5.2/eaccelerator-0.9.5.2.tar.bz2 tar -xjf eaccelerator-0.9.5.2.tar.bz2 cd eaccelerator-0.9.5.2 export PHP_PREFIX=$HOME/lsws/lsphp5/bin export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin $PHP_PREFIX/phpize ./configure --prefix=$HOME --enable-eaccelerator-shared --with-php-config=$PHP_PREFIX/php-config make cp modules/eaccelerator.so $HOME

After the compile is complete and eaccelerator.so is in your /home/username/ folder, change the Command setting in Server/External App/phpLsapi from $SERVER_ROOT/fcgi-bin/lsphp to $SERVER_ROOT/fcgi-bin/lsphp5
Make a file called php.ini in your $HOME/lsws/fcgi-bin/ directory. Add these lines to enable eAccelerator.
extension_dir = "/home/username" extension="eaccelerator.so" eaccelerator.allowed_admin_path="/home/username" eaccelerator.shm_size="16" eaccelerator.cache_dir="/home/username/tmp/eaccelerator" eaccelerator.enable="1" eaccelerator.optimizer="1" eaccelerator.check_mtime="0" eaccelerator.debug="0" eaccelerator.filter="" eaccelerator.shm_max="0" eaccelerator.shm_ttl="3600" eaccelerator.shm_prune_period="3600" eaccelerator.shm_only="1" eaccelerator.compress="0" eaccelerator.compress_level="1" eaccelerator.keys = "shm_only" eaccelerator.sessions = "shm_only" eaccelerator.content = "shm_only" output_buffering = On memory_limit = 32M

Make a directory /home/username/tmp/eaccelerator and chmod those directories 777. Keep the shm_size as large as your memory will allow. Dreamhost’s NFS file mounts are slow, and we want to avoid putting cache files there. Using /tmp as the cache_dir is faster and allows a smaller shm_size to be used, but it has a capacity of only 128MB, and the server will crash if that directory runs out of space.

Now perform a graceful restart of Litespeed. That’s it! To check if everything is running as it should, create and browse to a file called phpinfo.php with these lines of code:
< ?php phpinfo(); ?>
If all is well, you should see a page titled PHP 5.2.5 that contains this line: “with eAccelerator v0.9.5.2, Copyright (c) 2004-2006 eAccelerator, by eAccelerator.”

With the installation of PHP5 and eAccelerator, most of our speed optimizations for Litespeed are complete. Next time: final tuning of Litespeed and Dreamhost settings for lowest cost and highest stability.

Optimizing Dreamhost PS CPU and Memory Usage by Installing Litespeed Web Server

2008-02-22T19:27:33Z

Dreamhost PS can act as a very cost effective VPS setup if you are able to configure it correctly. For $15.00 a month on top of the generous Dreamhost shared hosting plan, you can move off of the horrendously loaded shared webservers and onto a virtual private server with 150 MB RAM, 150 MB swap memory, and 150 MHz of dedicated CPU. Dreamhost’s MySQL database servers are still shared with others, but they are decent enough for most sites, and the fact that they are off-server means that they don’t use precious VPS memory.

Dreamhost PS’s default configuration was inherited directly from their shared hosting setup. It was slightly fiddled with but never fully optimized for low memory situations, which is what we have with Dreamhost PS. In particular, the Apache prefork threads that manage web connections to clients are compiled with libraries that you probably don’t need for your personal site. Because of this, more than 2MB of RAM are wasted per thread, and a moderately popular website usually has 30 or more threads. Also, the FastCGI settings are crude, leading to out-of-memory errors and debilitating “blocking” load from common FCGI daemons such as PHP, Perl, and Ruby.

There is much instability when running Dreamhost PS at the lowest memory settings. The easiest solution to this problem is to scale up the CPU/Memory of the Dreamhost PS server until it reaches acceptable levels, and pay extra month after month. A more cost-effective solution is to install an alternative web server behind Dreamhost’s Apache mod_proxy setup. The Litespeed web server is fast, stable, and .htaccess rewrite compatible so it’ll work straight out of the box with your Wordpress or Gallery or phpBB.

