Merry Christmas!
Regardless of religion, I hope whatever you’re all up to, wherever you are, whoever you’re with, and whatever you believe in is treating you right.
Bob Plankers
links for 2008-12-23
First Look: FontShuffle puts FontShop in your pocket – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) Oh hell yeah. I might be a computer dork, photo dork, and a theater tech dork but I also am an amateur font dork, too. The right font sometimes means as much as the text content. This app doesn't have everything, but it's a start. this is sippey.typepad.com: project management lingo My favorite project management term in this post is "Come to Beavis meeting." Come to Beavis. Hehe hehehehe he hehe hehehe I have no idea how difficult my class is « Nickel Ramen Noodles "One student has recently learned that the shift key on the keyboard can turn letters from lower case to upper case." …
Why Would You Want A Second Superuser?
A bunch of people seem to be reposting of the VMware KB article on adding a second superuser (root) account to VMware ESX. I have to ask: Why would you ever want a second superuser account? Isn’t one enough trouble? Root is basically a user with full access to the machine. And by “full” I mean “uncontrolled and unaudited.” When it comes to securing a computing environment I don’t usually want to add more accounts like this. I usually want to reduce them, and secure any accounts like that which absolutely need to remain. My recommendation, in all cases, is to secure your root accounts well with SSH restrictions (which is the default in ESX), firewalling, and very secure passwords. …
Narcissism & Me
Gotta love spam. I didn’t think I was this narcissistic, but the subject line says it all: And yes, I have upgraded from Pine to Alpine. Thanks for asking.
If It Ain't Broke Then Today Is Not The Day To Fix It
“What are you up to today?” a friend asks. It’s the Friday of the week before Christmas, and everybody is taking most of the next week off. “Not much, just doing some paperwork and writing stuff. I can’t really start anything — everything on my to-do list runs the risk of breaking something.” “Everything? There’s got to be some small stuff you can do.” “Yeah, but the small stuff is on large, complex systems. You ever have a fish tank?” “Nope, just cats.” “Fish tanks have this thing called the nitrogen cycle. You feed the fish, they crap, bacteria eats the crap, eventually turns it into nitrates, and plants in the tank fertilize themselves with it. Fish eat the plants, …
Winter Wonderland
By “winter wonderland” I sort of mean “winter hell hole.” At least until the plows get to us. I hate the cold but I love the snow, mainly because it’s what my 4×4 Jeep Grand Cherokee is made for. It was also apparently made for pulling my neighbors out, too. A minivan with 5 inches of clearance vs. 9 inches of snow — yeah, no wonder they got stuck. Compare & contrast today’s outdoor look to November 30th, a mere 20 days ago.
Load Average On Linux
By themselves, load averages on Linux are not an indication of CPU utilization. Classically, UNIX systems have calculated the load average by counting the number of processes that are either running on the CPU or runnable (ready & waiting for a CPU to run them). Linux does this, but it also counts the number of processes in uninterruptable sleep. Uninterruptable sleep usually means a process is blocking on I/O (waiting for disk, etc.). As such, you can’t really use a Linux host’s load average to determine the CPU utilization of the host. If the load is high you might have an I/O problem instead of a CPU bottleneck. Then you need tools like vmstat, top, iostat, etc. to tell you …
links for 2008-12-17
F**k You, Penguin NSFW, but a funny blog where they tell cute animals off. 1700 E Madison St, Seattle, WA 98122 to Gas Works Park – Google Maps Great directions from Google Maps — "kayak across the Pacific Ocean, destination will be on the left." Um, yeah. The Best Burglar Alarm in History "One such guy is an Australian named Peter who runs a website called TeslaDownUnder, which showcases all his wacky Tesla ways, or rather electrickery, as Peter calls it." Cool photos….
links for 2008-12-16
The White Balance Lens Cap at The Photojojo Store This is pretty cool, I think I will get one of these after Christmas.
links for 2008-12-13
Geek Love: Google exec Marissa Mayer engaged Awwww, there go my chances. 🙂 The case of the 500-mile email Matt at Standalone Sysadmin had this linked a few weeks ago (I'm just catching up on my RSS feeds from then). This is a great story, and I remember laughing with Trey Harris' original post . Actually, I'm also impressed with the stats folks for cataloging the symptoms so well. How long has your server been running? | The VMguy Ah yes, uptime wars. I wish I knew their IP addresses because you know they haven't patched anything in three years… That's all an uptime war is: an advertisement that you don't think security is important. The Old New Thing : …