Friday, May 25, 2007

Domino pool

How to sink 70 balls in one shot

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Tracking the price of gas?


If you're interested in the price of gas, and oil, and why gas is so expensive right now, go right to the data about the industry and investigate for yourself: This Week In Petroleum, from the U.S. Department of Energy. Lots of charts and graphs, and analysis.

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Work

"Every man is proud of what he does well; and no man is proud of what he does not do well. With the former, his heart is in his work; and he will do twice as much of it with less fatigue. The latter performs a little imperfectly, looks at it in disgust, turns from it, and imagines himself exceedingly tired. The little he has done, comes to nothing, for want of finishing."

-- Abraham Lincoln
Source: September 30, 1859 - Address before the Wisconsin State
Agricultural Society

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

What's wrong with me?




Your Dominant Thinking Style: Visioning



You are very insightful and tend to make decisions based on your insights.

You focus on how things should be - even if you haven't worked out the details.



An idealist, thinking of the future helps you guide your path.

You tend to give others long-term direction and momentum.

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Back Up

I just spent all day fighting a power outage that happened in our colocation facility. We managed to get all the machines back up and running correctly, except for one. The one that was just going on 1000 days of uninterrupted uptime, by the way, spoiled by Abovenet/DataPipe's interruptible Uninterruptible Power Supplies.

We lost a disk and some RAM from that system, and /usr/local/bin disappeared, and... it's a mess, pretty close to destroyed. The hero of the day is Allen, a friend of the company, who made a very long drive down to San Jose to help us out of a tough spot.

Anyway we did have backups of the data, I have moved the web site over to another machine, and the couple of mail accounts that are still stuck on there will be moved someplace else tomorrow, and then we can abandon that heap of junk to Abovenet/DataPipe when I abandon their facility sometime in the near future.

So that is a somewhat happy story, despite the loss of one day of my life. Here is what happens when you don't have good backups:

Business magazine fails to heed its own tech advice

NEW YORK: Business 2.0, the technology-aware magazine published by Time, periodically reminds readers of the importance of backing up computer files. A 2003 article likened backups to flossing - everyone knows it's important, but few devote enough thought or energy to it.

Last week, Business 2.0 got caught forgetting to floss.

On the night of Monday, April 23, the magazine's editorial system crashed, wiping out all the work that had been done for its June issue. The backup server failed to back up.

(International Herald Tribune)

Mysterious Linux boot message

paride: aten registered as protocol 0

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

I knew it! I knew it!

A campaign to expose the truth of 4/29

http://www.429truth.com/