Clker.com – weblog

Some people think that injuries only happen if you’re doing physically demanding work. However, lots of people who work in the computer / IT field suffer injuries, it’s just that they don’t know it!

Have you ever felt back pain or muscle spasm – may be one that lasted like 6 weeks without being able to turn your head, lift heavy things? Some people think that Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is yet another injury cause by compressing a nerve as a result of using keyboards.

The most common is the back / shoulder / neck pains and it happens frequently to people who spend a lot of time in front of computers & screens. I had a back pain recently, that reduced my activity a lot for the past eight weeks. It was horrible, once I come back from work, I’m almost grounded. That was the fourth time I get this pain, and the second time being so bad to make me go to the doctor & last around 6-8 weeks.

My doctor referred me to a physical therapist, who gave me a good reason for this happening after some tests. As he explained, I suffer from neck muscle atrophy – more on the left side, which is simply weakening in the muscles of the neck due to not using those muscles. As a result, my other muscles had to exert more effort to carry the neck, and the result is pain in the other muscles. I noticed that when I sit and read, I actually lean my head on my hand, so the head is being carried a significant amount of time.

I was advised to do some exercises that should help build the neck muscles and stretch the back muscles that have pain. I also noticed lots of other people doing exercieses while sitting – so I wasn’t alone in this computer related back pain world. Best way to avoid it, stop sitting funny & exercise a couple of time a week & I hope no one else gets it.

I previously wrote about hardware problems that were puzzling me, and I finally found the answer. I installed sensors on ubuntu and ran ksensors and just watched what’s going on. The old server that was shutting down suddenly had an opteron dual core processor, which ran at 50 degrees Celsius at no load. I had three websites running there, the most recent addition is clker.com . Due to the large number of people that were trying to access the website, the CPU was loaded and overheated, which inturn lead to it shutting down.

Of course the solution is to put the server in a very cold room, which I don’t have. I resorted to buying a new board and CPU, which does not heat as much as the old ones and transfered the database and pictures to it. Currently the no load temperature is 11 degrees, which I think is great. This new board is a special sale from microcenter, both the board and CPU were for $94 with $15 rebate Sempron 64! I added 1GB of RAM. It really worked much better than my expectations, as I had very very low performance expectations from that CPU

Currently this server is running clker.com only, and will run mibrahim.net today. The CPU load as shown in top does not pass 2% except in spikes. People are still digging as well as search engine robots. So that’s a good value if someone wants to run his/her own starter website.

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