...more recent posts
The freeware ScriptExport is an iPhoto plug-in that lets you process photos with your own shell scripts. I need this for a project coming up. Excellent.
Geek (attempted) humor: Absolut Hacker.
Also making waves on the music front is the Slacker music service. It's a free streaming radio service, plus a portable playing device that can also stream over WiFi or Satellite connections (portable player coming "soon".) The company behind it, Broadband Instruments, has some big name executives from Diamond / Rio, MusicMatch, and iRiver. You can't listen to exactly what you want, but you can configure "radio stations" that will play particular artists you have selected, plus other artists that Slacker thinks are related to those you have chosen. The free service allows you to skip 6 songs an hour, while a future payed service will let you skip more.
Engadget has some more info.
Pretty big play. My guess is it won't work.
SNOCAP Announces Alliances with Major Labels (sort of....)
The company revealed today that it would now be offering tracks from major indie labels like Sub Pop, New Line and Dangerbird. While this seems innocuous enough at first glance, I should point out that all of these labels operate under the Warner umbrella, making the announcement far more savory.
Perhaps I'm being overeager in my assessment, but I envision this as a key break in the DRM-dam. A vast army of listeners get their music from MySpace and I'm certain that, with it offering DRM-free copies of popular musicians, this number will grow exponentially. I'm confident that we'll begin seeing far more announcements from major labels in the very near future.
I'm not as confident, but this certainly is moving in the right direction. In a strange way the iTunes store might actually force the labels in the DRM-free direction merely in an effort to kill the Jobs juggernaut they unwittingly created. Still, when push comes to shove, I just don't see the labels being able to swallow the medicine. They're too used to getting payed.
Funny diagram of programming language hierarchy. Wouldn't Python be on top of Perl though?
Last night I went to my first ever opera, Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata, at Lincoln Center. Apparently this is a fairly standard "first" opera to see. Very enjoyable. Lincoln Center is beautiful. We ate before hand, and then during the first intermission you go back and sit down at your table for dessert. Nice touch. Not sure if I'm converted to a big fan or anything, but it was a great evening. I'm hoping to give the symphony a shot next (although I've been to that once in the past.)
Here's a horrible phonecam shot I felt like a total dork taking. You can see the screens in front of every seat that translate. They are *highly* directional, so you can only see the LEDs if you are looking directly straight at it - no peripheral vision distraction at all. Pretty cool. I guess these were something of an issue for the real buffs when they first put them in, but it's very helpful if you can't speak Italian.
Looks like my fix yesterday did take care of the problem. I'm still keeping my eye on it, but so far so good. One big help in tracking this down was enabling the MySQL slow query log. This lets you set a threshold for number of seconds, and then any query taking longer than that gets logged to a specific file. Watching that file is then a huge help in spotting where potential problems are hiding.
Here's the official MySQL slow query log page, and here's a nice write up on how to activate it. Basically it just amounts to adding these lines to the my.cnf file and restarting MySQL:
long_query_time = 1 log-slow-queries = /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.logI had to create the /var/log/mysql/ directory (and chown mysql:mysql) in order to get it to work.
I had a bit of a chase this morning tracking down an issue on the new server (new server = ash, old server = tulip, old old server = elm.) CPU usage was being pegged at 99.9% by mysqld. Turns out - I think - to be a problem with some PHP code I had written (who would have guessed!) Anyway, I ended up learning a bunch about MySQL that I didn't know previously, so these things should be easy to track down in the future. For my own reference I will link here to this excellent Jeremy Zawodny post on tuning MySQL.
Keywords: thread_cache : my.cnf
From the Onion: Apple Unveils New Product-Unveiling Product: iLaunch.
Damn, wasted about 7 hours on this one. I so wish I didn't have to run a mail server. Anyway, the issue was that Qmail was not allowing outgoing messages with 15 or more recipients. Up through 14 would be fine, but then at 15 it would reject all messages (including the first 14) with this error: sorry, reached maximum number of recipients for one session (#5.7.1 - chkuser). Error 5571
So obviously Chkuser is the problem. But how to change this? I took a bunch of wrong turns trying to create a /var/qmail/control/maxrcpt file, but it turns out my Qmailtoaster installation is not compiled to understand the maxrcpt control file. So no luck there.
Hours of googling later I finally found the mailing list question that put me on the right track: I needed to edit tcp.smtp (which I was told would be at /etc/tcp.smtp but of course nothing is easy and mine was instead at /etc/tcprules.d/tcp.smtp). So I changed CHKUSER_RCPTLIMIT="15" to CHKUSER_RCPTLIMIT="150" in tcp.smtp. And then ran qmailctl cdb to reload the new rules (I guess this makes the tcp.smtp.cdb file out of the tcp.smtp file that just got edited.)
And now it works. Fun fun fun.