June 11, 2004
Carnival Late Final Extra
Whoops and whoops again. These posts somehow got lost in my scramble to put up the tents and get the show underway; I've since added them to the regular schedule, but just in case you missed them the first time, here they are in their own little mini-Carnival:
Laughing Wolf, Laughing Wolf, where have you been?
Trapped in my spam filter? Languished unseen?
Sprung free from the trap, he sinks his jaws -
Not into me, but the Old Media, of course.
Alas, poor Helen,
I know her well.
What happened to her entry
Only Mozilla can tell. And whatever her name is,
And who she might be,
Is for her to decide -
Not the phone company. (And from 2:01 to 2:03
She can call Malaysia for a pound a minute.
Sounds like a good deal to me
I doubt there's any money in it.)
At the bottom of the garden, down behind the rusty shed,
Is a spamtrap made entirely out of glass.
It mostly does its job and leaves the spam completely dead,
But every now and then it bites me in the arse. The Watcher of Weasels was stuck in the trap,
Whence I'd already pulled Laughing Wolf out,
His post takes on people with minds full of nonsense,
Who ought to be slapped with a large fish.
King of Fools brings us the sad story
Of a marine, two reporters, and 7% diversity.
Dissecting Leftism takes on a difficult word,
Greenie Watch says 7 billion will now go unheard,
And PC Watch reports something yet more absurd.
Northstar reports on a maritime disaster...
Only he slept through the whole thing and didn't find out about it until after.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:07 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
I Blog, Therefore I Is
Steven Den Beste has been hitting the hard stuff again. Anime, that is. In this case, Masamune Shirow's classic Ghost in the Shell.
Now, I'm a shallow sort of guy, and I read Shirow's work mainly for the hot anime chicks, but in GitS (as it is known) he does raise some important questions. In a not so distant future where people are often part machine and part computer, what does it mean to be human?
And beyond that, what does it mean to be a thinking being, and what does it mean to be alive? As a mechanistic atheist engineer, Den Beste finds these questions important, and difficult, and troubling.
I'm also a mechanistic atheist engineer* and I also find these questions important - but not difficult or troubling. That's because I've worked out what the answers are. And that's because I've argued the point with a number of people who aren't mechanistic atheist engineers. Of course, they think I'm wrong, and I think they're crazy, but that's not the main point here.
Den Beste asks, Is a virus alive?, and confesses he doesn't know. To me there is one obvious, clear, simple, and comprehensive answer, and it is sort of.
A virus is sort of alive. For any useful definition of life, salt, for example, pure sodium chloride, or, say, hydrogen gas in its ground state, are not alive. For any useful definition of life, people, cows, cats** and fish are alive.
I'm quite comfortable with saying that amoebas are alive, and bacteria too. Individual isolated proteins aren't alive, not really. And viruses are sort of alive.
It's the argument from utility really; as Den Beste himself has put it, It is what it does. Does a virus act like life? Well, it does, sort of. So it is sort of alive.
Some people don't like this; they want a yes/no answer, a knife-edge division between life and unlife. To them, I say: Tough. Neither life nor the Universe owes you an easy answer. Why should life be a binary property, any more than, for example, intelligence, or complexity?
The same argument also solves*** the even trickier questions of the conscious mind. Is there actually an identifiable self with continuity of existence which is typing these words? asks the engineer. Well, yes, there is. In the same sense that the surface of this table is solid, Steven Den Beste is a real, identifiable, continuous entity.
Of course, at an atomic and subatomic scale the table is mostly empty space. And at a low enough level, consciousness is just Physics. But that doesn't matter, because it still works. This keyboard is not going to fall through the table, and the fact that it is a big blob of atoms doing the thinking in my head does not contradict Descartes' Cogito ergo sum.
* Well, more or less. I'm a computer programmer, so I have aspirations towards engineering, and try to apply the principles of engineering to my craft.
** Most cats. Not Schroedinger's, and not dead ones.
*** For a sufficiently small value of "solves".
** Most cats. Not Schroedinger's, and not dead ones.
*** For a sufficiently small value of "solves".
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:39 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
There Are Some Magazines Man Is Not Meant To Buy
I've mentioned here before that New Scientist is the only magazine I still buy (or indeed, read) regularly. Back in the 80s and early 90s I bought and saved three magazines every month: Byte, Dragon, and Scientific American. I still have boxes full of each at home.
