Okay, all you 1337 Linux haX0Rz out there, how do I teach my CentOS machines that the U.S. Gummint has screwed up daylight savings time this year?
X-Geek
Extreme geekiness
There are 702 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.
Google query of blog spam sites
Here’s only a quick extract of sites set up to blog-spam everybody. If any of the sites in this list try to add a trackback to your blog you should delete the trackback: its spam.
I’ve written their hosting provider, Liquidweb. Let’s see if they bother to do anything.
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.
Continue reading
Home away from home, robotically
On my way back from the Ohio Linux Fest, my friend Bill mentioned that iRobot is building a new Roomba-style robot to provide “presence” to remote users. It’s called the ConnectR and provides a remote user (say, a dad traveling on business) the ability to move around, see, and talk to others (say, a family who’s dad is traveling on business).
Continue reading
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.
Back from Ohio Linux Fest
I made it back from the Ohio Linux Fest about 4:45 this afternoon after driving from Ohio and dropping off my passengers, Bill Mars and his son, Jim. Bill and I had a lively discussion about a number of geek-related and Navy vet-related topics which made the 9+ hour drive go much faster than it otherwise would’ve.
Continue reading
Freedom Trail
I’m off to join the Software Freedom Road Rally tomorrow as me and my fellow geeks travel from Raleigh to Columbus, Ohio for the Ohio Linux Fest. We should have net access on the way, so expect some updates while we travel. Being a driver, my updates will be light.
Check out the Software Freedom Road Rally site to follow the fun.
Suspicious cop stumbled upon Google – YouTube negotiations
I was amused to read in Valleywag that the Google-YouTube deal was almost broken up by a cop.
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… yeschecking 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. 🙁