links for 2010-04-05
KFC's Bacon Sandwich On Fried Chicken "Bread" Starts Killing People Nationwide April 12 – The Consumerist Mmmmmmm.
links for 2010-04-03
Sorry, Just Because You Tried Hard Doesn't Mean You Deserve A Prize "It doesn’t matter if you tried really hard. You didn’t win, you lost." I like this article, and agree that the idea that everybody is a winner is detrimental to society. You're a winner if you win.
links for 2010-04-02
The commuting paradox – (37signals) Interesting post with links to more interesting stuff about commuting. I've always seen a commute as wasted time, which is why I live 20 minutes from work by bike, and when I drive I go in at weird times to avoid traffic.
VMworld 2010 Call For Papers: Last Day!
Today, April 2[0], is the last day to submit session proposals for VMworld 2010. Get them in, people! I’m looking forward to being educated and entertained by you all this year in San Francisco. If you’re wondering what you need or whether you have time to do this, I submitted a session proposal and it took me about 30 minutes. You need to have a good description of your session, three takeaway points you want to convey, a short biography for yourself, a short description of your speaking history, and you need to know your own mailing address. 🙂 You don’t need slides or anything yet. Get moving! Go go go! Update: Apparently you have until April 9th, now. —————- …
links for 2010-03-31
vSphere: Hot Add or Remove a VMDK with a Linux VM « ICT-Freak.nl Good post on using hot-add & remove of disks on Linux under VMware. Sun's IBM-mainframe flower wilts under Oracle's hard gaze • The Register This isn't surprising. You don't pay God-awful amounts of money to IBM for a zSeries mainframe to run Solaris or Linux on it. You run z/OS, and you like it. Besides, if you have a budget to support a zSeries and you wanted a Solaris or Linux box you'd just buy one.
I Will Keep Saying It: Align Your Partitions
ICT-Freak.nl has a nice post on hot-adding & hot-removing VMDKs from a Linux virtual machine. However, like most guides out there, it doesn’t mention the number one thing you need to do for optimal disk I/O: align your partitions. From my Linux Virtual Machine Tuning Guide: Logical Block Addressing is a common addressing scheme for disks on PCs. However, under this scheme the master boot record causes partitions to start at a block that isn’t a power of 2. This isn’t a huge deal for individual disks, but for shared storage where a LUN is actually striped across many different disks a single read or write by the guest OS causes twice as much I/O on the storage array. The …
Dell PowerEdge R610 & PERC/6i Disk Comparison
I’ve recently done some very basic disk performance testing of a Dell PowerEdge R610 with 24 GB of RAM (1333 MHz), dual Intel X5550 CPUs, a PERC/6i RAID controller, and a bunch of 146 GB 15K RPM 2.5″ disks, as well as four of the Dell 50 GB enterprise SSD disks (which are Samsung drives). I tested various combinations of RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, and 50 with 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 disks. While the RAID controller configurations varied, all the configs had the element size set to 64 KB, read policy set to Adaptive Read Ahead, and write policy set to Write Back. The PERC/6i firmware was 6.2.0-013. The operating system was Red Hat Enterprise Linux …
links for 2010-03-30
Judge Nullifies Gene Patents | Threat Level | Wired.com "The patents gave Myriad Genetics a virtual monopoly on such predictive testing for breast and ovarian cancer. Women who fear they may be at an increased risk are barred from having anyone look at their BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes or interpret them except for the patent holder, which charges about $3,000 for a test." This is good news, especially since the patent system is so thoroughly broken. Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief | Magazine Holy crap, what a story. Good use of 15 minutes of your time.
links for 2010-03-28
I’ve Joined Automattic NexentaStor Project DoubleCloud » VMWorld 2010: Call for Papers and Pre-registration Pwn2Own 2010: iPhone hacked, SMS database hijacked | Zero Day | ZDNet.com “It was a real world exploit against a popular device. They exfiltrated the entire SMS database in about 20 seconds. It was as if a Web page was loading.” Looks like Apple needs to do some work on the security of their devices, including making sure that when I delete something it's really gone (the SMS database apparently keeps deleted messages, according to this article).
links for 2010-03-27
Salon fake trend article about hipsters on food stamps raises ire. "Eating is now a major moral issue in America, and whatever choice you make is wrong." Yeah, couldn't have said it better. And you know what? Eating healthy most of the time is the plan we all should be on, but life isn't worth living if you can't have the tasty-but-totally-unhealthy stuff once in a while. Like a McDonalds cheeseburger, a Taco Bell ten-pack of crunchy tacos, washed down with a can of beer, or bacon in all its salty goodness. And sure, soda is terrible for you (diet soda even more), but a root beer float once in a while isn't going to kill you. In fact, if …
