How are they going to enforce the possibility of users downloading from our fast American servers? An unenforceable law is not a law. The same thing problem occurred when Finnish and Swedish ftp servers had the gif encoding libraries available. I don't think that it is patent law that needs to be reworked, but rather, how intellectual property as a whole faces the challenge of a no-borders networked world.
The MacGIMP site is getting ready to release a GIF-enabled build of the GIMP at midnight.
Re: mysql replication and high availability howto
on
Linux Clustering
·
· Score: 3, Informative
O'Reilly's Linux Hacks has one of the best explanations I've seen for setting up mysql replication. Load balancing and failover area are topics in their own right, but the Linux High Availability HOWTO is a good place to start. In general, the ibiblio site has been a helpful source.
When the biology folks and the computing folks get together, it always gets really theoretical and really useless. All of the real-world-benefit folks are busy working on problems of a fundamental chemical nature: it is enzymes that shape, edit, and cut DNA. It is enzymes that create drugs and ARE drugs. You cannot learn too much about protein chemistry or structural biology. These disciplines are under-appreciated and there are very real biology and computational problems involved in them for those who take the time to look.
Circle swimming happens every so often in the penguin exhibit at the Omaha Zoo. They have a very nice display, which happens to include a penguin webcam. I think for the most part the Omaha penguins are more laid back than their San Francisco inmates. Also, here is a map of the aquarium where the keep the penguins. Enjoy.
Renewable Energy Policy Project
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 3, Informative
REPP has a paper on how wind the top five or so wind farfarm projects have affected housing and property values. See the report in PDF here: http://www.repp.org/articles/static/1/binaries/win d_online_final.pdf They refer to "view shed" as a way of indicating how far around the area the wind generaters are visible. Very interesting look at wind energy.
I combed through the changenotes and here are the ones that I thought were among the most important:
# Added a new Apache 2 SAPI module (apache2handler) based on the old version (apache2filter). # Fixed several 64-bit problems # Fixed bug #22672 (User not logged under Apache2). (Ian) # Fixed bug #22989 (sendmail not found by configure). (igyu@ionsphere.org) # Fixed bug #17098 (make Apache2 aware that PHP scripts should not be cached). (Ilia) # Fixed bug #20802 (PHP would die silently when memory limit reached). (Ilia) # Fixed bug #21498 (mysql_pconnect connection problems). (Georg)
Google has clusters of 100+ CPU's, and they run MySQL. I haven't seen any public confirmation that they are clustering MySQL, but it would make a lot of sense for them to do so. They would be smart to use a relatively flat db to store all incoming search requests for analysis.
What will really allow PHP to compete head-on with ASP.NET and SharePoint is PEAR and the PEAR Foundation Classes (PFC). A really good set of classes for web development means low-cost, robust web apps are on the way. You java gurus can eat your hearts out. The reviewer doesn't say if the book covers either of these topics, so hold off on your purchase until this becomes clear.
Ever heard of 802.16? Seriously, the microwave folks have been doing point to point wireless to project mad bandwidth across serious distances for a LONG time.
Robertson really waffles on this one and it is only a matter of time before it comes full circle and bites him in the a$$. Having user-space applications run by root by default is trouble. Microsoft operating systems have struggled with viruses for the last decade precisely because system and userspace permission lines have been blurred, aka sacrificed, in the name of ease-of-use. When you have all users running as root all the time, what you've really got is a large distributed read/write file system out there just waiting to be written to. In that context, it is almost hard to hold virus-writers accountable, as the OS vendor and end-users have conspired to build a network in which self-copying executables are tolerated. MacOSX has a sane approach, which continues to evolve (there are authentication sessions planned for WWDC). The added advantage of having application-space locked down by default is that end-users can't muck things up as easily, but I'll grant that this necessarily involves the end-user having to wear both hats: sysadmin and end-user. My take is that privelege awareness an inevitable part of being a netizen. Accordingly you either leave the barn door open and let all the animals come and go in chaos as they please, or you build fences and enjoy network civilization from the inside. Good fences make good neighbors.
