Lua is not an acronym. From the Lua web page:
"Lua" (pronounced LOO-ah) means "Moon" in Portuguese. As such, it is neither an acronym nor an abbreviation, but a noun.

LuaJIT is probably the fastest scripting language in existence. I have found for math-heavy algorithms it's as fast as optimized compiled C code. Plus it's FFI interface is stunningly fast, allowing easy fast access to native libraries.

I boot off a DVD/USB to a minimal Linux system then write over the whole drive with cryptographically secure random data. That is a bit overkill but I work in security/cryptography and often have or had extremely sensitive data on my machine. "dd if=/dev/zero" works faster and is plenty good for normal people. This "nukes" the whole drive to a blank slate.

From there I'm usually able to install whatever OS they are using and set the machine up fresh. If the company has draconian IT policies and I can't install the OS then I let them re-image the drive. I only do this after I completely wipe the drive myself though. A re-image on top of your existing system most likely will not wipe all your old data.

People can tag anyone on Facebook. A random person could take a picture of you and tag you in it without you even having a Facebook account.

Hmmm, I just now noticed that my Ubuntu and Debian systems did not insert the leap second. That's probably why they didn't have problems.

Not sure why they didn't insert it, they're all running ntpd. Now their time is off by one second.

My up-to-date Arch workstation went haywire (kernel 3.4.4). mysqld, firefox, and ksoftirq were using a massive amount of CPU. Stopping the processes made the CPU usage go away but as soon as I restarted them they would go nuts again. I had to reboot the machine.

I have an Ubuntu 12.04 server and Debian stable server that apparently were not affected. My Linux based routers also seemed unaffected although they don't run ntp as a daemon which probably makes a difference.

Almost all VPN services are fly-by-night ops. Just don't do it. Seriously, they come and go like the wind. I'm sure there are legit and have been around for a long time but it's nigh impossible to vet any of these companies.

Instead find a good hosting providing and rent yourself a server with the amount of bandwidth you need and the location in the US you want (most providers have data centers in various places). For more security I would get a whole machine, not a VPS. Run OpenVPN or whatever on it and you're good to go. It wouldn't need much disk or RAM.

The XFCE window manager does sort of work. The case where it breaks for me is when I run VirtualBox with the VM having 4 screens that are fullscreen on each of my physical screens. I actually don't remember the exact problem(s) but it was either a performance degradation, something whole with the XFCE panels interfering with the VM, or some combination when running VirtualBox fullscreen on all the screens.

At least that was the problem, I haven't tried it in a while. Personally I don't really care for XFCE either so I haven't tried very hard.

KDE is one of the few environments that actually works with my setup of four monitors in a dual twinview (xinerama) configuration. Unity and GNOME3 do not work at all with this setup, they render only on half the screens, the mouse doesn't work at all, and other problems.

Currently I have to run a bastardized mix of XFCE and OpenBox to get everything to work because the XFCE window manager doesn't work correctly either. MATE (GNOME2) desktop seems to work and I have been thinking of switching (back) to it but it seems kind of buggy. It will probably end up being what I use though.

But on topic, I would love to just use KDE because it works right out of the box without me having to tweak or worry about anything. BUT, it's just too weird and often has annoying bugs/crashes (sort of like Opera actually). It looks weird and doesn't work like I think. I can't really explain exactly what it is other than "weird". It feels confusing and hard to use. If I could pick one example application that showcases the weirdness of KDE it would be the Amarok app. Good grief that thing is bizarre. The UI is so funky and doesn't work anything like what I need. For me that app is a good reflection of KDE as a whole. Bizarre, ugly, and unintuitive UI. I can't get any work done in that.

Heh, I came here to make the same post.

And anyone interested in high-performance computing/scripting should check out LuaJIT. One of the coolest software projects ever. Imagine a simple, powerful scripting language that runs as fast (or really close) as compiled C. Kick-ass fast built-in FFI interface and super easy to embed.

Go here if you want to switch off Unity and GNOME3.

Both Unity and GNOME 3 suck. Neither one works correctly with multiple monitors. Try running 4 monitors on two video cards, TwinView'd and Xinerama'd, and you will understand.

I especially hate the global menu bar in Unity. I can sort of live with the similar design in OS X but Unity does it horribly. I'm not even sure what the difference is but I just couldn't stand Unity even though I'm used to OS X.

That's too much. Check out lowendbox and find something you like.

Since you don't need disk space, much RAM or CPU then you should be able to find something that will work for less than $20 a year. They usually come with a fair amount of bandwidth.

I have been programming in C for 25 years so it's not my lack of experience. It's a very simple algorithm anyway, there isn't any more optimization that I can do, it's all in the compiler and LuaJIT just does it better than GCC.

I can't explain it either because until now I didn't think it was possible. This algorithm almost 100% pure math operations and LuaJIT is apparently really fast under certain circumstances.

Plain Lua is nice and all but LuaJIT is where the fun is. It blows the doors off of any other scripting language (and many compiled languages) in terms of performance. I actually have some LuaJIT financial data processing code that runs faster than anything I have been able to code in C. It also has an incredibly awesome and fast FFI interface so you don't even need to write native code to interface with most native libraries.

Lua's Achilles Heal is string performance. It does have awesome tools like LPeg and has powerful string handling functions but if you're handling massive amounts of string data then it starts to bog down because of the string interning. It's still very fast and usually faster than other scripting languages like Python (not as fast as Perl though) but it is a long standing problem that pisses me off considering how fast it is otherwise.

By the same token, not getting enough of certain things can have bad consequences. It's a complicated balance and it's different for every person.

It is my personal theory that the correct diet for an individual is similar to whatever tribe they came from back before modern times when we had to eat whatever was available. Some ate a lot of meat, others mostly grains, some had only fruit, and still others had access to a variety of foods, etc. What is healthy for you depends on what type of tribe you are descended from. This is part of the reason why it's so hard to be healthy these days, it takes a lot of work to figure out what is correct for you from the vast array of choices.

And it's not just the government that does that, businesses do it too. Over the past few years we have seen consumers cutting back personal budgets which causes businesses and governments to increase prices or look for other sneaky ways to get more money from people in order to make their next budget cycle. Which then causes consumers to cut back even more, which then causes business to increase prices even more... and so on.

The whole thing is about to implode here at some point if businesses and government don't recognize that they need to seriously cut spending just like us normal people have been doing. You can't have infinite budget increases when the economy is going the opposite direction.