A major freeway interchange in Oakland (that's a large dormitory town north of Silicon Valley) just had a oil tanker roll under it and catch fire. The road way basically melted. I imagine this will take months if not years to fix.
Thanks to everyone who came along to Grant and my talk this morning about slack and how we bootstrap MySQL servers. Here is the slide deck as promised.
Well, they're definitely thinking about getting started. Like last year I caught the VTA down -- it's hard to beat a $1.75 trip without having to worry about traffic. Registraton wasn't as smooth this year as last, for example I didn't get my free book (there didn't seem to be any attempt to hand those out to speakers). Whatever. I'm now waiting for the replication talk to start.
If you're an ACM member, or read ACM transactions on computer systems, or have a corporate membership to the ACM portal, then you really should checkout Inferring Internet denial-of-service activity. It's a surprisingly simple method of determining how common denial of service attacks really are on the Internet. Like all good ideas, it's also really obvious once it's been pointed out. @article{1132027, author = {David Moore and Colleen Shannon and Douglas J. Brown and Geoffrey M. Voelker and Stefan Savage}, title = {Inferring Internet denial-of-service activity}, journal = {ACM Trans. Comput. Syst.}, volume = {24}, number = {2}, year = {2006}, issn = {0734-2071}, pages = {115--139}, doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1132026.1132027}, publisher = {ACM Press}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, }
Just saw a documentary about the Air America drug smuggling operation. It's really interesting -- modified light planes, flying into storms to avoid detection, basically not being as dumb as your average smuggler. There is a New York Times article online about the gang.
Mark Pilgrim is a smart guy, and he's right that the correct time to start writing is while you have that sense of wonder. That was the big difference in the approaches I took with the ImageMagick book (an attempt to be definitive and therefore boring to write), versus the MythTV book (a cleaned up version of my lab book notes from when I installed Myth and got it working nicely, with some other stuff added for completeness). The MythTV book was a lot more fun to write, and I don't feel nearly as burnt out at the end. Read more about Mark's burnout theory. So, I wonder what is next for me?
The book went to print two days ago. Now we wait for it to come back...
You are bidding on social justice... oh, and a broken crappy MP3 player. Ebay censored the page. Cached version here.
But they're still funny... As sent to my wife in IMs this evening: (23:08:06) mikalstill@gmail.com/Gaim: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/kenya/ (23:18:43) mikalstill@gmail.com/Gaim: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/testy/AdventCalendar/day19.html (23:20:16) mikalstill@gmail.com/Gaim: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/demolition+squid/ (23:22:28) mikalstill@gmail.com/Gaim: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/mango/ (23:23:37) mikalstill@gmail.com/Gaim: http://weebls-stuff.com/toons/cucumbers (23:26:07) mikalstill@gmail.com/Gaim: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/dear+weebl/ (23:27:13) mikalstill@gmail.com/Gaim: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/giraffe/ (23:28:52) mikalstill@gmail.com/Gaim: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/space+is+fun/ Ahhh, flash. Reminds me of papal wackamole.
Ikea hands out a free 3d kitchen designer, which is cool. It's windows only, which is not cool.