I still buy New Scientist because, although the information is available online, I'd have to spend a great deal of time digging it out. It's worth the few dollars I spend to have the staff of New Scientist to seek out the latest news and compile the magazine for me. I pay them to be editors, really, rather than writers.
Which is why it's particularly galling when their editors run off the rails. They're generally pretty good with science, a little weaker on environmental matters - there's a clear bias there that assumes that bad news is intrinsically more reliable than good news, and pretty much hopeless on politics, being a bunch of unreconstructed lefties.
But I still don't expect them to be pushing the hokey old line from Frankenstein that there are some things Man is not meant to know. And yet, this weeks editorial on choosing the gender of your baby, titled Boy or girl? Best leave it to chance, sums up as follows:
Increasingly, reproductive science is taking us beyond the limits of nature. On the grounds of safetey and the unknown societal impact such novel technologies could have, governments surely have a responsibility to regulate. Needless meddling is never good, but in this case drawing the line as to who can use the technology might be the least intrusive move of all.So, when exactly did the secular European left align themselves with the reactionary Christian right? These people make the old Count Vorkosigan look enlightened.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:10 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Carnival The Next
The next Carnival of the Vanities will be appearing at Jessica's Well where the team will be presenting your finest posts as interpretive dance.
The place to send your submissions is carnival@jessicaswell.com. Neatest correct entry wins a prize!
Well, and all the other entries too.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:18 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 10, 2004
Carnival Of The Vanities
Overture, candlelight...
And welcome to the Carnival!
What we present to you tonight
Is something quite remarkable:
We've gathered here for your delight
A most astounding spectacle
And now before your very sight,
The unlikeliest of animals - From far across the Blogosphere
The finest work we've deftly pluck'd;
(While we left for the Bonfire here
The posts that we thought, frankly, were not quite good enough to be worthy of bringing to your attention.)
The words are music to your ear;
(The ones that weren't, you'll note, we chucked.)
We hunted far, we hunted near,
A finer showcase to construct. These shining jewels we bring to you;
The Web we scoured for rarities -
Despite a dose of Martian Flu
And RAID-5's failing parities.
Here's unicorns! And mermaids too!
No donkeys now, nor manatees.
So let's begin; without ado
The Carnival of the Vanities!
We start with Nikita Demosthenes,
Who has a serious question to ask:
Who most could harm the Land of the Free
And he takes standard wisdom to task. Jeff Doolittle (dot com)
Seeks ubiquitous high speed connection;
With a little spectral freedom
He sees a positive economic inflection. Ann is at the Fuse Box
Studying labour statistics,
She looks at the numbers (as does Fox)
And reports on Kerry's poor twist tricks.1 My favourite Canadian ethereal insect
Would have to be Ghost of a Flea;
When I visit his blog I never know quite what to expect
Which is exactly how it should be. Today he offers us maxims
For surviving converse on the 'Net;
Built from undeniable axioms,
I'm sure they'll be proved, but not yet. Kevin at the Smallest Minority
Asks are we headed for Civil War?
I sure hope not, but I2
Think some people have a lot to answer for. Answerman remembers Ronald Reagan
Actor, governor, president;
Anyone but a hippy neo-pagan
Should admire what the man represents. Karol of Spot On (yes I know the URL says Alarming News)
Talks to us of Girls, Girls, Girls.
Now pay attention to her views -
Because sometimes blogging is like casting swine before pearls. And over at Patriot Paradox
Nick comes out of the starting box,
With a post comparing Liberals and Conservatives.
I personally prefer Liberals because they contain only natural ingredients and no preservatives. Quibbles-N-Bits! Quibbles-N-Bits!
Alas, it's a blog not a cereal;
Reports that Harvey has cashed in his chits3
But I somehow suspect it's not real. Jon of QandO has a report
That the wedding party was nothing of the sort.
No bride? No dancing? No Hava Nagila?
No half-empty bottles of cut-price tequila? Susie, Susie, a lithium smoothie
Has never tasted sweeter;
She's just so groovy, she can screen us a movie
Using nothing more than a flashlight, an old bedsheet, two pie plates, half a dozen coathangers, and a broken egg-beater.
She tells us her woes, makes Harvey propose
With her wicked sense of humour.
