Matt's Blog

Here’s something I’ve never understood… Why don’t ISPs run mirrors of popular things for their clients? I’m having Debian update its package info, and it’s taking a while because it’s seemingly using a crappy mirror. I can customize it–and will do so later–but I’m left wondering… From my perspective, it’d be great, because it’d be [...]

I’m a pretty firm believer that, after several years, computers build up enough cruft that you need to start from scratch. With Windows the machine has gotten unbearably slow and there’s never enough disk space. With Linux, you’re running something really old, or just itching to try something new. With any OS, you’ve got a [...]

A couple things I ran into today that I want to keep searchable here in case I run into them again, and that I figured might be useful to someone else someday: Let’s say that you take down a MySQL server that’s a replicated slave to do a memory upgrade, and it takes a really [...]

If you ever read a technical discussion board, you’ll quickly come to the realization that the breakdown of people is maybe 90% people who have kind of figured out how to use the technology, 7% people who are power users, and 3% people who are experts. It’s an arbitrary breakdown, but it seems about right [...]

People who know me well will know that I’m not generally fond of movies. I can think of maybe a half-dozen movies I’ve seen lately. Borat is the only one I can think of that I’d recommend. Most movies just turn out to be a waste of my time. So I’m maybe not the normal [...]

Unlike SAV (also known as challenge-response systems), SPF is generally a decent idea. Basically, you publish a DNS record for your domain that lists what IPs are allowed to send mail from your domain. This means that you can say that mail sent from the host ‘mail.yourdomain.com’ is valid, but if a spammer sends mail [...]

I consider myself a moderate Democrat. I support the right of citizens to own guns, think government should be as small as possible, and hate paying taxes. I think Obama is to the right of me, too. I think we’ve screwed up Gitmo so bad that we need to just free everyone today, and arrest [...]

I thought I’d piggyback on Mr. T’s work to ensure we gave fair coverage to more than one beverage. I actually have a couple different things to say. A year or two ago, when gas was $4 a gallon, someone mentioned that people are furious paying $4/gallon for gasoline, but merrily pay $2 for a [...]

A few thoughts on MySQL replication: Since a “READ DATA FROM MASTER” will issue locks until the slave is up to sync, it’s a horrible way to bring up a new slave to an existing setup. What’s not written about a lot, but isn’t really a big secret, is that you should use the latest [...]

I got a bunch of kinda-neat apps for my iPhone. The free version of TouchTerm works well, but isn’t anything special. Twitterific is an okay Twitter client. Pandora is kind of cool, but I wish you could put it in the background, and it’s really only good over WiFi, and when there’s WiFi, I’m almost [...]