We have recently got a new car and are trying to offload my other cars — the white Pulsar is too small now for the family of 4, and Voyoge is too big to drive around the town. I have just put our 11 year old Nissan Pulsar N15 hatchback on Drive.com.au 2 nights ago…
It has a 82kw 1.6l engine, done around 82,000km, 5 speed manual, and drinks regular unlead. Bought it before Vivian and I were married, and has done a few trips to the Gold Coast and Canberra. Drove it on my wedding day. Drove it to bring both Anna and Elsie back from the hospital. Still going strong, and it would be sad to see it go.
Interesting after I placed the ad on Drive.com.au, there has been a few enquiries.
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One is asking for significantly less in cash. I was like WTF it is too low (it’s already cheap comparing to others on Drive.com.au, especially with low mileage). And he said, “didn’t it say ‘ono’ on the ad?” Well, apparently on Drive.com.au you can only choose between ‘ono’ or ‘neg’. But even with ‘ono’ it is still “or NEAREST offer” — not asking $1,200 below asking price!
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Got an email enquiry this morning, willing to pay $500 above asking price. That immediately raises an alarm. Then he goes on to say that he is currently in US at the moment, will pay with PayPal and will ask his agent to come and pick up the car. Meh, heard that line before. The next thing would probably be asking me to pay his agent some pick up fee. Go away, and have a nice day, I replied.
It’s still on the market. Contact me if you are interested ($3,999 ono, or special discount for poor Moore students or MTS :).
Google’s probably the last update on Google Wave. It’s a bit sad, because Wave is primary a Sydney product, sad I have spent the last Google partners day looking at it. We even used it for one of the collaboration at work. I guess a technically superior product might still not be popular, if no one actually know how to use it.
Took an 2.5 hours trip on CityCat on Brisbane River yesterday.
So many bridges…
Hacker News Poll — what is your religion? I actually found the religion-related threads on HN usually quite good comparing to sites like Whirlpool, where people would ridicule first before any discussion. Still, atheism/agnosticism are still the majority in the tech world/startup scene.
Python 2.7 has just been released, on Anna’s birthday :) it’s going to be the last 2.x release. Time to start picking on 3.x?
This blog is brought to you by WordPress App running on my Nexus one just updated to Android 2.2 “FroYo” FRF91. Everything runs great so far, except Swype needs to be reinstalled.
Last night Vivian and I managed to dine at Cha Cha Japanese Restaurant near Oasis on the Gold Coast high way.
Food: Teppanyaki chicken + rice ($12.80), Tempura udon ($11.80), fried tofu ($6.80), Japanese green tea ($2.70).
We actually meant to go to Cha Cha last time when we were on the Gold Coast (late Jan), but the place was packed back then. There were surprisingly empty tables on Monday so we took the chance. Food was good. Portion-wise not as much as I have hoped :) Will I come back? Only if not crowded.
Over the last week I have moved FOCUSER.net (yes the good ol site that does not seem to be used by anyone any more) and all my personal sites from VPSLink to Jumba‘s Virtuozzo VPS. Because
- It is Australian (servers in Sydney in my case), whereas VPSLink is in US
- Believe it or not, Jumba is actually cheaper ($10/month)
- Most importantly, VPSLink sucks after being acquired by Endurance International, and the server migrated to Boston = even higher latency.
Jumba is not without fault — had a 48 hours down time the other day. None of the sites here are important anyway :)
Android Australia: Vodafone announces Google Nexus One. It is finally officially coming to Australia via Vodafone and its UK arm. Yes, a few days after I bought mine. Such an awesome phone ONLY IF Froyo is releasing tonight :)
Via Hacker News. Fred Wilson talked about Being Present, because “you have about ten to twelve years to connect with your kids and then they turn into teenagers…” That’s a message to the hard working entrepreneur-parents out there. In fact working 9-5 can feel missing out, let along getting back home at almost 8pm each day? Time for a change. Seriously.
Just ran this on my various blogs:
$ svn switch http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.0
And navigate to the Admin pages of the blog. Done — WordPress upgraded to the latest and the greatest within seconds. Would be faster if something like git is used instead of subversion (which I found slower and slower than git or hg), but certainly no complain here.
As of WordPress 3.0 — not much changed on the surface. I am pretty sure Matt and gang have done the heart transplant under the bonnet, but these days I am so out of touch with the latest WordPress development I seriously have no idea what has been changed. It does chew up a bit more memory, which can be a problem if you are running tiny virtual servers.
So far so good.
SMH/Drive: East beats West when it comes to road manners and safety. Looks like Asians are more likely to be safe drivers than caucasians. Again, that’s generally speaking base on statistics, and our unbelieves usually come from some special cases :)
It arrived today and I’ve switched. From my Nokia E71 of 18 months to this.
1GHz Snapdragon processor. WSVGA AMOLED display. 512MB memory + 4GB SD card. Android 2.1.
First impression from Anna when I went home. “Wow iPhone!” (arrghhh!)
So far so good. Installed a few apps to get the VoIP working. I do miss the nice QWERTY keyboard on E71 though. Typing on Nexus One on the first day is awkward (and super slow comparing to E71). Fingers are too clumsy I guess. Can’t wait to get onto Swype beta and hopefully that will help out with my slow typing.
Just tweet about my recent bad experience with VPSLink’s migration from Seattle to Boston (which this blog is hosted on), and noticed that Twitter is not displaying my number of tweets correctly. Saying 828 there but I know very well that there are 3,200+ tweets there, as I ran a scheduled script that backs up all my tweets (which I still not have ported to use OAuth ARGHHHH!)
That reminds me not to trust the said company to backup all my status updates. It is much easier to locate what you have blogged about than what you have tweeted, if they have not yet archived it to the non-retrievable ether.
Update: It is actually reported on Twitter status so it’s a known issue and they are fixing it now. Except at the same time they are also having availability issues. D’oh.
For the past 12 months OzBargain has been running on a single Linode 720 at Linode, in their Fremont data centre. I thought it was pretty good for a Drupal website getting 5 million page views per month, especially renting that VPS is pretty much free to me :) Due to surge in traffic as end of financial year draws close, it has been struggling though. Loadavg will go over 1 regularly during day time, and can peak at 3-4 in evening hours. It was so bad at one stage that Nginx would stop serving FastCGI requests.
So I went and got another Linode 720 at Fremont running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and migrated the database (~700MB so far) at 1:30am yesterday morning. There was around 10 minutes of downtime for me to copy the database around and reconfigure the files. And now OzBargain is running on two $39.95/month servers, one running Nginx + PHP-FastCGI, and the other running MySQL. Here’s the loadavg of the web server (taken from Cacti)
Note the big drop of load on the 12th. Two are indeed better than one :)
Looking at hitting 6 million page views this month and I know everything is going to die down a bit until around October/November. Let’s see how long this setup will last.