There are several geek epitaph lists on the net (look here, here and here) but most are rather dull and they don’t really look like they’re written by real geeks, so I decided to write down my own list, with one line for each geek stereotype:
the WoW player: «Met a Death Knight with serious blood abilities».
the Python guru: «TombException».
the Urban Terror player: «Did the lemming thing».
the Star Trek fan: «Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvam».
the network guru: «TTL expired in transit».
the Magic player: «Opponent played Grindstone with Painter’s Servant».
the Spaceballs fan: «Out of order? FUCK! Even in heaven, nothing works!».
the Matrix fan: «She told me: dodge this!».
the NASA fan: «What do you mean “One way mission”?».
This week’s mood is all abourt cloud computing, html5, TED and the incoming conferences, with a trail on tablets. Balancing between seasonal hype and true link gifts is getting harder and harder:
Mouse art — A program that creates nice artwork from your mouse pointer tracking.
A casual on-line conversation with a nice guy from Linux community:
seven: «I’m very busy preparing Linux Day 2010 at the moment.» geekscrap: «Whoa! it’s in october, isn’t it? You’re taking it early!» seven: «This year it’s going to be big.»
Recently S. Lott published a post on what’s a clear definition of Enterprise-level applications. Even though I agree with him that “Enterprise-scale” definition has been streched by marketing to mean about anything, I have to disagree with his conclusions:
The fact that an enterprise running a mission-critical piece of software can actually survive to bad things(tm) by other means (falling short on their obligations?), doesn’t mean that the mission wasn’t critical, after all. Anyways, mission-critical is just a typical requisite for enterprise applications, not the definition of.
If the test is “if installer is next-next-done, then it’s not Enterprise”, it can be easily falsified by examples like Oracle database or Oracle business applications, which are definitely into the Enterprise set but are rather easy to install. Obviously you can achieve complex redundancy setups with Oracle DB or MySQL DB, and both of them require special configuration activities not provided by installer.
When your computer or server has access to multiple LAN segments with different address spaces and different gateways to the Internet, there’s a nice feature called policy routing that allows you to use all of them simultaneously without having to re-configure your network topology. This is especially useful when you want to increase the bandwidth and resilience of a single computer or server without the burden of being an Autonomous System (BGP peering, Internet Registry bureaucracy, etc.).
Here are the steps to setup multiple uplinks through policy routing on Gentoo:
It seems that Toast 10 Titanium cd burning application doesn’t support overburning, so if you need to burn cd images that are larger than conventional 700MB, you can either use cdrtools from the command line with -overburn parameter (available in MacPorts), or use a nice cdrtools frontend called Firestarter FX, which is tested for Tiger and Leopard releases.
One way to receive up-to-date reports about vulnerability issues is subscribing to vulnerability RSS feeds: they update on demand, they don’t rely on your mail subsystem and they don’t fill up your mailbox. The only drawback is that you could miss alerts if you don’t sync your feeds for a long time, but if you’re a IT security manager, you don’t have a life, so how could it happen anyways?
Here’s the top feeds you should be subscribed to (CVE tags are reported in brackets):
Twitter History — A nice video with developers from Twitter.
If you have a little more time, you may enjoy this 20-minutes video by Jamie Oliver at TED 2010 on food education. He must have read Ned Batchelder’s tips on presentation: entertain, educate, practice.
Last year Wordpress got an award as best Open Source CMS software and the reason is clear: it’s easy to setup, low on resources, very customizable and full of useful extensions. So unless you have very specific deployment requirements and if your blog is not part of your core technology, you may get the best of both worlds by using Wordpress for blogging and use a web framework for everything else. Not reinventing the wheel is very important in post-agile world, after all.
Being a Django monkey, I’d like to share some tips on how to make Wordpress and Django live together: Read the rest of this entry »
I’m not a fan of McDonalds. I don’t really like Ronald, CJ and all the family, but when Ipazia pointed me to new McItaly burger and Guardian’s controversial article on Italian government being involved in the agreement between McDonalds and Italian food companies, I decided to forget stereotypes for a day and try the product. All in all — I thought — criticism should be based on facts, not just McDonalds is crap fud.