If you're installing from CD, OpenBSD 3.3 did not contain sendmail 8.12.9. Correct me if I'm wrong but this was fixed in 3.3-current but didn't make it onto the CDs (?). Older sendmail-based servers should use patches 014, 027. See: www.sendmail.org/patchps.html
I colocated two servers for about three years at Communitech until about two months ago when I saw the writing on the wall and started looking around. Was told unofficially that Communitech would be shutting down in May, but I've seen no public acknowledgement of any deadline. After looking around both in Kansas City and Omaha, I signed on a cabinet for a year at: Axiom Integration. Nice data center, good prices, and I've got room to spare so look me up at phpconsulting.com. and get in touch. Because I now have surplus rackspace, I'll beat any colo price out there.
Mac OS X apps are "bundles" which means that they are a directory with a structured content inside. Grab a terminal on OSX, cd into your/Applications directory and then cd inside of an app and look around. This paradigm fits perfectly with multi-chipset binaries inside of the bundle. So imagine a Photoshop.app that has both PPC and 970 and 64bit and x86 code inside of it. Sure, the app size is larger, but all of the platform-independent resources are conserved. I can't really imagine a cleaner way to handle multi-platform compatibility.
Just because a project/product is GPL doesn't mean that you can't market it. There are lots of business models behind open source software, just ask the folks at RedHat or Zend. Lowering the barriers to adoption by making distribution essentially free (cost of bandwidth) and no up-front expense is a great marketing tool, actually. Ask your university's marketroid advocates the following question: would RedHat and/or PHP be here today and be the most popular tools of their kind, if they had to reach their userbase by traditional marketing means and expenditures?
Well, to Apple's credit, the iBook battery life still beats the pants off anything that Intel or AMD make. Also note that the iBook has held this advantage for a year and a half. IMNSHO battery life makes a much bigger practical difference than processor speed.
A few weeks ago, CompUSA was selling the Linksys 802.11g card that works in the TiBook for $60. I'm using it right now, along with the driverhack here and I like it not only for the 802.11g but for the fact that it increases signal strength relative to the internal TiBook airport card by about a factor of 2 or 3. It uses the same BroadCom chipset that Apple calls "Airport Extreme" and Buffalo and D-Link also make cards which use this chip as well.
Scott McNealy: all alone and only bones
on
OpenBSD 3.3 Song
·
· Score: 5, Informative
At the tower Puff appealed For the wisdom of the One Denied, his mind did reel Puff was getting tired of Sun
Broke down the guard Cause math is hard Found McNealy on his throne All alone and only bones
Come the Sun King blade ablur Hammer down eclipse the Sun And Puff, the land secured The new King Barbarian!
We already know that Hammer will wipe Sun off the map, oh wait, I forgot that Sun's messaging software will save the day. heh Probably just like their Linux distro showed the world how hip they could be to open source.
Once you have both partitions set up, holding down option when booting will bring up OpenFirmware and will let you boot into Linux or OSX. Check the Yellow Dog site for details.
Well, since some Anonymous Jackass Coward already gave a bunch of reasons here why not to run Linux on PowerPC hardware, I thought it would be appropriate to give some solid reasons why it makes sense to do so. Mind you that I'm not advocating this for every person in every circumstance, but the point needs to be made that there are circumstances in which Linux on PPC can make a lot of sense.
>Somewhere in the translation from PowerPC to IA32 something got lost. Absolutely not. About a year ago, performance for desktop applications under Yellow Dog linux on my 400mghz TiBook had the same "feel" as 1Ghz Athlon. I'm referring to the speed of calling up windows in apps like Evolution and Mozilla. Unfortunately, I don't have anything quantitative, but I preferred working on my tibook because things were snappier. (Also, the TiBook had 8MB of video RAM and the Athlon had around 32MB of vRAM in a nVidia graphics card: both were using appropriate XFree86 builds.)
