OpenOffice.org Down Under!

On Diamond Mature Video you will find free videos of mature women engaged in sexual acts with younger men. Mature women are experienced, and their lust for sex is as strong as that of any younger woman.

There is a change happening around here. I posted this on my business blog a couple of days ago, and I thought I would share some of the changes with you dear reader.

We have renamed the business, or to be closer to the truth, we have given it a real name. No longer will we be operating just under my name, instead, we will be using the name Collaborynth. Yes it's a made up name, but I think it works to show how the main aim of our business is to help our clients through the sometimes very confusing maze of collaboration options.

We're in the process of developing our own hosted collaboration products as well as continuing the development of our more general hosting stuff.

This means that jamespurser.com.au has now returned to it's normal function as my personal blog.

The future looks exciting, let's go there!

Peter Zaitsev wrote an interesting item on front-end performance of a website.



I've always tried to look at the front-end from the user perspective, rather than purely technical. Once you weed out what's not really necessary for the user, and also deal with issues like "how important is it that this number is live", you generally look at a fairly different site already ;-)



Before my time at MySQL, I wrote a little gizmo called Measly Mouse which leads a modest but still active life. When reading on from here, please remember it was designed in 2001 and hasn't really been changed since.



Measly Mouse retrieves a page and deals with redirects, CSS and other includes like images, and tries to apply some basic metric to see how sensible the page is. Basic usability testing shows that people cannot choose between more than about 7 or so items. So you can imagine how the brain desperately fails to deal with most websites (website creators often feel everything is so important it must be on the front page), or through training filters out most things than don't relate directly to what the person is looking for. The other key factor is size. The bigger the page, and the more includes, the longer it takes. That's annoying. So the Measly scoring formula is as follows: BYTES + ((REQUESTS + LINKS) * 1024) where:

• BYTES - is the total page content including stylesheets, images, etc;
  
  
• REQUESTS - is the total number of requests required (including redirects) to get all page content;
  
  
• LINKS - is the total number of clickable items on the page, including forms fields.

Naturally all pages have some includes and some links, it's just a matter of finding balance to keep the site usable. Some sites use so many redirects.... nutty.



At the time there was quite a lot of debate on the simple methodology and the owners of some sites got pretty upset when someone ran their front page through Measly and it ended up in the top 10 ;-)

I still reckon the concept has merit though... please do make your own judgement and feel free to comment.

You may find some aggregating (like mailing list archive) sites in the top 10... I personally take those entries less serious, because they're generally focused on a niche (geek) group which does not conform to a general user profile. Still, it's quite possible their user interface could be improved!



As to how the tool works... it actually parses the pages in PHP using regexes (again remember the time it was built). Although it still works reasonably well, could be vastly improved now and catch more of a modern page.

But what would be really great, is if someone would care turn Measly Mouse into a Firefox plugin. Inside Firefox you have clean access to a page, so the analysis becomes extremely easy. For any page, the plugin could calculate the Measly Mouse (MM?) score, and perhaps optionally submit it to a central location. Who would like to pick this up?

Dear lazyweb number 3.

So far, I've asked:

high latency net simulations - great answers.

python friendly back-end accessible search engines - many answers, none that fit the bill. So I wrote my own :).

Today, I shall ask - is there a python-accessible persistent b+tree(or hashtable, or ...) module. Key considerations:

- scaling: millions of nodes are needed with low latency access to a nodes value and to determine a nodes absence

- indices are write once. (e.g. a group of indices are queried, and data is expired altered by some generational tactic such as combining existing indices into one larger one and discarding the old ones)

- reading and writing is suitable for sharply memory constrained environments. ideally only a few 100KB of memory are needed to write a 100K node index, or to read those same 100K nodes back out of a million node index. temporary files during writing are fine.

- backend access must either be via a well defined minimal api (e.g. 'needs read, readv, write, rename, delete') or customisable in python

- easy installation - if C libraries etc are needed they must be already pervasively available to windows users and Ubuntu/Suse/Redhat/*BSD systems

- ideally sorted iteration is available as well, though it could be layered on top

- fast, did I mention fast?