Then nails Evil Glenn, yet again, yet again,
With the latest scurrilous rumour. Linda talks of separation
And how painful it can be,
And how there's two sides to every situation
And sometimes even three. CD isn't semi-intelligent -
That's just the name of his blog
This is satire at its most relevant:
ACLU's 'bout as smart as a log. A change of pace, to fill some space,
Madfish Willie presents his Ultimate Salsa
Don't eat it all at once, it makes 15 gallons, you dunce!
And with five pounds of Jalapeno Poppers4 you'd probably end up with an ulcer. Wally from Irreconcilable Musings
Is back from California,
Where he has been visiting his grandmother
And for some reason my electronic rhyming dictionary seems to have crashed.5 Bussorah Merchant
Has a Wicked Thought
About a government
Cat what don't behave as it ought. Pietro of The SmarterCup Cop
Notes that others seriously need to grow up. Sorge, a new blogger, at Total War
Explains to us what freedom's for. By night the Cheesemistress of Chaos
But by day she's the Candyfloss Fairy.
Her cow-orkers don't know Lesotho from Laos,
And they couldn't spell "irony" with the help of a Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Jennifer, Jennifer, trolls should beware of her,
How does your history grow?
With notable quotes and the choicest bon motes
And dead presidents all in a row. Bill Adams comes from Idler Yet
With a detailed and enlightened post
On links between the Saudi set
And those people whom we count on most. Peaktalk too bids sad farewell
To Ronald Reagan, 93,
Where e'er he's gone, we wish him well;
A finer man you rarely see. Jim comes to us from Snoozebutton Dreams
Where nothing whatever is quite what it seems.
The Bestofme Symphony strains at the seams -
Don't touch it lest you end up covered in memes! At Zero Intelligence
School Knows Best
You'd think before they became teachers
These people would have to pass some kind of test. Chicken is as chicken does
Cranial Cavity takes off the gloves.
(After all, you can't lick your fingers if you're wearing gloves.) Last but not least, from DCGI
Thoughts on life without electricity
No computer! No modem! No internet too!
I'll just save this post before something goes p
And what's all this?
There's three I missed!
Best add them to my list -
Because otherwise someone might get annoyed with me. At Quantico, Virginia,
Is another National Cemetary
Ted from Rocket Jones reports to us,
Our cultural emissary. John Moore of Useful Fools
Shows us some dangerous political operatives
Dangerous at least to those far-left tools,
Who really could do with a sedative. And Simon returns from his travels,
With a review of the movie Cold Mountain,
Not so bad that his brain quite unravels,
But I'll stick with Three Coins in the Fountain.
Laughing Wolf, Laughing Wolf, where have you been?
Trapped in my spam filter? Languished unseen?
Sprung free from the trap, he sinks his jaws -
Not into me, but the Old Media, of course.
Alas, poor Helen,
I know her well.
What happened to her entry
Only Mozilla can tell.6 And whatever her name is,
And who she might be,
Is for her to decide -
Not the phone company. (And from 2:01 to 2:03
She can call Malaysia for a pound a minute.
Sounds like a good deal to me
I doubt there's any money in it.7)
At the bottom of the garden, down behind the rusty shed,
Is a spamtrap made entirely out of glass.
It mostly does its job and leaves the spam completely dead,
But every now and then it bites me in the arse. The Watcher of Weasels was stuck in the trap,
Whence I'd already pulled Laughing Wolf out,
His post takes on people with minds full of nonsense,
And who ought to be slapped with a large fish.
King of Fools brings us the sad story
Of a marine, two reporters, and 7% diversity. Dissecting Leftism takes on a difficult word,
Greenie Watch says 7 billion will now go unheard,
And PC Watch reports something yet more absurd. Northstar reports on a maritime disaster...
Only he slept through the whole thing and didn't find out about it until after.
1 CityRail apologises for any invonvenience caused.
2 Okay, you try to find a workable rhyme for Kevin, or indeed Minority.
3 Frankly, I don't think this makes any less sense than the more conventional phrasing.
4 Sorry, little MuNu in-joke there.
5 Even Shakespeare didn't rhyme all the time. Help me out here!
6 And it's not talking.
7 My day job just happens to be implementing exactly that sort of inane marketing ploy. My all-time favourite (at a previous place of employment) was a plan where if you spent more than $X in a month, your call rates were reduced retroactively - so the calls which you had made that brought you to the $X mark now cost less and no longer brought you to that mark, meaning that you weren't in fact eligible for the cheaper rates...
And welcome to the Carnival!
What we present to you tonight
Is something quite remarkable:
We've gathered here for your delight
A most astounding spectacle
And now before your very sight,
The unlikeliest of animals - From far across the Blogosphere
The finest work we've deftly pluck'd;
(While we left for the Bonfire here
The posts that we thought, frankly, were not quite good enough to be worthy of bringing to your attention.)
The words are music to your ear;
(The ones that weren't, you'll note, we chucked.)
We hunted far, we hunted near,
A finer showcase to construct. These shining jewels we bring to you;
The Web we scoured for rarities -
Despite a dose of Martian Flu
And RAID-5's failing parities.
Here's unicorns! And mermaids too!
No donkeys now, nor manatees.
So let's begin; without ado
The Carnival of the Vanities!
We start with Nikita Demosthenes,
Who has a serious question to ask:
Who most could harm the Land of the Free
And he takes standard wisdom to task. Jeff Doolittle (dot com)
Seeks ubiquitous high speed connection;
With a little spectral freedom
He sees a positive economic inflection. Ann is at the Fuse Box
Studying labour statistics,
She looks at the numbers (as does Fox)
And reports on Kerry's poor twist tricks.1 My favourite Canadian ethereal insect
Would have to be Ghost of a Flea;
When I visit his blog I never know quite what to expect
Which is exactly how it should be. Today he offers us maxims
For surviving converse on the 'Net;
Built from undeniable axioms,
I'm sure they'll be proved, but not yet. Kevin at the Smallest Minority
Asks are we headed for Civil War?
I sure hope not, but I2
Think some people have a lot to answer for. Answerman remembers Ronald Reagan
Actor, governor, president;
Anyone but a hippy neo-pagan
Should admire what the man represents. Karol of Spot On (yes I know the URL says Alarming News)
Talks to us of Girls, Girls, Girls.
Now pay attention to her views -
Because sometimes blogging is like casting swine before pearls. And over at Patriot Paradox
Nick comes out of the starting box,
With a post comparing Liberals and Conservatives.
I personally prefer Liberals because they contain only natural ingredients and no preservatives. Quibbles-N-Bits! Quibbles-N-Bits!
Alas, it's a blog not a cereal;
Reports that Harvey has cashed in his chits3
But I somehow suspect it's not real. Jon of QandO has a report
That the wedding party was nothing of the sort.
No bride? No dancing? No Hava Nagila?
No half-empty bottles of cut-price tequila? Susie, Susie, a lithium smoothie
Has never tasted sweeter;
She's just so groovy, she can screen us a movie
Using nothing more than a flashlight, an old bedsheet, two pie plates, half a dozen coathangers, and a broken egg-beater.
She tells us her woes, makes Harvey propose
With her wicked sense of humour.
Then nails Evil Glenn, yet again, yet again,
With the latest scurrilous rumour. Linda talks of separation
And how painful it can be,
And how there's two sides to every situation
And sometimes even three. CD isn't semi-intelligent -
That's just the name of his blog
This is satire at its most relevant:
ACLU's 'bout as smart as a log. A change of pace, to fill some space,
Madfish Willie presents his Ultimate Salsa
Don't eat it all at once, it makes 15 gallons, you dunce!
And with five pounds of Jalapeno Poppers4 you'd probably end up with an ulcer. Wally from Irreconcilable Musings
Is back from California,
Where he has been visiting his grandmother
And for some reason my electronic rhyming dictionary seems to have crashed.5 Bussorah Merchant
Has a Wicked Thought
About a government
Cat what don't behave as it ought. Pietro of The Smarter
Notes that others seriously need to grow up. Sorge, a new blogger, at Total War
Explains to us what freedom's for. By night the Cheesemistress of Chaos
But by day she's the Candyfloss Fairy.
Her cow-orkers don't know Lesotho from Laos,
And they couldn't spell "irony" with the help of a Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Jennifer, Jennifer, trolls should beware of her,
How does your history grow?
With notable quotes and the choicest bon motes
And dead presidents all in a row. Bill Adams comes from Idler Yet
With a detailed and enlightened post
On links between the Saudi set
And those people whom we count on most. Peaktalk too bids sad farewell
To Ronald Reagan, 93,
Where e'er he's gone, we wish him well;
A finer man you rarely see. Jim comes to us from Snoozebutton Dreams
Where nothing whatever is quite what it seems.
