Extreme geekiness
There are 700 posts filed in X-Geek (this is page 61 of 70).
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.
[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
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
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.
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
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.
I was amused to read in Valleywag that the Google-YouTube deal was almost broken up by a cop.
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. 🙁
They Might Be Giants announced this week that they’ll be playing Durham’s Carolina Theatre Friday, October 26th.
The last show I saw was at Raleigh’s now-defunct Ritz Theater. Must have been close to a decade ago. Anyhow, its worth a drive to Derm to see TMBG.
On a related note, I’m kicking myself for not seeing Elvis Costello last night. PTA meeting took priority. I was glad to see that Paul provided the setlist. Thanks, Paul!
This is interesting. Google kicked in money to fund a $30 million award to the first private group to land a robot rover on the Moon. The rover must be equipped with high-definition cameras, must roam 500m, and must do this before the year 2012. Google is teaming up with the Ansari foundation, sponsors of the X-Prize, to manage the award, officially called the Google Lunar X Prize.
Continue reading
