POSTS FROM 2011

I had been hosting this site on a 256MB VPS from Slicehost for just over 2 years in their Dallas datacenter. Overall, it was a great service (and a much needed upgrade from Dreamhost), with only 3 unscheduled reboots over those years. However, my weekly monitoring reports from Browsermob never hit 100% uptime across their global servers. A typical report looked like this:

Slicehost (Dallas) VPS weekly uptime

Location	Response Time	Checks	Failures	Availability
Amsterdam	5.94 secs	192	26	86.5%
Dallas, TX	1.04 secs	166	0	100%
Dublin, Ireland	2.28 secs	140	0	100%
New York City	6.01 secs	196	33	83.2%
SF Bay Area, CA	1.3 secs	163	0	100%
Singapore	3.83 secs	170	0	100%
Washington, DC	1.1 secs	174	0	100%

Over 4 months of monitoring, between 1 and 3 locations would fail to reach 100% availability each week. Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if any other VPS service could do any better. I signed up for a Linode 512 plan and ported over this site, which had the following relevant configuration:

• CentOS 5.3
• Apache 2.2
• MySQL 5
• WordPress 2.1

The change in the Browsermob profile was immediate. The first full week of running on Linode in their Fremont datacenter looked like this:

Linode (Fremont) VPS weekly uptime

Location	Response Time	Checks	Failures	Availability
Amsterdam	2.06 secs	84	0	100%
Dallas, TX	1.05 secs	84	0	100%
Dublin, Ireland	1.9 secs	83	0	100%
New York City	1.27 secs	84	0	100%
SF Bay Area, CA	672 ms	84	0	100%
Singapore	2.37 secs	84	0	100%
Tokyo	1.58 secs	83	0	100%
Washington, DC	1.15 secs	84	0	100%

(The drop in number of checks is due to a drop in the daily allowance for free Browsermob accounts, in addition to an increase of one new location in Tokyo.)

Diving into the data some more, I found that the range of response times across the globe were also substantially improved. The response time chart in my profile showed a clear improvement at the time of the switch on July 4:

	Slicehost	Linode	% improvement
Average response time (ms)	1889	1513	19.91%
Response time stdev	1161	638.7	44.95%
Coefficent of variation	0.6141	0.4221	31.26%

So, for the same price ($20/month), Linode was able to deliver almost 20% improvement in average global response time along with a much tighter standard deviation.

At the time that I switched, the 256 Slicehost plan cost the same as the 512 Linode plan. Slicehost has since changed their pricing to almost match Linode.

I was hiking up in Yosemite when at the top of North Dome the mirror in my Canon 5D came unglued and started bouncing around in my camera! I took it to a local camera shop, who quoted a $350 repair (which involved replacing the entire mirror housing), but luckily a bit of interneting yield the following service notice from Canon's astoundingly-difficult-to-bookmark support site:

Service Notice: EOS 5D: Main Mirror Detachment

Thank you for using Canon products.

We have discovered that, in rare instances, the main mirror of some EOS 5D Digital SLR cameras may detach due to deterioration in the strength of the adhesive. Accordingly, we would like to convey the details and our service policy concerning this phenomenon.

We offer our sincerest apologies to those customers who have been inconvenienced by this issue. Canon always strives to provide the highest quality products to our customers and we will spare no effort in our quality management to make sure our customers can use our products with confidence. We hope our efforts will earn your understanding.

Phenomenon: The main mirror of the camera detaches and images cannot be viewed through the viewfinder.

Affected products: EOS 5D Digital SLR cameras whose main mirror has detached.

User Support: We will repair and reinforce the mirror portion of the affected products free of charge. If you own one of the affected products, please contact our Customer Support Center.

We appreciate your patience, and we offer our sincerest apologies to the customers using these products who have been inconvenienced by this issue.

This information is for residents of the United States and Puerto Rico only. If you do not reside in the USA or Puerto Rico, please contact the Canon Customer Support Center in your region.

Contact Information for Inquiries
Customer Support Center
1-866-422-2965 (toll free)
8:00 a.m. - Midnight, EST (M-F)
10:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m., EST (Sat.)
Email: carecenter@cits.canon.com

The Canon customer support rep was far more friendly than their website. The timeline went like this:

• August 6: Canon sent over a UPS ground shipping label to the closest repair facility in Irvine, CA
• August 11: I shipped out my 5D body
• August 18: Canon sent an email confirming that they have inspected the camera and would be starting repairs
• August 22: Canon sent an email confirming that the repair was finished and a Fedex tracking number

So within 2 weeks, I got my camera back, freshly cleaned and sporting a reinforced mirror mount (highlighted in green below) total free of charge: