Here’s a neat tip I picked up from Andrew. Have you ever run into a machine that won’t reclaim all of its swap? It turns out there’s an easy way to force a reclaim.

First, a caveat. For most people, this makes no sense. If something is just sitting in swap even when there’s lots of free RAM, it means that whatever’s in swap is something that nothing, anywhere, cares about. It would have been reclaimed if anything tried to use it. You want to leave it in swap. And a second caveat: what I’m about to say is an awful idea if you don’t have lots of free RAM. But in cases where you’re using 4% swap and getting paged every 15 minutes because the monitoring system sees swap being used, and yet you have 5GB of free RAM, here’s a neat trick that will force everything in memory to be reclaimed.

First, find the swap partition. On Linux, it’s “cat /proc/swaps,” though you could also look at fstab. GNOME and KDE users probably have a fancy GUI for this, but our servers don’t run GNOME. 😉 On the machine I just did this on, it was /dev/sda2, so I’ll use that as an example.

Then, you ‘unmount’ the swap partition, and then re-enable it. As you turn off the swap partition, its contents are forced back into memory. “swapoff /dev/sda2” to turn it off, and then “swapon /dev/sda2” to turn it back on.

At work, I have to deal with a ton of mail bounces. We get hundreds a day. Automating the process has been a bit of a side project of mine, but it’s been slow going, for the simple reason that mailservers don’t use standard codes. I’m able to catch something like 50% of mail, but that’s still a lot that gets missed. Some is base64 encoded, and in others, people just thought they’d get cute and use wholly custom text to indicate the problem. When you’re AOL I can write a filter to match “MAILBOX NOT FOUND” even though there’s no 500-level error. When you’re joesdiscountplumbing.com, I’m not going to waste my time. (VERP kind of solves this, except that Exchange doesn’t support plus addressing, so we’d need to set up a new MX to catch mail, which means we’d need to send mail from a new subdomain, and it quickly becomes a really involved project.)

But anyway, today I got this awesome bounce message (I’ve removed the user’s e-mail address):

Message from  yahoo.com. Unable to deliver message to the following address(es). : /libexec/ld-elf32.so.1: Shared object "libc.so.4" not found, required by "qmail-local"

For the uninitiated, that’s a baaaad error on Yahoo’s (or maybe AT&T’s?) end. libc.so.4 is the C library. It’s not quite apples-to-apples, but think, “Cannot find kernel32.dll.”

It’s probably something like a corrupted disk in one of hundreds of servers, but it certainly stood out from all the other “Mailbox unavailable” messages that came in. (I do see a surprising amount of mailservers that give ridiculous errors in some situations, like putting the full SQL query used to try to find the account in the bounce e-mail, or complaints about file permissions.)

We talked a bit at work tonight about Twitter. It have a release to push out in an hour, so I’m basically killing time. (Waking up after a 90 minute nap is murder.) So be warned that this post may be a bit rambling. This post is really just a collection of disparate thoughts relating to Twitter.

Immediately after the meeting discussing Twitter, we all went back to our desks and added everyone as friends. It was kind of neat, in that I found one person, looked through their followers, found some more, and pretty quickly had everyone in our office who’s on Twitter. (And not just peers, but our CEO and CTO.) Others presumably had the same idea. My follow counts doubled in about 10 minutes. (I seriously worry that Twitter is going to flag us as spammers.)

A few people mentioned that they still don’t get Twitter. And it occurred to me that it’s kind of like blogging: I’ve been doing it for a long time, and yet I’m still at a loss for what, precisely, the point is. I think of a Twitter as sort of SMS meets blogs: really short status updates. But not, “I’m folding laundry now” status updates: things that your friends might conceivably care about.

I never liked the term “followers,” nor was I too keen on “tweet” or any of its conjugates. Tweeting sounds ridiculous, and makes the action sound even more frivilous than it is. “Followers” are people who blindly immitate you. Kim Jong-Il has followers (albeit mostly coerced). I want to have friends, not followers. I can’t bring myself to say, “I have 24 followers.”

I find Twitter way too complex. For something that’s just 140-character blobs of text, what is the deal with TweetDeck? There are 14 icons across the top, three panes, and it’s practically filling one of my monitors. Plus, whenever anyone posts, it makes the type of sound I would expect to hear if I was being beamed up into a UFO, which startles me every single time it happens. (The TweetDeck noise, that is.)

They have a simple web API, so I’m giving serious thought to writing a little script (Ruby!) that will just pull in new data once a minute and display it in a terminal window. That’s all I want. A simple little interface. TweetDeck is way too intense. I used Syrinx previously on the Mac, but it was really wide. Another program (Twitterific maybe?) gave no option but to always sit on top of your other windows, which doesn’t work well when you have a job and are expected to occasionally do some work there.

People use Twitter in various ways. Most of the people I follow are friends, and they post little notes. It’s neat having coworkers doing it, because it sort of gives me a sense of what people I don’t interact with everyday are up to. There are also a lot of ‘power users’ I follow. The problem is that I’m interested in maybe 10% of what they post. I don’t want to stop following them and miss out on the good 10%, but I don’t want to have to deal with the 90%, either. I do think I should stop following a few, like news companies (cool for a while, but posting way too frequently) and snoopdogg. (Hilarious for a day, then really tiresome.)

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of a little Ruby script. It’d be a good way to learn the API, and an even better way to master Ruby. Plus, when I eventually had the free time, I could play with XCode and build a slick GUI around it, keeping it a minimalistic tool. It kind of ties into my long-standing desire to just have a little textbox (think IRC) that would just scroll various “events” that I might care about. I think I’d put in e-mails to my personal mailboxes, too.

I started to write out a question on my favorite Ask MetaFilter, asking if Obama’s citizenship has ever been concretely proven. There are still some who call it into question.

But as I wrote the question, I started to realize how absurd the argument was. Right about the time he was being labeled a Muslim, people started “pointing out” that he was born in Kenya and thus not a citizen. Nevermind the fact that his father was practically estranged his whole life, or that he was born in a Hawaiian hospital to a mother from Kansas. So Obama’s team obtained a copy of his birth certificate and posted it online, thinking they’d once and for all prove the rumors false.

Then people argued it was just Photoshopped. Clearly, they’d taken a blank and filled in Obama’s information to make it look like he was a US citizen.

Someone else argued the other day that, when he went to visit his grandmother on the verge of death, he wasn’t seen much in public for a few days, which is evidence that he was using millions in campaign cash to bribe Hawaiian officials.

Someone then pointed out that Snopes has debunked the whole thing, concluding that he is a citizen. But apparently, Snopes is run by a “liberal California” couple, so they’re covering for him.

At what point does the burden of proof shift to the conspiracy theorists? I think it’s fair enough to question the citizenship of someone running for President, though I do find it suspect that the first minority president is the only person to ever jump through these hoops. (Just for fun: Obama was born in Hawaii. McCain? South America, though I don’t think many people seriously doubted his citizenship after he was born on a US military base.)

But after the candidate provides a copy of his birth certificate, I think that if you want to argue it’s Photoshopped and that he bribed the Hawaiian government, the burden of proof shifts, and suddenly it’s on the conspiracy theorists to make the case. At the very least, I’m through trying to have a rational conversation about it. (Did you know that Sarah Palin is actually a martian, and a convicted serial killer? It’s true. She used her power as governor to destroy the records of the hundreds of people she murdered, and then used taxpayer dollars to have surgery to appear to be a human. Bet you can’t prove me wrong!)

Failblog posted this amusing homework assignment, and someone in the comments pointed out that if you Google all five of the terms, you get taken to this page [spoiler!], which probably posted it originally and has access to the answer key. (The assignment is apparently from Russia, yet in English.)

I won’t post the real answer (which I argue is wrong), but by far my favorite (inaccurate) one:

They’re all completely screwed. The penguin is standing in front of a train. The boot has no foot in it. The train has no tracks. The whale is stranded out of the water. The piano has no bench (nobody wants to play a piano without a bench…)

What do you think the commonality is?

A few years ago I took an interest in electronic voting machines. As a computer geek, it seemed odd to me that most fellow computer geeks were opposed to the idea. Computers make everything better and easier: why oppose them? I soon found the answer: what they make especially easy is fraud. Rigging a paper election is hard. (Although the frequency with which cases of marked ballots are “lost” makes me wonder…) Rigging a computer election is trivial: you just increment a counter.

We’ve known for a long time that something was up. Every time there’s a national election, there’s a flood of news about insane voting machine stories. Some precincts have one candiate getting more votes than there are voters. Some release periodic updates, and people have watched some candidates lose votes as time goes on. Others had thousands of votes cast before the election starts. And still others have concluded that some candidates got negative votes.

I wrote a paper on this once, and it’s even more insane than it seems. One major voting company employs as a head developer a person who was convicted of wire fraud and computer hacking. Another keeps running into trouble because it’s not a US-owned company. Another sued to prevent the disclosure of security testing results. Oh, and one of the biggest companies had a bunch of e-mails leaked in which developers and executives basically talked about how how they didn’t need security so that people could go in and change things in the backend easily.

The whole think reeked, but it was kind of like some politicians: you were never sure if they were ridiculously inept or if they were truly corrupt. But now it’s getting a little clearer: election fraud is rampant.

Okay, checking out the BradBlog.com site a bit more… Diebold is one of the big voting machine makers, but also a prominent ATM manufacturer. This article is downright scary: Windows malware specificically targeting ATMs. The details are sketchy, but it sounds like it basically reads the data off of swiped cards and sends it to some nefarious entity. Instead of using a hardware “skimmer” on an ATM, they put a virus on the ATM to make the ATM itself the skimmer.

Some things aren’t meant to be computerized. I think voting machines are one of them.