>MacOS kernel has been optimized for the G3, G4, and 970 since Apple began writing the operating system back in 1996. Yada Yada Yada. Well, as much as the kernel has been all optimized, the overhead of the double-buffered and heavily anti-aliased aqua-goodness takes it all away. Seriously. You can easily turn off XFree86 in Linux. Turning off the MacOSX GUI is poorly documented. Why Apple doesn't do this for tuning MacOSX servers is beyond me.
>Control over the source code OK Linux users have source code to everything. On the other hand, Apple lets you have at the Darwin source but apparently has no plans to open source pretty much anything GUI, including the quartzwm that they ship with X11. Think about it. Even if you want to run X apps on MacOSX, you're stuck with an apple-only window manager layer. The mailing lists are full of complaints about quartzwm which only Apple can now fix. If you want to be able to customize your machine, there is remains no better choice than Linux.
As far as updates go, once set up, apt-get works great even for PPC builds! Also, the config, make, make install worked for everything I tried, with the exception of drivers and other hardware-focused code.
The biggest reason in my mind is security. While security through obscurity isn't the best option from an absolute standpoint, it is practically very useful. The number of script-kiddie hacks exploting PPC buffer overflows is effectively zero. MandrakePPC and Yellow Dog aren't for everyone, but I'm glad they exist and hope that they can attract enough of a following to justify sticking around.
Call me skeptical, but did occur to anyone else that Microsoft picked FreeBSD because 1) they despise the GPL for what it represents and 2) Mono is being developed on Linux?
Don't get me wrong, I run several FreeBSD servers and prefer the ports system over RPM. It just unnerves me when the Microsoft marketing machine starts mucking around on my chosen platform.
As a postscript, you all should be aware that PHP may well become the best platform for deploying.NET. Here's why and here's why this is irrelevant.
There must be some periodicity that allows the compression algorithm to go further with images from living things. Any fft-based compression algorithm would pick up on that. Kewl. You could probably do something similar with satellite images to pick out man-made structures, since these would have greater periodicity (think of sectioned fields in the midwest or city streets spaced by blocks) than natural structures such as the fractal-like shapes of rivers and mountains.
Slashdot Mirror
How are they going to enforce the possibility of users downloading from our fast American servers? An unenforceable law is not a law. The same thing problem occurred when Finnish and Swedish ftp servers had the gif encoding libraries available. I don't think that it is patent law that needs to be reworked, but rather, how intellectual property as a whole faces the challenge of a no-borders networked world.
If you can spare some bandwidth, please drop by macgimp.org to offer a mirror for the MacGIMP update. It is a 52 megabyte file.
The MacGIMP site is getting ready to release a GIF-enabled build of the GIMP at midnight.
O'Reilly's Linux Hacks has one of the best explanations I've seen for setting up mysql replication. Load balancing and failover area are topics in their own right, but the Linux High Availability HOWTO is a good place to start. In general, the ibiblio site has been a helpful source.
When the biology folks and the computing folks get together, it always gets really theoretical and really useless. All of the real-world-benefit folks are busy working on problems of a fundamental chemical nature: it is enzymes that shape, edit, and cut DNA. It is enzymes that create drugs and ARE drugs. You cannot learn too much about protein chemistry or structural biology. These disciplines are under-appreciated and there are very real biology and computational problems involved in them for those who take the time to look.
Circle swimming happens every so often in the penguin exhibit at the Omaha Zoo. They have a very nice display, which happens to include a penguin webcam. I think for the most part the Omaha penguins are more laid back than their San Francisco inmates. Also, here is a map of the aquarium where the keep the penguins. Enjoy.
