Wii games you won’t be seeing anytime soon
I found this really funny although it might offend other people’s senses.
Link to Rejected Wiiplay Games
Thanks LRR!
I found this really funny although it might offend other people’s senses.
Link to Rejected Wiiplay Games
Thanks LRR!
I’ve been trying out Firefox 3 and one strategy I do is to copy my Mozilla Firefox folder with me to whatever machine I go to so I don’t have to reinstall plugins, re-enter all my passwords, and configure everything about Firefox until I’m happy.
However, it seems due to some reason or another I lost the ability to install extensions. After Googling around I dug up a nice hint on Ubuntu’s Launchpad site.
Basically delete the file named extensions.rdf in your Mozilla directory
A quite from this article I pulled up from Planet Sysadmin
Unbound was written by NLnet Labs, VeriSign, Nominet and Kirei. Unbound will support DNSSEC, a version of DNS that uses public-key cryptography to protect DNS results, from begriming. Unbound and BIND are the only open-source recursive DNS servers that support DNSSEC.
Seems interesting. If they can make sure to make the transition from BIND as painless as possible I’m sure it will start getting some traction. Although, if you don’t need DNSSEC and lots of fancy features djbdns handles things not so badly (in my experience).
One thing that is interesting that wasn’t mentioned in the news announcement is that Unbound ONLY handles recursive requests while its cousin nsd is an authoritative only nameserver which is similar to how the djbdns suite works. In some cases, I DO like how BIND can handle both authoritative and recursive in one binary but I guess it always depends on the situation…
Animoto sounds like an interesting service. Take some photos (and videos?) and some music or choose some already available and they remix it into a music video automatically. Don’t like the mix? Hit retry. Cool stuff…
Here’s a juicy quote from their blog post on Jeff Bozos talking about them:
This is about 50 EC2 instances down here. Their Facebook app kind of broke through. And so this is their Facebook app taking off. This is just three days ago, April 16th.
You can see they’ve gone from 50 instances of EC2 usage up to 3,500 instances of EC2 usage. It’s completely impractical in your own data center over the course of three days to scale from 50 servers to 3,500 servers. Don’t try this at home.
Great showcase for Cloud Computing. Too bad not ALL applications can take advantage of Cloud Computing. But glad to see ideas that can.
And oh yes… since their frontend is a Rails app of course it can’t scale
Wow… thanks John
Okay first day at YAPC…
Missed most of the opening speeches and Larry Wall’s Keynote.. d’oh. Then again trying to handle the incoming rush of attendees was quite the experience. I’d say jumbled is a good word for how we handled it but at least it got handled. It’s pretty hard handling the Japanese Incoming Rush that seems such a common phenomenon in Japan.
Sat in on the Perl as a Second Language Talk. Here are some of my messy notes
After that… somehow I missed most of the others.. oh yeah I was busy trying to volunteer but I did manage to catch
mizzy’s – Easy system administration programming with a framework – フレームワークでシステム管理プログラミングをもっと簡単に
Afterwards came Lightning Talks which were really good. Here’s my blurry recollection of them (wish I took notes…)
Lightning Talks are probably one of my favorite events in a conference since 5 minutes really forces you to get to the point. There was also the dinner party which is what I guess you could expect from large amounts of geeks with large amounts of food and booze. Okay last day coming up! I need sleep…
I’m at YAPC Asia this year working as a volunteer. It’s interesting mingling with the Perl folk especially since I’m not a Perl person but am curious to know more about the Perl community.
Anyways here are my scribbling notes that I’ve taken
UPDATE:
Just found a link to Ero Geek Conference on the Soozy website. Neato. Also there were a lot more females than I expected at this SoozyConf/RejectConf/Perl Conference. Guess that’s just a sign of Perl being more mainstream than Ruby!
After looking at a seriously useful tip for cleaning out a clogged postfix queue I puzzled over the -r option in xargs. I’m not an xargs master but I figure if I need it I can always RTFM.
Well man xargs on my Ubuntu box provides the typical GNU fair and I spend the next way too long time period looking for where the -r option is. (The full option is –no-run-if-empty).
Sadly, I ended up finding it faster with a Google search on this web page that has some find-fu and xargs then looking again at the GNU manpage and finally find the option buried just before the EXAMPLES section.