I wanted to round up a few political things that are all bugging me:

• President Obama referring to his bowling scores as something out of the Special Olympics. I very enthusiastically supported Obama, a really sensitive politician who’s an advocate for minorities everywhere. (And it has nothing to do with his race.) Surely, I thought, he’s much more advanced on those issues than MLK-day-opposing McCain would have been. But that only makes it more insulting that Obama would inadvertently put down the Special Olympics. It’s one of those things that a normal person might say and maybe 10% of the population would be offended. But when you’re President, you can’t go around making insensitive remarks that offend 10% of the population. And he really should have known better. The good news is that the Special Olympics are trying to capitalize on the publicity to promote a better sense of tolerance, and Obama seems to feel bad for the condescending remarks, so maybe the inappropriate remarks will spur a long-overdue conversation about discrimination against the disabled.
• I heard some allusion on talk radio to someone again stating that America was founded as a Christian nation. And I had a long time to dwell on it, and came to think that it’s even more ignorant than I previously thought. Let me get out of the way that I’m a Christian, and I think Christians are great. But we were founded on principles of freedom of religion, because the Founding Fathers were sick and tired of the British government meddling with their religious views. So the claim that we’re a Christian nation seems ignorant of history, as well as the Constitution, which is pretty clear on the issue. It put it in the very first of our many Amendments. The general argument is that most of the Founding Fathers were Christians. That’s true. Most of the founding fathers were also white slave owners who didn’t take showers. But we’re not a nation founded on white supremacy, slavery, or poor hygiene. Most of the founding fathers were Christian, and today, most of our leaders were Christian. That’s great, but it doesn’t make us a nation founded on Christianity. Suppose some of the Founding Fathers were Muslims or Jews. Would that make us a Muslim nation or a Jewish nation? In any case, why does it matter? Christianity is still the dominant religion, and is practiced by most of our political leaders.
• I saw this article today, and my gut is already wrenching at that outrage I expect from far-right pundits. They hate immigrants, but gay immigrants? And Kerry wants to invite gay illegals into the country?! Except that this isn’t what’s going on at all. He wants the law to provide asylum for those who get married in the US. The law already does, but the government doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages, so homosexuals don’t have a chance at asylum, while a heterosexual woman who came here, married, and would be attacked if she went back to her home country would be allowed to stay for her own protection. I guarantee you, though, that this will have some people up in arms, and that they’re going to say that Kerry wants to afford special protection to gays and illegal immigrants, when in actuality, it does neither: it just plugs a hole caused by DOMA.

I’ve always thought that, although our school system is pretty good comparatively, there’s still massive room for improvement. I think some of the courses I took were utterly and completely wastes of my time. Trigonometry, for example. It has never come up in anything else. When we hit integration of cosine and whatnot in calculus, the professor even joked that it was alright if we didn’t remember the difference between tan, sin, and cos, just that we had to know how to integrate them. And I don’t think trig is a good example of the, “It teaches you how to think” thing, either. It teaches you a set of mathematical skills that don’t come in useful in anything else. This isn’t to say that no one should take trig, just that, after high school, the subject has never come up, and I’d be hard pressed to solve for a hypotenuse. (I guess I remember that much, actually.)

More important, though, are the things I think we can do a much better job of teaching. I took multiple economic classes in college at a prestigious business school, including some that covered things like game theory and way too much detail on product bundling. I took finance courses and learned about TVM and secondary markets and muni bonds and debentures. Compared to the average person, I received way more education on finance and economics. Yet I have only a cursory understanding of the current economic situation in the US. That scares me. We fall down flat with geometry, too. Gym class and computer classes both seem full of potential but often squandered.

So driving home today, with absolutely nothing better to think about, I started wondering about this some more. And I think it helps to stop viewing it as a hypothetical discussion about what an ideal society would teach in schols. I wondered how it would be structured if we started from the ground up.

I think grades 1-5 all teach valuable life skills. But let’s suppose that, after 5th grade, there were only three more years of school. This would be bad, but bear with me. With only three more years of school, what would you teach? Many of the things that come to mind for me are things that aren’t even in school right now, which I think reflects poorly on status quo. Really, though, what would you teach?

I’ve been trying to make up my mind for a while now on whether or not it’s reasonable to buy another 22″ LCD, to bring one of them into work. At home I have the Mac’s internal LCD (1440×900), plus my 1920×1080 external LCD. At work, though, we have a slew of 17″ LCDs, but 1280×1024 isn’t quite the same as 1920×1080.

Best Buy had a decent deal, though I’m not sure I ever want to try ordering from Best Buy again after my last experience. I went to Newegg to try to price-check, but Newegg didn’t have the LCD I saw at Best Buy. But it turns out they have something even better: the Acer X233Hbid, a 23″ LCD with full 1920×1080 resolution, for a mere $190, shipping included. It’s sort of an ugly color, but that’s the only criticism I can think of. VGA, DVI, and HDMI inputs. Slick. Really slick.

Working at a startup, and living in a cratered economy, I’d put the odds of my work reimbursing me for the monitor at about 0.25%. (Plus, none of the other developers, with much more experience and seniority, have huge LCDs.) But how weird is it to buy yourself equipment for work? If anyone out there is itching for a nice monitor, though, I think this is an excellent buy.

So is this notebook hard drive, incidentally, though I think I posted about it before. 320GB SATA II notebook drive, 7200RPM, 16MB cache. $70 shipped, $20 rebate after that.