REPP has a paper on how wind the top five or so wind farfarm projects have affected housing and property values. See the report in PDF here:n d_online_final.pdf They refer to "view shed" as a way of indicating how far around the area the wind generaters are visible. Very interesting look at wind energy.
http://www.repp.org/articles/static/1/binaries/wi
I combed through the changenotes and here are the ones that I thought were among the most important:
# Added a new Apache 2 SAPI module (apache2handler) based on the old version (apache2filter).
# Fixed several 64-bit problems
# Fixed bug #22672 (User not logged under Apache2). (Ian)
# Fixed bug #22989 (sendmail not found by configure). (igyu@ionsphere.org)
# Fixed bug #17098 (make Apache2 aware that PHP scripts should not be cached). (Ilia)
# Fixed bug #20802 (PHP would die silently when memory limit reached). (Ilia)
# Fixed bug #21498 (mysql_pconnect connection problems). (Georg)
Google has clusters of 100+ CPU's, and they run MySQL. I haven't seen any public confirmation that they are clustering MySQL, but it would make a lot of sense for them to do so. They would be smart to use a relatively flat db to store all incoming search requests for analysis.
What will really allow PHP to compete head-on with ASP.NET and SharePoint is PEAR and the PEAR Foundation Classes (PFC). A really good set of classes for web development means low-cost, robust web apps are on the way. You java gurus can eat your hearts out. The reviewer doesn't say if the book covers either of these topics, so hold off on your purchase until this becomes clear.
Ever heard of 802.16? Seriously, the microwave folks have been doing point to point wireless to project mad bandwidth across serious distances for a LONG time.
Robertson really waffles on this one and it is only a matter of time before it comes full circle and bites him in the a$$. Having user-space applications run by root by default is trouble. Microsoft operating systems have struggled with viruses for the last decade precisely because system and userspace permission lines have been blurred, aka sacrificed, in the name of ease-of-use. When you have all users running as root all the time, what you've really got is a large distributed read/write file system out there just waiting to be written to. In that context, it is almost hard to hold virus-writers accountable, as the OS vendor and end-users have conspired to build a network in which self-copying executables are tolerated. MacOSX has a sane approach, which continues to evolve (there are authentication sessions planned for WWDC). The added advantage of having application-space locked down by default is that end-users can't muck things up as easily, but I'll grant that this necessarily involves the end-user having to wear both hats: sysadmin and end-user. My take is that privelege awareness an inevitable part of being a netizen. Accordingly you either leave the barn door open and let all the animals come and go in chaos as they please, or you build fences and enjoy network civilization from the inside. Good fences make good neighbors.
If you're installing from CD, OpenBSD 3.3 did not contain sendmail 8.12.9. Correct me if I'm wrong but this was fixed in 3.3-current but didn't make it onto the CDs (?). Older sendmail-based servers should use patches 014, 027. See: www.sendmail.org/patchps.html
I colocated two servers for about three years at Communitech until about two months ago when I saw the writing on the wall and started looking around. Was told unofficially that Communitech would be shutting down in May, but I've seen no public acknowledgement of any deadline. After looking around both in Kansas City and Omaha, I signed on a cabinet for a year at: Axiom Integration. Nice data center, good prices, and I've got room to spare so look me up at phpconsulting.com. and get in touch. Because I now have surplus rackspace, I'll beat any colo price out there.
Mac OS X apps are "bundles" which means that they are a directory with a structured content inside. Grab a terminal on OSX, cd into your /Applications directory and then cd inside of an app and look around. This paradigm fits perfectly with multi-chipset binaries inside of the bundle. So imagine a Photoshop.app that has both PPC and 970 and 64bit and x86 code inside of it. Sure, the app size is larger, but all of the platform-independent resources are conserved. I can't really imagine a cleaner way to handle multi-platform compatibility.
Just because a project/product is GPL doesn't mean that you can't market it. There are lots of business models behind open source software, just ask the folks at RedHat or Zend. Lowering the barriers to adoption by making distribution essentially free (cost of bandwidth) and no up-front expense is a great marketing tool, actually. Ask your university's marketroid advocates the following question: would RedHat and/or PHP be here today and be the most popular tools of their kind, if they had to reach their userbase by traditional marketing means and expenditures?
Well, to Apple's credit, the iBook battery life still beats the pants off anything that Intel or AMD make. Also note that the iBook has held this advantage for a year and a half. IMNSHO battery life makes a much bigger practical difference than processor speed.
