X-Geek

Extreme geekiness

There are 701 posts filed in X-Geek (this is page 61 of 71).

Facebook’s worth fifteen billion? I think not.

Okay, that’s it. Money truly doesn’t mean anything anymore. Its all paper, worthless paper. I learned today that Microsoft just paid $240 million for a 1.6% share in Facebook.

Facebook, for crying out loud! And Microsoft’s quarter billion got them less than two percent of it!

I’m all for people being rewarded for their innovations, but Facebook is just another stupid social networking site. Where’s the lock-in? What’s to keep the next fad-du-jour from suddenly stealing their users? Remember Friendster? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Give it up to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for hoodwinking Ballmer on this. He’s pulled off the con of the century.

Found the cause of mysterious load average

[Warning: extreme geekiness ahead! Non-geeks might want to skip over this post and look at the pretty ponies instead.]

I figured out what was causing my home Linux server to think it was busy. It turns out my server has an automounted nfs share from another server, a server which happened to be down. I’d done a few df commands to check disk space before I downloaded the new Ubuntu release and these commands hung in uninterruptible sleep while they waited for the drive share that would never be found.
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Looking busy

Just looked at my home Linux server, which from all appearances is working fine. The top tool, as well as uptime both show the load average to be 16! Yet, the CPU is listed as 96.7 % idle, as show below:

top – 13:16:58 up 61 days, 16:12, 3 users, load average: 16.00, 16.01, 16.00
Tasks: 267 total, 1 running, 264 sleeping, 2 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.7% us, 1.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 96.7% id, 0.0% wa, 1.7% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 450988k total, 447500k used, 3488k free, 121676k buffers
Swap: 987988k total, 33216k used, 954772k free, 170976k cached

I’m not sure what is going on with this server. Its actually idle but doesn’t think it is. Very strange.

cat /dev/funkywhiteboys

This may be the funniest geek humor I’ve ever seen. I was building the OSX plugin for the XMMS audio player just now when I got this ‘error’:

checking pthread.h usability… yes
…

checking for GTK – version >= 1.2.0… yes
checking for xmms-config… /opt/local/bin/xmms-config
checking for gawk… (cached) awk
checking for XMMS – version >= 1.2.0… yes

checking for white_boys in -lFunkyMusic.so… no
Warning: You may not have enough white boys to play your funky music.
Please obtain additional funky white boys.

configure: creating ./config.status
config.status: creating Makefile

…

Kudos to Bob Dean! We’ll see if it will work in spite of these limited resources. 🙂

[Update] Must not have enough funky white boys: the plugin segfaults. 🙁