It's a blog.
In: Uncategorized
19 Apr 2009Thanks to Rusty for pointing out a lens that, apparently, made its debut more than two years ago, yet went entirely unnoticed by me. The Sigma 200-500mm f/2.8 lens. f/2.8 means that this lens lets in a lot of light, allowing you to shoot in dimmer light or to get really high shutter speeds for [...]
I think you could say with relative accuracy that there are three main bottlenecks in a computer: CPU, memory, and disk. There are some outliers that people might try to pile in: video card performance, or network throughput if you’re tweaking interrupts on your 10GigE card. But the basic three are pretty universal. To cut [...]
I think part of the thing I love about MySQL is the same thing I love about Firefox and Thunderbird. Even though I sometimes wonder if there are databases that would work better than MySQL or have fewer bugs, MySQL has an incredibly rich community that’s home to myriad fascinating projects. I’ve looked into MySQL [...]
In: Uncategorized
16 Apr 2009Although you probably shouldn’t take your reviews from someone who watches very little TV, the first season of Damages was absolutely, positively the best show to ever air on television. Besides being a thrilling show to watch, it was brilliantly produced. One of the lead character’s mottos was “Trust no one,” which can easily be [...]
Here’s a good one to have in your bag of tricks: all the time I wind up with a directory where I just want to delete anything older than a certain number of days. Here’s a pretty simple one: DELETE_PATH=’/var/backup/full_dumps/’ DAYS_TO_KEEP=’7′ for i in `find $DELETE_PATH -ctime +$DAYS_TO_KEEP`; do ls -lh “$i” #rm -vf “$i” [...]
This falls into the category of things that are simple yet I’m always trying to remember. Sometimes in bash I find myself wanting a for loop, not of the usual foreach type (for i in `ls /etc/`; do …), but a more classical one (a la C-style for var=0; var<100; var++ … syntax). Here’s the [...]
In: Uncategorized
11 Apr 2009As the gay marriage debate broils, I’ve been hearing about transgender rights a bit lately. As someone who hasn’t sat down and read a newspaper lately, I was a bit out of the loop. I’d seen it mentioned in passing in a few times, and then one morning there was nothing good on FM radio [...]
Lately I’ve felt that things were going pretty well. I was reading a bit of international news and looking at the international reaction to our presence at the G20 summit, for example. Of course not everyone in the world loves us, but I couldn’t help but feel that our presence was a little different than [...]
In: Uncategorized
7 Apr 2009After experiencing XKCD’s problem with Wikipedia first-hand, I went from the page on canned air to the page on liquid nitrogen to the page on promession. “What is promession,” you might wonder? It’s a new alternative to cremation, in which a corpse is frozen with liquid nitrogen until it is so brittle that it can [...]