.:.

This blows my mind: Involver, sort of a competitor to the far more interesting Mosuki :-), recently posted on their blog:

You may have noticed that our site broke this morning. Apparently the power supply on our database server decided to commit suicide while everyone was asleep.

OMG. How can any social network site hoping for some semblance of success (or real funding) be running their DB on a single machine with no failover. I’m totally floored by this. Even when Mosuki was doing private alpha testing 3½ years ago we had a hot-failover cluster. I wonder if they do backups.

In a very interesting article about suicide bombing in Halo 3, the author describes how the “psychology of asymmetrical warfare” led him to take up the tactic. The article is not about the game but about his insight into when suicide tactics become the reasonable choice.

Even though I’ve read scores of articles, white papers and books on the psychology of terrorists in recent years, and even though I have (I think) a strong intellectual grasp of the roots of suicide terrorism, something about playing the game gave me an “aha” moment that I’d never had before: an ability to feel, in whatever tiny fashion, the strategic logic and emotional calculus behind the act.

On October 28, I heard/saw Pussyfinger play at Robotspeak’s 5th year anniversary party. They were completely awesome. Here’s a 30s clip I shot with my point and shoot camera:

A small PSA: If you are upgrading Ubuntu to 7.10 “gutsy”, check to see if you have the “evms” package installed. If you do, and you have no knowledge of installing it and don’t know what it is, then you probably should remove it. The consequences of keeping it are a spew of system messages:

device-mapper: dm-linear: Device lookup failed
device-mapper: error adding target to table

Even worse, you may be unable to mount any partitions aside from /! That’s what happened to me.

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While innocently reading the 7.10 Release Notes my left eyebrow raised at their method for creating a new file with a single word in it.

echo letter | sudo tee /etc/papersize >/dev/null

Say what? Why on Earth use tee if you are going to dump it’s output to /dev/null? I assume whoever wrote it ran into a file permission problem due to the redirection.¹ How about the following:

sudo sh -c 'echo letter > papersize'

I’m not going to complain that their way spawns an extra process; I dislike complaints which ignore the capacity of modern computers and that this command is run once by hand. Probably, I just think their way is ugly.

1. The sudo manpage also suggests using sh -c for making redirection work. [↩]