Random Androgynous Face

Last night I was struck by the mood to draw, instead of programming I couldn’t help myself but to draw. I took out my Moleskine Sketchbook, pencils, eraser and started out on my third entry (on the Moleskine).

I’m currently into drawing realistic people. And I do feel I was able to have a big leap in this piece. I do feel the hair and eyes don’t seem that realistic yet, but I can improve with more practice. For me, the person on the drawing looks like a mature woman, most people are saying that the face looks like a guy, also one person stated that the face looks androgynous. What do you think?

Sorry for the bad quality of the preview. I just took this photo using a computer’s camera. I’ll change the picture after getting hold of a scanner.

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Tickling ruby apps every 5 minutes

I posted a while ago about the problems on DreamHost killing my ruby applications’ start-up. Currently I have a solution, yet it is experimental and certainly not reliable. To tickle the application every 5 minutes, the application processes won’t be idle and won’t be turned off by DreamHost. Since my application don’t get much traffic, I need this desperate measure to keep the application from dying. In return, I can access the applications in an instant as if they were  PHP applications.

My web application is small and lightweight since it uses Sinatra which is a very light framework, so I know it won’t be needing much resources. The starting up is the only problem, since running ruby applications on DreamHost creates a sudden spike on the ram by starting up.

To tickle the application, you need to create a cron job that will visit the application every 5 minutes.

*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/curl http://your-domain.com/ -s -o /dev/null

I noticed some odd behavior though. When you try to run another ruby application on the same server, the loading of my ‘tickled’ applications are also being delayed.

I had this idea a long while ago, and when I saw that this method being used by other ruby users hosted on DreamHost, I decided to try it out too.

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Happy Birthday Pixelmai Blog!

Today is the First Birthday of PixelMai Blog! Happy one year of blogging to me and PixelMai, and may we have more blogging years to come! The pretty cake picture came from Not Your Average Cakes.

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Thinking of purchasing VPS Hosting

DreamHost has changed their rules lately. They have a script running which  kills processes that goes over their limit of 153600.00. That is of course since I’m hosted on a shared server, so they’re killing the processes calling my ruby applications.

2009-11-13 11:37:52 procwatch2 INFO: Process(pid=26603, name=’ruby1.8′, uid=thisismyid(#####), tty=None, cpu=4.6, rss=100552.0, vsize=174236.0): kill for total RAM (50276.00 self, 157280.00 total exceeds limit 153600.00)

When trying to access any of my ruby applications, even the Sinatra-powered ChanLu Dev, it takes more than a minute to load compared before when the loading time took only five seconds. There are other ruby applications I’m using, like Tracks and Redmine that I can’t live without. Also, I really don’t want to use other programming language for ChanLu. Let’s just say Ruby got me, and it took my heart away.

I know that I do need a private server if I want to host ruby applications, DreamHost also advised me to get one. I’m planning to purchase a VPS plan on another hosting company, because they’re more affordable. I just hope to have some more money to finance on this.

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