As of lately, the site has completely gone to hell. For starters, almost all the “big boys” with their premier ads have pulled out. The only ones buying banner ads are NON-LOCAL businesses. Then again, how could you even contact them? The contact system has been broken for over 2 years. And to make things worse, using the contact form on the site has never resulting in any response.

But what is even worse is this: nobody is buying anything on that site anymore. And I mean nobody. The only responses you get from listings on there these days are people wanting to trade crap like horses and used tires. And while I don’t mind a good set of used tires for a used car – what on earth gives some of these people the idea that I would even WANT a horse?!

Of coarse, my favorite are the ones that contact you all day long to see how much they can talk you down on your asking price – yet have absolutely no desire to actually buy anything. They are simply curious to see if you would have been willing to take a lower price. I cannot cound how many times I have responded with “how much are you willing to pay for it?” and was answered “oh, well – I don’t really need it – just curious”. WTF?

You know, I own mycookietown.com – perhaps I should create my own classifieds site on that domain….

…one that filters out useless trolls and actually responds to the inquires of those willing to spend money.

- Dean

It seems like almost yesterday, I can recall loading over 100 used Pentium III and Pentium 4 computers [with monitors] on my trailer for less than $400. These were working units! That’s not the case these days.

I have been keeping an eye on GovDeals and Nashville e-Bid the past year now… Wow. It amazes me, yet makes sense why most “mom and pop” computer repair and sales shops struggle so bad. Recently, I saw a lot (two pallets actually) of used Dell P4 desktops [34 computers total] go for over $1500. The listing clearly stated: most are non-functional.

Now take 34 computers. If you were to get half them working – lets say more than half – that’s 20 total. That’s $75 you have into each computer – and you STILL have to test, re-load, and clean the computer. Lets say your time to do all this is only worth $25 (you sure could not pay me $25 to test, re-install, and clean a computer)… Now you have $100 into this computer. So are you going to sell it for $150 and make a $50 profit? Remember you still have overhead: lights, phones, Internet, etc. Where are you making your money?

Perhaps you will sell the computer for $200-$250. Now you have another issue… Is it really worth that? Of coarse, you can GET that much out of it, but are you truly providing your customer with good value? Good advertising, and sales tactics may sell that computer, but in today’s economy, customer retention is far more important than “just selling the merchandise”. Put simply: a Dell P4 2.0ghz w/ 512 megs ram and 40gb hard drive is **not** worth a dime over $150-$175ish.

Remember: when you make a bad impression towards a customer, you change his/her image of ALL small computer repair businesses!

Back in the day, small shops actually got along. Hell, the owners of several PC repair businesses could actually get together on a weekend, have a cookout, and play a couple good games of pool or golf. Unlike the “I am jealous of all the other repair shops” mentality that clouds the industry today, we would use this time together to find out who was wholesaling what, for how much, and where. We actually worked together in order to ensure we ALL got good deals on the stuff – rather than mindlessly bidding against each other and going out of our way to cut every one’s throat.

I have seen dozens of shops come and go over the years – myself included. Everyone needs to work together on this, otherwise the only ones left will be the Geek Squad…

Been messing around with alternatives to VMWares ESX and ESXi. Of the top contender thus far is KVM.

KVM is a true kernel-level hypervisor similar to ESXi. Unlike ESXi, you still load a typical Linux OS first – the KVM runs via a special kernel module.

At first glance, I was a bit confused: you install Qemu and KVM. “So is this Qemu or is it KVM”. It is actually both. KVM is largely comprised of two components: the kernel-level hypervisor and a handfull of shared libraries and binaries shared by Qemu.

At the core, you call the “kvm” command just as you would call the “qemu” command (they take the same arguments).

Installation on Ubuntu is easy-squeezy:

apt-get install kvm qemu

Currently, kvm supports all the neato stuff you would expect from a kick-ass virtualizer:

• Full virtualization that takes advantage of VTI and AMD-V extensions
• Supports snapshots and machine states
• Live migration of a running guest from one server to another
• Multi-processor support (up to 64 I believe)
• Good memory management with Windows guests

There are some GUI tools for managing the virtual machines – one of the neatest I found was virtual-manager. Similar to VMWares VCenter. I have not used this tool much however in favor of custom scripts for management.

Looks like I will be deploying this in an initial test phase at our TeirII data center in Franklin, TN for the Army National Guards website (http://www.nationalguard.com). I will keep everyone posted on how the tests turn out!

It is amazing that this is a niche that has not really been filled via open source offerings.. yet.

Say hello to PG::Stats.

Okay, okay… so this is NOT a finished work of art yet. But I have started a large portion of it thus far. In fact, I currently have:

• A standalone high-performance customized web server daemon for the data push API
• A single perl module for the actual data insertion
• A near-finalized table structure.

The system is written purely in Perl. Theres a front-end I currently have styled and sketched out using the Catalyst framework but nothing functional on that end.

The database is Postgres (as apposed to MySQL) because:

• Postgres supports Table partitions and proper inheritance.
• Postgres has nifty data-type such as IP Address types
• MySQL is now owned by Oracle – need I say more?

I have been thinking of turning this into a GPL’d application and setting up a subversion project on my server if enough people would be interested.

Gimme a shout at dean@supergluetech.com

Check out http://www.cookeville.com

Things that just stick out at first glance:

1. Horrible jpeg image that is severely pixeled and looks as though it was spliced together with Microsoft Paint.
2. “If Viewing in I.E. 8 Use Compatibility View” – this is unacceptable for any serious production (read: well designed/tested) site.
3. Almost complete lack of spacing between text and page elements – both on page copy and main site links.
4. A right column cluttered with ads that have text so tiny you can not read them.

This entire site reminds me of the days of poorly hacked up Front Page sites of the 90’s.

Digging into the site reveals an extremely un-polished user experience. Now, I ain’t just saying this because I do web design myself, in fact heres some others locally that [as far as I have seen thus far] perform some outstanding web design:

1. http://www.one7media.com/
2. http://www.cookevillecomputers.com/ <– Pretty damn impressive for a “computer fix-it shop”
3. http://www.eyeblastmedia.com/
4. http://www.mmacreative.com/ <– A favorite, really clean

Cookeville.com: if you are reading this, please contact one of the people above (or somebody) to get things up to 21st century web standards!