I’d just like to note, as a corollary to my post a few days ago chronicling the saga of the “failing” list server, that the list server software decided to get even yesterday. It died and stayed dead for about six hours in the middle of the day. I suspect it was doing that just to prove me wrong. Maybe our software has become self-aware and is just smart enough to distract us with this stuff so we don’t actually notice it taking over the world.
Building software yourself? Don’t forget about GNU make’s ability to build in parallel, taking advantage of all those fancy CPUs you have: make -jX where X is the number of processes you want to spawn in parallel. For me it’s an old habit to make X the number of CPUs + 1. Not all software is set up for this, though. I usually try it, and if I get compilation errors I issue a “make clean” then a normal “make” command to see if it’ll build that way.
One of the million, billion grains of sand in the desert | dooce ® Interesting commentary about death, wrt to a set of portraits taken of people before and after death. I like it, but I’ve never been freaked out by this sort of thing. Death is just a part of life (specifically, the end of it). 🙂 World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King “New Hero Class Revealed: Bard” LOL. Now this is an April Fools joke I like.
If a picture is worth a thousand words then getting to see something for yourself is worth an entire library. Especially when it comes to troubleshooting. We’ve been having problems with our list server lately. Our monitoring system sends email through it at regular intervals to check the service, and if the round trip time is too long it sends an alarm. Standard stuff, built to handle the case where the list manager software spontaneously dies once every quarter or so. The problem lately has been that we get the alarm much more frequently: once a day or more. Since this thing is a production service our operations staff have procedures on how to restart it. They get the alarm, …
Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients via Computer This is mean. Reminds me of Stephenson’s “Snow Crash.” Chris Blattman’s Blog: Holy evaluation I’ve been surprised lately by some people around me like this… people you never expected to “get it.” jwz – Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day! “Because their lawyers determined that, because mcom.com is ten years old and four letters long, they could make several hundred thousand dollars by simply putting it on the market and selling it to a spammer!” AOL is a bunch of tools.
YouTube – Hillary Clinton’s New Video Game: 3AM Call of Duty “Because it takes a village to take a village.” LOL. Slow Cooker Carnitas – Allrecipes I love cooking in my crock pot. (tags: recipes)
I just upgraded to WordPress 2.5. Went very well, with the exception that the Popularity Contest plugin causes a fatal error and won’t load. The interface changes take some getting used to, mainly because things moved. It’s nicer overall. I’m looking forward to using the new media/gallery features. The Automattic Subversion repository doesn’t didn’t have a 2.5 tag, so, being impatient me, I jumped to the development trunk. The Popularity Contest issues might be because of that (it was listed as compatible with 2.5), so I’ll try it again after they get a 2.5 tag out there. To the WordPress 2.5 team I say: awesome job folks! Update: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/ exists now. Yay!
Google Street View Car Driver Heh, we get to see the driver of the Google Street View car, talking to a Excelsior Springs, MO cop. I’m stoked that Madison is in the Street View now. What’s A Vacation? I usually do the “spend time away” and “go dark weekend” when I need a break. Blinkenlights.nl “Ever wanted to see Star Wars in Telnet?” Holy crap, this is cool.
If you’re a Dell sort of person you’ll be happy to know that version 5.4.0 of the Dell OpenManage Server Update Utility DVD works under VMware ESX 3.5. Older versions didn’t work, which made firmware management more difficult. I don’t currently run the OpenManage suite of tools[0]. Instead, I copy the SUU DVD contents to an NFS share, and I have a shell script which handles the mounting & unmounting, and updating my servers. I’m glad that the whole process works on ESX now, too. ————- [0] I might, in the future, especially as things like ESX 3i remove the OS.
The Emergency Power Off (EPO) switch in a data center I was in last week. Appropriately labeled, in my opinion. My favorite is actually the old-school pushbutton light switches, though. The lamp next to the switch glows red when they’re off, which makes it easy to find the switch in the dark.