Tagging air force one
Video of someone tagging air force one. Presumably real footage, although Schneier seems to have some doubts.
Random linkage
Yucca Mountain is part of the 87% of Nevada which is federal property. It's also where the US intends to store it's nuclear waste, instead of in dry cask storage. Before it starts glowing in the dark, I should consider going on the tour.
On clusterssh once more
Chris came on a little strong I think with the title "Google alternative to DSH". Clusterssh being in no way associated (that I am aware of) with Google. It's simply was the first distributed ssh Andrew and I came across, and it does everything I want, so it will be staying in the toolkit. [btags:]
Blogging essential to a successful career
The Boston Globe says you should blog. Unless you're a retiree. The article also suggests single focus blogs, which is interesting. I will meditate on that aspect further.
MySQL User Conference coming up
Stewart has a new toy for his MySQL User Conference presentation, which is probably for the best as I fully intend to ask why MySQL replication is so unreliable, why Innodb hot backup appears to hate me, and lots of other biting questions if I think of them. It does make me wonder what other Aussies are going to be in town for the conference? I have a survey for you to complete: My name is: ________________________________ I am arriving: ________________________________ I will be staying in: ______________________________ (name of city only please) I would be interested in drinking so much I fall off my chair: yes / no (please circle) I would like to know where you can get Coopers beer in Silicon Valley: yes / no (please circle) Is Frys really as dodgy as it looks? yes / no (please circle) Let me know if you're going to be in town for the conference, and perhaps we can all get together and do something geeky. If there aren't too many of you, then perhaps I can organise a tour of the Googleplex or something. Hopefully it wont be raining the whole time like it has for the last few…
On freely available guide data
One of the flaws with Microsoft's Media Center flavour of Windows XP when it was released in Australia, was that it suffered from the same inherent flaw as every other PVR option in Australia. No guide data. It really says something about Australia's television networks that they don't want to help people with even vaguely modern computing setups watch their content -- it's a situation which reminds me a lot of the RIAA's stand over tactics, and I think it's equally doomed. That's one of the joys of my MythTV setup in the US -- the guide data is trivially available in return for doing a simple four or five question survey every three months or so. What could be easier than that? Well, when I was using a TiVo in Australia the OzTiVo folk had a solution to these problems, and were working with the XMLTV / MythTV people to make it more generic. I hadn't been paying much attention to it until today when I was randomly surfing on the topic, but it's interesting to see that they also now provide instructions for how to import their guide data into a Windows Media Center PC. It's cool to…
clusterssh
For reasons which might be fairly obvious, I've been doing a lot of repetitive sshing to machines recently (think executing the same upgrade on four mail servers for instance). I pondered aloud in the cube the possibility of an application which would give me a dialog to type in, and then wack that text into a bunch of xterms all at the same time for me. Andrew did some Debian foo and suddenly cluster ssh is presented as an option. It's pretty cool, and basically does exactly what I wanted. It's not perfect though -- some people have complained that it uses gnome-terminal, and about the fonts of all things. I've noticed some odd behaviour if you try to cut and paste into the gnome-terminal as well (instead of the text entry dialog). Interesting, I think it might be time for me and the cluster ssh code to become acquainted sometime.
MythTV frontend on an xbox
Surprisingly easy. Xebian, and pre-compiled packages make me smile. Time spent building the whole thing -- about an hour. Children now quiet after Australian DVD player broke in the US -- two.
Off line versions of the color images from the book
There are now off line versions of the color images available. There is a zip version and a tarball version.
Apparently I regulate
Someone in the office complimented me on "regulating" today. It turns out that's crazy American speak for laying down the law.