...more recent posts
Short interview (advertisement?) in Salon with Scott Rosenberg about his new book "Dreaming in Code". It is an effort to explain coding to non programmers, or as he puts it:
My goal was really more to write something that, if you were a developer, then yes, you might find it interesting. But even more, if you had a relative who was always wondering, "What is it that you do all day?" you could hand my book to that relative and say, This is what my work is really like.Most of what he has to say really resonates with me as being correct. Especially the parts about the advantages of having only one person writing a particular piece of software.
Jonathan Rentzsch, an actual programmer (Rosenberg is just an observer,) has some push back that strikes me as correct as well.
Interesting discussion.
Internal Microsoft emails discussing Apple's release of OS X 10.4 (Tiger,) made public recently during an anti-trust trial in Iowa. I am surprised how impressed they are by it - especially spotlight.
This is from a Microsoft engineer who had an early release he had just gotten at the WWDC (Apple developer's conference)
You will have to take Vic's disk ... I am not giving mine up ;)I like that he won't give up the Mac install disks!
Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store. I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and ... my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was fucking amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Lonqhorn land today.
It reads like a spoof.
Don't you love when you have a problem in your head for weeks (or months) and then one day you're reading through RSS links and discover someone has built a tool that solves your problem? And released it for free with a BSD license? Nice.
SoundManager 2:
is a Javascript Sound API which talks to Flash, effectively mapping most of Flash 8's native sound capabilities to Javascript. It enables web developers and front-end engineers to programmatically control sound in a cross-browser/platform way, using a language they already know.
Vint Cerf says 1 in 4 computers are secretly controlled by hackers:
Of the 600 million computers currently on the internet, between 100 and 150 million were already part of these botnets, Mr Cerf said.
Botnets are made up of large numbers of computers that malicious hackers have brought under their control after infecting them with so-called Trojan virus programs.
While most owners are oblivious to the infection, the networks of tens of thousands of computers are used to launch spam e-mail campaigns, denial-of-service attacks or online fraud schemes.
ZOMG!!11!!!1!! Apple just announced the breakthrough mobile device I have been waiting for. A few details I still need to find out (including price) but this is IT. Finally. The future is here.
I know I'm prone to hyperbole around this subject, but I predict (this is 1 minute after hearing the specs and only seeing a couple pictures) that this will be the best selling consumer electronics device of all time.
Had a little drama today. I needed to reboot the server so that a few changes I made would take effect. But it never came back up. D'oh. So I ran down to the datacenter to see what was up. Yuck. Bad Superbock on /dev/VolGroup01/LogVol00. WFTBBQ?
In a little over my head here. Not the best feeling. Nobody there could help me either, but they were nice and at least set me up at a work station so I could begin googling.
It's really important to keep your head in this situation. It's easy to feel like it is hopeless when you have no idea what is going on, but the key is just to keep looking. In this case (and really in every case with computer problems like this,) looking just means plugging the exact error messages you get into google.
Of course most of what you get back is not helpful. But you keep looking. Inevitably you learn things along the way. I kept running out to my machine, trying something, then running back into the office and googling something else.
This went on for a few hours. During this time I cursed myself pretty thoroughly. My recent decision to keep all my clients on this box instead of moving them to ServerBeach was not seeming too wise. And my other plan to have that old PIII 1U server setup as a backup so I could just swap the ethernet cord and at least get a recent backup of everything on line was seeming very wise, except I hadn't gotten around to setting that up yet.
But no giving up. There is no one to give up too. No one to call. So just keep going. Eventually google helped me determine that it was just my /tmp partition that was giving me trouble on boot. So I erased that line from fstab and rebooted again, although truthfully not expecting this to help. But it booted. A little more hassle getting MySQL to start up (more googling... aha!)
And now everything is okay. I think I was down for a little under 3 hours. Not so smart, but even in failure I am somewhat proud to have found my way back to a working system. I really had to fight with my brain so that it wouldn't just turn off (like "Forget it - I'll never figure it out!") Read, look, try, repeat. Read, look, try, repeat. Eventually you get there.
Need to get started on the more robust contingency plan for sure.
