What's James (PipCop) doing? - Pip Cop

**PipCop** · 2009-03-05, 07:54 PM

I thought I might start this little thread as a pseudo-news thread so anyone interested could have an idea of what's going on.

I'll start with this week:

1. FIXED! The Quick Stats were changed to show the Top 10 robots and group the brokerages under each robot name, in order by equity. Unfortunately there is a bug and the equity of the robot is being read from the robot above it (so robot #2 shows the equity from robot #2, and #3 shows #2's, and so forth) which needs to be fixed.

2. My UPS for the servers arrived yesterday. I need to buy a deep-cycle sealed battery for it. I also found out that it outputs modified PWM sine wave, which is not suitable for my servers (read: it will destroy their power supplies). As a result, I have to buy a line conditioner. Pay day is on the 15th so hopefully I can do it then. Right now the robot testing servers are not running with any UPS so I hope the power stays on!

3. DONE! My Seagate 500GB HDD in my desktop computer died. I lost a huge number of files, including software which I purchased for the site and documents which I had put together. Luckly I had a backup and managed to (I think) recover most files. I was also lucky and did not lose any (many?) personal files which amazed me considering the breadth of damage to my hard drive. I copied all my files to a secondary 500GB Seagate drive I had. I noticed several errors during the file copy and found out it was defective too. So I purchased a new 500GB Seagate drive and an external FreeAgent xtreme 500GB drive. Both of THOSE were defective! So I pulled out a pair of older 400GB Seagate drives and found out that one of the two was also defective! I am currently copying all my files over to the 400GB drive that works, which should take well into the morning, as I have several hundred GB of HD video from my wedding and honeymoon which I need to save. I have purchased two Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA 7,2000 RPM drives which I hope can handle my demanding desktop environment.

4. DONE! Once my backups are all done, I have to re-install Windows XP and all my work applications. That should take a good day.

5. FOUND! I completely lost a document I created which laid out the next feature I wanted to implement on the site. I believe I have it in a Sent Items folder on my laptop, which would be great, as I spent several hours writing it up.

6. FOUND! I also lost an Advertising Overview document I spent several days creating, and also have to look for it in my Sent Items and hope it's there. I also have to build an interface for advertisers to be invoiced and so forth.

7. DONE! The advertising site on the system is acting funky. it displays the wrong size ads in the wrong areas (like a tall ad in a wide place). I am not sure why, so I have to fix that.

8. DONE! The donation system was one of the pieces of software I lost during my HDD crash, so once I am up and running I have to find it and download it again, then re-install it on the site.

9. I have to do my taxes for my other company.

10. DONE! I have a new robot up and running on a test server, but have not conected it to the site (statements). But it's running! (I should go check on it!) I forget what robot it is, but you'll see it soon.

11. I have been introduced to a new brokerage who has a MT4 ECN platform. I would like to see how various robots perform. They have very low spread

, such as 1-2 pips on EURUSD and the likes.

12. RECEIVED! Jerry of Forex Goldmine says he is working on a version of RoboMiner and GT-Shadow which can function on ECN brokers.

13. I have a new robot purchase lined up, but I have to get them my demo account numbers. I have to set up a new VM

for that, which takes a few hours.

14. FIXED! I am pretty much cut off from my email due to my computer being down, so I apologize if I haven't been as active or replying to things lately.

Oh great ... the power just flickered ... I hope I don't lose power!!!!

I need a UPS!

**PipCop** · 2009-03-05, 07:55 PM

15. DONE! I am working with MT4Stats.com to let folks link from our respective sites. I have not been able to get back to him yet, but that's why there is that little icon under my name.

**rsmereka** · 2009-03-06, 09:58 AM

Sounds like you have been busy. This is the kind of stuff I do at work day in and day out. And at home, pretty much the same thing with trading thrown in for extra fun.

Quote:

I copied all my files to a secondary 500GB Seagate drive I had. I noticed several errors during the file copy and found out it was defective too. So I purchased a new 500GB Seagate drive and an external FreeAgent xtreme 500GB drive. Both of THOSE were defective!

I was also going to purchase the FreeAgent drive but started reading the reviews at TigerDirect and noticed that their were a lot of complaints about dead and malfunctioning drives (which is surprising for Seagate). I went to Lacie instead and never regretted that decision. Lacie external drives are expensive but they are built like tanks.

Keep up the excellant work

I can't tell you what a benefit that an honest Forex site is to the community.

