Please don’t

A fresh cup mentions the Ruby on Rails exception notifier plugin. The idea is that every time an exception is raised in your code you get an email. This is such a horrible idea that I need to take the time to comment. As someone who spends all his time dealing with large deployments of software, email is the worst way of reporting errors I can think of. Think about it: Email is unreliable to deliver. It could get queued on the reporting server, a mail router on the network, or on your delivery server. Worse than that, it could get marked as spam, or randomly discarded. Email is expensive. There are two kinds of expense here -- email needs to be written to disk reliably, which means you sync() when you write the mail to a destination or a queue. For some MTAs, this can mean several syncs() per email as the mail moves between queues. There can be more than one of these MTAs on the way to the final delivery target as well. Additionally, storing email at the destination is expensive. Think of the backups, virus scanning, spam scanning, caching on clients and so forth. Email is…

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Large inodes = faster samba

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Ted T'so just mentioned in his LCA 2007 talk that larger inode sizes improves the speed of Samba 4. This is because you can fit more file attributes in the inode. I can't find a reference to the benchmark results online quickly, but wanted to make a note of this.

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Mirror traffic during the last day of LCA 2007

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It seems obvious to me that videos of LCA 2007 are good. Specifically: IPTraf # Statistics for eth0 ########################################################## # # # Total Total Incoming Incoming Outgoing Outgoing # # Packets Bytes Packets Bytes Packets Bytes # # Total: 241091 228940K 96646 18025370 144445 210915K # # IP: 241091 225548K 96646 16655328 144445 208892K # # TCP: 241086 225547K 96643 16655034 144443 208892K # # UDP: 4 412 2 266 2 146 # # ICMP: 0 0 0 0 0 0 # # Other IP: 1 28 1 28 0 0 # # Non-IP: 0 0 0 0 0 0 # # # # # # Total rates: 49188.4 kbits/sec Broadcast packets: 0 # # 6592.2 packets/sec Broadcast bytes: 0 # # # # Incoming rates: 3814.2 kbits/sec # # 2714.4 packets/sec # # IP checksum errors: 0 # # Outgoing rates: 45374.2 kbits/sec # # 3877.8 packets/sec # # Elapsed time: 0:00 ######################################################### X-exit Yay for LCA 2007 videos.

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Am I really the first?

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I find it a little hard to believe I am the first to use an Intel Core 2 Duo for MythTV stuff, but I can't find anyone else reporting this to the MythTV users list... mythtv@mythtv2:~/Desktop/mythtv-0.20$ ./configure *** WARNING *** Your CPU was not detected properly: uname -m: i686 uname -p: unknown model name: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm If you are using a recent CVS checkout, please e-mail the above to mythtv-users@mythtv.org With the subject "configure did not detect my cpu"

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Updated: linux.conf.au 2007 MythTV tutorial homework

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The final version of the MythTV tutorial homework is online. I promise no more changes now (unless they're minor bug fixes), mainly because I get on a plane in 9 hours to come to Australia. Note that the bottom of the homework gives the details for a VMWare image if you're too lazy to do the homework. See y'all at LCA!

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Updated: linux.conf.au 2007 MythTV tutorial homework

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I spent the afternoon updating the linux.conf.au MythTV tutorial homework. I did all the homework on a VMWare virtual machine, and it took me about four hours to complete, given that compilation was slow for me in the virtual machine, but downloading was fast. Next steps are adding ffmpeg setup to the homework, and putting the finished virtual machine online so that lazy people can just download the crazily large file.

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