- stable formats - these indices may last for years unaltered after being written, so any libraries involved need to ensure that the format will be accessible for a long time. (e.g. python's dump/marshal facility fails)

sqlite, bdb already fail at this requirements list.

snakesql, gadfly, buzhug and rbtree fail too.

OpenOffice Writer.

No, I kid you not. It quells all of the riotous JavaScript etc, gives you a plain layout, & best of all you & your friend the Delete key can have fun culling useless rubbish, making font sizes meaningful, readable, & you can save the most successful results as Writer (ODT) files for later.

Oddly enough, I’m starting to look forward to my email — even wading through a hundred or so spam a day — thanks to SMS (/ME WAVEs across 12 megameters).

I've blogged about this before but I'm going to do it again.

Why, oh why do people insist on building their own TZ databases and ignoring the Operating Systems TZ dataset? Is this just a really stupid case of NIH? I've hit this in drupal (specifically the Events Module), Plone (inherited from zope), and I've been told about java having it's own tz set as well.

I might even do a t-shirt, this has got me that annoyed!

This fellow is pretty amazing: http://beta.ivancover.com/wiki/index.php/Eee_PC_Internal_Upgrades. To the already tiny Eee PC, he added (internally!):

1. USB hub
   
   
2. GPS with antenna
   
   
3. Bluetooth
   
   
4. Card reader w/ additioal SSD
   
   
5. Power switch (10 dip) for switching all extra foo on/off
   
   
6. Wifi upgrade 802.11n
   
   
7. FM transmitter
   
   
8. Modem (admittedly there's design space for that)
   
   
9. Touch screen
   
   
10. Temperature sensor
    
    
11. Heatsink
    
    

That's pretty cool...

For those people who like living on the bleeding edge of development, you can now update your system to include the latest builds coming out of the OpenSolaris sausage factory. Alan has been posting updates on indiana-discuss when they are available. Those who have been used to SXCE should be pretty comfortable updating, and both IPS, ZFS and beadm have made this a breeze.

The current update is build 91, and here’s the steps to clone your ZFS file-system, and download the latest packages -

# Refresh the package catalog gman@rampage:~$ pfexec pkg refresh # Install an updated version of SUNWipkg (which avoids a few bugs) gman@rampage:~$ pfexec pkg install pkg:/SUNWipkg@0.5.11,0.5.11-0.86 # Refresh the package catalog again (to get fixed up content) gman@rampage:~$ pfexec pkg refresh # Image Update for the win! (sit back and watch the progress) gman@rampage:~$ pfexec pkg image-update # Now you need to ensure to active your new boot environment (temporary step) gman@rampage:~$ pfexec mount -F zfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-1 /mnt gman@rampage:~$ pfexec /mnt/boot/solaris/bin/update_grub -R /mnt # Now reboot and enjoy!

In the works is build 92, that should be available in a week or so - including GNOME 2.22. Hopefully by the time 2008.11 rocks around, we’ll have 2.24 included!

15:00: Mikal shared: ICANN Board Approves Wide Expansion of TLDs

15:00: Mikal shared: Crooks Nab Citibank ATM Codes, Steal Millions

15:30: Mikal shared: Wired on Google Android

15:30: Mikal shared: Doodle forerunners for Flickr, Twitter, etc





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Rainbow Over Pumphouse, Isle des Pins, New Caledonia

For best system security you want to apply kernel security patches ASAP. For an attacker gaining root access to a machine is often a two step process, the first step is to exploit a weakness in a non-root daemon or take over a user account, the second step is to compromise the kernel to gain root access. So even if a machine is not used for providing public shell access or any other task which involves giving user access to potential hostile people, having the kernel be secure is an important part of system security.

One thing that gets little consideration is the overall effect of applying security updates on overall uptime. Over the last year there have been 14 security related updates (I count a silent data loss along with security issues) to the main Debian Etch kernel package. Of those 14, it seems that if you don’t use DCCP, NAT for CIFS or SNMP, IA64, the dialout group, then you will only need to patch for issues 2, 3 (for SMP machines), 4, 5, 7 (sound drivers get loaded on all machines by default), 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14.