A few weeks ago, CompUSA was selling the Linksys 802.11g card that works in the TiBook for $60. I'm using it right now, along with the driver hack here and I like it not only for the 802.11g but for the fact that it increases signal strength relative to the internal TiBook airport card by about a factor of 2 or 3. It uses the same BroadCom chipset that Apple calls "Airport Extreme" and Buffalo and D-Link also make cards which use this chip as well.
At the tower Puff appealed
For the wisdom of the One
Denied, his mind did reel
Puff was getting tired of Sun
Broke down the guard
Cause math is hard
Found McNealy on his throne
All alone and only bones
Come the Sun King blade ablur
Hammer down eclipse the Sun
And Puff, the land secured
The new King Barbarian!
We already know that Hammer will wipe Sun off the map, oh wait, I forgot that Sun's messaging software will save the day. heh Probably just like their Linux distro showed the world how hip they could be to open source.
Right on. I sysadmin the xdarwin.org site.
Once you have both partitions set up, holding down option when booting will bring up OpenFirmware and will let you boot into Linux or OSX. Check the Yellow Dog site for details.
Well, since some Anonymous Jackass Coward already gave a bunch of reasons here why not to run Linux on PowerPC hardware, I thought it would be appropriate to give some solid reasons why it makes sense to do so. Mind you that I'm not advocating this for every person in every circumstance, but the point needs to be made that there are circumstances in which Linux on PPC can make a lot of sense.
>Somewhere in the translation from PowerPC to IA32 something got lost.
Absolutely not. About a year ago, performance for desktop applications under Yellow Dog linux on my 400mghz TiBook had the same "feel" as 1Ghz Athlon. I'm referring to the speed of calling up windows in apps like Evolution and Mozilla. Unfortunately, I don't have anything quantitative, but I preferred working on my tibook because things were snappier. (Also, the TiBook had 8MB of video RAM and the Athlon had around 32MB of vRAM in a nVidia graphics card: both were using appropriate XFree86 builds.)
>MacOS kernel has been optimized for the G3, G4, and 970 since Apple began writing the operating system back in 1996. Yada Yada Yada.
Well, as much as the kernel has been all optimized, the overhead of the double-buffered and heavily anti-aliased aqua-goodness takes it all away. Seriously. You can easily turn off XFree86 in Linux. Turning off the MacOSX GUI is poorly documented. Why Apple doesn't do this for tuning MacOSX servers is beyond me.
>Control over the source code
OK Linux users have source code to everything. On the other hand, Apple lets you have at the Darwin source but apparently has no plans to open source pretty much anything GUI, including the quartzwm that they ship with X11. Think about it. Even if you want to run X apps on MacOSX, you're stuck with an apple-only window manager layer. The mailing lists are full of complaints about quartzwm which only Apple can now fix. If you want to be able to customize your machine, there is remains no better choice than Linux.
As far as updates go, once set up, apt-get works great even for PPC builds! Also, the config, make, make install worked for everything I tried, with the exception of drivers and other hardware-focused code.
The biggest reason in my mind is security. While security through obscurity isn't the best option from an absolute standpoint, it is practically very useful. The number of script-kiddie hacks exploting PPC buffer overflows is effectively zero. MandrakePPC and Yellow Dog aren't for everyone, but I'm glad they exist and hope that they can attract enough of a following to justify sticking around.
Call me skeptical, but did occur to anyone else that Microsoft picked FreeBSD because
.NET. Here's why and here's why this is irrelevant.
1) they despise the GPL for what it represents and
2) Mono is being developed on Linux?
Don't get me wrong, I run several FreeBSD servers and prefer the ports system over RPM. It just unnerves me when the Microsoft marketing machine starts mucking around on my chosen platform.
As a postscript, you all should be aware that PHP may well become the best platform for deploying
vi
There must be some periodicity that allows the compression algorithm to go further with images from living things. Any fft-based compression algorithm would pick up on that. Kewl. You could probably do something similar with satellite images to pick out man-made structures, since these would have greater periodicity (think of sectioned fields in the midwest or city streets spaced by blocks) than natural structures such as the fractal-like shapes of rivers and mountains.