The Bestofme Symphony strains at the seams -
Don't touch it lest you end up covered in memes! At Zero Intelligence
School Knows Best
You'd think before they became teachers
These people would have to pass some kind of test. Chicken is as chicken does
Cranial Cavity takes off the gloves.
(After all, you can't lick your fingers if you're wearing gloves.) Last but not least, from DCGI
Thoughts on life without electricity
No computer! No modem! No internet too!
I'll just save this post before something goes p
And what's all this?
There's three I missed!
Best add them to my list -
Because otherwise someone might get annoyed with me. At Quantico, Virginia,
Is another National Cemetary
Ted from Rocket Jones reports to us,
Our cultural emissary. John Moore of Useful Fools
Shows us some dangerous political operatives
Dangerous at least to those far-left tools,
Who really could do with a sedative. And Simon returns from his travels,
With a review of the movie Cold Mountain,
Not so bad that his brain quite unravels,
But I'll stick with Three Coins in the Fountain.
Laughing Wolf, Laughing Wolf, where have you been?
Trapped in my spam filter? Languished unseen?
Sprung free from the trap, he sinks his jaws -
Not into me, but the Old Media, of course.
Alas, poor Helen,
I know her well.
What happened to her entry
Only Mozilla can tell.6 And whatever her name is,
And who she might be,
Is for her to decide -
Not the phone company. (And from 2:01 to 2:03
She can call Malaysia for a pound a minute.
Sounds like a good deal to me
I doubt there's any money in it.7)
At the bottom of the garden, down behind the rusty shed,
Is a spamtrap made entirely out of glass.
It mostly does its job and leaves the spam completely dead,
But every now and then it bites me in the arse. The Watcher of Weasels was stuck in the trap,
Whence I'd already pulled Laughing Wolf out,
His post takes on people with minds full of nonsense,
And who ought to be slapped with a large fish.
King of Fools brings us the sad story
Of a marine, two reporters, and 7% diversity. Dissecting Leftism takes on a difficult word,
Greenie Watch says 7 billion will now go unheard,
And PC Watch reports something yet more absurd. Northstar reports on a maritime disaster...
Only he slept through the whole thing and didn't find out about it until after.
1 CityRail apologises for any invonvenience caused.
2 Okay, you try to find a workable rhyme for Kevin, or indeed Minority.
3 Frankly, I don't think this makes any less sense than the more conventional phrasing.
4 Sorry, little MuNu in-joke there.
5 Even Shakespeare didn't rhyme all the time. Help me out here!
6 And it's not talking.
7 My day job just happens to be implementing exactly that sort of inane marketing ploy. My all-time favourite (at a previous place of employment) was a plan where if you spent more than $X in a month, your call rates were reduced retroactively - so the calls which you had made that brought you to the $X mark now cost less and no longer brought you to that mark, meaning that you weren't in fact eligible for the cheaper rates...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:46 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 09, 2004
The Carnival is Coming!
I'm working on it right now... Or after my nap, anyway. But you still have a chance to get your last minute entries in - just email your best recent post to carnival@pixymisa.com and we'll do the rest!
Update: Still working on it. Darn you Tiger, it's your fault for setting such a high standard!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:10 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Just Checking
Darn security patches...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:23 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 08, 2004
FPEG!
The ticket machine at the station this morning had an unusual problem: On the display, all the Os were turned into Fs, and all the Ns were turned into Es. I couldn't work out how this could happen; certainly no single-bit error (a broken pin in a connector, say) could do that. Not if it's ASCII, at least.
A niggling suspicion and a quick Google gave me the answer: The machines are using EBCDIC. EBCDIC! In 2004! Anyway, this handy chart shows that an O in EBCDIC is binary 11010110, whereas an F is 11000110. So if that fourth line is broken, Os turn into Fs.
Now, the display normally alternates between OPEN and NO CONCESSIONS when it's not actually in use, so instead this morning it read FPEG and FG CGFCESSIGFS.
This brightened my day immeasurably.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:16 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 07, 2004
It's Nearly Carnival Time!
Carnival of the Vanities is coming to Ambient Irony this week, so the time to get your entries in is now!
