My friend Matt and I have shared a number of stories regarding our frustrations with reporting bugs to Ubuntu. He recently wrote an overview of his experiences — Why I’ve stopped reporting bugs to Ubuntu — which was linked to by OSNews. The comments there are mostly level and reasonable, but some people are missing the focus of his statement. He’s not whining “fix my bug!”, he’s drawing attention to the methodology used to process bugs.
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. 
My Mosuki Events