German court orders shutdown of Wikipedia | The Register I don’t like what you are saying so I got some court to make you stop. And, in the course of this 4.2 billion people just read the article that says things I don’t want you to read. Think Pyrric victory. (tags: censorship wikipedia) Yahoo! gives up quest for search dominance This is exactly what I was saying — Google and Yahoo! have different business plans. (tags: yahoo google search)
How to Be a Curmudgeon on the Internet – New York Times (tags: humor internet) Cut the Cord: USB Runs Free with Freescale – Gizmodo (tags: gadgets USB wireless technology) The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users » Slacker Manager (tags: del.icio.us delicious tools tags) Read/WriteWeb: Yahoo The Imitator? (tags: yahoo) Next Generation – Why PC Gamer Kicked Out Gold Farmers Thank god. These bastards are destroying online gaming. (tags: gaming WoW cheating) Basement.org: Taking RSS Beyond Headlines : Part One Niyaz – MidEastern Electronica (tags: music bands niyaz) Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab: Yahoo is an Imitator (tags: yahoo google) Om Malik on Broadband : » Yahoo, Google & Web 2.0 Reality Check (tags: google yahoo) Don Dodge on The …
I just happened upon a post over at Read/WriteWeb commenting on Umair Haque’s assessment of Google versus Yahoo!. In short, Haque’s feeling is that Yahoo! does not innovate in these markets, they merely purchase companies that do, and then they don’t understand the market well enough to innovate. Google does innovate, creating value at the edge of the market. MacManus’ question is “Is Yahoo! creating new value chains?” It’s always hard to be the innovator. You burn through cash, you have millions of false starts, and you sometimes look like you don’t have direction. It’s much easier to be second. You watch what works for the market leader and then you do it better and quicker, before they get to …
Dear VMware, I’ve noticed that your flagship product, ESX Server, doesn’t support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Fedora, Solaris x86, or FreeBSD 5.x. RHEL 4 was released on February 14th, 2005. FreeBSD 5.0 was released in January 2003, with releases of 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, and 6.0 spread evenly until today. Fedora has been out forever, it seems. Solaris x86 10 is pretty recent, but with all of the talk last summer of Sun and VMware teaming up I was expecting something to happen. I am mostly concerned with support for Red Hat’s products. Back in the summer of 2005 you told me that support for RHEL 4 would come in ESX Server 3.0, which, at the time, was estimated …
“There is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at, without result!” – Winston Churchill I hate to carve a chunk out of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s argument, but there are more pirates on Earth now than there ever were. I’m not talking about software or music pirates. I bet the pirates mentioned in the recent CNN article were crapping their pants when one of our AEGIS-equipped destroyers was shooting at them. An excellent book on the topic is John Burnett’s “Dangerous Waters.” I read it a year ago and it amazed me how little we hear about piracy. I’m guessing it’s coming up more now, given the attack on the cruise ship a couple months ago. On an unrelated …
“Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make more clear.” – Joseph Joubert I’ve been evaluating Nagios over the past couple of days to see if it can replace our aging Big Brother installation. I have about 130 hosts I’d like to monitor, and the other teams have another 200 hosts or so that will probably join me if things work out. During this exercise I’ve realized a bad habit system administrators have: using abbreviations instead of descriptive text. This is the same bad habit that programmers strive to avoid with variable names. When you’re defining service tests in Nagios you have to give them a name. The first round of names I gave to the services were …
Dear IBM, EMC, and Hitachi, Your storage virtualization devices are pretty neat. They let me buy lesser disk arrays and treat them as a pile of disks. They let me have different classes of storage and shuffle things around without the hosts ever knowing. They let me add cache to my storage architecture to make things even faster, and do intelligent caching in front of the arrays. And they let me do remote mirroring for storage arrays that wouldn’t do it otherwise. Sure, some of you use weird, proprietary, hard to maintain approaches like embedding the virtualization in the SAN, but that’s okay. From time to time I need to do maintenance on my storage arrays. Because I use EMC …
Too much sysadmin stuff lately, so I’m going to share with you my love for Thai panang curry. Easiest recipe on earth. If you don’t have a wok get one. If you don’t cook, well, you should. 🙂 It’s also a great way to deal with slightly freezerburned chicken. Ingredients: 2 tbps. oil (I use peanut oil) 3 tbps. of red curry paste 1 lb. chicken breast, carved up into bite-sized pieces 2 cups of thick coconut milk (I use two cans of it) 2 tbps. of fish sauce 1 tsp. of brown sugar Thai red chilis or hot sauce or whatever for spicyness (read below) I cheat and use two cans of coconut milk. Remember to shake them vigorously …
Over the last couple of days I’ve been bastardizing Guy Kawasaki’s list of ways to brand products and applying it to system administrators (sorry Guy!). Sysadmins have ample opportunities to treat themselves and their work as a product being sold to their end users, but they rarely do. If there was another IT group in the building would yours still get the business? Are all of your users happy with the product you provide to them? Do you communicate as a human being and not as a robot when you talk to non-IT people about IT topics? Guy Kawasaki’s points six and seven hit hard. “Focus on PR, not advertising,” and “strive for humanness.” There are two key points he …
Hi. Here’s a quick HOWTO on using compression, and on BitTorrent. If you were looking for a real HOWTO, well, you can probably achieve compression with: compression_program.exe uncompressed_file.txt You could get tricky with: cat uncompressed_file.txt | bzip2 > compressed_file.txt.bz2 Oooooh. Certain file formats are compressed. Generally files ending in: MP3, MP4 ZIP, RAR, ARJ, LZH GZ, BZ2, TAR.GZ, TAR.BZ2 MPG, MPEG, MPEG2, MPEG3, MPEG4 OGG, FLAC AVI, WMA, AAC, M4P, VOB, etc. etc. etc. are compressed already. This means you don’t need to compress them again. Really. You actually lose space when you do that, due to the overhead of compressing things. And time. And patience. There’s nothing I love more than getting a zipped-up set of MP3s, or a …