Send them to carnival@pixymisa.com and I'll make sure that something good happens to them.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:47 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 03, 2004
Good Bits, Bad Bits
Good: I wandered into Kinokuniya on the way home, and there at the entrance, instead of the usual pile of Michael Moore's latest crapulation, was a pile of P. J. O'Rourke's Peace Kills. Which I bought.
Not Quite So Good: My latest disk failure seems to have taken with it the only complete copy of Penny Anti in the world. I do have a partial backup, and printouts of almost everything, so I should be able to put it back together. It wasn't that far along anyway, so it's really just a pain rather than a disaster. But I think I've lost one of the villains for good.
(If, like 99.9999999% of the world's population, you have no idea what I am talking about, you can confuse yourself further here.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:09 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
The Easy Way Out
Which Extremity of the World Are You?
From the towering colossi at Rum and Monkey.
Which Extremity of the World Are You?
From the towering colossi at Rum and Monkey.
Which Office Moron Are You?
Rum and Monkey: jamming your photocopier one tray at a time.
(Thanks, of course, to LeeAnn of the Cheese)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:41 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 02, 2004
WootNet
I got INN to work! Look out, Usenet, I'm back in business!
(INN has to have one of the most god-awful configuration systems on the planet. Okay, so it's an order of magnitude better than Sendmail, but that still leaves it about three orders of magnitude short of "adequate".)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:48 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 01, 2004
Woof Woof!
What's that Lassie?
Bark!
You say that NTFS.SYS has got corrupted on the backup system, while the main system is down due to disk failure, leaving me with 650GB of files that may or may not be any good, and no easy way to tell, and what's more, the Windows XP install disk, the only copy I have with Service Pack 1a built in, and hence the only copy that will boot on this machine, has some sticky gunk on it and can no longer read the NTFS.SYS file when I try to use it in rescue mode?
Woof!
But everything is backed up on DVD-R?
Arf!
On 175 DVD-Rs to be precise? Well, I must admit that's slightly better than no backups at all, but still...
Woof woof bark!
And little Timmy's fallen down the well again? Sucks to be him, doesn't it?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:00 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
May 30, 2004
So How Was Your Weekend?
Whine whine computers whine whine disk drives whine whine NTFS whine whine software raid whine whine reinstall whine whine data loss grumble grumble disk failure growl growl another disk failure whine whine rsync whimper whimper completely ignores the fact that the other end is now read-only and is not writing any of the files I'm transferring moan moan Windows networking snarl YANK! peace quiet ahh.
Beep beep bzzzzzzt bing mmm chicken and cheese burrito yum.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:55 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
May 24, 2004
Aargh!
Disk drives = bad.
RAID-5 = good.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:04 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
May 23, 2004
So Many Moles, So Few Mallets...
Bill Whittle is playing whack-a-mole with the enemies of civilisation.
Read it.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:33 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
May 20, 2004
How Are You Using The Tool?
Hi Mena.
My name's Pixy Misa. I run MuNu.
MuNu is a blogging community. (It's other things too, but we're talking about the blogs today.) We have personal blogs, public service blogs, group blogs, test blogs, gimmick blogs, joke blogs... We have over one hundred blogs, some with as many as eighty authors; we have over one hundred and fifty authors in total. (It just sort of grew.)
And we kind of like Movable Type. It's not perfect (what is?) but we're used to it.
But. I just added a new blog and a new user, and I've got more people waiting to join, and every Munuvian is free to add guests to their blogs, and that just doesn't work with blog-count and user-count limits.
We'd like to move to MT 3.0. I'm happy to pay for it - and pay more than $69 too - but it needs to be unlimited. Single installation, fine. Non-commerical, okay. But we just can't survive with restrictions on users and blogs.
Thanks.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:04 AM | Comments (15) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
May 19, 2004
Catching Up
Happiness is relative. Today I don't have a headache; I'm getting over my cold; two of my bosses are out of the office so stress levels are manageable; the new server is finally working... Good enough for me.
Munuvia, and Heather in particular, came under a particularly nasty spam attack today. This one dodges MT Blacklist by generating a new throwaway sub-domain for every spam. And it was persistent. But manually blocking the primary domain stopped it in its tracks. Then I just had to go and delete 400-odd comments. The world blog was saved, thanks once again to Jay Allen and MT Blacklist! Block banned-pics.com now and avoid the rush!