This means 11 reboots a year for SMP machines and 10 a year for uni-processor machines. If a reboot takes three minutes (which is an optimistic assumption) then that would be 30 or 33 minutes of downtime a year due to kernel upgrades. In terms of uptime we talk about the number of “nines”, where the ideal is generally regarded as “five nines” or 99.999% uptime. 33 minutes of downtime a year for kernel upgrades means that you get 99.993% uptime (which is “four nines”). If a reboot takes six minutes (which is not uncommon for servers) then it’s 99.987% uptime (”thee nines”).

While it doesn’t seem likely to affect the number of “nines” you get, not using SMP has the potential to avoid future security issues. So it seems that when using a Xen (or other virtualisation technology) assigning only one CPU to the DomUs that don’t need any more could improve uptime for them.

For Xen Dom0’s which don’t have local users or daemons, don’t use DCCP, NAT for CIFS or SNMP, wireless, CIFS, JFFS2, PPPoE, bluetooth, H.323 or SCTP connection tracking, then only issue 11 applies. However for “five nines” you need to have 5 minutes of downtime a year or less. It seems unlikely that a busy Xen server can be rebooted in 5 minutes as all the DomUs need to have their memory saved to disk (writing out the data to disk and reading it back in after a reboot will probably take at least a couple of minutes) or they need to be shutdown and booted again after the Dom0 is rebooted (which is a good procedure if the security fix affects both Dom0 and DomU use), and such shutdowns and reboots of DomU’s will take a lot of time.

Based on the past year, it seems that a system running as a basic server might get “four nines” if configured for a fast boot (it’s surprising that no-one seems to be talking about recent improvements to the speed of booting as high-availability features) and if the boot is slower then you are looking at “three nines”. For a Xen server unless you have some sort of cluster it seems that “five nines” is unattainable due to reboot times if there is one issue a year, but “four nines” should be easy to get.

Now while the 14 issues over the last year for the kernel seems likely to be a pattern that will continue, the one issue which affects Xen may not be representative (small numbers are not statistically significant). I feel confident in predicting a need for between 5 and 20 kernel updates next year due to kernel security issues, but I would not be prepared to bet on whether the number of issues affecting Xen will be 0, 1, or 4 (it seems unlikely that there would be 5 or more).

I will write a future post about some strategies for mitigating these issues.

Here is my summary of the Debian kernel linux-image-2.6.18-6-686 (Etch kernel) security updates according to it’s changelog, they are not in chronological order, it’s the order of the changelog file:

1. 05 Jun 2008: CVE-2008-2358 for DCCP and CVE-2008-1673 for ASN.1 (NAT for CIFS and SNMP).



2. 23 May 2008: CVE-2008-2136 memory leak in IPv6 over IPv4 tunnels, CVE-2007-6712 timer related bugs, CVE-2008-1615 ptrace on AMD64 architecture, and CVE-2008-2137 “Validate address ranges regardless of MAP_FIXED”.



3. 07 May 2008: CVE-2008-1669 SMP race



4. 11 Apr 2008: CVE-2007-6694 PPC only, CVE-2008-0007 Add VM_DONTEXPAND to vm_flags in drivers that register a fault handler but do not bounds check the offset argument, CVE-2008-1294 prevent user escape from RLIMIT_CPU, and CVE-2008-1375 fix dnotify race.



5. 10 Feb 2008: CVE-2008-0010 and CVE-2008-0600 Fix missing access check in vmsplice.



6. 25 Jan 2008: Not a security issue, but silent data loss on IA64.



7. 22 Jan 2008: CVE-2007-6151 ISDN memory overrun, CVE-2008-0001 something related to checking the access to a directory, CVE-2007-2878 FAT filesystem related, CVE-2007-4571 ALSA bug that allows user to read kernel memory.



8. 17 Sep 2007: Fix minor DOS attack for slightly privileged users (EG members of dialout group).