Apple t-shirt from 1983 holiday gift catalogue. :-)
I've posted before about ZFS, Sun's seemingly amazing open source file system. I have some fairly large (couple TB) ext3 partitions running on hardware RAID5 under linux, and while I've never had any issues <knocking on wood> I've always felt like there must be a better way. And if the ZFS hype is true then it sounds like that better way. Although I guess these things are always open to reevaluation upon inspection.
Still, I'm pretty skeptical these days, and ZFS really does sound great. And now the rumors are that Mac OS X 10.5 (probably announced in January, shipping in March/April) will have ZFS support. Interesting. It almost seems too advanced for the home user, except the whole zpools stuff really makes sense. And it's very Apple. Want more space? Just plug in another hard drive. No fussing with it, or choosing parameters; and it doesn't show up as a separate drive or anything complicated like that; you just get that much more storage added to your pool of storage. Kind of like how you might think it would work if you didn't know too much about how it actually works.
Fujitsu annoucnes 300GB laptop hard drive (2.5 inch.) Nice!
So I'm absolutely stumped about what to do. I have a very nice server I bought over a year ago colocated here in NYC at Peer1. They have been great. Zero problems. But this maybe goes to prove the saying "you get what you pay for" because they are at the expensive end of the cost spectrum for colocation (not way out of line or anything - just at the expensive end of the reasonable spectrum.)
My problem is that I have one project that needs more bandwidth. But it's a little bit of a sideline project, and I can't really dump tons more money into it. That pretty much rules out the easy option which would just be to buy more bandwidth from Peer1 (although that would be so easy I still do think about it.)
Another option would be to move to a facility with some economy bandwidth (really that pretty much means one thing - Cogent bandwidth.) Economy doesn't necessarily mean bad, but just toward the cheaper end of the spectrum. Maybe they oversell their capacity a bit, and/or maybe they don't respond quite as well to issues, and/or maybe latency can be a little high. On the other hand, prices can be significantly cheaper. Like starting at half as much. So in terms of bang for the buck it appears to me like it might be worth it. Of course you don't really know until you use it yourself. How much is a headache worth? How much is worrying about a headache worth?
Then there is the third option, which is to split the difference. I could move my bandwidth hungry project, along with some other hobby projects, to some place with cheaper Cogent bandwidth, and then keep my business customers at a higher quality location. To do that I could either buy another server (would be cheap since I wouldn't need much storage or really much horsepower considering how crazy powerful even entry level servers are today,) or I could even just get a dedicated server somewhere (which would mean some of the administration worries would be lifted from me and placed on the company I was buying from - maybe not a bad idea since I'm at best only a average unix admin.)
And Peer1 actually has another venture called ServerBeach that I could use. You pay monthly for your own server which they supply and initially configure (in a pretty minimal way.) Then I would get root access and could finish the setup however I wanted (i.e., they'd install CentOS 4.4 with all latest patches, along with Apache, PHP, and MySQL - but I'd have to set up mail servers and DNS if I didn't want to use theirs, and anything else I needed to customize - plus I'd be responsible to keep it up to date from there.) That's a pretty attractive solution. One great thing is that customers can log into a web based control panel (not on your server - on the main ServerBeach servers) and power cycle (reboot) your machine remotely. This would give me a lot of peace of mind. Especially now that I have been doing some traveling - it would be great to know I could (most likely) bring the machine back from any issues from anywhere in the world. And then on top of that, if there was some issue I couldn't solve, I could pay them to try to solve it. In my present situation I don't even have that option - I'm really on my own.
Does it sound like I've already made up my mind? Maybe I have. But it's still hard to pull the trigger. Do I really need two machines? This server has been up for over a year and hasn't really had any issues. Maybe I'm being too cautious? I could just move everything to the cheaper bandwidth, and it might well be fine. That would save me money, and the headache of having two machines. But then what if something did go wrong? And in any case, doing anything that involves leaving my present situation is going to be a hassle involving some downtime for the sites I already have up. So I definitely want to get it right the first time.
The only other option is the one I have been taking - keep thinking about it and putting off the decision. That's okay for a while, especially if you really are thinking about it and learning more, but I'm going to have to make up my mind soon. Tick tick tick....