Safari (on OS X Tiger, all the latest updates) seems to be dying way too much when I'm on Slashdot. It's gotten bad enough that when I report it to Apple, I put "Slashdot hates you" in the what-were-you-doing part of the crash dialogue box. I wonder if Slashdot has some funky scripts that Safari chokes on?
One of the things that annoyed the hell out of me when I made the "big switch" around 2000-2002 from AmigaOS to Linux, is the dynamic scheduling. I'm pretty sure I've bitched in my
Hey, when I "nice" a time-consuming process, I fucking expect it to not slow my computer down, no matter how CPU-intense it is. That's how it was on AmigaOS: I could run as many tasks as I wanted, and as long as I gave them a priority lower (or was it higher, damn I don't remember the specifics) than 0, it had absolutely no impact on the responsiveness of the computer, and anything that I ran at a normal priority, ran just as fast as it would if I hadn't been running those other tasks at all. That's the joy of an absolute scheduler: it starves the low-priority tasks, and as a user that's what I want.
But all the so-called "modern" systems after the 1980s, from OS/2 to Windows to Linux (and now Mac OS as of version 10) totally fuck this up.
My Mac here at work runs a long job every morning, that I have niced. When it's running, the whole damn machine feels sluggish and -- seriously -- I can out-type the speed at which my fucking keystrokes are appearing in this fucking web browser's textarea. It is so utterly ridiculous that a 1.5GHz machine can't run as fast as 50 MHz Amiga.
Niced processes should starve if there's anything better to do. Absolutely starve. That is a good thing, not a bad thing.
But can Unix have this? Nooooo, because something (I don't know what) might deadlock (at least according to Linus, when the topic comes up in the context of Linux). Well, get your locks sorted out, Unixheads, so that maybe someday Unix can run as fast as an Amiga that has a tenth of the processing power.
I would never see it again.
It's destroyed. A fire erupted at about 6 this morning (WTF happened?!). When I walked by it again on my way to work a few hours later, it was totally gutted. I could see right through the front of the building, out into the parking lot behind it.
So.. a bar burned down. What's the big deal? It's just a bar, right? No. This place was special. It was fucking gorgeous, easily the nicest-looking bar in Albuquerque. Classically decorated decades ago.. timeless. Red velvet-covered walls, chandeliers, tin roof, the Puccini opera posters -- they're gone.
I saw many many shows there, mostly metal. I particularly remember one snowy Tuesday night about 4 years ago, seeing my favorite local band, Wisdom of the Leech. I was the only fan who showed up, and they still played for me.
I had my first Bridgeport IPA there. It happened after I tried a "new" (at the time) awful-tasting cloyingly-sweet stout (I won't name names), and I had to wash the taste out of my mouth. "Do you have any IPAs?" I asked. I wasn't even a hophead at the time; I just wanted some bitterness. Mathias served me a Bridgeport and I fell in love with it. Over the next few years, I didn't even have to order; Ryan or Christine would see me and start walking to the right tap.
I've brought dates there, been shot down there, got "lucky" there, sulked there, and celebrated there. And rocked, rocked, and rocked.
Read the musicians' reactions at rocksquawk, see photos at The Alibi. KOB, New Mexico Business Weekly.
The Launchpad, next door and also damaged, is closed for a few months too. It will be back. Serious doubts about the Golden West, though, and even if they rebuild, it won't be the same. It was the one bar where the original fixtures will actually be missed. Every other place in this town was replaceable. That one wasn't.
...and I just don't know who I'm going to vote for in the GOP primaries now. I'm down to a few very bad choices. This will very much be a lesser of the evils election for me.
I have to choose between John McCain, a man who seemingly has more fondness for Democrats than for his own party on the big issues of the day (save for the war), and Mitt Romney, a man who ran and governed as a liberal in Massachusetts, and now claims to be the heir to Reagan....which means either he's had the mother of all mind changes, or that he just tells the crowd whatever it wants to hear to win the next office. Nice choice,eh?
And don't even mention Huckabee, a man more like Jimmy Carter than a Republican nominee for President.
I've had to write a bunch of bash scripts at work lately, and they're all long pipelines.
No threads, no shared memory, no dealing with (or even having to think about) race conditions, no complications. Just lots of processes connected with pipes.
But if I were to write the same stuff in a "real language," it probably wouldn't have been as parallel. I'd just have a big loop that does a bunch of things to one chunk of data at a time, instead of a bunch of processes at that do one thing at a time.
I wonder if there's something wrong with "real languages" -- something that the "Unix philosophy" got right, yet rarely trickles up into bigger apps, where you'd think there would be even more opportunity to parallelize, not less. Hmm.
I work at a place that runs a fairly (locally) popular website. We sometimes get orders for ads from a company who just gave us one of these to run. I gather that the behavior in question is intermittent, so it was just dumb luck that it happened to me, so that I realized WTF was going on and killed it.
So they aren't screening this stuff, huh? That means I have to? Shit. I don't know how to screen for this. I hate Flash. I hated it before, but now I really fucking hate Flash.
Just out of morbid curiousity, I've returned to Slashdot after almost a year and a half. To my utter surprise (not), Slashdot is still the land of the Idiot and the home of the Troll. And the "America Sucks" people are more prominent than ever.
Oh well...I'm in a mood to give the virtual finger, so bring 'em on.
I have to say one thing...I'm surprised I don't see more Ron Paul supporters here. I figured Slashdot would be a breeding ground for them. Most here are just generally apathetic assholes that complain a lot.