9. 18 Dec 2007: CVE-2007-6063 overflows in ISDN subsystem, CVE-2007-6206 core dumping over an existing file can get the wrong ownership (should be possible to use kernel.core_pattern to work around this [1]), CVE-2007-5966 timer issue, CVE-2006-6058 Minix fs DOS attack via corrupted fs, and CVE-2007-6417 tmpfs memory leak.



10. 29 Nov 2007: CVE-2007-3104 local kernel DOS attack (Oops), CVE-2007-4997 malicious frame on wireless interface crashes system, CVE-2007-5500 potential system hang, and CVE-2007-5904 CIFS overflows from server sending corrupt data.



11. 02 Oct 2007: CVE-2007-4573 Xen 64bit with 32bit DomU, CVE-2006-5755 Xen, CVE-2007-4133 memory management DOS, and CVE-2007-5093 DOS when unplugging a webcam that is in use.



12. 25 Sep 2007: CVE-2007-3731 ptrace causing Oops, CVE-2007-3739 memory management Oops, CVE-2007-3740 CIFS not honoring umask, CVE-2007-4573 ptrace of 32bit process on AMD64 bug, and CVE-2007-4849 JFFS2 (flash media) filesystem bug.



13. 27 Aug 2007: CVE-2007-2172 IPv4 memory related issue (local DOS or compromise?), CVE-2007-2875 local user can read kernel memory if cpuset filesystem is mounted, CVE-2007-3105 buffer overflow in random number generator, CVE-2007-3843 CIFS, and CVE-2007-4308 AAC RAID.



14. 11 Aug 2007: CVE-2007-1353 bluetooth, CVE-2007-3513 usblcd, CVE-2007-2525 PPPoE, CVE-2007-3642 H.323 connection tracking, CVE-2007-2172 IPv4 local exploit, CVE-2007-2453 slightly less random numbers, CVE-2007-2876 SCTP connection tracking, CVE-2007-3851 i965 batch buffer usage, and CVE-2007-3848 potential privilege escalation.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/01/05/core-files/

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• Alexandro: OpenOffice.org Migration Webinar “Alexandro, a longstanding member of the OOo project, is testing out some new online presentation tools and providing training and a Q&A for OpenOffice users tomorrow, June 19th 2008, 19:00 CST.” Thanks Janet! (tags: openoffice janethawtin training)

I had an eventful week of night shift when I was on 2 weeks ago (and have only just gotten time to write this up, at 2am, on a worknight when I have to be up in 4 hours. Sigh, sometimes I shit me). The first eventfulness started when I got up to the 'scope on my first night to discover the telescope was out of action. It had collided with the floor. By that, I mean the telescope had come down this very thin access corridor:



in order to be able to let us access the field plate:



from the access platform you can see behind the telescope in this:



And just kept on going. Woops.



There are hardware limit switches (in the form of mercury tilt switches, mostly) all over the place, because even in the late 60's, they recognised that All Software Sucked (ASS), and so consequently designed in failsafes. Except that someone came along and raised the floor but didn't raise the limit switches enough (I'm not surprised. The work that proceeded this found out that a dome zero switch that had been recently installed for the new computer control had been installed at not the useful azimuth of 0 degrees, but had been installed at the precise azimuth of 176 degrees).



The original Computor Control System of the telescope has a very precise servoing mechanism that we just haven't been able to reproduce quite as well in the new Telescope Control System. It slews fullspeed at 2200 arcsec/sec right on down to the last 15cm, and then smoothly stops within a second (incidentally, this looks very scary when you know there is an as-yet undiagnosed problem with this slewing, no matter how confident you are that it is working correctly this time based on the correspondence between the computer control and the old mechanical dials). I don't have the specs handy, but I seem to recall the telescope weighs about 500 tonnes. The computer reads the encoders, decides when it is close enough to start slowing down and does so. Then the first hardware limit tells it is is not allowed to slew anymore, and must only proceed at a slow pace. In the access corridor, this limit simply stops it from slewing sideways into the corridor's walls. And there's a second limit that tells it to stop really damn fast. Usually by inadvertently blowing the 4 really-hard-to-replace 1968 specced-and-no-longer-manufactured-and-mitsubishi-can't-even-turn-on-the-assembly-line-again-no-matter-how-much-we-pay-them-because-they-don't-have-the-data-anymore bridge transistors by asking them to suck down 2200 Joule back-EMF impulses. Turned out it wasn't fast enough to stop the telescope in time before hitting the floor in the light of another failure, but at least probably 90% of the kinetic energy had already been wiped off -- it probably only needed to be a couple of cm higher. Last time the telescope was asked to stop from a fullspeed slew by the external influence of misplaced inch thick plate steel (a mere 3 months ago -- we're getting careless), one of the armatures? in the drive motors in the anti-backlash arrangements decided to try to eject itself out of the drive casing at 6000rpm*10cm=200km/h. We can still hear the irregularities in those gear teeth.