First, we’ll install the Litespeed Standard Edition web server to our home directory. The free Litespeed Standard Edition has a low connection limit of 150 and is more like trial software. However, since all of our web connections will be routed through Apache’s front-end mod_proxy module, Litespeed will never reach that limit, and we will never have to purchase Litespeed’s Enterprise Edition. Using Litespeed behind a proxy server makes for a slick deal.

Connect to your PS server’s shell account using SSH.

Using the command prompt, download the Litespeed web server:
wget http://www.litespeedtech.com/packages/3.0/lsws-3.3.4-std-i386-linux.tar.gz
Unzip it to a directory in your home:
tar -xzf lsws-3.3.4-std-i386-linux.tar.gz
Run the install, agreeing to the license and following the instructions:
lsws-3.3.4/install.sh

The Litespeed configuration server will automatically start after the install. Load the LiteSpeed Web configuration panel by browsing to domain.com:7080/

The important settings that you’ll need to configure to get started are .htaccess overrides and file paths. Under Server’s htaccess allow override, untick None and set the overrides that you require. FileInfo is important, as it controls permalinks and mod_rewrite ability. In Virtual Host’s general tab, untick all htaccess overrides to inherit the settings from Server. To set up file paths, edit the Virtual Host Root in the Basic tab to /home/YOURUSERNAME/. Edit the Document Root in the General tab to $VH_ROOT/yourdomain.com/

That should be enough to begin! Perform a graceful restart of Litespeed and test your site by browsing to yourdomain.com:8088.

If it works, we move on to Dreamhost’s control panel to finalize the configuration. In the Domains “Mongrel and Proxy” page, proxy your entire domain to port 8088.

In the Goodies “Cron Jobs” page, add a new cron job that initializes Litespeed after every server reboot: /home/yourusername/lsws/bin/lshttpd start

Wait a few minutes, and Litespeed should be serving the site on the default web port of 80. To check if it worked, use curl to grab the web page headers, and it should read “Litespeed” instead of “Apache”:
curl -I yourdomain.com

You’ll notice that all of your Apache threads are now lighter. They only use about 6MB RAM in mod_proxy mode instead of Dreamhost’s normal 8MB.
top CTRL+C

We’ve taken a big step towards optimizing performance, but we’re not done yet. Litespeed comes standard with PHP4 for your popular web applications such as Wordpress, Gallery2, and phpBB. Next time, we’ll compile Litespeed’s PHP5 LSAPI with eAccelerator for top PHP performance.

the new rich

2008-02-21T15:16:10Z

My freedom is the empty kind.

Yours is the freedom to choose what you want to do.

A very substantial freedom that you got from experiencing lots of hardship and pain.

You’re free to choose what you want.
That’s why you’re also free to abandon what you want.

Erika - FREE lyrics and review

2007-07-05T21:58:43Z

Sawajiri Erika’s last song was the chart-topping drama theme song “Taiyou no Uta”, released under Amane Kaoru, her character’s name in the drama. “Taiyou no Uta” ended up selling 481,000 copies, making it 2006’s top-selling single by a Japanese female artist. Now going by just ERIKA, she is releasing her debut single FREE on 2007-7-4.

FREE is a song with high pop sensibilities. The rhythm is strong, and the melody is catchy. Erika’s voice constantly modulates between whispery and confident, and it is truly a captivating voice. Compared to the more acoustic Taiyou no Uta, FREE is a rockin’ song.

In the PV, Erika has changed her image. Whereas before she was snowy and pure, she is now bronzed and sexy. During the numerous scenes in which she is lying on a bed, she faintly resembles a tanned Reon Kadena.

Without the backing of a drama and with the abandonment of her image, FREE is a experiment in change. The great thing that Taiyou no Uta had was a soulful synergy between girl, drama, and song. The acoustics of FREE are nearly on par with Taiyou no Uta, but it feels like something is missing.

Still, the song sounds good, Sawajiri Erika has a major fan base, and there’s a curious air about this debut release. How far will it go up the Oricon charts (I’m guessing 125,000 copies sold)? I can’t wait to find out!

