Archive for March, 2005
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30 Mar 2005
My boss at work just told me we’re going to be getting ten old Sun Rays that he found on eBay for something like $20 apiece. We’re going to put a Sunfire v20z behind them, probably running Xen. That’s a dual-Opteron beasty with 8GB of RAM. They’re fast, and they’ll be about a kajillion times better than my current 500MHz desktop. I’m really super excited about this.
Update 6 Apr: We got the Sunrays in today. They’re exactly as awesome as I expected.
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30 Mar 2005
The space shuttle Discovery was moved from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle Assembly Building this morning, to prepare it for its expected May launch of STS-114. NASA has spent a lot of time and money making a number of improvements to the shuttle and its support systems.
Hooray for human spaceflight!
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25 Mar 2005
I discovered the Firefox extension Greasemonkey in early March 2005. I had probably heard of it before then, but I don’t know why it had taken so long for me to really look at it. It’s exactly the kind of thing that appeals to me: injecting Javascript (often with DOM actions, possibly with Ajax) into any web page. Every once in a while, I come up with an idea for a one-off script. They’re all available from my profile on Greasemonkeyed.com.
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25 Mar 2005
I love Chris Onstad, the mind behind Achewood. Only he would try a joke like today’s strip, and make it accurate. Read it, and then read the rest of this post.
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23 Mar 2005
The aforementioned major deploy went out this morning. It went well. More than 5000 man-days culminated in a very smooth site rollout this morning. I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders.
Remember a few months ago, when I said that we had gone with SuSE instead of Redhat? Apparently, before we could sign a contract with Novell, Redhat turned around and told us “We want your business. We will match any offer Novell gives you.” So although nothing (still) has been totally resolved, it looks like we will be going with Redhat for our Linux needs. It’s been a long, wild ride, but it looks like we’ll soon finally have enterprise support for the roughly sixty servers under my domain.
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21 Mar 2005
A couple years ago, the great web zine A List Apart featured an article about rewriting the tech news site Slashdot with XHTML and CSS. Not only was it a neat exercise in a site rewrite while keeping the same design, but it also demonstrated the financial (yes, financial) advantages to using web standards. The article estimated that Slashdot would save thousands of dollars in bandwidth per year. (Calculating savings based on ease-of-maintenance wasn’t done, and would be very difficult to estimate).
Despite being perhaps the most well-known technology website, and a number of posts about web standards, it’s taken a while for Slashdot (or rather, Slashcode) to come around. Now, the work is going forward.
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21 Mar 2005
Had a little time this weekend to do some HTML hacking, so I got rid of the much-derided orange header. Mount Everest forever! I think I might come up with some way to rotate the header image, too, but then again it might stagnate like the Metablog. Reply if you see any funkiness with the new header.
Update 18:55 – Fixed some IE issues
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15 Mar 2005
Just to allay any fears, I have not forgotten this blog. There’s a huge new site launch next week for which I’m in the middle of configuring and tweaking 50 Linux servers. I’ve heard some people say that this is our single biggest launch since the dot-com bubble burst. I can believe it.
I was called for Jury duty (petit jury, thank goodness) on May 3. As a heavy-duty Law and Order fan, I look forward to watching the real thing from the inside. Believe it or not, I actually hope I’ll get picked. I just hope it doesn’t interfere with E3.
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7 Mar 2005
I was reading through this AskMe today, and it started me thinking. Emailing yourself five or ten years in the future isn’t a difficult problem (in fact, that thread includes several solutions). But what would be the most reliable way to get a message to yourself in, say, 50 years? Not necessarily an email, and inexpensiveness and plausibility are important (becoming President and renaming the country “Hello Future Me” won’t work).
Would Doc Brown’s method of sending a letter from
18881885 to Marty standing in the road (not even an address) in 1955 even work back then? I doubt it. How could it be done today? -
1 Mar 2005
Tada Lists were a blog-world meme a few weeks back, and I’ve finally come up with a good use for them: keeping track of my reading list.