Good basketball has me out of my seat waving, whooping, and worrying; wonderful emotions that come out during the NBA Playoffs. My neighbors must love me. 
Here’s a little audio excerpt of a great moment. I love it when the announcers are having just as good a time.
James from outta nowhere …
April 30th, 2008Zabbix 1.4.4 packages for Ubuntu
February 8th, 2008Step right up and get your Zabbix 1.4.4 packages for Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)! Packages are available for i386 and amd64 architectures (sorry, I don’t have a powerpc machine). To get them via apt add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:1
deb http://packages.devsuki.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main
deb-src http://packages.devsuki.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main
You can also download them manually.
- You may want to download the package signing key and add it with
apt-key. ↩
Buying music online, part 1 (bleep.com)
January 25th, 2008Over the last few years I’ve purchased music online from a variety of sites. Aside from wanting files that sound good, a hard requirement is songs must be DRM-free. Yep, that mostly means the iTunes store is out.1
My favorite place to buy/download music is bleep.com. There are two reasons:
- very high quality, DRM-free tracks
- an awesome music preview system
- I did buy one DRM-free track via iTunes when iTunes-plus launched (as a vote of support), but I have yet to find any other iTunes-plus tracks I’m interested in. Seriously, every time I look for an album it’s only available wrapped in iTunes’ DRM. With the advent of amazonmp3.com, I’m probably going to stop checking the iTunes store at all. More on that later. ↩
Fixing and reporting Ubuntu bugs
January 18th, 2008My 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.
Earning the FAIL in failover
December 18th, 2007This 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.