Erika - FREE lyrics:

Nee kikoeru? Kono koe ga
Furitsuzuku you ni kimi ni made tooku todoku kana?
Mou ano basho ni wa kaerenai
Kaze ni kieru negai
Kimi ga iru dake de boku wa toberu yo
Itami sasu basho e doko made mo
Tsunaide itai tsunaide itai
Mada aenakutemo inori nagara hibikiwataru sora e
Aa koko kara dakedaseru chikara ga hoshii yo
Te no hira no mirai sore dake de
Ushinatte kitamono
Te ni shita mono
Zenbu idaite hashiru
Kotae ga aru kara ima wo ikiteru
Mamoritai mono ga koko ni aru
Tatoe ima ga kioku no naka kara kiesattemo
Kimi no koto wa koko de oboeteru yo…
Itsuka deau hi ga kite
Sono te ni furerareru no nara
Yasashiku kono te wo nibiri kaeshite yo
Kimi ga iru dake de boku wa toberu yo
Kienai itami nara sono mama de
Tsunaide itai tsunaide itai itsuka aemasu you ni
Inori nagara hibikiwataru koe de
Ano hibi
I wanna be free…
Ano hibi

作詩：ERIKA・白鳥マイカ作曲：COZZi

ねえ　聴こえる?　この声が
降り続くように　君にまで遠く　届くかな?

もうあの場所には　帰れない
風に消える願い

君がいるだけで　僕は飛べるよ
光挿す場所へ　どこまでも
つないでいたい　つないでいたい
まだ会えなくても
祈りながら　響き渡る　空へ

ああ　ここから駆け出せる　力が欲しいよ
手のひらの未来　それだけで

失ってきたもの　手にしたもの
全部抱いて　走る

答えがあるから　今を生きてる
守りたいものが　ここにある
例え今が　記憶の中から　消えさっても
君のことは　ココで　覚えてるよ…

いつか　出会う日が来て
その手に　触れられるのなら
優しく　この手を　握り返してよ

君がいるだけで　僕は飛べるよ
消えない痛みなら　そのままで
つないでいたい　つないでいたい　いつか会えますように
祈りながら　響き渡る　声で

I Wanna be free…

3 days - Hirano Aya @ AX2007 and iPhone

2008-02-13T10:43:05Z

Until today, I’ve never understood the urge to travel that some people have. To me, traveling is like buying a new gadget. Travel is amusing, fun, and memorable, but it’s also emotionally destitute and money gobbling. Travel is like “Lost in Translation” before Bob met Charlotte. During trip planning, I feel like I’ve already exhausted half the experience from researching the destination. So usually there’s no motivation to travel.

But today, I want to go to California, because Hirano Aya is going to sing at the Anime Expo there on 6-29. I’ll probably be able to find a recording of the performance on the web afterwards, but I still want to be there. Maybe it’s because there’s some sort of significance in seeing her in 3D for the first time. Maybe it’s because she’s an idol. Maybe.. I don’t know.

Every place becomes a mirror of yourself. Traveling is not about the places you go or the things you see, but the ways in which you change.

Incidentally, the Apple iPhone is also going to be released on 6-29.

Purple Haze, by borealnz

shows of the season

2007-06-03T16:51:44Z

More than just mere entertainment, good shows are like vitamins for the soul.

Bleach

Capeta

Claymore

Death Note

Hayate no Gotoku

Heroes

House

Liar Game

Lucky ☆ Star

NANA

Naruto Shippuuden

Proposal Daisakusen

Sexy voice and Robo

Smallville

materialism

2007-06-02T00:03:50Z

GROHE Ondus bathroom sink faucet, price censored

My bathroom sink faucet is old and grime-encrusted. I considered buying a new one to replace it, but currently faucet prices are ridiculous. They start at $100 for the most generic types, and sleek designs don’t exist until after $500.

I do not understand why minimal contemporary designs cost more than their ornate counterparts. I only know that my hands don’t deserve this yet. Luxury is a right that exists for the worthy; others bear a crude likeness called materialism.