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Systems monitoring is continuous integration

The League of Professional Sys Admins (I always want to say Extraordinary Gentlemen but who would classify a sys admin as a gentleman?) has an interesting post on comparing systems monitoring to continuous integration The concept of using monitoring as a continuous testing service to validate your changes against the environment in order to reduce […]

A different way to scale out MySQL? (Gigaspaces + MySQL)

Interesting stuff. Here is a snippet… Scale your application, while leaving your existing database untouched by front-ending the database with In-Memory-Data-Grid (IMDG) or caching technologies. The database acts as a persistence store in the background. I refer to this approach as Persistence as a Service (PaaS). Although I do question how reliable the background persistence […]

OpenMac, yes, me wants one

From their website OpenMac: The Smart Alternative to an Apple The Psystar OpenMac works just like an Apple Macintosh Yes, very desirable. However, we’ll see if Apple lets them continue with it… Hope they don’t get sued out of existence

OS X 10.4.11 update, you suck

After a long time of not updating my trusty old iLamp iMac, I finally updated it to 10.4.11 over the weekend and let it lie. Later on I hear a report that Safari won’t start up. That’s odd, I’ve never heard of Safari having launch problems before. I check the log and I see something […]

Fixing that really irritating perl: warning: Setting locale failed. on OS X leopard

Anytime I’ve been running a perl based script on my leopard box I got this really irritating output with whatever else I was expecting: perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LC_ALL = “En_US”, LANG = (unset) are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to […]

Long Live Linux

Because the packaging certainly isn’t…

Choosing good names for machines

I was thinking about the concept of naming machines and in general I try to first think of a theme to help decide on a naming convention. I don’t know where I read about this… perhaps in the DNS & BIND book or some other website (before blogs really took off) however I just rediscovered […]

The Google Data Center FAQ

While not much is known about Google and their Data Center operations this makes a decent attempt at aggregating all of it in one spot… Read more

Data center used to heat swimming pool

I love reading about these smart uses of waste byproducts I bet this might work well in Japan if it wasn’t for those pesky earthquakes. A new data center in Switzerland is being used to heat a nearby swimming pool. In what appears to be a first, the town pool in Uitikon, Switzerland will be […]

The difference between information, knowledge, and wisdom

Well worth the read.. Well, read it already!

Meraki, how not to work with your customer base

Virishi tells a story of Meraki (an off-shoot of MIT Roof-Net) changing their tune. Today I learn that my failure is due to the fact that Meraki has automatically updated the software on all of the units (including legacy, such as ours) so that you cannot install a different firmware on it, at all. Not […]

Security is mathematics

Colin Percival had this to say on security: Schneier suggests that this “particular way of looking at the world” is very difficult to train — far more difficult than the domain expertise relevant to security. I respectfully differ: In my opinion, this mindset is not particular to security professionals; and universities have been successfully training […]

Does innodb log file size parameter affect performance?

This is a question I was asking myself after looking at some tweaks to a mysql server. I guess the more appropriate question that I wanted to ask was Does setting the innodb_log_file_size parameter larger affect runtime performance? A quick google led to the well known Mysql Performance Blog (highly recommended for understanding mysql internals […]

SVN Worst Practices

I’m dying of laughter looking at the slides for this presentation on how to screw up the development lifecycle with subversion. Useful things to throw in: –object code –per-user preference files –generated docs –ISO images –release tarballs Either way a good read on trying to follow a good path when trying to apply version control […]

Daring Furball, i can haz flamin cheezburger

while lukingz 4 moar informashun on distributd scms (again) i findz post by dave dribin bout y he chose mercurial 4 hims needz. but even moar awsum iz hims darin furball. far 2 awsum. let teh semantic web has cheezburgers, man. Daring Furball Lolspeak translator