When the day staff left after this collision, and I was handed control, I decided that it would be safe to proceed off the old electromechanical syncros, and not allow the computer anywhere near it. We didn't observe that night anyway, because of the weather.



So the next day, the first task was to reinstall the limit switches, and then start investigating why the telescope didn't start to slow down until it hit the second limit. And so much messing with wirewrap was involved:







Turned out the declination encoder was reading -136 degrees (you can see that off the status LEDs at the top of that rack -- all 1's, which for some reason represents -136 degrees on the course encoder). Declinations don't really come in that variety. The pole is sorta -90degrees. And the CRT display was reading -36degrees, because no one ever anticipated there'd be a need to display -136 degrees declination. Funny that. Of course, it did mean that it wasn't entirely obvious anything was wrong. So the telescope was given a demand to slew to +46 degrees, and it continually saw it was at -136 degrees, so gave it the fastest demand it could muster (without ever bothering to wonder why the encoder wasn't registering a movement -- that would have cost a few bytes in the 64k of core. Needless to say, the new system is a lot more cautious, and stops everything if something isn't moving when it's meant to, *just in case*). Right to the very end. OK, goodo, it took them several days to find why the encoder was going dodgy every day. Intermittant fault and a crowbar circuit in a power supply, combined with the daily power-cyclings involved in setting up the new system -- never been a problem in 35 years, and we didn't even contemplate this failure mode. And a combination of other red herrings that have been popping up because of the work in trying to get this new computer system in. Fortunately, we weren't in want of opening the dome and firing up the oil pumps and opening the mirror cover, because it was positively 100% humid out there. I'd put up a movie of the fog flowing past the dome, but none of the photos really turned out that good. I need a better DSLR.



Then the weather cleared. The very least I expected was to not be able to find any of the guide or aquisition stars very easily. Although the secondary mirror -- that several tens-of-tonne thing at the top end of a 10 metre long lever, that collided with the floor -- is suspended by 1 inch x 4 inch steel rods, it still looks comparatively flimsy (I guess compared to the rest of the overengineered structure). And then the robot is precision optical equipment with 5 micron tolerances. I was also expecting to need to do the 4meter class equivalent of collimating a telescope (I'm not looking forward to my boss retiring). I opened up, directed the telescope in the direction of the star, and took a test exposure. Straight down the middle, within an arcsec. I shouldn't be surprised. All new observers at our 'scope comment on how they have never seen a telescope point so accurately. They don't actually have to do any work in aquiring targets. That's what 1960's brute strength engineering does. None of these flimsy 10meter class telescopes that flop about as they move away from the zenith and whose pointing models have to be parameterised by 50 parameters, and then still only get it to 10 arcsec despite the modern finite element analysis. Our pointing model only needs 11 parameters, of which only 5 are adjusted regularly (clock error being one of them, and the temperature and pressure being another 2 for the atmospheric model of refraction -- incidentally, I'm utterly convinced thin cloud has a visibly different index of refraction, causing a 1 arcsec deflection; no one else at work has noticed this).

Very excited about my second trip to China that we’ll make later this year.

Dear Google,

I am not sure how to quantify the exact amount of evil involved in unsolicited bulk email (I guess I could argue that it's even commercial email, because you are a company promoting a product, even if it is a coding competition), but let me assure you, the amount of evil is exactly the same in 2008 as it was either time in 2005, and for that matter, in 2003.