Fedora Core 2 is out - think of it as Red Hat Linux 11. I logged into my home box from work, killed my existing BitTorrent download (Pretty Cure episodes 1-5) and started downloading FC2 instead. It's available as a DVD as well as 4 CDs (8 in all, counting the source CDs as well) but I don't currently have a DVD-ROM drive on my Linux box. I'm not sure quite why I don't, but there it is: A perfect excuse to buy a new 8x DVD burner! (4 CDs, and I bet it still doesn't include Nethack.)
Now I just need to think of an excuse to buy a gigabit switch: I can get a Netgear 5-port switch for $170 now, and my Windows box and my fileserver are already equipped with gigabit cards. Of course, with a mere 2.6GHz Pentium 4, Windows can't really go much above 100mbits anyway, so there's really no point.
On the other hand, it's cheap...
The 1.4 terabytes fileserver at the office has been fixed by the Judicious Application of Money™ - in this case taking the form of a Highpoint RocketRaid 1820 PCI-X 8-port Serial-ATA RAID controller (around A$300). It's a bit fussy, and the drivers don't seem to work with Fedora, but once I'd downgraded to Red Hat 9 everything went smoothly. Nice card, even if it does beep beep beep beep if there's something it doesn't like. Oh, and the ports are numbered 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 3 - 4 - 1 - 2, which was a little confusing.
I've been experimenting with rsync for backups - now that we have an extra 1.4 terabytes of space that needs to be filled up - and it works very well. Very well; I'm actually rather impressed. Err... assuming that it's actually working, that is, and it appears to be. It's very quick to backup minor changes to a very large filesystem. Not the best way to back up a live database, but no worse than most of the other ways.
600 gig down, 800 to go. (What do you mean, it's not a contest to see who can fill it up first?!)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:01 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
May 16, 2004
Strange Days
Merde in France comments on yet another of those vile french editorial cartoons.
The strange thing with this one, though, is that everything in the cartoon except the television set is 1940's period. Why?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:59 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
May 13, 2004
Danger Will Robinson!
For the new server (the 1.4TB server) we bought four Western Digital 200GB SATA drives, and added 4 200GB Western Digital regular-IDE drives we already had.
Two of the four SATA drives were D.O.A. and had to be replaced.
Now the filesystem has gone wonky and the data, as far as I can see, is totally trashed. Fortunately, we have copies of everything on other servers.
I'm running a scan for bad blocks on all the drives. Nothing on the regular IDE drives (so far), and literally hundreds on the SATA drives.
Either we've got a bad batch of drives here (I find it hard to believe that Western Digital is usually this crappy) - or these SATA controllers do not actually work, as such.
Update: If you put two of these SATA controllers in one box, everything appears to work fine until you actually start to use it, at which point the badness sets in. We hadn't planned to do that originally, but then Linux couldn't recognise the SATA controller on the motherboard and...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:12 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
May 12, 2004
Less Than No Yay
And to add to the fun, someone clicked on the attachment.
Normally, I wouldn't care, but today neither of the people "responsible" for our Windows machines are in the office, so I get to run around updating anti-virus files and scanning machines.
And then installing Fedora on them all...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:57 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
No Yay
The 1.4TB filesystem on our new server has gotten itself hopelessly corrupted.
Just what I needed.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:18 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
May 11, 2004
Okay, Now I'm Dead
Nonetheless, my freshly disinterred corpse is conducting the Bestofme Symphony over at the main Mu.Nu website.
Any excess pongage is entirely due to Abby Normal's brain.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:25 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
May 08, 2004
I Knew It!
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:08 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
And The Next Thing I Knew...
So, there was the Devil (or at least one of his associates) writing out my very own personal contract with an old-fashioned quill pen on parchment (I didn't ask what what he used for ink) and I was looking over his shoulder and pointed out that the word wept is spelled w - e - p - t and not the rather quaint way he had it, and (rules are rules, you know) he had to tear the whole thing up and start again.
Good thing devils are immortal or they might lose their patience at times like this.
Of course, when I actually got the final copy, it read like a penis enlargement spam ("3-Inch-es E-x-t-r-a or Re-fund to YOU! nu kzf bt") only with penalty clauses and I suddenly realised I had pressing business elsewhere.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:49 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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