Rick

**PipCop** · 2009-03-06, 10:47 AM

Yeah, very busy. I just got EvolutionV up and running, and had to create new icons for the new brokerages I am using. Now I have to test it and it looks like it's using the wrong statement for several instances which I have to go fix now.

I picked up a pair of Western Digital Caviar Black drives for my desktop, and XP couldn't recognize one. Un-freaking-believable. I've already been to MicroCenter FOUR times trying to get something that works. Thank goodness my servers are hardcode. They are running fine!

**PipCop** · 2009-03-06, 11:03 AM

And now it looks like the Quick Stat icons don't match up to the statements and are reading the balances wrong. I will have to look into this too.

So many things going on! I need lunch!

**PipCop** · 2009-03-07, 05:53 PM

Brilliant.

So I am moving things around in my closet to make space for the new UPS and line conditioner, and moving one of the power strips I manage to hit the on/off switch. Of COURSE, I had also unplugged the second power supplies for all the servers. Boom. All the servers go offline. And one of the servers won't power back up. Yes, dead server. Luckily I was able to pull the drives and load them into one of the other servers which is not being used, but now I have to repair or replace it.

Add one more thing to my list!

cogs · 2009-03-08, 06:20 AM

Hi James,

Are there inherant problems wwith running UPS systems that you know of?

I have just set up a Ritmo 650VA for my modem and a 1800VA for my PC and all seems fine for now. We occasionally have power outages here and I don't really want to hard wire the PC 'always on'.

Testing works well, was just reading your posting above and noticed you had some problems?

**PipCop** · 2009-03-08, 10:46 AM

UPS' in general are fine if you're using one that is designed for what you are using. The Ritmo is specifically designed for computers, so you're a-ok. However, the UPS you're using is way too small for what I am doing. This UPS here:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1157067061643

is the biggest I cound find at a retail shop, and it only provides 4 minutes of runtime for my servers. That's not long enough to last through a moderate power outage, and doesn't even give them time to shut down gracefully if needed (they take about 8 minutes to shut down due to all the VM

's running.) To get much bigger with APC or any other "retail" brand is crazy, and anything with built in batteries is just not a good deal for what I am doing. However, an inverter is great.

This is the Inverter which I purchased:

http://www.provantage.com/tripp-lite...0~7TRPI01M.htm

Which hooks up to deep-cycle marine/RV batteries and can run for hours and hours. However, it outputs modified PWM sine wave power, which is great for things like light bulbs and refridgerators, but really bad for computers. To fix that, I've also purchased this:

http://www.provantage.com/tripp-lite...0~7TRPC003.htm

Running those two pieces of equipment should allow me to run for several hours and not damage the servers. Well, not damage the three that are left!

Each of my servers pulls about 250w and 250va on a single PSU if the second PSU is offline. If both PSU's are online, then they each pull about 125va/w. My setup is to have one PSU into the wall power and the other PSU into the UPS, so if the power goes out each server still has on PSU supplying power.

For a home user, you won't need any of this stuff. This is way overkill for a desktop computer. You could probably run for a week on my setup. However, I could probably only run for a few seconds on your UPS. I have a 550va UPS in there right now, and it lasts about 4 seconds, so it's great for micro-outages and short

brown outs, but I need something better.

As I was reminded last night, computers don't like being unplugged!

cogs · 2009-03-08, 05:38 PM

It is amazing how much grunt you need to keep these things alive.

I hope all your equipment isn't too close to your living area? You may need to get a EMF meter to just check out how much you are exposed to, hence radiation. I may even have to check my home now as I have a 1 1/2 year old to protect also.

Do you get a large elect bill from all your equip you are running? If this is business it's not a problem but home is different.

I noticeed on the instructions of the smaller unit that it recommends not to run printers off it, I never looked into why and hoped it did not include modems

One of the first things I did was unsolder the annoying beepers on both units, I would hate to have to put up with that at 3AM!

**PipCop** · 2009-03-08, 06:46 PM

Quite. They need a lot of power.

They're in a closet in a hallway which is central to our house, but not really near anywhere we hang out, so I am not too worried.

Yes, my electricity bill has gone up a bit. Quite a bit, I'm surprised to see, but that's okay. It's less than paying a service to host the servers for me.

Laser printers are bad for UPS' because they have a huge power draw to heat up the drum and overload the UPS or burn it out. Most other equipment is fine.

We have lots of UPS' in the house ... as soon as the power goes out, they beep, and the dogs go nuts. It's quite entertaining ...