So, knock it off already.

Today I received a Dell PowerEDGE T105 for use by a client. My client had some servers for development and testing hosted in a server room at significant expense. They also needed an offsite backup of critical data. So I suggested that they buy a cheap server-class machine, put it on a fast ADSL connection at their home, and use Xen DomU’s on that for development, testing, and backup. My client liked the concept but didn’t like the idea of having a server in his home.

So I’m going to run the server from my home. I selected a Dell PowerEDGE tower system because it’s the cheapest server-class machine that can be purchased new. I have a slight preference for HP hardware but HP gear is probably more expensive and they are not a customer focussed company (they couldn’t even give me a price).

So exactly a week after placing my order I received my shiny new Dell system, and it didn’t work. I booted a CentOS CD and ran “memtest” and the machine performed a hard reset. When it booted again it informed me that the event log had a message, and the message was “Uncorrectable ECC Error” with extra data of “DIMM 2,2“. While it sucks quite badly to receive a new machine that doesn’t work, that’s about the best result you can hope for when you have a serious error on the motherboard or the RAM. A machine without ECC memory would probably just randomly crash every so often and maybe lose data (see my previous post on the relative merits of ECC RAM and RAID [1]).

So I phoned up Dell (it’s a pity that their “Packing Slip” was a low quality photocopy which didn’t allow me to read their phone number and that the shipping box also didn’t include the number so I had to look them up on the web) to get technical support. Once we had established that by removing the DIMMs and reinserting them I had proved that there was a hardware fault they agreed to send out a technician with a replacement motherboard and RAM.

I’m now glad that I bought the RAM from Dell. Dell’s business model seems to revolve around low base prices for hardware and then extremely high prices for extras, for example Dell sells 1TB SATA disks for $818.40 while MSY [1] has them for $215 or $233 depending on brand.

When I get the machine working I will buy two 1TB disks from MSY (or another company with similar prices). Not only does that save some money but it also means that I can get different brands of disk. I believe that having different brands of hard disk in a RAID-1 array will decrease the probability of having them both fail at the same time.

One interesting thing about the PowerEdge T105 is that Dell will only sell two disks for it, but it has four SATA connectors on the motherboard, one is used for a SATA DVD player so it would be easy to support three disks. Four disks could be installed if a PCIe SATA controller was used (one in the space for a FDD and another in the space for a second CD/DVD drive), and if you were prepared to go without a CD/DVD drive then five internal disks could probably work. But without any special hardware the space for a second CD/DVD drive is just begging to be used for a third hard disk, most servers only use the primary CD/DVD drive for installing the OS and I expect that the demand for two CD/DVD drives in a server is extremely low. Personally I would prefer it if servers shipped with external USB DVD drives for installing the OS. Then when I install a server room I could leave one or two drives there in case a system recovery is needed and use the rest for desktop machines.

One thing that they seem to have messed up is the lack of a filter for the air intake fan at the front of the case. The Opteron CPU has a fan that’s about 11cm wide which sucks in air from the front of the machine, in front of that fan there is a 4cm gap which would nicely fit a little sponge filter. Either they messed up the design or somehow my air filter got lost in transit.

Incidentally if you want to buy from Dell in Australia then you need to configure your OS to not use ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification [2] as the Dell web servers used for sales rejects all connections from hosts with ECN enabled. It’s interesting that the web servers used for providing promotional information work fine with ECN and it’s only if you want to buy that it bites you.

But in spite of these issues, I am still happy with Dell overall. Their machine was DOA, that happens sometimes and the next day service is good (NB I didn’t pay extra for better service). I expect that they will fix it tomorrow and I’ll buy more of their gear in future.

Update: I forgot to mention that Dell shipped the machine with two power cables. While two power cables is a good thing for the more expensive servers that have redundant PSUs, for a machine with only one PSU it’s a bit of a waste. For some time I’ve been collecting computer power cables faster than I’ve been using them (due to machines dying and due to clients who want machines but already have spare power cables). So I’ve started giving them away at meetings of my local LUG. At the last meeting I gave away a bag of power cables and I plan to keep taking cables to the meetings until people stop accepting them.

