Bob Plankers

Bob Plankers is a man who wears many hats. In his professional career he has spent three decades leading teams that design, build, operate, and talk about reliable, secure, and compliant IT infrastructures, both in the public sector and in the high tech industry. He currently focuses on applied security, compliance, and operational resilience for virtualization and cloud platforms.

links for 2008-04-29

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Interviewing Six Conservative Women On Dating – Right Wing News (Conservative News and Views) LOL, going to a dump to shoot rats is pretty good. That and Kit Lange’s story about the guy and the coffee shop. Wanting a quickie after being an hour late and penniless? After an hour I’d be too embarrassed to show up. They do make great stories, though. Hans Reiser Guilty of First Degree Murder | Threat Level from Wired.com Guess I should steer clear of those filesystem guys… 🙂 Just kidding. And mail order brides. Not kidding so much there. Glad this is over so we can get on with our lives.

Harold & Kumar, The Square Root of Three

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I saw “Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay” tonight. Pretty funny, but not as good as “Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle” in my opinion. The end is terribly anticlimactic. NPH does a good job, though. Mmm, unicorns. Kumar does recite a poem by David Feinberg, “The Square Root of Three,” which I thought bears more attention since it’s my kind of dorky. Props to FilmChat for having a copy. I fear that I will always be A lonely number like root three The three is all that’s good and right, Why must my three keep out of sight Beneath the vicious square root sign, I wish instead I were a nine For nine could thwart this evil …

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How Do You Find The Number of CPU Cores on Linux?

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I have a script I want to make decisions based on the number of CPU execution cores in a machine. Of course, in order to make a decision the script first needs to find the number of cores in a machine. Problem is: how exactly do you do that? What an OS thinks is a CPU isn’t always a CPU, thanks to HyperThreading. You could look at /proc/cpuinfo, but there isn’t anything there that tells you if a CPU core is real or a HyperThreading fake. You could use dmidecode, but that’ll just count sockets, and you won’t know about the cores or HyperThreading. In the end, you could just leave it to Intel to write sample code for you …

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links for 2008-04-27

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Tidal bore – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Heh, something I never knew. In places like the Turnagain arm of the Cook Inlet the tide is impeded by mud, so when it finally breaks through it forms a big wave rushing in. That’s pretty cool, especially since people surf it sometimes. Hundreds of Thousands of Microsoft Web Servers Hacked – Security Fix People, you *have* to patch in a regular and timely fashion. Courteous to Whom? – Dr. Bob’s Snake Oil Good points about doing “favors” for people. When you do a favor for someone, especially on the road, you’re often inconveniencing someone else. Would you use Apple server SW if you could run it as a VM? – Inside IT …

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links for 2008-04-26

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McCain Defends Campaign E-Mail Linking Obama To Hamas McCain’s statements here indicate to me that he is 100% willing to keep the U.S. in wars abroad. Hopefully Obama can, in turn, link McCain to the $4/gallon oil situation. I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Apple to the Core | PBS Interesting take on the PA Semiconductor purchase by Apple. My question: since Apple has demonstrated that its developers will go wherever they go what difference does this make? My second question: why would Intel be scared, with Apple’s market share? The crazy baseball fan rule (Scripting News) “But why should we tolerate the news organizations giving free air time to the campaigns? Aren’t they making an illegal campaign contribution when …

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Vizio Goatse?

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Undoubtedly you’ve seen goatse at some point in your life on the Internet. If not, don’t look for it. It is downright awful, and it’s decidedly NSFW. However, if you have seen it and been scarred for life perhaps you will be as amused as I was in seeing Vizio’s HDTV packaging.

links for 2008-04-25

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Nalgene to phase out hard-plastic bottles – More health news- msnbc.com Yay, I only own like 10 of these bottles. I’ll replace them with metal flasks instead. Color + Design Blog / All 120 Crayon Names, Color Codes and Fun Facts by COLOURlovers Jazzberry Jam? JAZZBERRY JAM?!? (via GMSV) Metafilter comments vs. Youtube comments Trolls facing off.

But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me

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I had an opportunity today to read “I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me” by Trevor Paglen. It’s a short read and pretty interesting, as it’s all about the insignia that classified DoD teams have. Beyond the title of the book being pretty cool, my favorite patches are “Sneeky Pete, World’s Oldest Known Flying Pig,” and one that proclaims “Gustasus Similis Pullus,” meaning “tastes like chicken.” Heh.

Ksplice: Rebootless Kernel Patching

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As a system administrator one of the biggest pains in my duff is scheduling reboots when kernel patches need to get applied. Enter Ksplice, a way for kernels to get patched without a reboot. Of course, the caveat: To be fully automatic, Ksplice’s design is limited to patches that do not introduce semantic changes to data structures, but most Linux kernel security patches don’t make these kinds of changes. This would be perfect for a distribution like Red Hat Enterprise Linux where great pains are taken to not change data structures, in order to preserve the kABI. Maybe the folks at Red Hat will be kind and put this in Enterprise Linux 6… PLEASE?!?

links for 2008-04-24

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Wing Men | Popular Science A $12,000 R/C A10 Warthog? How cool is that? IBM Debuts New Category of Server for Web 2.0 Computing – iDataPlex Hasn’t Rackable had this forever?

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