The Larry Craig thing happened weeks ago, but it's just now hitting its stride. I got a double-barrel blast of absurdity this morning.
First, one of my cow-orkers reviewed the Minneapolis airport men's bathroom. Too funny.
But it gets even more absurd, in an ACLU quotation from this USA Today article:
Instead of having an undercover officer "trap" people in the bathroom, Romero says the airport should put up a sign that prohibits customers from having sex in the men's room.
For some reason, this reminds me of the Beagle Bros floppy warnings, like for example, don't feed your floppies to an alligator. I wonder if we're seeing the genesis of complete list of activities that are prohibited in airport bathrooms. Until we have that list, you might want to think twice before you shoot up any heroin, wager on a dogfight, or run a child-labor sweatshop in an airport bathroom.
Having launched one of the thirty satellites required, the eight-member commercial consortium tasked with building Galileo, the EU's planned rival to the American NAVSTAR (better known as GPS) and Soviet GLONASS systems, has apparently declined to invest further money in the project. Future funding will consist entirely of another $4bn and change from EU taxpayers, since the consortium is no longer confident of getting a return on their own investment. (Somehow, it sounds almost as if they doubt the commercial prospects of being the third to launch a service which has already been available to everyone free of charge for over a decade...)
Despite this setback, with a further influx of EU funding, the European Commission hopes to have the constellation online by 2011; the American and Russian counterparts were completed in 1995 and 1994 respectively.
Just imagine how far behind the Soviet Union the EU would be without the influx of billions in extra funding to speed things up...
DVD rentals suck. They're always scratched, and the DVD player has a fit over it. How can I possibly spend another dime on this shit and keep my self-respect?
Well, that's it, then. I give up.
A modified quote from another movie: the more you clench your fist, the more customers will slip through your fingers. This is why piracy -- no more fragile media, no more DRM -- is the best way. It's not even about ripping them off -- it's about not getting ripped off. Fuck it. I really tried. I give up.
I've seen the movie; I know how it ends. Doesn't matter; this bullshit spoiled it. I was trying to show it to a friend.
It all started in late 2005. It's a rental house and other occupants had neglected the back yard (it was in aweful shape) so we got into the habit of throwing the used coffee grounds on the "grass." I think that when I moved in and started making sure it got watered regularly, that is what really brought the lawn back, but I never got completely over the coffee ground superstition.
Now I brew beer. It started with just a pound or so of steeping specialty grains, but since then I've moved up to partial mashing, and now produce about 6 pounds of spent grains with each batch, which is about every two weeks. So I thought, "I'll just throw them on the lawn." Spent hop leaves too, for the batches where I use whole hops rather than pellets.
This isn't going to work. When I went out there today to dump more grains, I saw that last batch's grains are still sitting around, visible in the just-now-awakening-from-winter March grass. This is too much.
So I want to compost it. What will I do with the compost? Beats the hell out of me. Maybe I can throw that on the lawn. Or I can just use it to brag about on my way up to pocket mulching.
But first things first: I need to get the chemistry down. My understanding is that brewers' spent grains are kind of high on nitrogen and low on carbon. I guess I could fix that with charcoal fragments from the grill back there. But I don't know the ratios, or if I'm really right about the nitrogen-vs-carbon thing.
Any gardening / biology / brewing nerds out there, wanna fill me in?
And no, I'm not going to start raising chickens any time soon. Actually, I'm going to move out of this house in a few months (that's another story...) so I won't even get into gardening. But I still want to learn and do things "right" even if there's no purpose to it.
How can I get a floating widget out of a Guinness Draft bottle, without breaking the bottle? (I want to re-use the bottle.)
Also, maybe related... how do they get the widget into the bottle in the first place?
*sniff* Alas, poor Server!
My current server, home to some of my websites, some e-mail and half my DNS service, has decided it would make life more fun if it rebooted spontaneously every few minutes. Nothing in the logs, just unsolicited rebooting - possibly a power supply issue of some sort. (All I know is SMART shows the hard drive is OK; I'd expect most memory or CPU problems to give different symptoms, but being eight time zones away makes diagnostics rather limited.)
I was going to have to change all my domain registrations anyway, since the IP address was going to change soon because of new transit arrangements with their transit provider, but now it's rather more urgent: I have a production site which is only sporadically available!
My plan is to get a second virtual server (I had one virtual and one physical, until now) and set everything up to be replicated between them (currently, I only have DNS and MySQL replicated fully, with some web sites rsynced when I change them, others only hosted on one machine or the other). Email will be more of a pain: I have a few mailing lists under ezmlm, which I'll probably convert to use MySQL for replicated list management (so list posts get delivered to and distributed by either of the two) - but my mailboxes themselves can only live on a single host, really.
The one big advantage of having a physical server was the value: for about the same money, I got far more disk space, RAM and bandwidth, with a dedicated CPU instead of sharing a couple of Xeon cores with a dozen or two other users. On the downside, no console access (I did have for a while, but that disappeared at some point), less control (a couple of times I ordered remote power-cycling through the host's web interface, while still logged in to the server; from the fact I was still logged in, the reboot didn't seem as successful as the site claimed!) - and no protection against hardware failure, which suddenly seems much more important now...
Has anyone in the zoo set up things like this before? Or, for that matter, got any ideas why my previously-reliable server suddenly starts rebooting itself? Any hosting recommendations for me?
Make sure your code does nothing gracefully.