• [0] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/06/13/ecc-ram-vs-raid/



• [1] http://www.msy.com.au/



• [2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3168.txt

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17:45: Mikal shared: Brothel on wheels

17:48: I have to stop trying to keep up with my incoming email... Its a losing game, and if I did read it all I would never get anything else done.

19:24: The AFP (the police force which patrols Canberra) seem to be cracking down on people riding bikes without helmets heaps. I have seem two people pulled over by patrol cars for a stern talking to in the last two days.

21:30: Mikal shared: Diary of a Failed Startup -- the 100-word version [Silicon Valley Users Guide]

21:30: Mikal shared: Angry Young Sisters Protest High Gas Prices After Losing Their Cable [Civil Disobedience]

22:15: Mikal shared: How Facebook serves pictures

23:00: Mikal shared: The Stalled Server Room - The Daily WTF

23:00: Mikal shared: Japanese telco institutes upload caps... of 30GB... daily

23:00: Mikal shared: Three-year old calls 911 for help





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We recently joined The Club of Mountain View, because it just happens to be around the corner, and we both want to try and get back into some semblance of shape.

The Club has pretty reasonable facilities. It has a large cardio room, a large weights room, a group exercise room where they do a number of classes, and a spinning room. It also has three racquetball/handball courts, as well as an indoor basketball court.

Pretty much all of the facilities are included in the monthly membership, so Sarah went and booked a racquetball court this evening, and we had a bit of a whack.

We didn't have a clue how to play, so it was just basically half an hour of belting the ball around, and I have to say, I really liked it.

I haven't played squash since high school, but didn't enjoy it, because I was more used to tennis, and constantly misjudged where the racquet head was, hence missing the ball. I never really liked the characteristic of a squash ball either.

I really like tennis, but I have habit of getting carried away and belting the tripe out of the tennis ball, either sending it completely out of the court (over the fence) and far away, or at the very best well and truly past the back line of the court and into the fence.

Racquetball seems perfect for me. I can belt the living daylights out of the ball. It can't get lost. The racquet is short and reasonably large. There's a very satisfying thwack sound to boot. In short: I like it.

The beanbag to use with this laptop (fullsize) Contrary to what may be guessed at by the t-shirt I am wearing in this photo, I am not trying to make my office just like those on the t-shirt. This new bean bag is going home, however it really does suit the laptop fairly well doesn't it?

I wonder what the people in Civic thought of me today watching me walk back to uni from target carrying four 100 litre bags of polystyrene beans on a very windy day. Mikal was somewhat annoyed with me that I did not give him a heads up so he could come and laugh at me doing the walk here. He did however help me fill the bag and take the photo, activities that were in his words either annoying or strangely satisfying at times.

The bean bag is a Jumbo sized denim bag purchased from Blob Beanbags, it seems well made, the zip can be pushed up inside a little sleeve so kids can not easily open the bag, also I purchased a liner with it so it is easy to take the beans out and clean the bag. Rather comfortable really, maybe I should actually get one for my office.

Today, I completed my migration of my personal machine to one that runs OS X. For those not following Twitter, I picked up a MacBook Air last week, and have slowly been moving my stuff off from the Dell. The Dell can now serve as a full development machine, and I can start running “unstable” Linuxes on it now (”unstable” like Rawhide).

But I digress. This is about how I moved Thunderbird and Firefox over to my new box.

Thunderbird:

Copy ~/.thunderbird over, and place it in ~/Library/Thunderbird on OS X. Only problem I found was with the Lightning plugin, which managed to grab itself an update, and all was dandy.

Firefox:

Copy ~/.mozilla/firefox over, and place it in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox. All the plugins I had, just ran fine.

Only snag? I couldn’t find a copy of Firefox 2 online. Good thing I had a copy on another Mac… Why did I need Firefox 2? Google Browser Sync. Though I suspect that in the very near future, I’ll move over to Mozilla Weave, and get all my systems up to speed with Firefox 3.

Next up, lets see how long I run OS X on the Air… or do I replace it with Linux if it annoys me significantly enough?