I guess I should be happy this time around, there are some GNU manpages that don’t even HAVE documentation (at least compared to the *BSD brethren). Grrrrrr
I got this WinCE device that I’ve been trying to wrangle into a nice cozy environment to do useful things so the first thing I started looking at was the availability of development tools that I can use directly on the device.
In general, I prefer Ruby however I’m not wedded to it since I’d prefer a language that is more
After looking around I dug up the following :
Also pocketpcfaq.com has a nice listing of languages you can run on your WinCE device.
Too bad I didn’t find any of the following:
So after looking at the choices, I think I’m down to Pocket Scheme, Ruby CE, and Python CE. I guess I’ll try them all and report which one seems like the easiest to just goof around with and get something useful done on a CE device.
From Artima’s Developer Buzz feed I picked up this story on someone managing to sell to management the use of Scala in a project. There is a little bit talk about performance and ease of deployment which could be good points depending on your environment…
We also had an occasion to have 2,000 simultaneous (as in at the same time, pounding on their keyboards) connections … thanks to Jetty Continuations … and an average of 700 requests per second on a dual core opteron with a load average of around 0.24… try that with your Rails app.
So, to this customer’s JVM, the Scala and lift code looks, smells and tastes just like Java code. If I renamed the scala-library.jar file to apache-closures.jar, nobody would know the difference… at all.
For a Java shop deploying a Scala app might not be AS big a deal. However, when you have a clean slate and don’t even need to sell Java just a solution selling Scala becomes a little bit more blurred.
After glancing at the Slashdot post on the forking of pidgin and wasting far too much time slogging through the ticket that caused a bit of strife, I’m pretty sure I will move away from Pidgin until the developers stop being dorks (highly unlikely since they seem to develop only for themselves).
Quick quick summary of the whole issue. The pidgin developers decided to make the input text box very small and auto-resizing (up to a certain point) based on some fancy heuristic. Quite a few users have jumped up and down and requested to make this optional however the pidgin developers basically said, ‘Go take a hike’. There has been quite a bit of reaction to it, including the creation of a plugin to bring back old functionality to a full on fork of the whole project.
In general, forks are a bit of wasted effort to the Open Source community as a whole but one will never get the idea situation where all developers will just ‘get along’ and combine their energies into the One True Implementation. So, from a pragmatic standpoint, forking seems to get the job done although with a lot of burnt cycles.
I believe migrating to something like Funpidgin (A fork of Pidgin that aims to be listen more to the community) and making sure that it gets enough momentum to stay alive is probably the best answer to extremely stubborn developers wanting to do things their own way at the expense of the ‘users’. However, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if the fork gets enough energy to keep itself running.
I’m not much of a designer type person but I find Khoi’s answers to some of the questions posed regarding the information design of the NYTimes site interesting since it is a continual battle in trying to add more but use less to say more.
Here’s a quick snippet:
You can think of it as an elaborate logic puzzle, with the onus on my design staff to solve the puzzle using as few elements as possible, in as aesthetically pleasing a manner as possible. We strive to distill every template that we create down to its core parts, and actively debate the placement of nearly every element.
Had a case where I had some rails app that was using files for its session store and had been running like that for months. While it was a careless (and dumb) thing to run it that way, we had to do something about it since it was eating up close to 85% of the system partition. The dumb way to try to do this is below:
nice find /tmp/ -name 'ruby_sess.*' | xargs -n 100 rm -fv
However, the problem is that this causes insanity on IO which is NOT good for a running service. (Luckily this service was merely important instead of critical) So, I present to you my quick and dirty script that will clean up all those nefarious ruby sessions files that have run amok for months.
while true; do nice find /tmp/ -name 'ruby_sess.*' | head -n 20 | xargs rm -fv; sleep 10 done
Been thinking about the role of testing in a software organization. Steve Rowe of M$ has a great blog post on finding the right people for the job. He breaks it down into 3 types of roles that are useful in a test team:
Definitely a good read for understanding the type of personalities you would want when building a testing team.
It’s Common Sense, Stupid notes the difficulties in bootstrapping a GUI testing framework and what to expect out of it. These are good things to keep in mind when building out a UI test framework and putting realistic expectations on what you will get for the investment of effort.
I would also note that the blog posts on the difficulties of UI testing can be applied to larger scale system testing (ever test a router?) since one could view a GUI application is a little microcosm of a system that cannot be easily taken broken down into its components when trying to do integration testing.